A Legacy Survived : Mikal Gilmore tells the painful history of a family--his own. Now, years after his brother Gary was executed, he writes vividly of living through it all.

What could be more purely Americana?

It’s a photograph that could be found hanging above a mantelpiece. Maybe slipped inside a gilded frame centered atop the TV. Father in straw hat, mother in cloth dress, stern faces and seen-too-much eyes peering far beyond the lens, into an expanse--probably the future.

Instead of the symbolic pitchfork and wood-frame farmhouse looming in the background, front-and-center stand three healthy boys--smiling or goofing.

But what lies behind this photograph, between the covers of journalist Mikal Gilmore’s raw yet eloquently rendered family album of memories, “Shot in the Heart” (Doubleday, 1994), is Americana turned on its head, Americana unflatteringly exposed.

It is a poignant testament to how three spirited young boys, within a few decades, would leave their mark: one dead, another an anonymous recluse and the third on Death Row, demanding to be executed.

The Gilmore story is more than a window into an ugly aberration. It is a disturbing mirror of the violence that echoes down through generations, simmers behind fragile appearances. How many American families, behind smiles or stoic stances, could tell heart-rending stories of wreckage and ruin?

Absent from this photograph, as well as from some of the more awful and relentless violence of the family’s early years, the youngest Gilmore approaches the book at first as an outsider looking in--curious and detached, thirsty to understand.

“The family I grew up in was not the same family my brothers grew up in,” writes Mikal. “They grew up in a family that was on the road constantly, never in the same place longer than a couple of months at best. They grew up in a family where they watched the father beat the mother regularly, battering her face until it was a mortified, blue knot. They grew up in a family where they were slapped and pummeled and belittled for paltry affronts.”

Structurally, Mikal’s testimonial unfolds as a vivid diptych. Panel One begins with a macabre history of Mormon blood (his mother’s religion), then flows into his own family’s bloodlines--the mysterious and incessant hauntings, the anger and violence. It is a history tangled--part fiction, part augmented memory.

The second panel details the stifling life just after Mikal’s now-infamous brother, Gary, murdered two Mormon men in Provo, Utah, and then--equally alarmingly--implored to be put to death by firing squad. To spill his blood on Morman soil, “as an apology,” Mikal writes, “to God.’

Gary Gilmore got his wish on Jan. 17, 1977, at the age of 36.

In the years that followed, Mikal Gilmore, eight years younger, found himself involved in an intricate push-me-pull-you tango with his family and its knotty history. He tried walking away, staving off the pain, but was ultimately unable to escape the broad cast of their shadows, the persistence of their closeted ghosts.

He bumped around the Pacific Northwest a bit and then set down roots in L.A., embarking on a serious career in journalism. After a stint with an underground paper in Oregon, he began writing about pop culture and music for the L.A. Weekly, the now-defunct Herald Examiner and Rolling Stone.

“What is less generally known,” Mikal says in his prologue, is the “. . . story of the origins of Gary’s violence--the true history of my family and how its webwork of dark secrets and failed hopes helped create the legacy that, in part, became my brother’s impetus to murder.”

It was hoped that Mikal would escape this “bad legacy,” this family’s grim haunting, that left two brothers dead at an early age, another who effectively turned into a wandering ghost. Both mother (branded the family’s black sheep for marrying a man who was first “too old” and, even worse, not Mormon) and father (whose mercurial moods and criminal record kept the family Ping-Ponging across the country) in their later years saw Mikal as a symbol of their last chance, the only hope.

“(My mother) wanted me to survive our bad legacy, to be her best work, and yet in order to do that, I felt I had to leave her behind, and of course that hurt her,” Mikal writes. “You cannot move into a new world and still stay bound to the demands of the old world.”

*

The new world that Mikal has found himself the center of circles back, he’s learned, to the old one, demanding closure of sorts. Sitting in a corner of West Hollywood’s Book Soup Bistro, unassuming in faded denims and a white shirt upon which rests a small, cubelike silver crucifix dangling from a simple chain, Mikal takes sips from a small glass of Coke.

Despite the horrors related in his book, a sense of placidness prevails; it is in the ease with which he moves his limbs, the slow scan of his blue-green eyes. The only signs of fatigue or world-weariness materialize as circles, like faint ash, beneath his eyes.

He is recalling one of his darker moments--the eyes still calm, the face unchanging--the brick wall he hit, the moment that sent him on his search.

“I thought: What the hell happened? What happened that we would all be essentially childless or without family?” says Mikal of his siblings--Frank Jr. and the late Gary and Gaylen, who died as the result of a stabbing. “And that was (when) I began to think about what happened in my family’s history, that I wanted to understand. I certainly felt that I couldn’t go on with my life . . . in any kind of productive way without understanding that.”

Mikal speaks as he writes: with a sense of cool detachment alternating with unblinking emotional clarity about his family.

He’s been surprised that the press and public correctly interpreted his intentions: to write not a true-crime expose about Gary, but rather he stresses, “a book . . . which is about a history of a family, and family patterns and examined legacy.”

Around the time of Gary’s execution, Mikal recalls something worse than a nightmare--the media circus that circled him and his mother and brother Frank Jr. Those memories, still vivid, almost halted the project before it began.

“I saw a lot of shameless ugliness on the part of the media at that point. I saw invasions of privacy and violations of grief. . . . I felt invaded by it. Particularly in terms of what I saw it do to my mother.”

It extended beyond the press, to neighbors and strangers. “People during that time had no hesitancy to ask the most personal and inferring questions about an experience like that. And that was a large part about why I kept myself away from this thing for so long.”

The story finally told, Mikal braced to confront battalions of reporters with microphones and news cameras. Those, he admits, have yet to appear.

“It certainly was a dark story and a difficult story,” Mikal says, “and I expected that for that reason it would be difficult and inaccessible for some people. And I also thought, given the current climate of this sort of hysterical search . . . of easy solutions to crime problems, and the things that frighten us, that this book, which is fairly non-judgmental at a certain level would be very coolly, at best, received given that climate.”

His journalist status aside, Mikal believes one of the major things that makes this time a little different is his brother’s place in the public eye.

“This is a book about something that happened 17, 18 years ago, and there really is no news value to it unless someone looks at more topical things to relate it to: domestic violence, which is news and should have been news long before this happened. Or questions about the death penalty. . . . Those are sorta the newsy aspects. Gary’s not news.”

Even if Gary’s name and infamy had retreated from the spotlight, the book’s larger themes about domestic violence and the prison systems have particular resonance. For Mikal, it is a life now assigned a larger context, with a community who can and do commiserate.

“I certainly have had my share of people . . . all along . . . say: ‘You grew up in this weird, freak family. . . . How did you survive?’ . . . But it was not a unique family, it wasn’t singular in terms of patterns,” Mikal explains.

This insight, however, was something he grew into, with time and exposure to the world.

“When I was a kid, I felt like we were the . . . Addams Family, I really did,” he says with a wry laugh. “I felt like we were monsters. . . . It wasn’t until later, much later, that I really began to see that this stuff happens all over and nobody talks about it.

“Where do we think all of this violence is coming from? . . . It’s coming from people who come out of homes. And if home and families are such great and ideal structures, then why are they spawning so much violence and fear we see in society right now? It’s an obvious thing, but it took me a long time to see.”

It is the survivor’s badge, so frequently pinned to him, that makes him uneasy. And ironically his survival may have much to do with the blood he feels is “bad,” the blood he has reservations about passing on.

“The question of survival,” he says, the thought suspended as if over a chasm, “I just figured I just survived for whatever reasons. . . . It was that old Mormon stock. They put up with a lot of stuff, they survived a lot of stuff. A tough and abiding people, maybe some of that carries over into the blood as well.”

Mikal, who wrote this family memoir in the same room where he stores a green jar with chips of Gary’s bones--sifts through his own life’s fragments.

“It’s good to survive,” he says, “but certainly it is not without costs. You obviously survive with less of yourself than was there before.”

Even as he approached this book as a family obituary, of sorts, he unwittingly recovered a missing piece: His oldest brother, Frank, who had effectively erased himself from the terrain. He found him living in a rooming house in Portland, Ore., doing day labor to get by. “This is as much Frank’s book as mine,” says Mikal, who describes his brother as deeply shy and reclusive, “and without his voice and his involvement, the story . . . would have been much less worthy. The one thing I got from doing this was the last thing in the world I expected--the sense of a living family.”

Mikal is protective of his brother’s privacy. Some of it comes from his own leanings. Life as a recluse, a cleverly altered identity, were notions that that the youngest Gilmore also flirted with. Thinking back, he says, his voice soft, distant, “There were long seasons of it seeming all pervasive, inescapable. I had long periods when I just wanted to leave the world, leave it all behind.”

For a while it seemed that attention would never dim--from a punk anthem and “Saturday Night Live” skits to a Pulitzer Prize-winning book by Norman Mailer (“The Executioner’s Song”) and a tie-in TV movie, Gary’s dark memory proved ubiquitous--inescapable for those who survived him. Reinvention, Mikal says, “was a kind of escape-valve fantasy that I resorted to many times.”

What stopped him was the immeasurable expense. “I never really considered it for a couple of reasons: I wanted to hold on to my name as a writer. . . . I thought I had already paid a lot for Gary’s acts and for his infamy, and my writing was in some ways the only thing I really had in the world that was mine, that could not be taken away from me and I did not want to lose that.”

But the more sobering reality was this: “I would always be Gary’s brother. I could not cut off the past just because I changed my name. I would always be somebody who came from this family. . . .”

For Mikal Gilmore, it is this haunting that persists--the ill deeds, the bitter lot. Not the ghosts and inexplicable presences his mother felt at every turn. Mikal prefers to ascribe them to the dream realm, those dreams so real they feel like experience.

“I think the family is haunted, that’s for sure. I think those were the mythological extensions of that haunting, the stories of memories. It was easier to live with the idea that there was a real hell around us at the time than to deal with the real hell inside of us, and inside of our home.”

The violence as Mikal relates in the book often came out of nowhere--prompted, it seemed, by nothing. Thanksgiving dinners that ended up on the floor. Family road trips that became “a thousand miles of arguing and slapping.”

And in one of Mikal’s at once perplexing and wounding memories: “I went up to my mother. I hugged her, kissed her cheek--things we were all forbidden to do, and had always been forbidden to do,” he writes. “Next thing I knew, I was shoved across the room. ‘Keep away from me, you little bastard,’ she yelled.”

For these reasons, Mikal finds little difference between the institution of family and that of prison. “I always felt like Gary never really left home ‘cause the prison was an extension of the family for him.”

Coming out on the other side, Mikal Gilmore, too, has served a sentence. “I think my definition of family hasn’t shifted, my definition of love has. . . . Family has always been this community of hell that you are most closely bound with. As an idea, it is something that I have very long envied.

“I remember when I was a kid, you know the stupid little plaques that say, ‘The family who prays together stays together,’ and I saw that once at a service station . . . and I thought, ‘Wow, there’s an idea . . . ‘ and I made my mother buy it for me. When people were arguing in our house, I used to walk around and show it to them. I wanted us to be that family, who was always on our knees praying together and that would bring peace. And of course that would never happen. . . . There wasn’t a chance in hell that it would happen. I saw my life as an impossible ideal, impossible to attain.”

His long-held wish has been, he says, to have a better family than he grew up with. “I always wanted my own family. I wanted children very much. I think from the time I was 15 or 16.” But Mikal says that in his search for an ideal--a relationship that flourishes and the bounty of children--he has come up with empty hands.

“I couldn’t figure out why the ravages of failed romance or love . . . happened. I couldn’t understand why. . . . And that sort of added to my hatred of family, because family was something other people had.”

The circumstances around a particularly painful break-up broke him like a dry twig--the dull ache of a turning point that led him to begin the book. “It felt like the last disappointment I could afford.”

Since all of that, Mikal admits that he has been spiritually on the mend. Other relationships--friendships, romances--have helped to fill the cold hollow in his own heart.

“I think that there are ways that I have become . . . a better partner. In some ways maybe worse, because there is part of me that flinches, or (is) reluctant for outright full commitment because of certain fears . . . the thought (of) how much I had lost and I could not lose again.”

There is one thing, however, he still works to reconcile. “The one thing that I thought that I would never do is start a family at the age of 50. That’s the one thing that I’ve always held against (my father) and found hard to forgive--that he would start a family at such an old age when he could not be there. I would never do that, and I’m 43. So the older I get, the more it seems like too close.”

And if good fortune turns the corner just as the calender announces age 49, “I’m sure in many ways that would be a great thing,” he says with an uncertain smile, eyes fixated on something out of view. “But it would also seem like one of life’s nasty tricks.”