Shot in the Heart - Mikal Gilmore [84]
“ ‘All right,’ Blue told me. ‘If that’s the way you want it.’ Mr. Blue scared the hell out of me that night with this bit. I’m sure that if he were questioned, he would say he was trying to find out whether I was gay, but I don’t think you have to do that to find that out. I knew other boys who described similar experiences with him. Of all the counselors and disciplinarians I knew at MacLaren’s, the one that I hold the most contempt for in memory is Mr. Blue. He was a cold, sadistic son of a bitch, a very scary person, and last I heard, he was still working within the Oregon corrections system.”
That was Gary’s first night in incarceration, away from our family.
GARY WENT INTO MACLAREN’S as a smart and talented fifteen-year-old boy, on his way to a life of trouble. He came out a little over a year later fully committed to living a criminal’s destiny. “Reform schools disseminate certain esoteric knowledge,” he told Larry Schiller years later. “They sophisticate. A kid comes out of reform school and he’s learned a few things he would otherwise have missed. And he identifies, usually, with the people who share the same esoteric knowledge, the criminal element, or whatever you want to call it. So going to Woodburn was not a small thing in my life.”
This isn’t to say that reform school was principally culpable for Gary’s degeneration. I have read through MacLaren’s file on Gary—a body of documents that became so legendary following Gary’s execution that the school kept it intact and occasionally made it available for the perusal of curious law enforcement and corrections officers. Though the school would not let me see my brother’s psychological reports (possibly the most important part of his file), I still found the records fascinating— sometimes full of real insights about Gary and about his family. Indeed, if there’s any single theme that emerges from these documents, it is this: Gary’s troubles were inextricably linked to the influence of his father—a man who seemed altogether reluctant to face the difficult truths necessary to save his son. Following the first intake interview with my parents, one supervisor wrote the following: “The counselor feels that the fact that the father sat outside in the car during the interview with the mother indicates either a lack of interest or shame or the feeling of inability to do anything about the problem. At the same time it should be honestly recorded that the four-year-old Mike was in the car, and that possibly Dad thought it best to sit with this small boy during the time that the mother had the interview.” A few paragraphs later, the counselor added: “Mr. Gilmore … appears to govern that which is under his authority as [an] … absolute monarch … Unfortunately, the much younger but completely overshadowed mother would seem to count little in Gary’s parole plan if Gary were sent home.” And, from another record: “Physical standards of the home are very good, but because of the paranoid attitudes of the father, the boy has been severely damaged.”
Throughout Gary’s stay at MacLaren’s, my father remained hostile to the school’s efforts to bring about a better home atmosphere for my brother. The family, my father insisted, was not to blame for Gary’s trouble; Gary had been set up by others and was being wrongfully punished. Exonerate Gary and set him free, my father told the school officials, and the problems would be solved. One counselor was smart enough to figure out that my father’s unswerving defense of Gary wasn’t so much a sign of love for his son, or a desire to protect him, as it was simply an extension of my father’s belief that the world was out to ruin Frank Gilmore, even through his family. “Whether [Gary’s innocence] is true or not,” wrote the counselor, “Gary, at home, could scarcely avoid feeling that the school, the judge, the important community citizens and maybe a few others were conniving to destroy the entire family.”
But records don’t tell the whole