Shot in the Heart - Mikal Gilmore [86]
“The next thing the psychiatrist would do,” Duane continued, “was give you pencil and paper and say, ‘Okay, draw a house for me. Now, draw a picture of yourself inside the house,’ and so forth. Well, I knew right away what he wanted. He wanted to see a house and he wanted to see where I was in this house. He was looking for me to give him clues to myself. I went ahead and played it straight with him, because I had already heard that if the psychiatrist thought you had a lot of problems, he’d assign you to one of the rougher cottages. I wanted to get sent to one of the better cottages, where the kids were likely to get out the soonest, so I wasn’t going to fuck up my psychological profile.
“When I got back to the squad room, I was sitting around with my buddies and we’re all laughing about this psychiatrist, thinking about ways we could fuck him up. That’s when I met Gary. I remember he was a nice kid, a little shy, but he was eager to get along with us and to establish himself as somebody notable. He saw what we were doing, and he was anxious to run a bluff on this psychiatrist and his fucked-up theories. Also, I think he wanted to impress us guys. He was a little younger than us—maybe a year and a half younger.”
Duane paused in his story for a moment, then shook his head. “I remember this so well and afterward I felt really bad, especially after I heard what happened to Gary in later years. I mean, it’s humorous to tell about, but if I could change anything of what I did back then—and I include my so-called crimes—if I was only allowed to change one thing, I would not have done this to Gary, because I saw him take the bit and run with it. I told him, ‘Okay, what you want to do is draw a picture of yourself, and give yourself a little mouth, big eyes, big ears, and no hands. You know what this tells this idiot psychiatrist? You’ve got no voice and no hands, so you’re helpless to change anything. But you hear everything and you see everything, so you’re obviously a paranoid.’ Now, Gary wasn’t really like that, you know what I mean? But he did what I told him—he went in there and drew the picture of himself that way.
“I shouldn’t have been doing that,” Duane said. “I thought it was cute as hell that some other dumb-ass kid would follow my instructions, even though I knew that fat-ass psychiatrist was a contemptible fucker in many ways, and he had the power to assign Gary to one of the rougher cottages. You’ve got to realize, when you’re a kid and you get locked up, it screws you up. I had the idea that there were only so many people who were going to get released every month. I wanted to be sure I kept myself on the pipeline to get out as quick as I could, and I felt like I was in competition for release with the other kids. That’s the way those places can make you think. I was playing a game I shouldn’t have been playing.”
MACLAREN’S REFORM SCHOOL FOR BOYS offered its wards both counseling and educational opportunities, or, if a boy preferred, some vocational training—primarily farmwork. Gary, for the most part, chose MacLaren’s unlisted fourth option: full-time punishment. In fact, Gary had only been at MacLaren’s a matter of days when he began getting into trouble. His first punishments came at the hands of Mr. Blue. “Mr. Blue loved to administer something he called ‘spats,’ “ Duane told me. “I got them a few times. It didn’t take much—all you had to do was yell at or push another kid. Any sign of belligerence.