The Executioner's Song (116 page)

                There was Schiller telling Jimmy Breslin about the eyes. The eyes.

                Well, Farrell liked Jimmy. Breslin had done some nice things for him over the years. When Farrell was doing his column for Life back in '69 and '70 and got into a large dispute one time with his editors, a make-or-break conflict, Breslin did him the favor of talking it over for an evening. Farrell came to the conclusion that Breslin was very smart. "You know, Barry," Jimmy had said, "your column is your real estate," a phrase to stick in Farrell's mind. "Never give up your real estate," Breslin said, "fight and fuck around, patch it up, spackle it, make compromises, but don't give up the real estate." Farrell had followed his advice and thought it was right, so he had a soft spot for Jimmy Breslin.

                The soft spot vanished, however, in one hot minute when he walked into the room and there was Schiller with this idiotic blissful smile on his face, rapping away to Breslin about the eyes. He could have been selling a new kind of floor polish on TV. And there was Breslin sitting on the couch, fat as a wild boar, taking notes three weeks late. One monument of bulk accepting tribute from another.

For weeks, trying to push these interviews uphill, Farrell had felt like he was searching in a dark room for a somber object. So when the story about the eyes came through, Farrell felt as if, finally, a little light was being generated. Living with Gilmore's rap sheet, going through his long prison record and petty busts, Farrell had about decided that Gary's life, by the measurement of its criminal accomplishment, would not rank high on any self-respecting convict's scale. He would be looked upon not as a heavy, but a ding.

                Sufficiently unpredictable for other convicts to give him a wide berth, but not a convict with real clout on the inside. In fact, close to a total loner. The kind of guy police terminology referred to as a germ. On human scale, a weed. Yet, just yesterday, coming toward the day of his death, talking about his eyes, Gilmore had said something fine as far as Farrell was concerned.

GILMORE            I told you that this ninety-year-old man wrote and asked me for my eyes . . . ah, eh, he's too old. I mean I don't want to sound harsh about it, but this other guy is only twenty, and I think it might be better. Would you like to call this doctor and, ah, just tell him simply: . . . you got 'em! Gary Gilmore. And to draw up the papers through you guys.

MOODY               We'll bring it up with the Warden.

GILMORE            In his letter here, he says something about the young guy's life is just dwindling. Like the guy is really living a hopeless life. I'd rather the eyes be his than just give 'em to the Eye bank. I'd kinda like to know where they went. All right . . . call him collect. (laughing) . . . Ask him if he'll accept a collect call from Gary Gilmore.

The fact that Gilmore could come up with that kind of thinking moved Farrell right down to the gut. The interview had come in the day before, and after he and Schiller had listened to it, Farrell played it again when alone in his room. It was late at night. He had been working for a long time that day. Gilmore's voice got to him. Barry was crying and laughing and felt half triumphant that the man could talk with such clarity. Farrell's own eyes were good, and he always thought of them as precious cargo. While he would sign a card giving any part of his body to anybody, willingly, cock included, it would be after he died his normal death. Here was a fellow who had an execution date—imagine that, Barry said to himself after twenty hours of work, alone in a room at three in the morning—an execution date and everybody wants a piece of him. Everybody is writing to ask for this part of his body or that, yet, he could think clearly about it. Sure there were people who carried cards in their wallets that said, "If you find me dead, you can have my kidney," but that was not the same as knowing you were going to be gone on the 17th of January, and applicants were coming around now, one week before, asking for your liver, your spleen, your left nut. Why a small-minded man could see it all as cannibalism, and cry out, "For Christ's sakes, leave me in peace. I want my eyes."

                By God, was Gary like Harry Truman, mediocrity enlarged by history? Christ, he had even become the owner of a cottage industry: the precise remains of Gary Gilmore. That, to Farrell, was more impressive than any ability to steer a firm course toward execution. Farrell had not been much impressed by that bravery. Gilmore, he thought, had a total contempt for life, his life, your life, anyone's life.

                Waived his own away because it was a boss thing to do, showdown shit, pure pathology that came out of long years of playing chicken with prison authorities. Yet, now, overnight new celebrity, movie star without portfolio, Gilmore was responding humanely to all the attention, actually functioning like a decent man. Those eyes redeemed the scene. Farrell was feeling very protective about this story.

                So when he saw Schiller and Breslin on the couch, he went into a tantrum. Barry liked to keep his cool, but twenty-hour work sessions had certainly heated him up. "You have a cop," he said to Schiller, "sitting up all night across the corridor to make sure nobody breaks into this office, but you ought to have that cop sitting on your upper lip." He was mad enough to smash a table. "Schiller, you're not handing this over to Breslin."

                Before the fight could even develop, however, Jimmy took out his pad, pulled the page he had been writing on, tore it in little pieces, and threw them up in the air. Beautiful, thought Farrell. He was very pleased with Breslin.

Chapter 25

GETTING TO KNOW YOU

Farrell had to be glad the eyes had been kept for him. He needed something nourishing in the marrow, for he had been discovering an awful lot about Gilmore that was not so good. Rereading the interviews and letters, Farrell began to mark the transcripts with different-colored inks to underline each separate motif in Gilmore's replies, and before he was done, he got twenty-seven poses. Barry had begun to spot racist Gary and Country-and-Western Gary, poetic Gary, artist manqué Gary, macho Gary, self-destructive Gary, Karma county Gary, Texas Gary, and Gary the killer Irishman. Awfully prevalent lately was Gilmore the movie star, awfully shit-kicking large-minded aw-shucks.

GILMORE            Here is that other girl who writes to me: "How's my wild pony with those wild eyes" "I wish I could kiss you just once. I don't know, Gary, how to say good-bye to you. Gary, I'm cryin' right now on your letter, I love you, I hate the fucking system, I hate that they won't even let you call Nicole, the fuckers. Execution. What is this? Wild, wild West? My love is with you, Gary. I love you." (laughing) I think she's got a case for me, eh? I got three letters from her today. A good thing for me I'm not in California. Christ, oh, ah, man, she'd wear me out.

STANGER            Is she fifteen? Holy mackerel.

GILMORE            Pretty hard to keep up with.

Then there was the old con full of jail-house wisdom:

GILMORE            After you get known as a troublemaker, it's so easy to keep getting in trouble, 'cause all them guards, man, like they put your picture on the hot list in the fucking guards' lounge. You know, watch this guy, suspected of doing this and that. Some guards take a personal dislike to you, man, and antagonize you in little ways that'll make you blow up, you know, in a situation where you're always wrong—and never right—because you're the prisoner. They got the hammer, you know?

The subtlety of the self-pity was cloying. Still, Farrell was loving the job even more than expected. One twenty-hour day after another, sure enough, but what absorption! What delight to be altogether out of himself. By God, Barry thought, I have all the passions of an archivist. I'm proprietary about the material.

                Once in a while, he even laughed. One night when he and Larry were so tense from overwork that they could hardly look at one another, a tape came in from Gilmore that got them laughing so hard they almost slid off their chairs. It had to be the tension. Yet for one glorious minute, Gilmore was as funny to Farrell as Bob Hope on a good night, same maniacal see-through X-ray eye, same hatred of horseshit. God, sometimes he saw into the bottom of the pot, thought Farrell.

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 locomotive, 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 Farrell, 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, 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, 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.

STANGER            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.