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elected to be shot.
    All this had happened before I began writing for
Rolling Stone,
and a few months later, when I
did
begin working for the magazine, I never mentioned anything about my brother or his crimes to any of my editors or fellow journalists. Only a handful of my friends knew about my strained relationship with my troubled brother. The truth is, I had put myself at a distance from the realities of Gary’s life for many years; I told myself that I feared him, that I resented his violent and self-ruinous choices, that he and I did not really share the same bloodline. After Gary’s killings and his subsequent death sentence, I felt grief and rage over his acts, and I also felt deep and painful humiliation: I could not believe that my brother had left his family with so much horror and shame to live with, and I could not forgive him for what he had done to the families of Max Jensen and Ben Bushnell. But in a way, the whole episode seemed more like a culmination of horror rather than its new beginning. That’s because part of me believed that Gary would
never
be executed—after all, there had not been any executions in America in a decade—and that he instead would simply rot away the rest of his life in the bitter nothingness of a Utah prison. At the same time, I think another, deeper part of me always understood that Gary had been born (or at least raised) to die the death he would die.
    Any hope for serenity in my life had been destroyed. Shortly after I heard about Gary’s wish to be executed, I told my editor at
Rolling Stone,
Ben Fong-Torres, about my relationship with Gary. By this time, Gary Gilmore was a daily name in nationwide headlines, and I felt that the magazine had a right to know that I was his brother. Fong-Torres, who had lost a brother of his own through violence, was extremely sympathetic and supportive during the period that followed, and eventually he gave me the opportunity to write about my experience of Gary’s execution for the magazine. To be honest, not everybody at
Rolling Stone
back in early 1977 thought it was such a great idea to run that article (“A Death in the Family,” March 10, 1977), and I could understand their misgivings: After all, what would be the point of publishing what might appear to be one man’s apology for his murderous and suicidal brother? Still, following the turmoil of Gary’s death, I needed to find a way to express the devastation that I had just gone through, or else I might never be able to climb out of that devastation. With the help of Fong-Torres and fellow editors Barbara Downey and Sarah Lazin, a fairly decent and honest piece of first-person journalism was created, and in the process a significant portion of my sanity and hope were salvaged. More important, perhaps the people who read it got a glimpse into the reality of living at the center of an unstoppable national nightmare.
    In the season that followed Gary’s death, I went to work for
Rolling Stone
full-time in Los Angeles. It wasn’t an easy period for me—I felt displaced, and (once again) was drinking too much and taking too many pills—but the magazine gave me plenty of slack; maybe more than I deserved. As time went along, I began to find some of my strength and purpose again as a music writer, and
Rolling Stone
gave me the opportunity to meet and write about some of the people whose music and words had mattered most in my life. It was also a season in which I spent many nights lost in the dark and brilliant splendor of punk. I liked the way the music confronted its listeners with the reality of our merciless age. Punk, as much as anything, saved my soul in those years, and gave me cause for hope—which is perhaps a funny thing to say about a movement (or experiment) that’s first premise was: there are no simple hopes that are not false or at least suspect.

    I WROTE FOR
Rolling Stone
from 1976 until the present—sometimes as a staff writer, sometimes as a contributor. In the