Shot in the Heart - Mikal Gilmore [179]
“I had felt so strong about him being out—I had really felt good about it. It was something I wanted inside. It was sort of like finding a gold mine and then discovering it was built over a deadly trap. That’s the way I felt. To me it was real painful.”
I WAS THE LAST TO KNOW, MY MOTHER had not called me to give me the news. She couldn’t bring herself to.
Like Frank, I felt these were good days. I had quit my job at the drug clinic—I’d found the work of watching people make bad choices and sometimes dying as a result a depressing career. A couple of years before, I had finally worked up the courage to do something I had been wanting to do for years: I began writing about music. I had been writing for local newspapers, and I was now starting to sell pieces to some national publications. I felt hopeful.
I was also working at a record store in downtown Portland, to help pay the bills. I loved being around the music and most of the customers, but there were sometimes rough aspects to the work. Occasionally we would have to bust shoplifters, and sometimes this obligation made us face the possibility of violence. Just a couple of weeks before, I’d had to confront a whole family of shoplifters who had their coats and purses full of cassette tapes. When I stopped them at the door, they pulled knives on me. Lucky for me, a coworker had called the police, and they arrived at the door at the same moment that the knives came out.
Later, when the matter went to trial, the judge asked one woman who had drawn a knife what she was doing with it in her purse.
“I was on my way to a picnic,” she replied.
The judge laughed. “A picnic with a switchblade?” he said.
On a Friday night, nine days after Gary’s arrest, I came home from work, drained after being on my feet for eight hours on a hot day. Since I had to open the store the next morning at ten, I passed up a chance to go drinking with some friends and headed for home.
The Wild Bunch, Sam Peckinpah’s genuflection to violence and honor, was on TV, and as I settled back on the couch to half-watch it, I picked up the late edition of The Oregonian. I almost passed over a page-two item headlined OREGON MAN HELD IN UTAH SLAYINGS, but instinctively I began to read it. “Gary Mark Gilmore, 35, was charged with the murders of two young clerks during the holdup of a service station and a motel…” I read on—in a daze—about how Gary had been arrested for killing Max Jensen and Ben Bushnell on two consecutive nights in July. Both men were Mormons, about the same age as I, and both left wives and infant children behind.
I was stunned. I put down the paper, went into the kitchen, and began throwing up in the sink. My girlfriend Andrea came in, alarmed. “What’s wrong?” she asked. I told her.
I sat on the couch the rest of the night, rereading the sketchy account. I felt shame, remorse, guilt… and rage. It could’ve been me, I thought, a victim of some senseless robbery.
The next day, I went to visit my mother in Oak Grove, six miles away from my house in Portland. I had no way of knowing whether she had read the news, except to call and ask, which seemed too distant and cold. I was worried about her health. She was now sixty-three, and she had never regained her strength from the surgery of a few months before, and of course she never would. It turned out that she had known of the killings for more than a week but couldn’t bring herself to tell me. We sat there in the claustrophobia of her bleak home that day, looking at each other across a gulf of devastated common history, and I finally began to understand that she had always lived much closer