Shot in the Heart - Mikal Gilmore [49]
Obviously, this child’s life is not off to an auspicious start. He has just been born of two people who carry their own bad legacies and who are presently in flight from certain unknown demons. If a parent’s fears can be passed on to a child at its birth, then Gary began life as a bundle of insecurity. On top of that, he has been given two names: one, the name of the woman who could never bring herself to love his father; the other—the name he will be known by, that he will become famous by—is a name that reminds his father of a loss that will always invoke his bitterness. There’s a horribly ironic twist that comes from all this name switching: What it means is, Gary Gilmore was never born; he would only die. (Years later, in fact, the federal penitentiary system would refuse me access to my brother’s files because I could not prove that any such person by his name had ever been born, or had ever had an official name change.)
I have to marvel at the complexity and stupidity of all these circumstances of birth—particularly the thought of two adults bringing a child into an atmosphere of fear and forcing on him identities that, one way or another, would ensure a loss of love. Do any of these factors matter? Does something as seemingly small as a wrangle over a child’s name really play any role in determining the child’s bloody fate? I can’t say for sure— I’m too mired in the webwork of my family’s mythology to sort it all out. It’s too easy for me to read significance into every oddity of fate, and I’m afraid I’m close to doing that here. At the same time, I know that all this business about the names would later matter to Gary a great deal, though by then he was already well down his particular road to hell.
SOMETHING IN FRANK STARTED TO GO A LITTLE WILD after Gary’s birth and the return from the South. It was like he needed to be somewhere different all the time. In the first few months of 1941, the new family drifted in and out of small towns every couple of weeks. Meantime, the fights between Frank and Bessie were becoming more frequent and rougher. One time in Santa Barbara, Frank went off on a five-day drinking binge. By this time, Bessie was used to these episodes. She knew to stay put with the boys and wait for Frank to return. This time, he came back wearing an exceptionally unpleasant mood. He walked into the hotel where they were staying, moved over to the bed where the new baby was sleeping and pointed down at Gary. “This isn’t my son, is it?”
Bessie wasn’t prepared for such an out-of-the-blue remark. “What are you talking about? Whose son could it be?”
“It’s Robert’s son, isn’t it? You think I don’t know about what’s gone on between the two of you back in Sacramento when I haven’t been around.”
Bessie looked at Frank for several long moments. Then she laughed. “You’re crazy,” she said. “You’ve been drinking so much it’s softened your brain and turned you into an old man.”
Frank hit her, hard, in the face. “Don’t lie to me, you python-spitting she-devil straight from hell. I’ve been lied to enough.”
He kept hitting her until she lay on the floor, her face bloodied all over, while the children cried. Through the whole ordeal she insisted the child was Frank’s. But after that instance, my father spent much less time holding his new baby son.
The two of them fought and shouted their way around America, with two babies in tow. One day in late spring, they were driving through northern Missouri. Frank had been in a miserable mood the entire day, yelling at my mother and driving the car at reckless speed, and the babies were growing restless from being cooped up for so long. This time, Bessie thought something was closing in on Frank. It was the only way to explain his behavior. It was like she could fed the hot breath on both of their collars. Late in the afternoon, Bessie insisted Frank pull into a service station along the highway. She needed to change little Frankie’s diaper, and she wanted to move her legs around a bit. She could see Frank wasn’t happy with the stop.