Shot in the Heart - Mikal Gilmore [197]
Instead of writing, I preferred reading hard-boiled crime fiction— particularly the novels of Ross Macdonald, in which the author tried to solve murders by explicating labyrinthine family histories. I also spent many nights lost in the dark glory of punk rock. I liked the way the music tried to make its listeners accommodate the reality of a merciless world. One of the best punk songs of the period was by a British band, the Adverts. It was called “Gary Gilmore’s Eyes.” What would it be like, the song asked, to see the world through Gary Gilmore’s dead eyes? Would you see through the eyes of somebody who wanted to kill the world, and then kill himself?
All around me I had Gary’s notoriety to contend with. For my first few months in L.A.—and throughout the years that would follow— people asked me often about my brother. I met men who wanted to know what Gary was’ like—men who admired what they saw as his bravado, his hardness. I met women who wanted to sleep with me because I had been close to him. I avoided these people. I would live with being Gary’s brother, but I would not live with being one of his fans or supporters.
I also met women who, when they learned who my brother was, would never see me again, never take my calls again. And I got letters from strangers who thought I had no right holding the job I was holding—writing for the attention of young people—since I had been related to a man who had murdered. I also got letters from people who thought I should have been shot alongside my brother.
There was never a season without some reminder of what had happened. In 1979, Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song was published. By this time, Andrea and I had separated and I was seeing another woman—somebody I liked very much. As she read Mailer’s book, I could see her begin to wonder about who she was sleeping with, and about what had come into her life. One night a couple of months after the book had been published, we were watching Saturday Night Live. Eric Idle was the guest host, and he was doing a routine of flash impersonations. At one point, he tied a bandanna around his eyes and gleefully announced who he was impersonating: “Gary Gilmore!” I was sitting with this woman and a couple of friends, watching the Saturday Night episode. After the episode played out, I went and poured a glass of whiskey. Later that night, my girlfriend and I had a difficult talk. She announced that she was leaving me, and within a week she was gone. To be fair to her, she would later insist that her leaving had nothing to do with Gary, that it had to do with me. I’m sure she’s right—we had been having trouble for some time, and we both had made many mistakes. But at the time, it felt as though everything that went wrong had to do with who I was—a man who carried the mark of his family.
It was a crushing moment in a long, bad stretch—a period in which almost every few days somebody would ask me: “You were Gary Gilmore’s younger brother, weren’t you? What did it feel like, having him die like that?”
I was never really sure how to answer that question. I think I wanted to say: I’m no longer sure what it feels like. The emotions of the event, like the details and history of it, were something I could no longer claim as my own. You watch what was once a private and troubling relation of your life become the subject of public sensation and media scrutiny; you watch your brother’s life—and therefore, in some way, a part of your own life—become larger than the confines of your sway, and after a while, it doesn’t seem much like your life anymore. It doesn’t seem like something you should feel too much about, because feeling won’t erase the pain or shame or bad memories or unresolved love and hate.
But I hated it every time the questions were asked. I tried for years to be polite or thick-skinned about it. I took comment after comment from people who betrayed their own intelligence