Shot in the Heart - Mikal Gilmore [150]
In a way, our new closeness had something to do with our respective ages—the same thing that had once helped keep us apart. When Gaylen was twelve and I was six, we just didn’t have much to talk about. Now that I was sixteen and he was twenty-two, we had much more in common. By this time, we had read many of the same books, watched the same movies, heard the same music. We talked and argued constantly—he hated Bob Dylan and the Beatles; I loved both—but it was friendly arguing, even respectful. We became companions during this time-something I had never known before with one of my brothers. It helped, I’m sure, that we no longer had to fight over my father’s love. For a while, Gaylen was my best friend.
But a peaceful life didn’t come easily to Gaylen. He had trouble fitting in with the other young people at the church. Most young men his age were on a mission or enrolled at Brigham Young University, and those were the men that the young Mormon women wanted. Also, Gaylen had seen too much of the world, knew too much about different ways of thinking and living, and the Mormons weren’t always comfortable with their knowledge of his history. They often would not invite him to social functions or young people’s parties.
Soon, Gaylen was drinking again and seeing his old friends. Soon, he was writing bad checks again, and soon the police were coming to the door again. I was surprised at how quickly and deeply he got himself in trouble. Within a few months, there were warrants out for his arrest in Clackamas County, and there were friends who were angry about things they thought he may have stolen from them. Now when Gaylen got drunk, he was often mean-tempered, and he was almost always looking for new ways to fuck up his life even more.
One night, when he was feeling the pressure of it all, Gaylen sat in the green leather armchair in our front room and drank a bottle of vodka. My mother sat there and watched him. I went upstairs and did my homework. I heard yelling and went back downstairs. Gaylen and my mother were arguing about money. He wanted her to give him two hundred dollars so that he could leave the state, but she told him she couldn’t— that was all the money she had, I told Gaylen: “Why don’t you lay off her? She can’t afford to give you that kind of money. Don’t you think she’s given you enough as it is?”
“Keep the fuck out of this,” he told me. “You’re not the big man you think you are.” He turned to my mother and said: “I want the money. I’m not leaving here until I have it.” There was a palpable menace in the way he said it.
My mother was trembling. She opened her purse and handed him one hundred dollars. “That’s all I can give you, and now I don’t even know how I’m going to feed us for the next month. You can never ask me for anything again,” she said, and then she started to cry.
Gaylen stood up, took the money, put on his jacket.
“If you leave here this way, with that money,” I said, “you aren’t my brother anymore.”
He walked past me without a word and slammed the door on his way out. We learned later that he had gone straight to the restaurant where my mother worked and cashed another bad check. She had the employer take the money out of her wages, so he wouldn’t press charges against Gaylen.
Gaylen ended up moving to Chicago and living under a different name. This time, we would not see him for five years.
AT FORT LEVENWORTH, FRANK SAW MUCH OF THE SAME HORRIBLE STUFF that went on in all prisons: homosexual rapes and guard brutality. He knew he was in a dangerous place, and so he asked for—and received—a cell to himself.
But staying to himself offended some of the other prisoners. They figured he was either independent or snobbish, and a few times, various prisoners tried to take him down a notch or two. There were some fights, plus an incident where an inmate tried to drop a heavy weight on his head. Frank knew that men got killed in these places. He saw one inmate attacked by others and slashed with a razor blade—so quickly, so many times, the guy was bloodied meat