Shot in the Heart - Mikal Gilmore [205]
“In what way?”
“Because then, truly, we would have seen how the public can give an event its importance, but how they can do away with that importance, too. I wish my film had that ending.”
“But didn’t you ever ask yourself whether your involvement was going to help determine the execution?”
“I don’t think our actions actually determined Gary’s death,” Schiller replied, “but I think they determined the entire size of his death. If the media, myself included, had decided to move out of town two weeks before the execution, Gary’s death would not have been as important as our coverage made it seem.
“You see, regardless of what you may think, I did not want to see Gary executed. I certainly had deep feelings about the value of a life, but I also understood that Gary had the right—the inalienable right—to choose his own destiny. I wasn’t necessarily convinced he was bringing harm to anybody else by choosing to die that way.”
It was late on a hot summer night. The only noise around us was the rustle of trees as the night air shifted and began to slough off some of its heat. I found that I was sitting across a table from a man for whom I once felt the strongest dislike, and I discovered, to my surprise, that I could no longer summon up that rancor.
TOWARD THE END OF MY DISCUSSIONS with Larry Schiller, I asked him about getting in touch with Nicole Barrett Baker, the girlfriend whom Gary had left behind. I had, in fact, never met or spoken with Nicole. When I visited Gary in Utah the week before his execution, she was still hospitalized following a joint suicide attempt with Gary. I tried to find some way to establish communication with her—in part, because Gary had asked me to, and also because the pain and confusion of the moment seemed to suggest reaching out to someone—but I could find no way around the strict confinement of her hospital. The closest I came to getting any message to her was by calling a Salt Lake radio station and asking them to play a song for her at Gary’s request. It was Gary’s favorite old rhythm & blues song, Fats Domino’s “Valley of Tears.”
In the years that followed, there wasn’t a month that passed that I didn’t think of making some belated contact—in part, because something about the events surrounding Gary’s death had always seemed unresolved to me. But the only way I knew to find her was through Larry Schiller and, by my own choice, I had shut off that course. Also, I probably wasn’t ready. Meeting Nicole would be something like confronting a living reminder of Gary’s losses, and there were times when that would have been too much.
Now, though, with the address that Schiller had furnished me, I sat down and wrote Nicole a letter, telling her about what I was doing and asking her if she would be willing to meet and talk. A few weeks later, I flew up to the small town where she was living in Oregon. The Nicole who met me at the airport seemed every bit as lovely as the Nicole played by Rosanna Arquette in the film, though also a good deal shyer and more self-possessed. Apparently, the last couple of years had worked some well-deserved kindly changes: Nicole was now a happily married, born-again Christian and the mother of a new baby boy. We greeted each other with a little uncertainty and headed out to an all-night restaurant for dinner.
We talked for hours, but it took us a while to get around to Gary. She told me about her marriage and her Christianity; I told her about my marriage, and why I loved rock & roll so much. We talked a lot for the next few days, and in time we could talk about Gary and what had happened. The funny thing was, it took us a while to sort through all our own, real memories and the written and filmed accounts of what had happened in our lives. Somewhere in the midst of all the interpretations of real life, we realized, it was far too easy to lose part of the elements of our real selves.
During the last night I saw Nicole, we went for a long drive in the Oregon coastal woods. We talked about our memories