Shot in the Heart - Mikal Gilmore [210]
Just in case that point wasn’t plain, at the segment’s end the interviewer set up another combination punch. “How could you say you loved somebody so cold-blooded?” he asked.
“There isn’t a day goes by,” said Nicole, “his name doesn’t go through my head. He came into my life, he loved me, and he destroyed all the good that was there.”
“If you could erase Gary Gilmore from your life, would you?”
Again, another broken smile, another glance away, and she shook her head.
“And you say that,” the interviewer asked, “knowing that if you erased Gary those two men would still be alive, those men’s children would still have their fathers …”
Finally Nicole closed off the question. “Yeah,” she said, nodding. “Yeah, then I would.”
After that, the camera cut to host Maury Povich, wearing an expression of smug disgust. “Tough to shed a tear for her,” he said.
I think it was the closest I have ever come to smashing my television.
I sat there looking at Povich’s face, and I thought: Nicole never asked for your fucking tears. None of us did: not Gary, not her, not me. Yes, if anybody deserves tears, it is the families of Max Jensen and Ben Bushnell; they deserve not just tears but compassion and support and prayer. But they aren’t the only ones. While you’re at it, I thought, you might try crying for all the people who never really cared to examine how and why these murders happened, and how they might have been prevented. You might try crying for yourself you fucking self-righteous prick, because in a way, just like me, you are a part of the context that helps breed murder in our daily world. And, Mr. Povich, if you cannot feel compassion for Nicole—whom you had no compunction about exploiting in order to draw an audience for your show—you might try showing some compassion, or at least some understanding, for those people who had the possibility of murder jammed deep inside their hearts at an early age, because sometimes murder is the only vintage that can come from an annihilated heart.
I admit that not everything I was thinking in these moments was very gracious, much less terribly rational. I was angry and I was hurting, and I was tired of all the world’s merciless judgments.
I turned off the TV and the lights in my front room and sat there in the dark for hours, thinking. Only a few months before, I had gone through one of the worst chapters of my life—my brief move to Portland and back— and as I reflected on it now, from a little distance, I realized that what had gone wrong had occurred in large part as a result of my past. It was an echo of a ravage that was already in motion long before I was born and, in effect, formed as much my true bond with Gary as any blood tie we might share: that is, we both had been heirs to a legacy of negation that was beyond our sway, maybe even beyond our understanding. Obviously, we each had different ways of dealing with that legacy: Gary ended up turning the nullification outward—in fact, turned it anywhere he could: on innocents, on Nicole, on his family, on me, on the world and its ideas of justice, finally on himself. I had turned the ruin inward, because I had not been allowed—and would not allow myself—to turn it outward. Outward or inward—either way, it was powerfully destructive, and for the first time in my life I came to see that it was not really finished. My family’s ruin did not end with Gary, because it had not started with him.
Sitting there that night, I realized I had grown up in a family that would not continue. There were four sons, and none of us went on to have our own families. We did not go on to spread any legacy or dynasty, to extend or fulfill any of our needs, kind or cruel, damaged or conscientious, through children. We didn’t even have kids in order to beat or ruin them as we had once been beaten or ruined. And though I may have spent years telling everybody that I wanted a family,