Shot in the Heart - Mikal Gilmore [140]
But this darker side of Gaylen hadn’t fully emerged yet. For now he was simply drinking much more than a seventeen-year-old boy should ever drink, and he had taken to hanging out with a tougher group of friends, from Milwaukie’s poor part of town. He was smarter than these kids, but that didn’t seem to bother him. They were willing to do things that the better-heeled kids weren’t willing to do.
Gaylen was also starting to hit his stride with the local women. He drove a beautiful, blue Jeepster convertible and he wore fine silk shirts and, for a time, he sported a sharp, hip goatee. He looked like a young Robert Mitchum—dangerous and vulnerable at the same time.
The stance worked like magic. He was always pulling into the driveway with one alluring young woman or another. The one I remember best was Eve. She had curly black, shoulder-length hair, and she would wear her blouse open down the middle and knotted around her waist. She was sweet and she was lovely, and best of all, she was nice to me. She would give me kisses on the cheek that awoke something in me that had not stirred before.
Gaylen and Eve would pull up into the driveway and Eve would wave at me. Gaylen would take the car into the open-sided carport, and the two of them would sit and kiss and pet for hours. From the viewpoint of the kitchen—my mother’s constant perch—you couldn’t see much more than the rear end of the Jeepster. From my viewpoint upstairs, though, you could see a lot more. Gaylen would open Eve’s blouse and pull on her nipples, and he would run his fingers down into her tight cutoffs. That always made her squirm memorably. Except for my brief encounter with Gary’s adolescent threesome a few years before, this was the first time I’d known the presence of sex around our home. Through all this, my mother was keeping her eye on the car in the carport, and she was quietly fuming.
SIX MONTHS AFTER MY FATHER’S DEATH, GARY FINISHED serving his sentence for driving without a license and was released from Rocky Butte Jail. He came back to live with us, and for a while he and Gaylen began running around together. It would seem like a natural enough pairing—two look-alike brothers, partners in crime—but there were ways in which the two of them were fundamentally different. Gary was dealing in a lot of extremes by this point, and he always had a test or code or some damn thing you had to pass to meet his standards. Gaylen, meantime, simply wanted the adventure and experience. He liked dangerous ideas much more than he liked dangerous acts. With Gary, he got a bit of both. Gary got him into drinking cough syrup and running around with some truly mean-spirited thugs, pulling bullshit robberies and attending all-night sex parties.
One night Gary and Gaylen got into a fight. It had to do with a woman. No doubt Gaylen had made a move on somebody that Gary considered off limits. Gary attacked Gaylen and Gaylen ended up decking him, then taking off. Gary sat and nursed his jaw between shots of whiskey and cough syrup. Then he opened his car trunk, pulled out a tire iron, and told a friend he was going to go find Gaylen. He was going to kill him. The way he said it, the friend could tell he wasn’t kidding. Somehow, word got back to Frank and Frank got word to Gary. “If you kill our brother,” Frank said, “then it’s between you and me.” Gary got the message. He put the tire iron away and sent back his own message: “Tell Gaylen to stay away from me.”
Gaylen and Gary kept a distance from each other for years after that.
THESE WERE AMONG GARY’S DARKER DAYS. He had made friends with people who were running prostitution and dealing drugs. Some of these people did hard things in hard ways, and Gary helped out when he could. I had lunch one day with a man who had known Gary a bit during this period and had also known Gary’s friends. “Portland’s heavy criminals,