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By Root 427 0

me have my own way. She thinks I’m old enough to make up my own mind and never interferes. She respects my judgment.” At the same time, he said he had never confided in either parent, nor in anyone else for that matter. “It would embarrass me to do so.” In the accompanying psychological profile, the interviewer noted: “Gilmore operates on the pleasure-pain principle and his personality structuring remains predicated to the infantile concept of self-gratification. Underlying this is a destructive interfamilial history where the mother was ineffectual and the father domineering and openly hostile toward authority … Dynamically, then, this is an inmate who had developed under the tutelage of a father who was himself unable to accept the authoritarian role. Gilmore had undoubtedly identified closely with these trends and it is noticed that his arrest record is elaborate… Gilmore may be seen as a character disorder.” The writer also made note of Gary’s clear artistic skills and his high scores in scholastic tests. It added up to a troubling profile: an extremely bright kid, hell-bent on doing dumb and self-destructive things.

Following Gary’s intake, OSCI’s superintendent wrote to Texas seeking my brother’s birth records. What he got back was a letter stating that they had no birth record for a Gary Gilmore; however, on the same date, a Faye Robert Coffman had been born in McCamey to a Frank Walter Coffman and Dessie Brown—names that were apparently aliases for my parents. The superintendent wrote my parents, asking them to clarify the matter, but my parents refused to reply. My father was never going to reveal to anybody the truth behind either his use of the name Coffman or the circumstances of that Southern trip, and my mother acted as if the whole thing had never happened. Despite repeated requests from OSCI, my parents offered no explanations.

The superintendent had a resident sociologist ask Gary about the matter. Gary told the sociologist he had no idea what he was talking about and asked to be taken back to his cell. Over the next few nights, Gary began to have severe headaches. It was the beginning of his lifelong bout with migraines—a problem that also afflicted Frank Jr., Gaylen, and myself. Over the years, Gary’s migraines became so chronic and disabling that prison authorities sent him to hospitals on several occasions to try to determine the cause of the headaches. Nobody ever found the cause, and nobody ever found the cure. Thirty years later, Gary’s girlfriend Nicole told me she remembered my brother walking out into their backyard in Spanish Fork, Utah, and pounding his head against a tree to try to mask the pain.

The question about his birth name began to bother Gary more and more. He visited the sociologist on several occasions to discuss the matter. At first, Gary denied the documentation could be correct, until he saw a copy of the certificate. Gary, however, refused to discuss the question with my parents. Neither he nor my father ever let on to the other that either one knew about the false name, and it would be several years before Gary discussed the subject with my mother, during the last day of his freedom that the two of them would ever spend together.

THESE WERE THE PATTERNS OF LIFE on Johnson Creek as I remember them: my parents fighting relentlessly, my father dragging me all around the Pacific Northwest. My brothers coming and going, living lives outside the home that I could not figure out and could not take part in.

In all this time, there was only one common pleasure that my father and Gary and Gaylen and myself all shared. On Tuesday and Friday nights, my father would take the entire family to the professional wrestling matches, held in Portland’s Armory Stadium and Civic Auditorium. Professional wrestling was as phony and flamboyant then as it is now—all ludicrous ballet, no real risk—but we loved it. We’d sit ringside, and my father and brothers would cheer the heroes and hiss the villains, and I would cheer and hiss along with them. Meantime, my mother and Frank Jr. would sit many rows