Shot in the Heart - Mikal Gilmore [206]
“You know,” said Nicole, “I never got to say good-bye to Gary.” She fell quiet for a few moments and stared into the dark as we sped down the highway. “One night,” she continued, “when I was staying at a house Larry had rented for me in Malibu after the execution, I had this dream about Gary. He came up to the house on this big motorcycle. He didn’t say much, but I knew he wanted me to go with him. I climbed on behind him and just held on tight, and we rode a long, long way. Finally, we came to a strip of land that stuck out into the sea. Out at the end of it stood this prison—but not the kind with guards or gates. More like a place where people go before leaving for somewhere else.
“On the inside, there were walls of white stone. Gary got off the motorcycle and said ‘Good-bye.’ I said, ‘I can’t go with you?’ And he said, ‘No, you don’t understand. You won’t be seeing me again’ started to cry then, just as hard as I had ever cried in real life. Then I looked around and saw another woman sitting close by, crying. It was your mother. I went over and held her close, and we cried together.”
We were both quiet for a long time, and then I asked Nicole: “Do you find yourself still thinking about him much?”
She looked at me a moment, smiled, and looked back out the window. “Oh,” she said, “the way the sun will set at night—sometimes that will remind me of Gary.” I thought about her words for a moment and realized what she was saying: Always.
Outside, the hill ranges of the small coastal town glided by, black silhouettes against the starlit sky. I came to understand that meeting Nicole had been a powerful experience, and a nice one. It reminded me that in real life, the truths of our hearts and memories never finish running their risks. Also, it felt a little like being part of a family—and that was something I hadn’t felt for a long while.
A few minutes later, Nicole dropped me back at my motel. “I hate good-byes,” she said, flashing a timid smile.
“I’m not good at them myself,” I replied.
I gave her a kiss, then watched her back her car out, turn and wave, and drive away. She went back to her life, and I went back to mine. It was all we could do.
MAYBE THAT SEEMS LIKE WHERE THIS STORY SHOULD END. Maybe it feels like a closure of sorts. Maybe it even carries a hint of redemption about it. At least, that’s the way it felt back in the autumn of 1982, when I wrote about meeting Nicole at the end of my article about The Executioner’s Song for Rolling Stone. I thought: Here is what I have to learn— what we all have had to learn: Our lives go on. We have to imbibe the pain, face the memories, and forgive what we can. All in all, not the worst truth to learn.
But the problem is, our lives do go on, and life has no real closure, except death. It is death that tells us that a story’s ended—that it is now time to evaluate the life that is finished, to reckon its plot and its drama, and to tell its stories. Gary and all those others who had joined the dead—the members of my family, the men Gary murdered—they were the only ones in this story who had any claims to closure, the only ones who had completed their parts, who had finished paying for or escaping the legacy. The rest of us were still living the lives that had to go beyond final pages, lives in which the bequests of the dead have never ended.
MY LIFE DID NOT ALWAYS GO IN GOOD PLACES, though on one level it probably seemed to. My career as a music journalist was a fairly fortunate one. I left Rolling Stone in 1980 for a few years, though I continued to write for the magazine. I went on to become the music editor at L.A. Weekly for a while, and then worked for five years as the pop music critic at the now-defunct, much-missed Los Angeles Herald Examiner. I did some of my favorite work as a writer during this period—I felt, for the first time in years, that I had found