Shot in the Heart - Mikal Gilmore [163]
Both of these stories, though, aren’t much more than grim rumors— all that my brother Frank and I have been able to piece together from what we remember of hushed whispers. I have never been able to find the Chicago Police reports or Illinois hospital records about Gaylen’s stabbing. It is likely that Gaylen was living under another name while in Chicago, and nobody seems to know what that name was.
I was, however, able to obtain Gaylen’s Clackamas County hospital records. Though I did not know it at the time, he was in and out of the Oregon City Hospital often during the spring through autumn of 1971. Every time it was for the same thing—intense stomach pain—and every time there wasn’t much that could be done. Twenty-three years later, as I was reading through those hospital records, I came across a technical medical description of the depth and severity and number of his wounds, and it all finally caught up with me. I cried over the horror of his pain and the loss of his life in a way that I had never cried for him before.
My mother, as I said earlier, knew all along about the severity of Gaylen’s wounds and how he had received them. It was simply another one of those ugly truths that she thought I should be protected from. It would not be until almost a decade after his death that I would come to understand that Gaylen had in effect been murdered while he was in Chicago, and that it had taken him longer to die than it did most people.
IN THE SUMMER, GAYLEN’S GIRLFRIEND, JANET, followed him from Chicago to Oregon. She had missed him as much as he had missed her, and so she left the violence of the world she had known for an unknown small town in the American West. Janet and Gaylen got a motel apartment down the boulevard from where my mother and Frank lived. Janet was a kind, caring person, and one of the few young women my mother would let enter her home. Janet also seemed to love Gaylen very much.
But it was a tempestuous love. The two of them would drink too much and then yell and throw things, until one or the other would stomp out of the motel to go and drink alone. Invariably, Gaylen would find a bottle of liquor and drink it to its bitter end. In contrast to the beer and red wine he had favored years before, he was now drinking stomach-churning rot like peppermint schnapps. I would take one sip of the sickly-sweet stuff and want to vomit. Gaylen, though, could drink it all night long.
On several occasions, at about three in the morning, I would hear a banging at my front door, I would go downstairs and it would be Gaylen, standing in my doorway, swaying in the summer night air, weeping like a baby. He would come in and we would sit and talk, and he would continue to nurse off his schnapps until he passed out on my sofa. I’d put a pillow under his head and a blanket over him, and then I would sit and watch him as he slept his fitful sleep. The next morning, when I’d wake up, he would always be gone.
GAYLEN TURNED HIMSELF INTO THE COURT and the court dismissed the charges pending against him. The judge and prosecutors could probably see he was in no condition to be put inside a jail. Also, he had lost all his appetite for crime. He had no more interest in writing bad checks, or stealing, or dreaming about the perfect crime. Instead, he wanted to marry Janet and have a family of his own. He wanted, he told me, to start life over.
One night, around one in the morning, Janet called Grace. Gaylen, Janet said, was in intense pain and needed to get to the hospital right away. He wasn’t able to drive, and they didn’t have the money for a taxi. Therefore, Janet was asking Grace to help them.
Grace drove Gaylen and Janet to a hospital in Milwaukee, but the emergency room would not accept Gaylen because he did not have insurance or a welfare card. Grace then took them to the Oregon City Hospital. Again, the hospital didn’t know what to do with Gaylen—he’d already been there so many times. When it was past five in the morning, and no doctor had yet seen him, Gaylen asked Grace to drive