Shot in the Heart - Mikal Gilmore [117]
The drinking, though, was the worst part of it. My brother Frank thinks Gaylen started drinking when he was about twelve and never gave it up after that.
One time, my mother and I took the bus home to Portland from Seattle, and when Gaylen opened the door to help my mother with her luggage, he was completely bald. My mother just about fainted. She stood staring at his gleaming, round dome, as Gaylen tried to act nonchalant, and her mouth made several motions before she could form words. “What the hell have you done to your hair?” she finally blurted. Gaylen explained that he’d wanted a fashionable Mohawk cut, like many of the tougher kids were starting to wear. A day or two before, he and a friend had several beers and began shaving and trimming each other’s hair. His friend, it seemed, couldn’t quite get the lines straight, as he tried to shave my brother’s hair into a hedgerow, and after a few passes, Gaylen finally got pissed and flat-out drunk and ended up shaving everything off. “You are not going to be seen in public with me looking like that,” my mother announced. “You better get used to wearing a baseball hat or stocking cap or some damn thing until your hair grows out, because what you’ve done looks hideous.” I don’t remember her saying a word to him about his drinking.
Not long after that, I was sitting in the living room watching television, when Gaylen walked through the front door. He was still bald-headed. On this day, he was also bare-chested, and from his head to his waist he was covered in jots and rivulets of blood. He had wanted to join a local gang, and for the initiation the ganglord had my brother stripped and tied up, then shot repeatedly with a pellet rifle—or at least that’s the story I remember hearing. Gaylen sat in a chair at the kitchen table as my mother washed the blood from him and picked the pellets from his arms and chest. She was crying and talking about calling the police, but Gaylen made her promise she wouldn’t. He said he would take care of it on his own. He didn’t look scared, simply coldly determined. Some time later, we heard that the teenage ganglord had been assaulted in an alley and badly injured by a BB shot to his eye. It all made a certain kind of sense.
But that’s not what I remember most about the affair. What I remember most is this: When I saw my brother walk through the door, blood running in thin stripes down his almost naked body, I knew I was seeing something both frightening and thrilling. In a way, I wanted to be him— to be able to walk with that kind of poise and determination, as the blood ran off my skin. To bleed, and be able to act as if it didn’t hurt a bit.
EVENTUALLY, GAYLEN’S DEFIANCE became as full-blown as Gary’s. “As you know,” Frank said, “Dad always had a thousand rules, and one of them was that you had to be in at a certain time at night or he locked the door and you stayed out. Ten o’clock, I think it was. Gaylen, though, would make it a point to come in about 10:30 or 11 P.M., and of course the door was locked by that time. He would stand out there drunk, screaming and pounding on the door, yelling to Mom and Dad to open up. And Dad would open the door—usually with his foot flying or his fists swinging, and there would be a big hell-raising. The neighbors used to say you could hear it all the way down the street.
“I remember thinking, ‘Things are bad enough with Gary. Now we have two trouble-raisers around the house, and Mom and Dad to boot.’ After that, between Gary and Gaylen, there was never a moment’s peace in our home.”
DURING THE SAME PERIOD that I am writing about here, Gary was serving his year at Rocky Butte Jail for burglarizing the office where he stole the pistol. He was discharged in May 1958 and somehow managed to get his job back at Bresse Appliances. Throughout this time there was the usual flurry of nocturnal