Buried Dreams (22 page)

Later, John still wasn’t willing to admit two people could live in one body; but how else could you explain Butkovitch? How could you explain agreeing to a divorce you didn’t want? If the Other Guy was there, you could know him only through the things he did, things that John Gacy would never do. The Other Guy was like the Old Man’s tumor, that small black heart, beating against his dad’s brain. The only evidence of
the poison inside was John Stanley’s sudden and unexplained rage.

The Other Guy: you’d have to break down the elements, anything John could recall about him, because no one knew him, not even John Gacy. One thing, though: There was a lot of John Stanley in him, the Other Guy.

That was the kind of insight John thought was important. He told the docs about it, this breakthrough, and he hoped they could use it in their theories when he went to trial. And then, eventually, when the trial was over, they could use these theories to help John Gacy. With therapy and shit.

It was after Butkovitch that all these—John didn’t want to call them “personalities"—all these “characters,” aspects of John Gacy, began to emerge fully. They weren’t like the Other Guy, someone hidden inside who might or might not exist. They were real aspects of the real John Gacy, and they might differ from one another, but they were John all the time.

John Gacy the politician really came to the fore that year. When he moved into the house on Summerdale, he discovered that one of his neighbors was a Democratic precinct captain, and John volunteered to be his assistant. That’s how John Gacy met Robert Martwick, a Norwood Park attorney who was the Democratic township committeeman.

“I figured,” John explained later, “that I could never run for office because of Iowa. They’d dig that up. What I wanted to be was the adviser, like the power behind the throne.”

Getting ahead in Democratic politics in Chicago wasn’t much different than earning a Key Man award for the Jaycees. You volunteered for everything, did a great job, then volunteered for whatever else wasn’t done. Gacy, for instance, made sure he and his young employees kept the Democratic headquarters on Montrose clean. Tony Antonucci had been helping John rise through the ranks of Chicago’s Democratic Party the night John Gacy gave him a little “test of morals” at the headquarters.

John never charged money to run an errand for the party, to fix a door, to set up chairs for a meeting, to donate one of his trucks to cart crap from one office to another, to erect and man barricades for Democratic events. He painted and decorated the headquarters free and helped make sure the annual dance ran smoothly. He made himself invaluable
to the Democratic Party on the far North Side of Chicago. “I was a do-gooder,” John recalls. “Anything anyone wanted done, just call asshole John.”

In 1975, after Butkovitch, John was finally appointed to his first political position: secretary-treasurer of the Norwood Park Township Street Lighting District. There is not much honor in the position, just a lot of work. John took care of the books for the lighting district, paid its bills, did all the secretarial duties, responded to complaints, and got streetlights installed where they were needed. As soon as John took over the job, he found that no one had ever thought to number the streetlights. If a light went out, people would call and try to describe where it was: “the uh, second or third one from the corner of . . .” Totally disorganized. John put a numbered box on each light and kept a map in his office. People could call in and say, “Number twenty-one is out.” And John would know exactly where it was. With just a single sentence. He was the best officer the township lighting district had ever had. The job paid twenty-five dollars a month.

A year or two later, the party rewarded John Gacy for all that selfless work, and he was appointed Democratic precinct captain for the Twenty-first Precinct, Norwood Park Township. During elections, John was a dynamo, going door to door, getting out the vote. He asked people what the committeeman could do for them; or, if it was some small thing, what John himself could do. He was tireless knocking on neighbors’ doors. Everyone in Norwood Park knew John Gacy had important political connections. He came around a couple times a year to remind them of the fact.

It was also in 1975 that Gacy was named director of Chicago’s annual Polish Constitution Day parade, a function of the Polish National Alliance. He was recommended for the job by Jack Reilly, the special-events director for Chicago under Democratic Mayor Richard Daley. Gacy was named for the job because of the orderly, almost military manner in which he’d directed the Christmas Day parade in Springfield in 1964 and because of his service to the party in directing the Democratic Day parades a decade before, during the State Fair in Springfield.

It was a headache directing that parade, but once John let them know he was the boss, things ran like clockwork. “Imagine trying to get ten thousand Polacks marching in unison.” God in heaven, it was something. Every organization
bitching about its place in the parade. “We need to be in front of this one; we want this one behind us.”

John fixed their ass. Every float, every band, every set of marchers was given a number. That’s how they inarched, by the number, and no one but John Gacy knew which group would march where. Of course, he wasn’t above providing a little help and information about parade positions to those who might enjoy doing something for him in return: some political favor, a little business thrown his way, shit like that.

And then there were the politicians. They descended on the parade like flies on a turd. Anyone in office, or looking to run for office in Chicago, is a fool to ignore the Polish Day parade. Politicians who wanted a favored position—anyone who wanted to look especially good to the Polish community—had to talk to John Gacy. He knew them all. Important assholes, and John had their phone numbers. He could call them up, they’d know who he was.

So, in 1975, Gacy was developing clout, becoming a politician himself. Which—John tried to fit this piece into the puzzle—was just the opposite of the Old Man. John said it hurt his head thinking about it every day in Cermak. You’d get an idea of the whole picture: “I am the opposite of the Old Man.” So being a politician made sense when you knew the Old Man hated them. But what about that tilt, the Other Guy tilt, the thing inside his head that sounded just like the Old Man and actually wanted the divorce? The Other Guy, whose silent voice said, “Get rid of the bitch. I want the house to myself.”

The year 1975 was also when John Gacy became Pogo the clown, a do-gooder who dressed like a moron so everyone could see at a glance that he was a man who gave of himself for the benefit of others.

Too old now for the Jaycees, John had joined Moose Lodge number 368, in River Grove. They had the Jolly Joker Clown Club, and there were only five or six clowns in it, who performed for kids at Easter, Christmas, and Halloween. There’d be as many as six hundred kids at these Moose-sponsored parties, and right away John could see they needed another Jolly Joker.

John had a costume made for himself and devised his own makeup. He performed with the other Jolly Jokers at the holiday parties, and visited hospitals, sometimes as often as
twice a month. He loved to cheer up sick children—paralyzed kids, kids with spinal injuries, the mentally and physically handicapped, children who weren’t taken to circuses and who would never otherwise see a clown in the flesh. Besides that, he clowned in “fifteen, oh, maybe twenty parades” a summer. All at no fee.

Jack Shields, a Chicago account executive who clowned with John, said Gacy was a good clown. “He prepared for the engagement and planned his entertainment. He used a series of two-hand puppets.” The puppets were professionally made, very realistic, and the little skunk was the one that made the kids laugh. John could get the shiest children to talk to the squeaky-voiced little skunk. Shields recalled that Gacy “also had a rubber chicken he used. He had a dog leash and a harness he would use. He had a tubing that would run down through the leash to the collar, a bulb in his hand would contain water, and he would caution the children that his invisible dog was just a puppy, and they best be cautious. Like all puppies, sometimes it would wet their shoes, and about the time the child would believe that there was no invisible puppy, he would squeeze the bulb and wet the child’s shoes and say, ‘Now you excited my little puppy.’ “ The child would look down in wonder at his wet shoes, and hundreds of delighted children would scream out their laughter so loudly it almost hurt your ears.

John said he never went to clown school. “It just came naturally to me. In a way, I guess you could say I love to perform.”

John understood that “Pogo was a tranquilizer for me. When I was Pogo, I was in another world.” A clown does nothing but live for others, like a priest or a cop, except that a clown doesn’t save lives or souls, he simply makes others laugh. Sometimes that’s enough for a man; sometimes making others laugh is a way of saving his own life or his own soul. “Maybe,” John said, “Pogo was a way of running away from myself. I enjoyed making people happy. I loved the laughing faces, especially the children. Why else would I do it, if I didn’t have the time for myself?”

He wouldn’t lie about it, either: John loved the attention, he “craved being in the limelight.” Just like, one time he was clowning for the lodge and he was running late with all his engagements, as usual. It was time for the Wednesday
night bowling league. He and Carol bowled in that league. So John raced over there all dressed up as Pogo.

Bowling was John’s one sport: he hooked ‘em hard into the strike zone from the right-hand side, hitting consistent 170s, 180s, but it was absurd watching a clown standing there studying the pins, then firing the ball down the alley like a pro. “They loved it,” John recalled, “and they asked me to come out and clown for Christmas. And one woman wanted me to do something special for her daughter’s birthday, so I went out there with my assistant clown, Patches—it was Michael Rossi, he was an employee then—and later on I got the cutest letter from this little girl.” That’s what clowning was all about: being in the limelight and making others happy.

Sure, there were times when he got paid for clowning, like for the grand opening of some ice-cream store in a shopping mall, shit like that, but it wasn’t the same. Usually Patches—Michael Rossi—came along. Openings could be fun, but they were commercial ventures, you got paid for them. and they didn’t make you feel warm inside, like coming out of church after confession.

There were times, too, when John Gacy as Pogo was a help to John Gacy the politician. He clowned at the Democratic organization picnic; he clowned at a fund raising fair for the retirement center across from Resurrection Hospital. A precinct captain had gone to John, the politician, and Gacy ended up helping organize the event. He donated lumber, the use of his trucks, and he built the refreshment stand. He and Rossi clowned as Pogo and Patches.

There were different clowns for different occasions. They were all Pogo, of course, but Pogo in a parade was not the same as Pogo at a birthday party. “Going to a parade,” John recalled, “you have to get into the mood, real festive, before you even put on the makeup. And you have to be one festive son-of-a-bitch all afternoon. Sometimes I had to work, didn’t even get any sleep, but when there was a parade, I had to be happy as shit all afternoon, running along the parade route for about four hours.”

If John did it right, got himself into parade Pogo, he could go all afternoon, running beside the bands and horses, hopping in and out of the crowd—never mind his bad heart—and it was like “regressing into childhood.” It was “like becoming someone else,” a “whole different person,” and he could do things he’d never do without the clown face on: He
could run into the crowd, find himself a “strange broad and honk her boobs.” Nobody ever said shit. “Oh, well, it’s okay, he’s a clown, you know.”

The parade Pogo was not the same clown who visited the hospitals. “When you sit there, looking in the mirror and putting on your makeup,” John recalled, “you had to get yourself up for it; you had to remember where you were going and why you were going. Just like a Democratic picnic is different than a birthday party where you want to concentrate on the birthday boy or girl. With retarded kids, you have to move like a son-of-a-bitch to keep their attention. Even if you worked all day, you have to keep jumping, always active. And you have to make them understand that a clown’s life is all happiness, and there is no sorrow for a clown. You got to be compassionate and goofy at the same time. You want to make them feel the way you act: happy all the time.”

There was a “whole other” Pogo who went to the hospitals to see physically ill children or kids who were the victims of accidents. What you have to deal with there is loneliness. “Just like I was in the hospital; I know what it is to be alone and sick. I been sickly all my life; I been alone all my life. I know what it feels like. So instead of an active, moving, goofy clown, like Pogo is for the mentally retarded, you want to be a more quiet Pogo. Still a compassion clown, but you want them to trust you and talk to you. They been lying there for days or weeks, they been lying there maybe a month, and they haven’t had anyone to talk with. So you get them talking, five-year-olds, and sometimes they don’t make any fucking sense at all—see, it’s all coming out, how they feel—and you stand there and smile and listen and laugh. Because I knew what a lonely life was, and I was spreading cheer, and it really, honestly made me feel good inside, talking to these kind of kids, going to the hospital. That was when it was best being Pogo.”

Once, on one of his visits to a hospital—Resurrection or Northwestern, he couldn’t remember—John rode up on the elevator with the other clowns: five bulky men in silly clothes and outsize shoes. The door opened on the children’s ward and they came tumbling out. John leapt into one child’s room and, he remembers, the boy was alone except for his mother sitting pensively in a chair by the boy’s side. Pogo went into his antics, blowing up balloon toys, twirling his cane, having
the hand puppets argue with one another: trying to cheer the boy up, make him laugh. The mother, John could see through Pogo’s painted eyes, was staring at him with a strange, almost pained expression. The boy was in traction: a comic-strip hospital patient with a cast on his arm, plaster casts on both legs, and a bandage around his head.