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By Root 375 0

mood. His friends lived in a mansion high on a hill on the east side of Portland. These were the people, it turned out, who were running Portland’s largest pornography and massage parlor business. They were dressed nicely and were polite, and they lived in a beautiful home. They were sitting at their dining table, looking at large black-and-white stills of blow jobs. They were trying to figure the best sequence for arranging the photos. Gary and I sat in another part of the room. He showed me his prize cache of drawings and paintings, a voluminous folder of poignant studies of everything from ballet dancers to bruised boxers, and an occasional depiction of violent death. Mostly, though, they were drawings of children, round faces with a bewildered, inviolable innocence. “Here,” he said, “take whatever you want.” To him, pictures were just something one drew and gave to somebody.

He wanted to take me on a tour of his friends’ premises, to show off the luxury that wasn’t his. While showing me around the indoor swimming pool, Gary, without warning, opened his jacket, took out a pistol and handed it to me, butt first. “Think you could ever use one of these?” he asked, head cocked in his best Gary Cooper fashion.

I felt as though I were being tested, and I didn’t like the method. I also felt awkward and vulnerable, holding a gun for the first time. I kept the barrel pointed toward the pool water and my finger away from the trigger. “I suppose I could if I had to, Gary, but I hope you’re talking about a situation where it’s a matter of survival, not choice.” He took the gun and put it in his jacket pocket. “C’mon,” he said. “I’ll drive you home.”

We drove in silence back to my apartment. I felt he was angry, but I wasn’t sure why. Gary started to honk at a car in front of us that was going too slow for him. The driver decelerated. “Son of a bitch,” Gary muttered, and swerved violently into the left-hand lane, right into the path of an oncoming car. The car honked and braked and at the last possible second Gary yanked our car off the road onto a sidewalk.

We stared at each other, twin mirrors of wide-eyed, openmouthed fear. “You almost got us killed!” I shouted. He rested his forehead on the driving wheel, breathing deeply. “Sometimes,” he said, “you just have to be willing to face that possibility.”

A FEW NIGHTS LATER, WHILE WATCHING THE NEWS, I learned of Gary’s arrest for armed robbery. He had walked into a service station in southeast Portland, high on whiskey and some opiate. He put a pistol to the attendant’s head and said: “Give me everything you have in your register or I’ll blow your fucking head off.” He was pulled over just a few blocks from the gas station and taken into custody without incident.

I felt relieved: Nobody had been killed. I also felt angry and saddened. Once more, Gary had thrown away his life. I tried to visit him at Multnomah County Jail, where he was being held, but this time he wasn’t allowed visitors. A couple of days later, my mother called me. Gary had been found lying on his blood-soaked mattress in his cell. He had cut himself on his right arm and he had also lacerated his abdomen. He was at the emergency clinic of the same hospital he had planned on springing his friend from.

Jesus Christ, I thought. There’s no fucking end to this.

GARY’S TRIAL FOR THE ROBBERY ATTEMPT was held in Multnomah County on February 12, 1973. My mother and I attended.

Gary entered the room in handcuffs. He asked to address the court, and the judge granted him the permission.

“I hope you don’t mind if I refer to my notes,” Gary said. “I’m not much of a public speaker.”

“Not at all, Mr. Gilmore,” the judge said.

Gary went on. “You have read the pre-sentence report and have decided probably what you are going to give me, but I would like to make a special appeal for leniency. I have done a lot of time, and I don’t think it would do me any good to do any more. What I mean is, I have been locked up for the last nine and a half calendar years consecutively and I have had about two and a half years’ freedom since