Shot in the Heart - Mikal Gilmore [97]
“Do me a favor, partner,” Gary said. “Don’t tell Mom and Dad about this. Tell them I wasn’t here.”
I nodded, then ran down and found my mother. I told her Gary had two girls in bed with him. I don’t know why I did it. I always wanted my brothers to like me. Looking back, I figure I just had to tell somebody, and she was the first person I came across. It’s the only time I remember my mother ever being truly mad at Gary. She went into the kitchen and told my father. I remember that my father laughed. “Aw, hell,” he said. “He’s just being a boy.” He went up and talked to the girls in soothing tones. Got everybody dressed, put them in the car, and drove them away.
The other incident I remember vividly took place on a Christmas night—maybe the Christmas after MacLaren’s, but more likely a year or two later. This holiday night I was sitting in my room, playing with the day’s trove of presents, when Gary wandered in. “Hey, Mike, how you doing?” he asked, taking a seat on my bed. “Think I’ll just join you while I have a little Christmas cheer.” He had a six-pack of beer with him, and he was speaking in a bleary drawl. “Look, partner,” he continued, “I want to have a talk with you.” It was probably the first companionable statement I remember him making to me. But what followed was an intimacy I had never expected and could not really fathom at such a young age. Sitting on the end of my bed, sipping at his Christmas beer, Gary stared off into some harsh, private place and told me horrible, transfixing stories. Stories about the boys he knew in the detention halls and reform schools where he now spent much of his time—stories about the hard boys who had taught him the merciless codes of his new life, and about the soft boys who did not have what it took to survive that life.
And then Gary imparted to me one of the few lessons I remember ever hearing from him. “You have to learn to be hard,” he said. “You have to learn to take things and feel nothing about them. No pain, no anger, nothing. And you have to realize, if anybody wants to beat you up, even if they want to hold you down and kick you, you have to let them. You can’t fight back. You shouldn’t fight back. Just lie down in front of them and let them beat you, let them kick you. Lay there and let them do it. It is the only way you will survive. If you don’t give in to them, they will kill you.”
He set aside his beer and reached out and cupped my face in his hands. “You have to remember this, Mike,” he said. “Promise me. Promise me you’ll be a man. Promise me you’ll let them beat you.” We sat there that winter night, staring at each other, my face in his hands, and as Gary asked me to promise to take my beatings, his bloodshot eyes began to cry. It was the first of only two times I would ever see him shed tears. And then I promised him: Yes, I’ll let them kick me. But I was afraid even as I said it—afraid of actually taking a beating from anyone, and afraid of betraying Gary’s plea.
I thought he was telling me how to survive in jail. I realize now he was telling me how to survive in our family.
IN THE YEARS AFTER I WAS BORN, my father kept his own photo albums, and in those books he had almost exclusively photos of me. I suppose that about sums up the reality of my early years: My father kept me. For many years—in fact, until the day