Shot in the Heart - Mikal Gilmore [71]
I know it is the only time I ever said that to him in my life, and I cannot forget what those words did to his face. His smile fell—indeed, his whole face seemed to fall into a painful fear or sense of loss. He laid his belt on his desk and sat studying the floor, with a weary look of sadness.
My mother led me out of the room and dressed my nakedness.
My father never hit me again. After that, he touched me only in love. I realize now I was the only one in the family that he saved that touch for, and to this day I still feel guilty for that singularity.
That was it—the one and only childhood beating I ever received within my family. It might have proved less memorable had it been a weekly occurrence, as it was for my brothers. At the same time, had I been beaten as much as they were—in particular, as much as Gary, whose pain and fear only seemed to gain him especially savage thrashings— there’s a good chance that I also would have ended up as a man who spent his whole life preparing to pull a trigger. When I think of what my brothers went through almost every week of their childhood and young adolescence, the only thing that surprises me is that they didn’t kill somebody when they were still children.
THE DIFFICULTY GARY HAD GOTTEN INTO BACK IN SALT LAKE was a fairly unremarkable sort. “He was doing stuff a lot of kids would do,” said Frank. “The sort of trouble people would talk about for a couple of hours, then forget. They figured he was just a kid growing up.” Chances are, Gary would have found worse trouble in Salt Lake, though he might have had to look a little harder for it. In Portland, trouble was easier to find.
By the early 1950s, Portland had been Oregon’s largest and most important city for more than a century, though it was still groping in many ways to define itself. It didn’t have the sort of history or ambition of other West Coast cities like Seattle, San Francisco, or Los Angeles—in fact, Portland was a town that pointedly decried ambition. The city’s sense of conservatism was a carryover from its earliest days, when its original New England settlers had sought to build a place that would be a refuge of civility and comfort in the midst of the rowdy Northwestern frontier. That attitude of smugness held sway in Portland for several generations, keeping the place hidebound and insular. Consequently, Portland was largely unprepared for the influx of population and the resulting cultural change that followed the end of the Second World War. In the time we settled there, much of Portland still looked and felt like a prewar town that did not want anything to disrupt its heart of fearful pettiness.
Still, a little disruption was inevitable. The postwar sense of release— plus all the new citizenry—had temporarily forced a crack in the city’s Victorian veneer. By day, downtown Portland was still a conventional shopping and business district, though like many American urban centers it was starting to lose its prominence to the outlying suburbs. By night, though, downtown Portland changed its character. Along the main drag of Broadway there was a strip of bustling bars and restaurants, and many of them stayed open all night. Inside these spots, you could find an interesting late-night social life: a mix of Portland’s rich folks and aspiring bohemians, plus a colorful smattering of its would-be criminal types. In the blocks off Broadway, down toward the Willamette River, there were other all-night emporiums, if you knew where to find them. Places like twenty-four-hour movie houses, where the last thing anybody did was watch the movies. Instead, various hustlers worked the patrons, dispensing oral sex or hand jobs for a few dollars, or selling marijuana or harder drugs to the more daring customers. There were also all-night gambling dens and crowded brothels that weren’t shy about servicing teenagers. I wish