Buried Dreams (18 page)

There were some mice upstairs, and Carol set out traps frequently, but the odor seemed to be coming from below, from the crawl space. She wondered if maybe a lot of mice had died down there. Like when the crawl space flooded. It was the smell of something dead drifting up from the crawl space.

And then in the utility room Carol noticed “there were a lot of little black—I don’t know if they were little gnats, but they almost looked like flies at times.” Little flies, gnats, maggots hatching off the dead mice in the crawl space. Carol wanted to call an exterminator, but her husband told her not to bother. John said he’d take care of the smell, get rid of the dead mice in the crawl space.

John would drop through the trapdoor with a fifty-pound bag of lime over his shoulder, spread it across the puddled darkness, and still the smell got worse. John said it was a broken sewer pipe. It was almost unbearable.

Carol said, “The smell is getting bad and I’m here all day, while you’re out. I think there must be a lot of dead mice down there.”

It was as if John wasn’t listening, as if his mind was on something else besides dead mice in the crawl space, because he said, “I’ll go down there and set a few traps.” It wasn’t like her husband at all, saying something that made him sound stupid.

“John,” Carol said, “if the mice are dead, how are they going to get in the traps?”

“Oh . . . yeah . . .”

“You really have to go down there and get them out.”

And then, after Carol came back from a trip out of town, John told her that he had poured a slab of concrete down in the crawl space and he hoped it would take care of the odor. There were no more flies rising up out of the darkness below the house then, but as long as Carol lived in the house on Summerdale, she could detect a faint, sweet, sewerlike odor: a bad, dead smell.

Carol loved watching John with the girls. The first year of their marriage he worked eight- and nine-hour days, giving him plenty of time to play with Tammy and April. “He was a very good father to my girls,” Carol said. “Never beat them, whipped them. He very seldom hollered. I was the one that was hollering, not him.”

In that first year, Carol found John Gacy to be “very gentle, very warm” as a lover. He was “the aggressor,” he was “passionate,” but the “gentleness” is what Carol remembers most from those happy times.

By the second year of their marriage, John was working longer and longer hours. In mid-1973, he quit Bruno’s and tried to make a go of PDM full time. Carol began to feel neglected. “It got to be he was working from early morning. He’d come home, have a fast break, something to eat, and just do paperwork or phone calling and go right back to work again. If it wasn’t paperwork, it was puttering around the house, in the yard.” John converted one room into a recreation area like the one he’d had in Iowa: there was room for a pool table and a fully stocked bar. He did a lot of work out in the garage, building stuff out there, and it was his private spot. Carol and the kids had no business in the garage.

With nothing but the profits from his own business with which to support his family, John Gacy would often work until two or three in the morning. “I think,” Carol said, “John could go on about an hour of sleep, maybe none. There were times I thought he was going to take a shower and go to bed, and he’d come back out of the bathroom dressed and say he had to go on a few bids, check a building, or talk to someone. It always had to do with work, and he’d leave maybe somewhere around anywhere from twelve-thirty, or maybe it was one or after one. And he’d be gone all night.”

Sex, so good at first, was getting to be a problem. “After a while,” Carol recalled, “we didn’t have too much sex at all anymore.” Either John was out somewhere, or he fell into bed, exhausted, just “too tired.”

It was during that time, when John was displaying less and less interest in sex, that a neighbor asked Mrs. Gacy if there were “any little ones on the way.”

“You have to sleep with someone first,” Carol said, and she did not smile, because, in the space of a year, she had begun to learn some disturbing things about the gentle man who “swept me off my feet.”

Once, cleaning out under the sink, Carol found some magazines that contained “quite a few pictures of nude men.” There was one that had “a kind of a bloody picture” of a man, or maybe it was a boy. Carol couldn’t be sure. She didn’t want to look at the magazines.

Then there were the silk bikini panties “John had but
never wore.” Carol found a pair in the bed once, under the covers, crusted with her husband’s semen. There were other times: a soiled pair under the dresser; a pair under the bed. With her sex life sinking into near-nonexistence, Carol confronted Gacy with the evidence of his masturbation. John was angry: the silk panties weren’t even his, they had been given to him as a gift, and he didn’t like being accused of shit in his own house. It was an argument, brutal as only a sexual disagreement between a man and wife can be, and when Carol called Gacy “a jag-off,” he grabbed her arm and half threw her across the room. It was the only time he was ever violent with her, and she learned that “jag-off” was a word she could never use in her husband’s presence.

It pissed him off because jagging off had nothing to do with his lack of desire. John said he was just tired, mentally and physically. It was true to an extent. Carol could see “he had one goal in life and that was to make something out of his business, and he was doing a good job of it. His PDM Contractors was just a small thing, and he worked it, making it a corporation, and doing bigger things, working on drugstores and buildings. It wasn’t just wallpapering and painting anymore.”

As Gacy’s business grew and his sex drive dwindled, he often slept on the couch, not even joining his wife in bed. Carol began to ask about John’s odd middle-of-the-night business appointments. “Nobody does business at those hours,” Carol said.

That only went to show what Carol knew. John insisted he had to “talk to somebody about a job,” or “make a bid.” It was more convenient to do these things at three in the morning because there was no traffic and he could get around faster, check more jobsites.

“Look,” John said, “with the money I got coming in, this is the only way. I got to keep going. It’s me and me alone.” John could hear himself “sounding just like my dad,” using money as a club.

Gacy’s business would keep him out until sometime between four and six most mornings. Sometimes he wouldn’t even sleep, just change clothes and go right to work. Carol never slept that well when John was out: she felt restless, unprotected, and one night, when she heard the car come in and out of the driveway several times, she got up and turned on the TV: Carol sitting in front of a feeble glow in the
darkness of the front room. John was outside somewhere, probably puttering in the garage.

Suddenly the door opened, and when John saw his wife sitting in front of the TV he seemed startled, even frightened.

“What are you doing up?” John asked. He seemed “scared” to Carol.

“I couldn’t sleep. I kept hearing the car going in and out and I decided to get up.”

Gacy acted confused. He said he just stepped in to get something, then turned and walked out of the house without getting anything at all. “He went right back out to the garage,” Carol said, “and as he went out there, I looked through the curtains and I saw a young boy, blond hair, get in the car and he hurried up and drove off.”

From the window, Carol could see a light in the garage, not something a man could work under, just a small red light, barely visible from the house.

Carol wasn’t allowed in the garage. “He really didn’t like me in there,” Carol said, “and I never had any reason to go.” This night, however, after John and the blond boy drove off, Carol went out to investigate the garage where John did so much of his night work.

“In addition to a red light on the wall,” Carol said, “there was a mirror and a blanket on the floor.”

Carol never confronted John with what she found in the garage. It was like the jag-off argument: John always said, “Don’t plant seeds.” It was one of his favorite expressions: Don’t plant seeds, and John told Carol it meant, “If I didn’t know for sure what I was saying and I couldn’t prove anything, then don’t bring it up.”

Only later did Carol learn John was having sex with some of the teenage boys he hired to work for PDM. When a former employee named Jackson
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beat him up one day, John explained that it was a dispute over money. Jackson had come to the house and parked in the driveway, by the back door. John was standing there, not doing anything, and the kid jumped out of the car and hit him. Gacy fell back against the car and curled down, protecting himself without fighting back. Jackson hit him again, and Gacy fell to the ground. Carol’s mother, who was living there at the time, ran out and stopped the boy from more violence.

This Jackson, John explained, was angry because his check had been withheld. “The kid was painting some steps,” John said later, “and he did a piss-poor job on them: paint running, thick and thin spots. So I told him to paint the steps over before he went home. Well, he went home and never did the steps. Now, I had to do that job, because I wasn’t going to get paid if the customer wasn’t happy. Then he wants his check. For the work I did. So that’s what the fight was about.”

A few years later, Carol heard a different version of the story. In 1973, John went to Florida to look at some land he had bought and invited Jackson along for the ride. “Jackson claims that John raped him the first day there and he slept on the beach because he said he didn’t want to stay with John anymore,” Carol said. “And that was his reason for jumping him.”

Carol didn’t like to blame John for his lack of desire, to make accusations about where he was getting it—no more jag-off arguments—she only knew that her marriage had fallen apart on her. Less than three years after they were married, on Mother’s Day 1975, John and Carol managed to get in bed together to celebrate the special time, the holiday.

“Happy Mother’s Day,” John said.

Carol said “Thank you” and something she doesn’t remember, because the next thing John Gacy said jolted her.

“This, “John said, “is the last time we’ll have sex.”

Carol thought it was a joke, it had to be a joke, but then she looked into her husband’s eyes and saw that he was as serious as death.

“How,” Carol asked, “how can you say—”

“Because I did.”

“But . . . you’ve got to be kidding.”

“No,” John Gacy said, “this is the last time.”

Sex, with a woman, involved love and tenderness. The foreplay and the afterplay were just as important as the act itself. With a woman, John needed to feel the emotions flowing between them. He knew, from reading the Kinsey Report, that “women don’t get off every time,” and his goal was to satisfy Carol first. That way he’d satisfy himself. It was good like that, beautiful, just the way Ma said it should be. It took time and tenderness, and it felt like a sacrament.

Ma was right on one other thing: No two families should live together, because when Carol’s mother got divorced, she came to live with John and Carol, in the house on Summerdale. Her presence, John said, “ruined my marriage.”

John had started working his long hours, and when the sex dropped off to something less than once a month, Carol asked him why he never seemed interested. “Shit,” John said, “I work twelve to twenty hours a day. I don’t have no sex drive. I’m exhausted.”

But when some woman called about a bid on her kitchen, Carol’s mother would “plant seeds” about how maybe John was banging her. He had to be getting it somewhere. “Every time I came home from work,” John recalled, “I had to explain where I’d been and what I was doing. Defending myself in my own house. And I wasn’t doing anything but working my ass off for Carol and the kids and her goddamn mother.”

John tried to explain it to Carol: no matter what her mother said there was no way he could work sixteen, eighteen, twenty hours a day and still be out fucking every other broad who called the house on business. John told his wife, “Carol, I swear as God is my witness that I am not having relations with any females, okay?”

“Then,” John remembered Carol saying, “you’re having them with boys.”

Carol couldn’t seem to get it out of her head that John had been honest with her and told her before they were married that he was bisexual. “Well, goddamn,” John said, “she knew I wasn’t gay, because I told her that. I told her I didn’t like homosexuals, that I thought they were weak, sick individuals.”

But John had “young guys” working for him, teenage boys, and Carol started asking about them. Was John doing anything with his employees? Why did he always hire boys, fourteen-, fifteen-, sixteen-year-olds? And who were the boys he brought over to the garage late at night?

Jesus Christ, John had the house-mortgage payment to make, he had to float a second mortgage, pay his mother a hundred dollars on the house every month, had to come up with another couple hundred just to keep a roof over his head. No, he wasn’t fucking around with the employees, or having sex with strange boys at four in the morning. He told Carol that he was working.

The crush of constant accusations weighed on John’s bad
heart, and in late 1973 he had a stroke because “I was working like a son-of-a-bitch and no one believed me and I couldn’t take the pressure.” You could trace it straight to Carol’s mother. He was in the hospital two weeks and was forced to spend two more weeks at home in bed. Then he had to go out and make up for that lost time: work that much harder, be out more nights, and Carol’s mother kept “planting seeds,” making accusations. John had to get a court order, actually have a sheriff's deputy come to move his mother-in-law out sometime in 1974. It wasn’t a pleasant thing to do, but John had to think of his health, his bad heart. The woman could kill him.

It was too late, anyway. John really loved Carol in spite of their problems, but she went around asking questions like some dumb cunt detective. “Once,” John said, “I think Carol saw me smoke some marijuana with one of the employees out by the garage. I never saw what they got out of it, but it was after work, and that was the way they liked to relax and we were talking. So Carol says, ‘If you’re not having sex, you’re dealing drugs in the garage.’ Because she thought I was going out at night to deal drugs then.”