Shot in the Heart - Mikal Gilmore [190]
“He’d seen things in prison. He told me about those things. He had seen people maimed—he saw a man get his hands cut off—and he had seen men murdered. He’d seen so fucking many assaults, and when he was younger, he himself had been assaulted. Beaten. Raped. Terrorized. But he learned to go with it. As he got older and bigger and meaner, he became the assaulter. After that, they had nothing they could scare him with. It was like being in Vietnam for twenty-two years. He’d been the victim and the victimizer of so many hideous things. He could say, ‘Yes, I’ve been destroyed, but now I’m the one who does the destroying.’
“You’ll find thousands and thousands of men in this country that lived a similar life, and many of those men would probably make the same kinds of choices as Gary—the same ways of killing and dying. All those years in the horror and brutality of prison changes them. They reach a point of no return. They sort of live a day at a time, and to them, after a while, death starts to look like a way but of life, which is what it is—a way out of everything. They’re afraid of almost everything but dying, some of those guys. And they become really dangerous. You can’t lock them up, because that’s home to them. You can’t kill them, because they want that. They are your truly dangerous people, and there are thousands of them in this country walking around, because of our jails and prisons, who are exactly like Gary. Take some kid that has problems— maybe emotional problems, maybe family problems—put him in these outrageous horror house reformatories and prisons, and chances are, eventually, that kid will become like our brother.
“Gary had reached that point of no return. He wanted the release of death. That’s one reason I didn’t go back and visit him again. I knew he really wanted it, and it bothered me. Not only did he want it, it was like it was a holiday. He was celebrating. He was trying to be set free. It was his exodus.
“That last time I saw him—he was so different from the brooding man I visited throughout the years. This time, he sat there and he was snapping his fingers, he was laughing and he was making jokes. It was like Christmas Eve. He had found the perfect way to beat the system by having them kill him. Then he’s out of it. It’s over. In his way of thinking, I’m convinced he believed he had won. Most of us couldn’t win the way he did. But that was his idea of freedom, and, of course, it was the only freedom he had left. That’s the reason I stood back. I know you and Mom wanted to save him, and I never held that against the two of you. But I had to stand back because if I had gone on and done something, if they had kept him locked up in that hell, I would have felt to blame for it.
“I don’t think I slept two minutes that night, after seeing him. I knew I wasn’t going back anymore. I couldn’t watch him suffer, and I couldn’t watch him die. I sat here in the park that day and I thought: ‘I don’t want to see him again. I’m going to try to keep him in my heart and mind as that boy I used to play with here—the little brother that I loved, before he got ruined.’ The only thing that bothers me about my decision is, I don’t think Gary knew that I actually liked him. I don’t think he ever knew in his life that I actually did care about him, that I really felt for him. But there was nothing more that could be done for him. It was all over for Gary. He had no chance. And I think that’s what he was trying to tell you.”
THE MORNING AFTER I HAD RUN INTO FRANK on the street, I phoned Schiller in Orem. I told him of the remarks I heard Moody make and expressed my disappointment in having any portion of what I’d understood to be a confidential conversation