Shot in the Heart - Mikal Gilmore [160]
My mother put her arms around him. “What is wrong with you?” she asked.
“I’ve been Prolixed,” Gary said thick-tongued. “The psychiatrist and warden here have put me on a heavy medicine, Prolixin. They use it to control the prisoners they don’t like. They’re punishing me because I’ve been angry with them about my teeth.”
Gary tried to explain more, but putting the words together was a terrible effort. He ended up just sitting there, his mouth hanging open. “I’m sorry, Mom,” he finally said. “I can’t stay any longer. I’ve got to go back to my cell and lie down.”
As he stumbled from the visiting room, all eyes were on him. A few of the other inmates offered words of encouragement as he walked by: “Steady as you go. Hang in there.”
When Gary had left, my mother stayed in her chair, sobbing uncontrollably, as Grace tried to comfort her.
My mother and Grace went to find the warden. They ended up talking with the assistant warden. My mother demanded to know why Gary was being given this medicine. She was livid. The assistant warden was unmoved. He told her that Prolixin was the best drug they had available to help them deal with violent prisoners. Gary’s behavior, he indicated, warranted the drug.
My mother walked out of the prison, full of fury and hatred, and feeling helpless.
“They’ve turned your brother into a zombie,” she told me that day on the phone, crying. “He was like a walking dead man. We have to do something about this.”
THE CIRCUMSTANCES LEADING UP TO GARY’S PROLIXIN EPISODE had been building for years. It all stemmed from two problems: Gary could be a difficult man to handle in incarceration, plus, he was a man badly in need of a set of functional false teeth. The combination of these two conditions created the setting for a terrible conflict that would know few bounds.
Shortly after his arrival at OSP in the spring of 1964, the prison dentist examined Gary’s teeth and decided they should all be extracted and replaced with upper and lower dentures. The dentist made Gary the dentures, but they did not fit well. They rubbed against his gums and scraped them raw. Talking or eating had become a painful ordeal. Gary requested new dentures, but when he received them, he had the same problem, so he destroyed them. The prison decided he was being difficult and they weren’t going to jump to meet his demands. Gary decided that the officials were refusing to issue him workable dentures as a way of punishing him further.
This battle went on for years. In fact, it would not be until 1975, following Gary’s transfer to a federal penitentiary in Marion, Illinois, that he would finally receive a set of comfortable false teeth that he could live with. In the meantime, he raised constant and momentous hell, and the dentures issue became a contest of wills between him and the Oregon prison authorities. He wrote numerous letters to the Oregon State Corrections Board and to two consecutive state governors, complaining about the situation. All these officials wrote the prison, seeking explanations and solutions. Gary got in frequent fights and arguments with the guards and other prisoners, which resulted in his being beaten and then isolated in a bare-bones segregation cell, sometimes for several months at a time. He set fire to his mattress, flooded his cell, and got sent to the psychiatric security unit. He attacked one dentist and threatened to kill another. He had my mother place an ad in Oregon’s largest newspaper, urging the public to take up his cause with a letter-writing campaign. For a while, the warden received a steady flow of letters from around the state, all demanding “equal justice for Gary Gilmore.”
I have a large file box, full of hundreds of documents related to this affair. You could write a book alone based on the drama of those correspondences and prison reports, and it would be