Shot in the Heart - Mikal Gilmore [143]
It is possible, as his jailers and one or two doctors assumed, that Gary was faking his mental episodes. Of course, just because somebody is faking craziness doesn’t mean they aren’t crazy. In any event, Gary was judged competent and able to stand trial. The state doctor’s final diagnosis was: “Sociopathic personality, antisocial type with intermittent psychotic decompensation.”
Gary’s trial took place at the Oregon City Court House, in the middle of March 1964, and lasted for three days. Cleophis, Gary’s partner, had turned witness against him, though it would have been an open-and-shut case even without that testimony.
On the last day of the trial, I was at home when the phone rang. My mother was keeping a doctor’s appointment but had left a number for me to call in case I learned that a verdict was going to be announced. I answered the phone. It was Gary. At first I thought he must have been found not guilty. How else could he be calling me?
“How you doing, partner?” he asked. “Look,” he said after a moment, “I just wanted to let you and Mom know: I got sentenced to fifteen years.”
I was stunned. I didn’t really know what to say. “Gary, what can I do for you?” I asked. I think it came out wrong, like I was saying: I’m busy; what do you want?
“I … I didn’t really want anything,” Gary said, his voice sounding broken. “I just wanted to hear your voice. I just wanted to say good-bye. You know, I won’t be seeing you for a few years. Take care of yourself.”
It was a wrenching moment. Gary and I hadn’t shared anything so intimate since that Christmas night, many years before, when he told me about his life in reform school. I felt I had somehow messed up something important—that I had failed him at a crucial moment. That feeling stayed with me for years. In fact, it’s still with me.
When my mother got home, I gave her the news. She sat down in her kitchen chair and cried long and hard—even harder than she cried at the time of my father’s death. I had never witnessed that much grief in a person.
IN NOVEMBER 1963. WHILE GARY WAS AWAITING TRIAL, President John F. Kennedy was shot in the head, during a visit to Dallas, Texas. Like any other American family, we were stunned by this event. The violence that happened that day seemed much bigger than anything we had ever known before: It was violence that changed the possibilities of the nation and its future and also spoiled a good part of its past, and I think we all understood that, even then. We talked and cried and grieved over that killing for days, but none of us ever said anything about the violence in our own lives. I don’t think I even understood there was violence in our hearts. The funny thing is, when that darkness later erupted in its ugliest form, it too would become a historical episode of American bloodshed.
In any event, Christmas that year was dismal. Both Gary and Gaylen were in jail. The family was running out of money. The nation was still in mourning. All the winter nights felt black. It was the first time my mother had not put up a Christmas tree, or even a wreath.
SOMEWHERE AROUND THIS PERIOD, MY MOTHER DECIDED it was finally time for me to become a Mormon. She invited some of the church’s young adult missionaries to pay us regular visits and to explain the fundamentals of the Latter-Day Saints religion to me. Every few days I would sit in the living room with these young men, and they would tell me the story of Joseph Smith’s ordeal—the agony he had known as a young man, trying to find the true church,