The Executioner's Song (111 page)

PART FIVE

Pressures

Chapter 22

A HOLE IN THE CARPET

Farrell felt in no hurry to go back to Utah and deal with Moody and Stanger, for he was enjoying the work on what he had already. While Schiller was in Hawaii, Barry had begun to lay out the Playboy interview. To make it more readable, he trimmed the dialogue, moved paragraphs around, and added relevant material from some of Gary's written answers to the earlier interrogatories. Usually, he rewrote Moody and Stanger's questions to smooth the flow, and offer something like the flavor of a Playboy interview. He did decide, however, for his own ground rules, that he would not take anything from the letters. The interview would be built out of responses, verbal or written, to their questions.

                That interview of December 10 was what he depended on most, however. Trying to get Gilmore on record over a broad range of topics, Farrell left a certain naiveté to the questions. He had been hoping for answers from which to dig out deeper questions, but figured these simple inquiries would allow Gilmore to feel superior. The results were astonishing. Gary came back in surprising volume. It looked to Farrell as if Gilmore was now setting out to present the particular view of himself he wanted people to keep. In that sense, he was being his own writer. It was fascinating to Barry. He was being given the Gilmore canon, good self-respecting convict canon. In fact, it was good enough for Farrell to begin to wonder whether the interview itself would ever get out of that tone.

INTERVIEWER   As far as we can tell from your prison record, you've been locked up almost continuously since you entered reform school, and that was twenty-two years ago. It's as if you never saw any choice but to live out a criminal destiny.

GILMORE            Yea, that's kind of a way of putting it. In fact, that's very nicely put.

INTERVIEWER   What got you started thinking like a criminal?

GILMORE            Probably going to reform school.

INTERVIEWER   But you must have done things to get yourself sent there.

GILMORE            Yea, I was about fourteen when I went to reform school and, ah, thirteen when I started getting locked up.

INTERVIEWER   What had you done to get locked up at thirteen?

GILMORE            Well, I started out stealing cars . . . but, ah, I guess my first felonies were probably burglaries, house burglaries. I used to burglarize houses on my paper route.

INTERVIEWER   Why? What were you after?

GILMORE            Why? Well, I wanted guns, mainly. A lot of people keep guns in their homes and, well . . . that's what I was primarily looking for.

INTERVIEWER   How old were you then? Eleven? Twelve? Why did you want guns?

GILMORE            Well, see, in Portland, at that time, there was a gang. I don't know if you ever heard of it—probably not. But, man, I figured that, well, I would like to be in the Broadway gang. And I figured best way to get in was to go down and hang around Broadway sell 'em guns. I knew they wanted guns. I mean, I don't know if the gang existed . . . it may have been a myth. But I—I heard about 'em, you know? So I thought, I wanted to be a part of an outfit like that . . . the Broadway boys.

INTERVIEWER   But instead you got caught and sent to reform school?

GILMORE            Yeah, the MacLaren School for Boys, in Woodburn, Oregon.

INTERVIEWER   Was that the point at which you just told yourself, From here on, I'm in for trouble?

GILMORE            (laughs) I always felt like I was in for trouble. I seemed to have a talent, or rather a knack, for making adults look at me a little different, different from the way they looked at other kids, like maybe bewildered, or maybe repelled.

INTERVIEWER   Repelled?

GILMORE            Just a different look, like adults aren't supposed to look at kids.

INTERVIEWER   With hate in their eyes?

GILMORE            Beyond hate. Loathing, I'd say. I can remember one lady in Flagstaff, Arizona, a neighbor of my folks when I was three or four. She became so frustrated with rage at whatever shit I was doing that she attacked me physically with full intent of hurting me. My dad had to jump up and restrain her.

INTERVIEWER   What could you have been doing to get her so mad?

GILMORE            Just the way I was talking to her and the way I was acting. I was never quite . . . a boy. One evening in Portland, when I was about eight, we all went over to these people's house, and there were two or three adults there. I don't remember just what I did, giving everybody a lot of lip, fucking with everything in the house—I don't remember what all—but anyhow, this one lady finally flipped completely out. Screamed. Ranted. Raved. Threw me out of the house. And the other adults there supported her and all felt the feelings she felt. Apparently, shit like that didn't have much effect on me. I can remember just walking home, about three miles, whistling and singing to myself.

INTERVIEWER   It sounds as thought you were on the course you've always followed well before you went to reform school

GILMORE            Well, I always knew the law was silly as hell. But as far as courses go, you react in a certain way because your life is influenced by all the varieties of your experience. Does that make any sense?

INTERVIEWER   It's hard to say. Give us an example.

GILMORE            Well, this is kind of a personal thing. It'll sound like a strange incident to you, but it had a lasting effect on me. I was about eleven years old and I was coming home from school, and I thought I'd take a short cut. I climbed down this hill, a drop of about fifty feet, and I got tangled in these briar bushes, and blackberry, and thornberry. Some of these bushes were fifty feet high, I guess, down in this wild, overgrown area in southeast Portland. I thought it would be a short cut, but there was no pass through there. Nobody had gone through there before. At one point, I could have turned around and gone back, but I chose to just go on, and it took me about three hours to pick my way. All during that time, I never stopped for a rest and just kept going. I knew if I just kept going I'd get out, but I was also aware that I could get hopelessly stuck in there. I was a block or so from any houses, and if I screamed . . . well, I could have died in there. My screams would have gone unheard. So I just kept going. It was kind of a personal thing. I finally got home about three hours late and my mom said, well, you're late, and I said, yeah, I took a short cut. (laughs) It made me feel a little different about a lot of things.

INTERVIEWER   What things?

GILMORE            Just being aware that I never did get afraid. I knew that if I just kept going, I'd get out. It left me with a distinct feeling, like a kind of overcoming of myself.

INTERVIEWER   Well, why then did you say it was going to reform school that got you started?

GIILMORE Look, reform schools disseminate certain esoteric knowledge. 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 that 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.

INTERVIEWER   Was it bad at Woodburn? How did you fit in there?

GILMORE            Man, that place made me think that was the only way to live. The guys in there I looked up to, they were tough, they were hipsters—this was the Fifties—and they seemed to run everything there. The staff were local beer-drinking guys that put in their hours, and they didn't care if you did this or did that. They had a few psych doctors there, too. Psychoanalysis was a big thing then. They would come in and they would show you their ink-blot tests and they would ask you all kinds of questions, mostly related to sex. And look at ya funny and . . . things like that.

INTERVIEWER   How long were you there?

GILMORE            Fifteen months. I escaped four times, and after that, I finally got hip that the way to really get out of that place was to show 'em that I was rehabilitated. And after four months of not getting into any trouble, they released me. That taught me that people like that are easily fooled.

INTERVIEWER   Did other inmates ever try to make you their punk?

GILMORE            NO . . . nobody ever . . . I've never had any trouble like that. No, never once. If it had happened I would have handled it in a decisive violent manner. I would have killed somebody—or beat them with something, you know, if they were too big. I would've took some weapon to 'em. But that never did happen to me.

INTERVIEWER   How did you feel when you were released from Woodburn?

GILMORE            I came out looking for trouble. Thought that's what you're supposed to do. I felt slightly superior to everybody else 'cause I'd been in reform school. I had a tough-guy complex, that sort of smart-aleck juvenile-delinquent attitude. Juvenile delinquent—remember that phrase? Sure dates me, don't it? Nobody could tell me anything. I had a ducktail haircut, I smoked, drank, shot heroin, smoked weed, took speed, got into fights, chased and caught pretty little broads. The Fifties were a hell of a time to be a juvenile delinquent. I stole and robbed and gambled and went to Fats Domino and Gene Vincent dances at the local hails.

INTERVIEWER   What did you want to make of your life at that point?

GILMORE            I wanted to be a mobster.

INTERVIEWER   Didn't you think you had any other talents?

GILMORE            Well, yeah, I had talents. I've always been good at drawing. I've drawn since I was a child, and I remember a teacher in about the second grade telling my mom, "Your son's an artist," in a way that showed she really meant it.

INTERVIEWER   Did you ever have a time when you had second thoughts about that criminal destiny, where you thought you might change?

GILMORE            Well, I figured if I could get something going as an artist—but it's so damned hard, you know. I wanted to be successful on a large scale—a fine artist—not a commercial artist. After a while I figured I'd probably just spend the rest of my life in jail or commit suicide, or be killed uh, by the police or something like that. A violent death of some sort, but there was a time as a kid when I thought seriously about it, you know, being a painter.

INTERVIEWER   How long was it before you were locked up again?

GILMORE            Four months.

INTERVIEWER   Four months! We thought you said that reform schools educate. Couldn't you have used your esoteric knowledge to stay out of jail?

GILMORE            It was just the pattern of my life. Some guys are lucky all their lives. No matter what kind of trouble they get into, pretty soon they're back on the bricks. But some guys are unlucky. They fuck up once on the outside and it's the pattern of their lives to be drawn back to do a lot of time.

INTERVIEWER   And you're one of the unlucky ones?

GILMORE            Yeah, "the eternal recidivist." We're creatures of habit, man.

INTERVIEWER   What's the longest stretch of time you've been free since you first went to reform school?

GILMORE            Eight months was about the longest.

INTERVIEWER   Your I.Q.'s supposedly about 130, and yet you've spent almost nineteen of the past twenty-two years behind bars. Why were you never able to get away with anything?

GILMORE            I got away with a couple of things. I ain't a great thief. I'm impulsive. Don't plan, don't think. You don't have to be a superintelligent to get away with shit, you just have to think. But I don't. I'm impatient. Not greedy enough. I could have gotten away with lots of things that I got caught for. I don't, ah, really understand it. Maybe I quit caring a long time ago.

All that was fine. Farrell was not for buying any of this without further examination, but the man was at least trying to give a presentation of himself. Clearly, it was the way he wanted the world to think of him, remember him. A mighty different man from the letters!

Farrell and Schiller agreed that the trick was to get Gary to talk truly about the murders. Something always happened then. Gilmore's readiness to comment on himself disappeared. His account fell into the same narrative style every hustler and psychopath would give you of the most boring, or of the most extraordinary evening—we did this and then, man, like we did that. Episodic and unstressed. Resolute refusal, thought Farrell, to attach value to any detail. Life is a department store. Lift what you can.

GILMORE            April got in the truck and, man, she turned the radio on real loud and moved right over beside me and told me she didn't want to go home, and I told her, Well, look, I'll keep you out all night, if you want. So I drove down to the place where I'd bought my truck and I talked to those guys about the financial arrangements. I give 'em my Mustang as the down payment and we drank some booze and just kind of made a loose arrangement about the truck, they were more or less just holding my guns for me, and, uh, I kept one pistol with me, the loaded one, and I signed the papers and took ownership of the truck and left my Mustang there, and then I was driving around with April and we got out into Orem and I pulled around the corner to this service station and it looked fairly deserted. That's what I guess drew my attention to it. I just drove around the corner and parked and told April to stay in the truck. I'd be back in a moment.