Shot in the Heart - Mikal Gilmore [76]
I look at this picture and I feel both sorrow and anger. For the life of me, I cannot understand why somebody didn’t value this kid enough to offer him something other than scorn and the rod. Gary was a smart kid in a time and place that did not value his brand of intelligence. He was smart and brave enough to want to rebel—to fuck things up as a way of declaring how things had fucked him up—but the world was not going to accommodate or tolerate that rebellion. It was going to see it as simple disobedience, and it was going to destroy that spirit, or take revenge on it. When I look at this photograph, I see a damaged boy. Or more accurately, I see the face of a broken angel as it looks away from the easy certainty that everyone else is looking toward and contemplates taking on the devil’s face for a lifetime fit.
IN SPRING EVENINGS after school, as the daylight hours stretched longer, Gary and his friends began hanging out in the woods behind Johnson Creek. They would take girls into hidden groves and they would sneak along bottles of beer or whiskey. Gary had a little camera he had stolen from my father, and whenever he could, he would talk the teen-aged women into posing for pictures in the nude. Within a few days, Gary would be passing the photos around school. “That was a big thing in those days,” says Frank. “Most kids didn’t have stuff like that. Gary was living the way that people twenty years old would be living, for example. In that sense, he was real popular with the guys because he was kind of a century ahead of us.”
Deeper in the woods there was an old train trestle, crossing the creek’s swimming hole. Sometimes, after Gary had a few drinks, he would climb out on the trestle and wait for the train to come along. He would stand in the middle of the span until the moment the train would hit the start of the bridge, then he would race to the opposite end, jumping to one side at the last possible second, as the train reached the other bank. He did this frequently, and he had several close calls as the train’s engine bore down on him. Word about Gary’s bravado got around Joseph Lane, and kids would come to the trestle in the early evenings to watch him race the train. Nobody else would risk matching the feat. Some of the kids admired Gary for his recklessness, but others began to keep a distance from him after they witnessed him make the run. They realized that a boy who did not seem to fear the momentum of a train might be too dangerous to get close to.
One day Frank went to watch his brother run along the trestle, and when he saw how close Gary let the trains come to hitting him, Frank was terrified. “I tried to talk to him,” he told me. “I didn’t want to see him get killed. Showing off was one thing, but this was suicidal.” Gary kept racing the trains. Finally, Frank went to my mother with his concerns. “We weren’t tattletales on each other,” he said, “but I was afraid Gary was going to get killed, so I asked her to talk to him. But I told her not to tell Dad, because he would just have got out his razor strap and made a big thing out of it, and what would that have accomplished?” Bessie finally prevailed on Gary that it would be an easy matter for his foot to get caught in the tracks and for him to end up ground under the engine’s razorlike wheels. Gary promised my mother and brother he wouldn’t outrun the trains anymore. But I’m willing to bet he kept on awaiting engines on the trestle, until something equally nihilistic caught his fancy.
IN PORTLAND IN THOSE days, if you were a teenager interested in proclaiming your lawlessness or toughness, the hippest thing you could do was join the Broadway Gang. A combination street gang and car club, the Broadway Boys—as they were also known—dressed in pachuco-style clothes and hung out late at night on Portland’s main avenue, outside a restaurant called Jolly Joan’s. Though some of its members occasionally