Shot in the Heart - Mikal Gilmore [112]
“One day,” Frank continued, “Ron came to me and said: ‘I’ve decided that this religion is right, and I’m going to dedicate my life to it.’ He said, ‘You and me got one more month of going down the street to where the prostitutes live. At the end of that time, I’m straightening my life out.’ So Ron and me went down there and we’d have our fun. We drank and did things. And at the end of the month, Ron lived up to his word. He became a Jehovah’s Witness and he stopped. He’d still come over and visit with me, because we remained good friends, and he really wanted me to come into the organization with him. I wouldn’t do it. But he did talk Mom into having a six-month study with him. She loved to argue over religion. I would sit in the next room and listen to them, because I didn’t want anything to do with it. And Mom, of course, would not accept any of it. She’d say, ‘That guy, he’s getting worse every week.’ But at the end of the time, I was convinced from sitting in the other room and listening to what he said, that Ron was right. And I told Mom. I said, ‘I like this; I’m going to take it up.’ Mom got really mad at Ron at this point. She went to the Mormon church and had the local bishop come over and talk to me. He told me that what the Jehovah’s Witnesses taught was wrong. He said it was better for me to remain a Catholic than become a Witness, because Mormons and Catholics both believed Christ died for your sins, so that when you die you can go to heaven, and the Jehovah’s Witnesses don’t believe that. I was polite to Mom and the bishop, but I told them: ‘This is what I believe.’ And I stayed with it. I started subscribing to the Witnesses’ magazine, started going to their meetings. I was nineteen years old when I finally accepted it.”
There are a lot of things about Frank’s story that I like. In particular, I like the idea of these two kids who were thoughtful and conscientious enough to care about salvation, but who were also smart and lustful enough to make sure they squeezed in a few good sins before it was too late.
What I like better, though, is that the story also says that Frank knew there were limits worth knowing. There were limits to how much he should risk his soul for indulgence, and there were also limits to how much he owed his family. By choosing a religion that neither my mother nor father could adhere to, Frank Jr. was making plain that he didn’t want to live according to their construction of the world and its worth— that he wanted to find his own path. It was his way of saying he was no longer duty-bound to the family. He had now envisioned a better home, a better life, and he was waiting for the day he could make it his own.
GAYLEN’S STORY IS ANOTHER matter, and trying to tell it raises some peculiar problems for me. Aside from my father, Gaylen—who was born as Gaylen Noel Gilmore—was the only member of my family who was never interviewed at one time or another about his life. In addition, I could find few witnesses or sources willing or able to fill in the missing chunks and secrets. Consequently I have little testimony from which to reconstruct him, except for the narrative of my own memory and the memories of my brother Frank and my cousin Brenda. What’s troubling about all this isn’t that I don’t have interviews or sources about my brother’s life, but rather that I should feel I even need such a thing so that I can tell his story. After all, I did grow up with Gaylen—I fought with him, laughed with him, resented him, and mourned him. I should know him—and if you had asked me at the outset of this project, I would have said that I thought I knew Gaylen better than I knew almost anybody else in my family.
But it wasn’t long before I realized that