The Executioner's Song (110 page)

GILMORE Oh, hey, man, I got something that’ll make a mint. Get aholda John Cameron Swazey right now, and get a Timex wristwatch here. And have John Cameron Swazey out there after I fall over, he can be wearing a stethoscope, he can put it on my heart and say, “Well, that stopped,” and then he can put the stethoscope on the Timex and say, “She’s still running, folks.”

Nonetheless, it offended Farrell to be so hooked. He often thought that if less attention had been paid to Gilmore he might have changed his mind and looked to avoid his execution. Now Gary was trapped in fame, and it gave him a crazy strength. Of course, one

Barry Farrell had become an integral part of this machine that was making it impossible for Gilmore to take an appeal. Hardly a flattering light on yourself. You could try to say, “I’m not the locomo-five, only one of the cars, and in my car, the best, most sensitive, thinking is being done about the situation. Therefore, my moral responsibility is to stay with it. If I leave,” Farrell told himself, “Gilmore is abandoned to the likes of ‘Good Morning America.’”

Nonetheless, in the quiet of 2 A.M., Barry would recall how his New West piece described Larry Schiller as a carrion bird. Now he had to wonder if Barry Farrell was not the blackest wing in journalism. Somebody was always dying in his stories. Oscar Bonavena getting killed, Bobby Hall, young blond girls getting offed on highways in California. One cult slaying or another. He even had the reputation of being good at it. His telephone number leaped to the mind of various editors. Barry Fan’ell, crime reporter, with an inner life exasperatingly Catholic. Led his life out of his financial and emotional exigencies, took the jobs his bills and his battered psyche required him to take, but somehow his assignments always led him into some new great moral complexity. Got into his writing like a haze.

Yet there was one aspect of the interviews he did not question. There was something marvelous about the energy Gilmore had to give. Cline Campbell stopped by at the motel to say hello, and remarked to Farrell, “Your work is a godsend. This is Gary’s one chance to express himself.” Looking at the daily bits and pieces of produce, Farrell would think, Yes, you could see Gilmore’s attempt to form a coherent philosophy in relation to some incredibly tangled ethical matters.

MOODY What are some of the things you could never do?

GILMORE Oh, I couldn’t snitch on anybody. I couldn’t rat on anybody. I don’t think I could torture anybody.

MOODY Isn’t forcing somebody to lie down on the floor and shooting him in the back of the head torture?

GILMORE I’d say it was a very short torture.

MOODY But how could any crime be worse than taking a person’s life?

GILMORE Well, you could alter somebody’s life so that the quality

it wouldn’t be what it could’ve been. I mean, you could torture ‘em

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you could blind ‘em, you could maim ‘em, you could cripple ‘em, you could fuck ‘em up so badly that their life would be a misery for the rest of it. And for me, that’s worse than killing somebody. Like, if you kill somebody, it’s over for them. I — I believe in karma and reincarnation and stuff like that, and if you kill somebody, it could be that you just assume their karmic debts, t-t-thrr-thereby you might be relieving them of a debt. But I think to make somebody go on living in a lessened state of existence, I think that could be worse than killing ‘em.

STriNGER Then there are crimes that you consider worse than murder?

GILMORE Well, Jesus, I don’t know, there’s all kinds of crimes, you know … what some governments do to their people,, you know? Forms of brainwash in some countries …. I think some forms of behavior modification, like, ah, you know, the irreversible forms, like lobotomies, and ah, you know, Prolixin-I won’t say they’re worse than murder, but man, you gotta give it some thought …. You don’t interfere with somebody’s life. You let people meet their own fate. STANGER Didn’t you interfere with Jensen’s and, ah, Bushnell’s lives?

GILMORE Yes.

STANGER YOU think you had any right to do that?

GILMORE No. (sighs)

MOODY If you really believe that your soul is full of evil, and if you really wish to atone, why haven’t you attempted … some expression of remorse?

GILMORE I don’t believe my soul is that full of evil.

MOODY Do you think it’s filled with any?

GILMORE More evil than yours, or RoD’s, or, uh, a lot of people’s. I think I’m further from God than you are, and I would like to come closer.

MOODy Do you think expressing remorse is mushy?

GILMORE I’m afraid the newspapers would interpret it in a mushy light.

Campbell might be right. With all his poses, Gary was still rising to the interview so well it was frustrating on occasion not to be able to conduct the interviews oneself.

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Yet Farrell was just as glad it couldn’t happen. He was saved thereby from having to muster that twinkle of the eye at which he had become so reassuring. Or that firm handshake which said, “I’m here to listen to you, man to man, buddy to buddy.” All those things interviewers did, those up-front sympathies, those gut-grinder empathies. This way, there was no quickly-arrived-at brotherhood to betray. He could sit at the typewriter and compose his questions, Moody and Stanger would truck them out, Debbie and Lucinda would type the tapes, and he could study it long enough to write new questions. He and Gary were immunized from one another. No need to twist his face full of instant humanity in order to keep Gilmore talking.

Even more important, he would not have to run the risk of getting too friendly with Gary and so forgetting that some basic pieces might be missing in Gilmore, that he, Barry Farrell, as a brother of Max Jensen, ought not to forgive for too little. Yes, it was better this

way.

Still, the tapes were endlessly irritating. Barry was developing quite a dislike for the lawyers. It was too cruel a demand on his nervous system not to know whether a serious question was going to be presented properly, or if Moody, or particularly Stanger, would giggle his ass off. To Farrell, straining to listen at the end of a tape, the lawyers seemed too cautious when they were not too flighty. Some of those Sisters at the Catholic school in Portland, Gilmore would confide to the lawyers, gave us real whippings. “They used to go insane with frustration,” Gary said, “trying to make me conform. I got beat by nuns more than once. It wasn’t like when they disciplined other children there. My father finally took me out of the school.” Farrell was up on tiptoe for the development of this theme. The key to every violent criminal could be found in the file of his childhood beatings, but Gilmore claimed his mother never touched him, and his father never bothered to. So here, at last, might be the beginning of some nitty-gritty. Stanger, however, chose to say, “Oh, gee, those nuns always seemed so nice in the movies.” Gilmore answered, “Yeah. In the movies.” Stanger cackled.

To Farrell’s ears at that moment, it went: Cackle, cackle, cackle. He went wild listening to those tapes late at night in Orem, in the ice-cold middle of winter.

Sometimes he and Schiller would sit down with the lawyers and go over the questions. Moody and Stanger would seem to know what they were doing as they left for the prison. Then they would come back saying great, great, and leave the tape. Schiller would play it — oh, God. The lawyers were hopeless as journalists. All that stuff they didn’t get around to.

GILMOaE This kid come to me and asked if he could talk, and wanted to come out in the yard with me and asked if he could walk around with me. I asked him, “What’s wrong?” and he said this, uh, nigger was trying to fuck him. He was going to turn himself in, you know, into the hole, to be locked up to get away from it. He didn’t know how to handle it. I told him, “Well, listen, man, what do you want me to do?” and he says, “I’ll be your kid if you’ll protect me,” you know. I says, “Well, I don’t want a kid, I don’t like punks, ya know, and I don’t want you to be a punk anyway.” I asked him if he was one. He said, “No,” and he didn’t want to be one. So I just went and got another guy and told him about it you know, and he said, Let’s kill the motherfucker. As it turned out, we didn’t kill him. Gibbs will say that we did, but we didn’t. We just caught this guy coming up the stairs and we both had pieces of pipe in our hand, you know, and we beat him half to death and drug him down to another nigger’s cell, and put him on the bunk. He was unconsicous. We hit him so fast and so hard.., he was a boxer, we didn’t give him no chance, slammed the door, and left. He knew who did it, you know, and, uh, he never tried to do anything about it. He accepted it and, uh, that’s the way it was.

That’s the way it was. They never asked Gilmore another question. He could have shouted in frustration. He would not have let Gilmore get away with that story. Farrell would have liked to learn if Gilmore had ever been turned out by some black guy. Maybe as far back as Reform School, maybe later. But there was something in the story that left Farrell suspicious. This big, black brute who aroused Gilmore sufficiently to defend a sweet white boy-it was like a girl calling you on the phone to say, “I have a friend who’s pregnant. Do

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yOU know a doctor?” Gary was walking tall in the tale, but what if that little white kid had been Gary?

So there would be hours when Farrell would be seized with depression at how few were the answers they had located in the inner works of Gary Mark Gilmore, and the size of the questions that remained. How could they begin to explain things so basic, for example, as the way he had led Nicole into suicide? That was clammy. Could you call such depths of lover’s perfidy a product of environment? Might you dare to explain it by saying that only an urban cowboy could pass through psychological machines that would stamp you out that badly? Could you say that you had to eat the wrong foods, sleep in the wrong places, take the wrong drugs, drive the wrong cars, make the wrong turns, do all that for an awful long time before you turned into a force who did horrible things to people who loved you?

Or did you put the blame on heredity, and say Gary Gilmore grew out of the evil seed of mystery in things itself? Why, there were thousands of people who could stick up a motel and shoot the motel owner. Afterward they would utter the same kind of half-stoned things Gilmore had testified to. Didn’t quite know, didn’t quite

member, it was like a movie, man, no reason. A veil of water over the mind, you know. But planning for Nicole’s suicide — that, to Farrell, had evil genius. “Little elf, how can you do this to me?” Gilmore would implore. Then, at the top of the next page, as if Gilmore had just swallowed a lightning bolt of rage, why, FUCK, SHIT, and PISS would be written in letters two inches high.

Farrell got formidably suspicious of those letters. The mood, he noticed, often changed at the beginning of a new page. In effect, each sheet was being worked on as a separate composition. Gilmore — good old Renaissance man — wasn’t about to sully the calligraphy of a pretty page with obscenities, not if he was planning to finish the pretty page with a drawing of an elf.

GILMORE If I talk to Nicole before I’m executed, I’m not going to ask her to do any particular thing, and I may encourage her to go on living and to raise her kids. Uh, I don’t want anybody else to be able to have her, though.

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MOODY You’re really on the horns of a dilemma,

GILMORE Yeah, you might say it’s giving me a little pause. MOODY She has a pretty heavy responsibility to those kids. GILMORE AW, no more responsibility than anybody has for their kids. Listen, your kids come through you but they’re not really of you. I mean … everybody is an individual little soul. Those kids come through her but they are not a part of her.

MOODY Do you think they could get along as well without her as

with her?

GILMORE I guess this sounds like a cold-blooded thing, but I’m not really overconcerned about them kids. They’re not going to starve to death. (pause) I’m concerned about Nicole and myself.

MOODY Might it be kinder and more loving to instruct her to forget you, get over you, and find a man for herself and her children who would give them a chance for a better life than they’ve had?

GILMORE Kinder and more loving to who?

MOODY To her and the children.

GILMORE I’m not going to answer that.

Well, a coherent philosophy came no more easily to him than to anyone else.

M1 this while Schiller was having his own reaction to Farrell. He didn’t like the way Barry tended to shape his questions upon conclusions he’d already made. In a way, very Catholic, thought Schiller. Catholics were supposed to know what they thought. Sometimes the habit carried over from church to a lot of other things. Start with preformed conclusions, and your investigation would move on tracks. In his own classy way, Barry could be as narrow-minded as an FBI man. He certainly wasn’t exploring karma enough. Nor was Schiller certain that Barry had a good sense of Gilmore.

The real friction, however, was that Farrell didn’t like to listen to tapes when they came in. For Schiller, that was the creative experi-

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ence of the day. He’d have an hnmediate reaction. At such times, he felt he understood Gilmore at a moment-by-moment level. But Barr didn’t like to listen. He waited for the tapes to be typed up. That left him a full day behind. Still, Farrell argued, he couldn’t work until they were on paper. Then he could underline them and analyze them. Schiller would say, “Don’t you hear his voice? Gar is ready to answer questions on this subject now.” Ban would reply, “Well, I want to look at the transcript.” Of course, their relations never got uncivil, except for that blowout over Jimmy Breslin.