Shot in the Heart - Mikal Gilmore [127]
I did not know it then, but I now believe that Walt was one of my father’s hidden sons, which would have made Larry my nephew. It was years before this would become apparent to me. I have tried to find that family in recent seasons, but like so many other people we once loved or hated or were related to, they have disappeared.
BACK AT HOME IN MILWAUKIE, life was heating up. My brother Gaylen had dropped out of high school—he felt there was nothing the teachers could really teach him—and the school officials were happy to see him go. He joined the. U.S. Navy, but the adventure lasted less than a month. After he had gone AWOL five times and had turned up drunk even more times, the base’s commanders surmised that Gaylen did not have much of a military career in store, and shipped him back home, with an honorable discharge.
Then, in the fall of 1961, Gary came home from Oregon State Correctional Institution. His stay at the facility had proved rough. He got into constant fights with the authorities, and the guards noted on several occasions that Gary was particularly vicious toward older men—sometimes threatening their lives. The anger in Gary became so strong that he repeatedly blew whatever good time he had accrued and ended up adding time to his sentence.
The counselor who wrote my brother’s post-OSCI evaluation noted that Gary had experienced a poor custodial adjustment during his imprisonment. “He received a total of 23 disciplinary reports, most of major proportion, the counselor wrote. “Fighting, refusing to work, disobedience, disrespect were characteristic of the inmate’s reaction toward authority and toward incarceration … At no time did Gilmore show any interest in vocational goals or vocational planning… The inmate did not participate in any educational programs, although his intellectual capacity indicated he was capable of functioning at a higher level than at which he was presently operating … Gilmore indicated that he had no interest in leisure time activities, seeing no need to alter his past behavior in this area. As his disciplinary record indicates, the subject was unable to relate to any staff members or any authoritarian figures. Outside relationships and contact were solely limited to subject’s mother and father who continued to excuse, condone, and indulge their son without end. Gilmore had no release plans at the time of his discharge, and from statements of the inmate’s, it was assumed he was not planning on working when he was released but [would] just live off his parents.” Another counselor noted: “Gilmore … substitutes his own pleasure principles for a moral code of any adequacy and is used to gratifying his desires immediately. Has great fund of hostility toward other individuals which has led him to [a] somewhat paranoid isolated approach [to] life … and he has a good deal of difficulty controlling his temper.”
Indeed, the Gary who came out of OSCI was a changed person—a boy only in his infantile needs, a deadly man in every other respect. “He was brutal in those days,” my brother Frank remembered. “He got mad at you, and his terms were that he could kill you or hurt you or injure and ruin you. You could not reason with him and he could not punish you enough. It was like being around Mussolini. Sometimes, I felt like he was just looking for reasons to hurt somebody.”
This is the Gary I remember best from my childhood. He was twenty-one years old, but he dressed like a man at the end of middle age, in a shabby black raincoat and curl-brim porkpie hat—junkie wear. He eyed all persons around him with an appraising and wary leer, like a man who knew that everything on the outside of his skin amounted to a threat. Interestingly, Gary also came out of OSCI with his artistic talents blooming like mad. When I say that Gary was an artist, I don’t mean simply