The Executioner's Song (116 page)

He carted himself to the university on the afternoon of the and went into this hall at BYU with something like four fucking college students, all Mormons, and this teacher who Bishop got up and blah blah blah. He introduced Tamera she was once a student here and now works for the Deseret and Tammy got up and made a ten-minute speech, very pious, Mormon girl striving for her Recommend. Then the troduced Schiller who stood there and made his journalism speech. Couldn’t remember a word afterward, standard thing he kept in the back of his mind. Any day he talk for fifteen minutes would be a very bad day.

After a while, he asked for questions, and thirty hands

and he pointed to a student who said, “Mr. Schiller, can you tell me why you’re wearing a Gary Gilmore belt?”

Larry looked down and, by God, he had a Gucci on.

G’s on the buckle. So, he explained the initials to those four Mormons, and then said to the fellow who asked the are a journalist, because you have turned one thing into that is journalism.” The rest of it was simple, very simple

placid. He wouldn’t call the students bright or intelligent, so much as in their own world. They were hostile to Gilmore, of course, but hostility in a Mormon was so reserved, you didn’t even see it. It just showed in the questions. “Why,” they would ask, “don’t you do the story about Ben Bushnell rather than Gary Gilmore?” and Schiller would answer that at this point in the realm of the United States, Gary Gilmore was making history. Fair or not, Benny Bushnell and his death never would. The kids didn’t like it, but he was very straight on. Told them he was not there to please them, but to show the other side of the coin. “I’m not going to hide what I am,” had been one of his first remarks. So it went. They asked. He answered. Two hours out of his life.

Back at the motel, Schiller had an interesting conversation with one of the police officers, Jerry Scott, that he had hired on Moody’s recommendation. Scott was a great big fellow with dark hair, reassuring in appearance, and had taken a leave of absence from his cop job to work for Schiller. He obviously knew the name of the game. Since he could only protect one entrance of the motel building at a time, he generally parked his police car on the back side to scare off anybody coming from that direction. On the near side, there was Scott waiting.

This afternoon, right after BYU, Larry discovered Scott was the same policeman who had driven Gary Gilmore from Utah County Jail to Utah State Prison on the day his trial ended. What a bonus. It gave Schiller the idea that Jerry Scott was bringing good luck. Just as well. Scott was getting paid about five hundred bucks a week.

By Saturday evening, Schiller decided that he ought to have a I6mm movie camera in action. So he made arrangements with CBS for one of their crews and explained he would need long shots of the prison with snow on the ground, and all the atmosphere they could find. It would cost another three thousand bucks, but he had hopes. Later, when he saw the film, it was lousy. The crew didn’t know how to shoot anything but newsreel footage. Blew all the opportunities for mood building.

He also made one last attempt to get Stephie to come in from New York. Again she refused. First, he asked her, then he begged.

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She would not come. It was a long and heated argument, and he didn’t often lose such discussions, but she was adamant. He was really mad.

“You’re always criticizing me,” he said.

“Don’t you see,” she cried out, “I criticize you because I love you, and I want to help you.”

In certain ways, he felt as close to breaking up with her as he ever had. Yet he knew he wouldn’t. That could be the reason in a funny way it was going to work, Maybe, he told himself, he had to understand that Stephie did not see herself as a total go-down-theroadwith-him gambler-which is what he’d always demanded of his first wife, Rather, Stephie had a nervous system, and it was cate, and she wished to protect it. She had been in a terrible car cident just a few years before and scarred by it. Her beauty was cate, it was vulnerable beyond his understanding, and at moment, maybe it was the weight of every emotion he had been rying, but he felt a great tenderness toward her, even if she join him.

Shirley Pedler had been called down to a studio by ABC News ran smack into Dennis Boaz. “You’re going to get what you she said to Dennis, “I hope you’re happy.” Boaz looked at her, said, “Gee, Shirley, can’t we be friends?” “I don’t want,” she told “to be your fucking friend.” He stood there a little taken aback, finally turned to the people with him. “Oh, she says she to be my fucking friend,” he said, and tried to laugh it off. Away went, away she went, and she was furious. That was one man had come in to gratify prestige needs. All he wanted, she was to be involved in an event of national import.

Of the two girls in the office Debbie was a former Bunny, a small good-looking redhead who gave you a lift personality and did her work well. The other, Lucinda Smith, absolute beauty, Barry decided, dark hair, fabulous eyes, the voice, one of those intimate, purring, matter-of-fact California Barry liked having her there. She was emotional and cried easily,

there was so much to cry about in the last week that he thought she was indispensable to the office. A chorus, nay, a brook of clear feeling to bring a breath of tenderness to the plasticoid abyss of their motel. God, she wasn’t that many years out of Corvallis run by the Religious of the Sacred Heart of Mary. Lucinda had been the only Presbyterian there. Her father, Barry learned, used to be head writer and director for Groucho Marx, and she had grown up in Studio City, just as secluded as you could get in the San Fernando Valley, had had an honest-to-God coming-out party, and gone to UCLA. Perfect Southern California pedigree. Now she was listening to Gary Gilmore say fuck, piss, shit.

She had gotten her job through an exclusive employment agency run by two girls. Lucinda had been an English major, and when Schiller called, the agent thought of her immediately, told her it would be an interesting experience. While Lucinda hadn’t met Mr. Schiller before the job began, she did have a talk with his secretary in Los Angeles, and was told that if she didn’t cut the mustard, she’d be sent home immediately. It gave her the feeling of a boss who laid down the law before they even met. That was stimulating. They would treat her on her merits, rather than her social standing.

Since the other girl had gone in a day ahead of her, she took the plane from Los Angeles by herself. When she got to the Orem TraveLodge, Mr, Schiller was very polite, and said, “Do you want to rest for a while?” She said, “No, I’ll get started.” Hardly put her bags down before she began to transcribe tapes, one after another. That tempo would increase. Lucinda started at twelve hours a day, and was close to working around the clock by the weekend. She didn’t really want to sleep. There was kind of an eerie feeling over the whole thing. She felt better being with Larry and Barry and Debbie. Alone in her room, it would start to come over her what was going on.

On Saturday night, she did take a break and turned on the TV. There was “Saturday Night Live.” They had a parody of Gary Gilmore. The cast was putting makeup on an actor playing the convict and the director kept saying, “A little more light over here, a little more eye shadow.” They were getting him ready to be shot for the camera. Very sarcastic. Kept putting on the makeup. She never thought television would be this weird. She had always thought “ex

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istentiar’ was an odd word, but it now was so bleak and cold outside, just a little bit of eternal snow on the ground, and she felt as if no one had ever gone out of this motel with these Xerox machines, and the typewriters.

7

Barry Farrell was studying Gary’s old letters to Nicole. Reading one of them, he nearly groaned. It was too late in the day to question Gilmore about this, not too late, that is, to ask the question — God, they had asked him everything — but it was certainly too late to get an answer that would reveal anything. They should have prepared the ground over many weeks.

“I was in the State Hospital in Oregon,” Gary had written, “try, ing to beat an armed-robbery beef and this r3-year-old boy came ‘cause he couldn’t get along at home. He was really pretty, like a girl, but I never gave him much thought until it became apparent that he.: really liked me. I was 23 then. I’d be sitting down and he would up and sit beside me and put his arm around me. It was j to him, a show o f friendship. One time he came up in the and asked if he could read this Playboy I had. I said sure, for a Man, he was dumbfounded! His eyes got big as silver dollars and mouth dropped wide open. He said ‘No!’ and it was really

I fell in love on the spot. He thought it over then and decided

‘

e he gave me,

wanted to read that magazine pretty bad, cams

rather let me take, a very tender little kiss on the lips. I used

watch him down at the swimming pool. He was one of the

tiful people I’ve ever seen, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen a

butt. Anyhow, I used to kiss him now and then., and we got to |

pretty good friends. I was just struck by his youth, beauty, and

” re”

ivete. Then one of us was sent elsewne

Barry Valued it greatly, that kiss. Gilmore was confesinl struck him as the most moral moment in the letters. Finally was admitting to something that had been on his mind all something which had gone right through all his evasio all that transparent discomfort with sexual material. Yet here,

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little confession, it was lifted. He could say it. What a sweet kiss. A nice moment.

Farrell didn’t think it was a matter of homosexuality as such. He took it for granted that Gilmore, like the majority of men, Farrell knew, who lived their lives in prison, had been one sort or another of situational homosexual. The choices, after all, were homosexuality, onanism, or abstinence. Farrell thought almost nobody chose abstinence, and those that did were probably none the better. It was just that Gilmore had a skewed and miserable relation to sex. Like many another prisoner, his natural sexual fantasies must have been burned out long ago by masturbation. No woman could do it as well as one could do it oneself. So his confession wasn’t to homosexuality. It was Gilmore admitting to Nicole how difficult, and pretty, and far-off, and kookyl was sex for him.

Farrell decided to break his own rules and insert the letter as part of the bona ride interview. A cheat. So be it. As Schiller had said, “Get down in the gutter with us sinners.”

Then he came across something else. From way back in December. It had been under his nose all the while:

GILMORE All right. (pause) There’s a book I would like, but I don’t think you can get it in Provo. You might be able to get it in Salt Lake. It’s called Show Me. A book of photographs of kids. You think you can get it? It’s probably about a $I5 book.

INTERVIEWER Yeah, I think we can.

GILMORE I tried to buy it in Provo. It was advertised years and years

ago. It may be banned in places like Salt Lake

INTERVIEWER What is it about?

GILMORE About the photographs of children.

INTERVIEWER Why would it be banned?

GILMORE Because it’s a sexual book. I read about it off and on for years and I got real curious. They banned it in some parts of Canada and the United States. But they got it in Salt Lake ….

INTERVIEWER This is an educational book?

GILMORE Well, it’s a high line, a real classic. It was made in Get

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THE EXECUTIONER’S SONG

many and all German children and they’re really artistic, tasteful, tactful photographs. It’s not a piece of smut, but I wanted to see it.

Farrell passed it by and then came back. That little elucidative light one depended upon was flickering again. Yes. Could it be said that Gilmore’s love for Nicole oft depended on how childlike she could seem? That elf with knee-length socks, so conveniently shorn — by Gilmore — of her pubic locks. Those hints in the letters of hanky panky with Rosebeth, the rumble with Pete Galovan. Barry nodded. You could about say it added up. There was nobody in of prison whom hardcore convicts despised more than child molest ers. The very bottom of the pecking order. What if Gilmore, so soon as he was deprived of Nicole, so soon as he had to live a week without her, began to feel impulses that were wholly unacceptable? What his unendurable tension (of which he had given testimony to ev ery psychiatrist who would listen) had had something to do little urges? Nothing might have been more intolerable to more’s idea of himself Why, the man would have done even murder, before he’d commit that other kind of tram

GOd, it would even account for the awful air of warped nobility seemed to extract from his homicides. Barry felt the woe of late covery. He could not say a word about this now. It was too insubst tial. In fact, it was sheer speculation. If Gilmore was willing to cute himself for such a vice, assuming it was his vice — beware understanding the man too quickly! then let him at least die the dignity of his choice. In fact, how much could a conceal?

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then he laid on miniature altar linens, put out the corporal, the chal ice, and the paten, the candles in their holders, set the crucifix, and gave a missalette to Gary so he could participate. Father Meersman wore a complete set of vestments, white alb, cincture, stole, maniple, and chasuble. Across from him, Gary was wearing a white shirt and pants.

Father Meersman recited the Confiteor, “… I have sinned through my own fault in my thoughts and in my words, in what I have done, and in what I have failed to do,” and heard the echo of the old Confiteor. “Through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault”