Shot in the Heart - Mikal Gilmore [196]
I thought all this, and then I looked over at my mother, and I saw her face crack, and I heard her wail: “My God, Gary, where are you? Where have you gone to?”
FOLLOWING MY BROTHER’S EXECUTION, an outcry arose in Utah against what many people (including several death penalty advocates) saw as the unnecessarily bloody and “old West” aspect of Utah’s mode of capital punishment. Why hold on to such gruesome conventions, the reformists argued, when an increasing number of other states were opting for the comparatively “humane” method of putting the condemned to death by lethal injection? In a fairly brilliant act of legal and moral sleight-of-hand, the Utah legislature managed to accommodate both the traditions of their region and the reformists’ pressure for change. As of 1980, hanging—an old West practice if ever there was one—would no longer be an option for execution (nobody ever chose it anyway), and in its place, Utah now offered the alternative of lethal injection. However, under what was rumored to be a tremendous amount of back-room ecclesiastical pressure, the state also retained the firing squad option, in case the man who was going to die wanted his blood to be shed, as a bid for salvation. In the years since, nobody has opted for the choice of being shot, and it is not likely that many will ever again take that course. Chances are, Gary Gilmore will remain the last man to die before a firing squad in America, as well as the last man to pay the Mormons’ rigorous cost of Blood Atonement.
YEARS LATER, I would learn what my brother’s last words were. They stunned me when I heard them, they haunt me still. Gary Gilmore’s final words, before the life was shot out of him, were these: “There will always be a father.”
I want you to take me
Where I belong
Where hearts has been broken
With a kiss and a song
Spend the rest of my days
Without any cares
Everyone understand me
In the valley of tears
Soft words has been spoken
So sweet and low
But my mind has made up
Love has got to go
Spend the rest of my day
Without any care
Everyone understand me
In the valley of tears
— FATS DOMINO AND
DAVE BARTHOLOMEW,
“Valley of Tears”
SHORTLY AFTER GARY’S EXECUTION, I wrote an article about the turn of events for Rolling Stone. I did this because I felt that the experience that I and my family had just gone through had been shattering, and somehow writing about it helped make it bearable. Our lives had overnight exploded in a way that we could never have imagined, and for a long nightmare season, our history, our sins, and our shame had been part of a pageant that was headed inexorably toward a public death. There was no way to withstand that without also trying to purge it, and I think that being able to write about Gary’s death helped save an immediate part of my sanity. But the deed wasn’t without its cost. I had, of course, blown my cover. People now knew I was Gary’s brother, and many of them had comments to offer and questions to ask.
Somewhere during this time, I decided I was tired of the day-to-day costs of my family and its infamy, and so I fled my hometown of Portland, Oregon, and moved to Los Angeles, where I had a job waiting at Rolling Stone. Meantime, Frank stayed with our mother, Bessie, in her run-down trailer in Oak Grove, Oregon.
Life in Los Angeles was not easy at first. I drank a pint of whiskey every night, and I took Dalmane, a sleeping medication that interfered with my ability to dream—or at least made it hard for me to remember my dreams. And there were other lapses. I was still living with Andrea but seeing a couple of other women when I could. Plus, for a long season or two, my writing went to hell. I had trouble figuring out what to say and how to say it. I could no longer tell if the things I was writing about were worth writing about. I wasn’t sure any longer how you made words add up to anything. The editors at Rolling