Shot in the Heart - Mikal Gilmore [161]
In 1970 and ’71, the trouble came to full boil. A couple of days after Christmas in 1970, Gary was admitted to the prison’s psychiatric unit. The resident psychiatrist, Dr. Wesley Weissert, noted: “Gilmore was, in general, very antagonistic, belligerent, uncooperative, with specific incidents being urinating on the floor, throwing his food against rail, spitting at various aides (including the undersigned), and in general being ‘obnoxious.’ “ Gary told the doctor that his anger stemmed from his problems with the dental department. The doctor thought that perhaps Gary was being manipulative about the whole matter. Gary became angry and spit in Weissert’s face several times. Weissert noted: “[An] attempt was made to try and convince him that we cannot fortify bad behavior such as he has been exhibiting. If the acting out continues for the next 24 to 48 hours, he will be given an intramuscular Prolixin to help control his verbal and physical aggressive assaults.”
Gary calmed down for a few weeks, but soon his rages resumed. He was threatening suicide, but Weissert thought that Gary wasn’t genuinely depressed enough to kill himself. In the first week of February, Gary talked several other inmates in the segregation unit into joining his protest. All of them—Gary included—slashed their wrists. Two of them almost died.
About a month later, Dr. Weissert prescribed Prolixin for Gary. Prolixin is a medication that can provide some true psychotics relief from the nightmares of imagined voices and other delusions. It has also occasionally been used in prisons and jails to calm down troubled or hostile men. Many doctors, though, believe that this is not an advisable use, since the drug can also make some people intensely restless or nervous. An average recommended dose of Prolixin might be in the range of 2 cc. to 4 cc. a month. Gary claimed that he was given 16 cc. a month for three months, which, if true, could be considered a large dose; however, I have not been able to obtain any records that may confirm or refute this claim.
According to some men I’ve talked with who also experienced the drug, it can sometimes make your body so anxious that you feel a need to stretch or bend as much as possible—a side effect basically known as akathesia. One man told me he had even seen other men try to bend over backward and snap their spines, so that they could end the miserable irritation. In Gary’s case—at least according to Gary, though other prisoners from the period corroborated his account—the guards would keep him tied to his cot for hours on end, just to watch him writhe in misery. Gary, however, stayed defiant. One time, when a guard got close enough to him, Gary covered him in spit. The guard, Gary later said, began choking him and then put a pillow over his head. “I was about to go out,” Gary said, when another guard thought it had gone far enough. The guards punched my brother in the face a few times while he was strapped down, then wheeled him under a bright overhead light and left him there all night. On Prolixin, my brother said, the brightness of the light was unbearable, and sleep was impossible.
One of Gary’s friends from the prison during these days, a man named Steve Bekins, told me: “Gary was never the same man after Prolixin. He was full of hatred, and he simply knew no boundaries. He would go as far as he could to make the prison authorities angry, even if it meant hurting himself. Some guys became more distant from Gary after all that. You could tell he was now a man full of murder.”
DURING THE TIME ALL THIS WAS HAPPENING, I got another call from my mother. “Your brother Gaylen has come home,” she told me. “He got tired of life in Chicago, and he decided he missed us. He’s come back to face his bad check charges, and he wants to make a new life.”
I was glad to hear the news. Whatever bad feelings I had once had about my last encounter with Gaylen had long been forgotten. If my mother could forgive him, then I should too. Besides, I missed his wit and his smarts.
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