Shot in the Heart - Mikal Gilmore [70]
Finally, Frank found a way to endure the punishments. He discovered at a young age that the more he seemed scared or upset by a beating, the harder his father would hit him. “If you cried or screamed,” Frank said, “then Dad knew he was hurting you, and it only made him go harder. So I would just cover up and just hold it in. Let him batter on me as much as he wanted. As a result, I got hit less than Gary, because Gary used to really jump and yell and scream. Dad would really go to town on him then. He would go completely off his rocker, and he just wouldn’t stop. He’d keep swinging and swinging and swinging, and Gary kept yelling and crying and begging him to stop, which would only make Dad hit him harder and longer.”
I suspect that what Frank means is that he simply shut down emotionally, though the psychic costs must have proved enormous. Gary, however, couldn’t shut down: The outrage and unfairness of being beat that way became a sticking point in his heart. It was as if, for the rest of his life, he would be reenacting the drama of his father’s punishments with every authority figure he encountered. Years later, when Gary was locked up in prison, he would go out of his way to challenge the dominance of the guards around him. Many of these men were cretinous and brutal, and they would hold Gary down and beat and kick him until his mouth was too bruised to talk and his legs were too sore to stand. Still, he would find a way to stand up and spit at them and call them the foulest names he could muster, knowing full well that they would just beat him again. He would not stop fighting the battle that he knew he could never win.
Once, a generation after their childhood, when my brother Frank was visiting Gary at the Oregon State Penitentiary, Gary told him: “The whole reason I hate authority is because it reminds me so much of Dad. Let’s face it, all those senseless razor strappings the old man gave me did not keep me out of trouble, now did they?”
THOUGH I WOULD LATER see indelible signs of my father’s violence, I never experienced it in the unrestricted way that my brothers did. In fact, I remember being hit by my father on only one occasion. The cause of the spanking is vague—which only goes to support Frank’s belief that all you truly carry away from such an incident is the bitterness of the punishment. I think I probably did something like drawing on a wall with a crayon or sassing my mother, and my father deemed that the act called for a whipping. I remember that he undressed me and stood me in front of him as he unbuckled his belt—a wide, black leather belt with a gleaming silver buckle—and pulled it from around his waist. This whole time he was telling me what my whipping was going to be like, how badly it was going to hurt. I remember I felt absolute terror in those moments— nobody had ever hit me before for any reason, and the dread of what was about to happen felt as fearful as the idea of death itself. My father was going to hit me, and it was going to hurt. It seemed horribly threatening—like the sort of thing I might not live through—and it also seemed horribly unjust.
My father doubled his belt over and held it in his hand. Then he sat down on his chair, reached out and took me by the arm and laid me across his lap. The next part is the only part I don’t recall. I know I got whipped and that I cried out, but I can’t remember a thing about the blows or the pain, or whether it was even truly bad. All I remember is that a few moments later I was standing in front of him again, this time held in my mother’s embrace. “That’s enough, Frank,” she said. “You’ve gone too far. You’re not going to do to this one what you did to the others.” I stood there, looking at my father, rubbing my naked, sore butt, crying. I remember that what had really hurt me was that I felt I had lost my father’s love, that the man I trusted most had hurt me in a way I had never expected. My father was