Shot in the Heart - Mikal Gilmore [96]
It happened on a hot summer night, in the middle of July 1957. Gary and Clyde had been out late, looking for the usual fun, the usual trouble. They were coming from a party on the east side, where they had been smoking weed all night, and were walking along 52nd Avenue, near Division. At about 2:30 A.M., they passed an office building. Gary looked around the streets. They were empty and silent in all directions. “Let’s hit this building,” Gary said. They found a loose window, jimmied it, climbed in. Moments later Gary was going through a desk when he came across a .32 automatic. The gun was loaded and already cocked, but Gary didn’t know.
There was a big drugstore down the street. Gary and Clyde decided to go rob it. Walking down Division, Clyde said to Gary: “C’mon, Gary, you’ve never robbed anybody with a gun before.”
“I have too,” said Gary. “I robbed a grocery store over by Mom and Dad’s house.”
“Oh, bullshit. Show me how you’d rob somebody.”
“Like this,” said Gary. He turned around, aimed the gun at Clyde’s midsection, pulled the trigger.
Clyde saw blue flame come from the end of the gun, and felt a burning sensation in his stomach. “Aw, man, you shot me,” Clyde said, and fell down.
Gary looked at Clyde a moment, then ran down the street.
A little while later, Clyde heard two more shots. “Jesus Christ,” he thought, “what’d Gary do—kill somebody, or shoot himself?”
Clyde managed to get up, make it to the street corner and flag down a passing taxi. Told the driver he’d been shot, and to take him to a hospital. When they got to the emergency room, Clyde told the driver: “I’m broke.”
“You fucking punk,” the driver said, and took off.
An hour later, Clyde’s mother was at the hospital and so were the cops. Clyde wouldn’t say how he’d got shot or who had done it. His mother turned to an officer and said: “Why don’t you check out Gary Gilmore? This looks like something he would do.”
NO MATTER HOW MUCH Clyde’s family insisted, he would not press charges against Gary for shooting him. “I would have done the same thing,” he said later. “I would’ve thought, ‘Hell, I killed the guy. Better take off.’”
It pissed off the police, but they could still hold both of the kids on burglary charges. Once again, they remanded Gary to adult court. This time, a good lawyer couldn’t help. He was sentenced to one year in Rocky Butte, the Multnomah County Jail. It was his first real jail time. He was sixteen years old.
AGAIN, I HAVE BEEN TELLING you stories that do not come from my own memory. They have been passed on to me either by the oral tradition of my family, or by witnesses, or by interviews or documents of one sort or another. Gary isn’t somebody who comes back to me that much through my own memory—or at least not through the memories of my childhood. To be truthful, I don’t remember Gary as somebody I saw around our house on a daily basis, like my parents or other brothers. I remember him more as somebody who was talked about—a sort of distant force, whose activities outside the home had a tremendous impact on our peace of mind, like a storm, always looming outside the door.
My mother told me Gary used to hold me on his lap when I was a toddler, that he loved playing with me. She also told me that he used to enjoy taking me downtown with him when he went shopping for school supplies or clothes, that he would usually bring me back loaded down with new loot he had bought for me with his own allowance. When my mother pointed out to him that he had just spent all his money on an already over-indulged child, Gary would laugh. It seemed he got a kick out of the idea that a small kid had actually conned him. I have to take my mother’s word for these stories. I simply have no memory of any of these occasions.
I clearly remember only a handful of incidents involving Gary from my early childhood. Here are a couple of them:
One morning—probably during Gary’s stretch of freedom between MacLaren’s and the county jail—my mother told me to go wake him up. He was going to be late for school. I ran