Shot in the Heart - Mikal Gilmore [155]
I THOUGHT ABOUT THE POLICEMAN’S WARNING A LOT. At times I had feared that crime might be a familial disease: Would I wake up one day and want to rob? Was it inevitable that I would make the same choices as Gaylen and Gary—that I would end up hurting people or plundering their lives and possessions? Was I bound to end up on the inside of a jail cell, thinking about the world outside?
In truth, I not only didn’t have much talent for crime (though, come to think of it, neither did my brothers), I also didn’t have much appetite for it. For one thing, I had seen up close what my brothers’ lives had brought them. In addition, I had my mother’s urgings to consider: For years, she had told me repeatedly that I was the family’s last hope for redemption. “I want one son to turn out right, one son I don’t have to end up visiting in jail, one son I don’t have to watch in court as his life is sentenced away, piece by piece,” she said. After the policeman’s warning, her words reverberated even more in my head.
As a result, I felt I now had the job of signifying all the goodness that would make up for all my brothers’ failures and misdeeds. I was not allowed, it seemed, to enact my own darkness, my own violence, my own hatred. All such license had been taken up by my brothers, with disastrous results. The only role left in the script for me was to atone for their losses, to set the historical balance right.
Still, I was doing my best to be bad—at least within certain limitations. I was now smoking dope regularly, and I had just started taking psychedelics on weekends. I was also skipping school much of the time— writing my own excuse slips and forging my mother’s signature, so I could take the afternoon off and go meet girlfriends at various places, for the purposes of getting stoned and having sex. I told myself I had to become familiar with sin and rebellion—that there were truths within those realms of experience that I had to learn about. They felt like natural truths—like something I had been gravitating toward my whole life.
My drift was not going unnoticed by people at the church. One Sun day, a member of the local bishopric—a man I admired much and had once regarded as something of a father figure—drove over to our house on Oatfield Road and asked me to step outside for a talk. He told me that he and other church leaders had grown concerned about my changing appearance—the new length of my hair and my style of dressing—and they were also bothered by some of the political views they had heard me voice. They found all these changes on my part an unwelcome influence on other young Mormons. Unless I was willing to forswear this new spirit of rebellion, he said, then perhaps I should think about no longer attending the church.
On that day. I realized a line had been drawn in my life, and I knew which side of that line I had to stand on. These new things that had become my passions—rock & roll, politics, art, literature, and sex—had provided me with a new creed and a new sense of courage. Looking back, I now believe that these choices allowed me—and many others in my generation—to act out a kind of formalized, largely permitted brand of “criminality”: We could use drugs or defy authority or flout the law or even contemplate violent or destructive acts of revolt, we told ourselves, because we had a reason to. Also, through the bravest