Shot in the Heart - Mikal Gilmore [74]
Lyden handed me a photograph he had taken of the first class of boys he taught at Joseph Lane. Gary is standing dead center in the group, looking off to one side, his head tilted, and framed with the backlight of the camera’s flash as it radiated off the window behind him. “That’s him right there, with the halo behind him,” Lyden said, laughing lightly. After a moment, he continued: “My first impression of Gary was that he was a quiet boy. He had beautiful handwriting and a clear artistic ability. I think that learning came easy to him. But it wasn’t long before he started getting into trouble, and then he became one of the most disruptive students I’ve ever seen. He had all this innate intelligence and ability, but he refused to develop it. I used to get angrier with him than any other student I had. Whenever I turned around, he was doing something to turn the classroom environment upside down.”
My brother Frank remembers well Gary’s misbehavior. It was something he lived with daily. “Gary was always in fights,” Frank said. “He wouldn’t study. He’d come to school dressed in his leather boots and leather jacket, wearing his hair like Marlon Brando. He’d sit down and go to sleep in class. Sometimes, when we were in different classes, I’d hear a disturbance in the hall and I’d know automatically. I’d hear the teacher out there dragging somebody from the room. I’d go out and it was always Gary that they were taking out. He was always doing something. Sleeping, showing off, telling the teacher to drop dead or something. He didn’t care about anything. He would get the worse grades he could get. He thought it was cute. And there was no need for it, because Gary was a bright guy. He could have been getting the best grades. He humiliated the hell out of me at Joseph Lane. By then I had reached an age where I wasn’t really interested in being a complete fool, and he was.
“One day,” Frank continued, “Gary and a couple of other school toughs pantsed some guy in the school yard. They held him down and pulled his pants and shorts off him and ran them up the flagpole. I didn’t see it happen—if I had, I would have got into a fight with Gary, trying to stop it—but the news of it was all over school. Gary didn’t do it for any reason except to be funny. But I could see right then, there was a cruel streak developing in him. Ripping some poor guy’s shorts off and running them up the flagpole, leaving the guy standing there in his buff, trying to find something to cover himself with. That wouldn’t have been much fun. The guy was a nice guy. He was somebody I got along with.
“I saw this same guy on the street a couple years ago. He asked me if I remembered that incident. I could see that Gary’s little act had left its mark on him, and I still felt embarrassed that my brother had done that.”
After one incident too many, Lyden either hit Gary or threatened to hit him. “Gary and I went into it, I know that much,” said Lyden. “There just comes a point when you have to say to a kid, ‘Okay, that’s it—this is the consequence of your behavior.’ ”
At eleven-thirty that night, Lyden got a call from my father. He was in a rage. “Tomorrow,” my father told Lyden, “when you come to school, I’m going to blow your goddamned head off.”
“Strangely enough,” Lyden told me, “I went to school the next day, and it didn’t intimidate or frighten me. I guess I was pretty naive.” Frank Gilmore didn’t make good on his threat, but he did send