Shot in the Heart - Mikal Gilmore [138]
God, I hate families. I see them walking in their clean clusters in a shopping mall, or I hear friends talking about family get-togethers and family problems, or I visit families in their homes, and I inevitably resent them. I resent them for whatever real happiness they may have achieved, and because I didn’t have such a family in my life. And I despise them for the ways in which the notion of the family good is still used to shame or subjugate the children within the family, long past the time when they’ve become adults.
But perhaps I’m protesting too much here. The truth is, I do not judge my parents harshly at all. I do not feel an ounce of hatred or bitterness toward either of them, though maybe I should. I love my parents. These days, I miss them both terribly. But there is something ironic that I have had to recognize about my act of contemplating my own family: In a better world, I would not be telling this story because this story would never have happened. In a better world, my parents would not have met—or at least they would not have married and had a family. In a better world, I would never have been born.
What sad and wretched people Frank Gilmore and Bessie Brown were. I love them, but I have to say: It is heartrending they ever had children at all.
IN HIS LIFE, MY FATHER WAS A SOURCE OF MUCH OF THE HEARTBREAK and violence in the family, but also an able and resourceful provider. We were hardly rich or socially prominent but we lived well. Now, with him dead, we would have to find a way to take care of ourselves.
My father’s business—his annual compendiums of state and county building codes—was still viable. My mother, as well as all my brothers, had worked with him on the enterprise at one time or another. They all knew how the ads were sold and how copy was gathered and laid out, and they knew how to do billing. They also had two or three salesmen who had remained loyal to my father and were willing to help the family keep the business afloat.
But things went bad from the start. Frank Jr. had been hoping to leave our house soon—get his own place, maybe start his own family. Now, he thought he should forestall those plans for a year or two and help my mother make the transition to a self-sufficient life. Frank went to Seattle to finish the work on the current edition of Building Codes Digest, and he took Gaylen with him. But as fast as Frank would collect the advertisers’ payments, Gaylen would turn around and draw the cash from the bank. Then he would stay out late, getting drunk, chasing women, and winding up too hungover to do his share of the work. Frank and Gaylen had a couple of fights about this state of affairs, and Frank could see all the good work was going nowhere. He sent Gaylen back home and stayed on in Seattle. In a few weeks, he had collected all the payments, sent the money to my mother, got the book to publication on time, and closed out the Seattle apartment. He didn’t want to continue supervising the business, but he thought he could do a fair job of helping my mother find a good partner to manage the concern. But when Frank arrived back in Milwaukie, he had a grim surprise waiting for him: Gaylen had wrecked the family car and had been arrested for drunk driving. He had also cashed a number of checks on the family’s bank account. All the money Frank had made in Seattle had been eaten up by Gaylen’s fines and legal fees, and repair costs for the car.
Meantime, a rival salesman in the Portland area began a competitive publication, and several of my father’s older clients had gone his way. The salesman offered to buy out our business and the rights to the name, but my mother refused, and threatened to sue. I don’t remember exactly how it happened, but within a year or so of my father’s death, my family lost all control and interest in the Building