Shot in the Heart - Mikal Gilmore [72]
The police knew about all these vice dens and tolerated them as long as there was a kickback in it for them. At the same time, they never let major organized crime get a foothold in the area, if only because they didn’t want the competition. Eventually, a newspaper-led, politically-motivated morality campaign changed the city’s night life forever. The all-night bars were shut down, the whorehouses were moved to the northwest corner of the city and the around-the-clock movie houses simply became cheap sleeping quarters for drunks and transients. Meantime, the city’s murder rate began to grow. In short, Portland became a lot like other midsized Western towns: a place hell-bent on believing that the darkness of its nights held nothing more provocative than the protected decency of American family life.
The early 1950s were also, of course, the period that saw the rise of juvenile delinquency—the term that many people used to describe the perceived upswing in dissatisfaction and violence among American adolescents. By the middle of the decade, the adventure called rock & roll would come to signify the growing enterprise of youth rebellion, and it would upend American popular culture in ways that it still has not fully accommodated or recovered from. My older brothers were coming of age in the midst of this time, and Gary and Gaylen in particular did more than merely enjoy or consume rebellion; they brought it home. They wore their hair in greasy pompadours and played Elvis Presley and Fats Domino records. They dressed in scarred motorcycle jackets and brutal boots. They smoked cigarettes, drank booze and cough syrup, skipped—and quit—school, and spent their evenings hanging out with girls in tight sweaters, or racing souped-up cars along county backroads outside Portland, or taking part in half-assed small-town gang rumbles. Mostly, they spent their time looking for an entry into a forbidden life—the life they had seen exemplified in the crime lore of gangsters and killers—and more and more, those pursuits became dangerous and scary.
In time, I wanted to be a part of my brothers’ late-night comings and goings, wanted to share in their laughter and friendship. I also remember being frightened of them. They looked deadly—like they were beyond love, like they were bound to hurt the world around them or die trying.
For Gary, none of this would end up as a simple youthful passage. It became instead a sensibility that encased him, like a creature caught in the ice of another age. Gary’s ideal of badness was formed in this time, and for him it would always remain a guiding ethos.
AS I SAID EARLIER, it is tempting to try to find a moment in this story where eveiything went wrong—an instance that gave birth to my family’s devastation, and especially to Gary’s. My mother held to the belief that Gary’s ruin was born during the brief move to Salt Lake, and even my brother Frank believes that something crucial changed in Gary during that period. For my part, I believe that the beatings were a decisive turning point, though I also suspect the simple (and more frightening) truth is, Gary’s fate was finished at about the instant in which my parents conceived him.
Gary himself, though, had his own view of the moment that made all the difference. It’s a strange instance, and it took place during the first year or so that we lived on Johnson Creek. Toward the end of my brother’s life, Larry Schiller—through Gary’s lawyers—asked him: “Is there any one event in your early life that you remember as fateful, that might have totally changed your life?” Gary replied by telling about a time when he was around twelve or thirteen years old and was heading home from parochial school and decided to take a shortcut. He crossed over from 45th Avenue—the long, winding road that connected Johnson Creek Boulevard to the street where his school was—and made his way to the top of the hill that loomed