Buried Dreams (23 page)

Pogo capered about, gave the boy a few balloons, and then started talking to him in Pogo’s goofy clown voice, trying to get the kid to open up, to pour out his loneliness.

“What’s your name, young fella? And what happened to you? Why, you look like an accident on its way somewhere to happen. Looks like you need a balloon dog there, young fellow. . . .” And as Pogo capered and made the balloon animals—as the young boy smiled and began to laugh—John noticed that the mother’s eyes had misted over and that tears were rolling freely down her cheeks. Suddenly she stood and walked rapidly out of the room.

The boy was focused on Pogo; he didn’t even notice his mother leave. John pushed Pogo through another few minutes, then he left the boy, promising that he would stop back and see him again soon.

The boy’s mother was standing in the hall, drying her eyes with a handkerchief, and John had to do a hard thing. He had to stop being Pogo and be someone else. He had to be John Gacy, a serious, compassionate man who just happened to be dressed like a complete lunatic.

“I hope,” he skid, “that I, uh, didn’t offend you in some way in there. I was only trying to—”

And the woman smiled up at him, the mascara still streaked on her face. “Oh, no,” she said, “don’t think that. It’s just that he’s been in here six weeks since it happened and . . . oh, my God, this is the first time I’ve seen him smile.” And the indescribable feeling shot through John like electricity: the full, welcome feeling you get after confession, the warm, peaceful feeling that fills your chest when you step out of church after Mass.

CHAPTER 14

JOHN TOLD THE DOCS
up in 3 North that becoming Pogo was the best part of 1975. Even then, “sometimes it was bad for me to be Pogo.” Sick kids, sure, they were easy, you had compassion, and Pogo was a compassion clown.

With healthy kids, performing as Pogo could be something else: like at a grand opening or a picnic, where the clowns were nothing more than ambulatory candy dispensers for a lot of screaming, greedy children. Or at the Moose Christmas and Easter parties, where Santa or the Easter Bunny was the main attraction and the clowns just kept order, like cops. Clown cops, watching to see that all the kids got their fair share. Pogo could watch selfish kids try to get more than what was coming to them and feel himself becoming a hatred clown.

So, John told the docs, if you really broke Pogo down, there were two of them: the compassion clown and the hatred clown. John wondered what that meant: a split in Pogo, one of the characters he was becoming in 1975, the year the Other Guy surfaced and Little John died.

Clowning was a calming influence on John Gacy, but it was harder to get up, mentally, when Pogo had to be a candy machine or a cop clown. John would sit, applying the makeup, carefully smearing on the white greasepaint. Pogo was a whiteface clown. That was John’s decision from the start, because a whiteface clown is a happy clown. He didn’t want to be a sad, pathetic asshole of a clown. The only place John Gacy liked sad clowns was in clown paintings. Then sadness seemed to give the goofy faces dimension.

In 1975, after Butkovitch, John started getting rid of the bullfight figurines he had collected, and began collecting clown paintings. He liked sad-faced clowns on the wall. Clowns staring out into the world with a secret sorrow in their eyes.

They made him feel sentimental, the poor, smiling sons-of-bitches with big, sad eyes shining out of happy, painted faces: a perfect example of how a guy can be right in the midst of a big social storm and still be lonely as a bastard.

John himself, as Pogo, was always a happy clown. Around the white face he drew a dark semicircle: a kind of upside-down horseshoe he left open at his white double chin. The eyebrows arched up in a ridiculous triangle on each side of his face. Then he drew a wide, dark mouth on his white face. John had designed his own makeup and had plenty of clown faces to work from, all those paintings hanging in his front room, but he liked Pogo’s mouth to be slightly different from those of other clowns. It was bigger, like a huge moustache extending from chin to nose, and it curved up sharply, the smile tapering off to a knife point toward the outside corner of his eyes. A sharp-pointed, happy, clown’s smiling mouth.

All the other clowns he had seen—all the professional clowns—used curved mouths. The pros said a sharp mouth can frighten children. John would look at Pogo’s face in the mirror and sometimes, sure, it could look a little scary. Sometimes Pogo didn’t mind scaring the kids just a little. That’s when he had to be a hatred clown.

At those picnics or Moose parties when it was bad for him to be Pogo, he’d have a pocketful of candy, giving shit away to healthy kids who didn’t really need it, and he could see “they were just greedy little bastards.” Pockets full of candy and they’d say, “Please, could I have some? I didn’t get any.” Little shits with their pockets full of gumballs, lying to Pogo as if they thought he was dumb and stupid.

John would jump, caper about, frolic away from the little fuckers, and they’d be after him, pestering him, pulling at his clothes, lying to him.

When it was like that, John told the docs, then it was bad to be Pogo; it was bad to be a clown who saw lying and greed. He’d be laughing because he was supposed to be laughing, but he could feel his heart swell with a kind of “hatred” so that the next kid who pulled at his sleeve, the next one who stood there with his pockets bulging and said,
“Please, I didn’t get any candy,” that was the one John taught. He taught the kid with pain. Punishment was teaching.

“Oh, ho, ho, you didn’t get any,” Pogo would say, leaning down to the child and smiling his odd, sharp-pointed smile. He’d pinch the kid on the cheek, like clowns will do, only he pinched hard, so that it hurt and he could see the pain in the child’s eyes. Smiling, and whispering so that no one else but the child could hear, Pogo would rasp, “Get your ass away from me, you little motherfucker. . . .”

And then he’d be up, capering around, a perfect fool, putting people and distance and laughter between himself and a suddenly sobbing child: Pogo smiling his dark, pointed smile.

Even while he was married, John felt a sense of loneliness, of being different, and the summer yard parties helped. Beginning in 1974 was the “Hawaiian Luau,” where John cooked and wore a Hawaiian shirt. The second yard party was the “Western Barbecue,” where one rough buckaroo roasted half a steer on a spit in the barbeque pit out in the backyard: John dressed up like Marshal Dillon. That was in 1975, the year of Butkovitch and Pogo and the divorce. John had just been appointed director of the Polish Day parade, and Mayor Daley had been invited to the party. John told everyone the mayor’d be out to the house on Summerdale for a little western hospitality.

Unfortunately, the mayor’s busy schedule prevented him from attending, though John pointed out that “a lot of aldermen” were there.

John was the perfect host, never drinking too much, keeping an eye on the guests, and dancing with the women who had sat out too many Hawaiian love songs or western ballads. His house was open to anyone, and when some people mentioned the vague, musty odor, John told them about the periodic flooding in his crawl space and the darn broken sewer pipe down there.

By 1976, the summer-theme party had become too big for John to handle by himself—as many as four hundred people attended—and Jim Vanvorous, a heating contractor John worked with, agreed to cohost the “Spirit of ‘76” party. Gacy wore a colonial outfit with a white wig and a three-cornered hat, as George Washington. Even though they were divorced, Carol came as the hostess of the party. John had
invited his mother-in-law, and it was the first time he had talked to her in a year. He enjoyed his party as much as anyone.

John and Vanvorous split the costs of mixers, a few kegs of beer, and a small band. Everyone was encouraged to bring his or her own booze, and, for the most part, all the neighbors were invited. There were important politicians there, and it was understood that John was a heavy in Democratic political circles. Some of John’s wealthy clients attended. And John himself talked with these men, with other contractors, about plans to buy a bar and turn it into a disco, to put together grandiose projects in partnerships with contractors and clients. Permits and shit would be a snap with his connections; raising money would be a piece of cake because of the respect he had from certain well-to-do clients.

Some of the neighbors thought John was “boastful” about the money he made. Others just felt left out. Lillian Grexa, John’s neighbor to the immediate west, said, “When you start quoting thousands and thousands of dollars and figures that an average person doesn’t fathom, how can you make much comment on it?”

In 1977, the theme was “Southern Jubilee,” with John a genuine Kentucky colonel frying up the chicken. In 1978, over four hundred people attended the “Italian Festival,” and John dressed up like a peasant to piss off his “wop friends.”

Lillian Grexa remembers John at the door after these parties, or others, and he would be carrying a big platter of turkey or beef. “Looks like I overordered again,” he’d say, offering the plate to his friend. “Go ahead,” he said, “you got kids, you can use it.” Anything anyone wanted done in the neighborhood, John would do it. He was “boastful” about money and political connections, but he was “generous to a fault.”

“No neighbor ever did things like that before,” Lillian Grexa said, “and none has since.”

As 1975 slid into 1976, when the divorce he didn’t want would become final, John began drinking more and more heavily. Sometimes he needed pills to help him sleep, pills to calm him down, pills to get him going in the morning.

John would fall asleep in the big chair, then wake up staring at the test pattern on TV. Worse, sometimes he’d wake up driving down to New Town, to Clark and Broadway,
to Bughouse Square and the male hustlers. John Gacy woke up “cruising,” after midnight, when the dark flower blooms. In his mind, he knew, he was becoming Jack Hanley.

Jack had a theory—well, it was John’s theory, but Jack used it on his nocturnal cruises—that most homosexuals have “light hair,” sandy brown, blond in color. “Go into the gay area of any city,” John once explained, “and you seldom see people with dark hair, moustaches, heavy builds, real
macho
look.” “Queers” have a look about them: the fake innocence, the slight, muscular build. Light hair. A certain kind of ass, small and tight. Some of them, you could look at their hair and build and tell—and these kids, they wouldn’t even know themselves. Not until they got off the bus and Jack offered them a ride. Then they’d find out about themselves.

Sometimes Jack skipped the Greyhound bus station altogether, because “the park” is where he ended up when he awoke to find himself cruising. Washington Park is a one-block-square area just north of the Loop and a couple of blocks south and east of the strip of nightclubs on Rush Street. In the 1950s, the park was a haven for soapbox orators, men or women who loudly declaimed wondrous theories. In those days, people began calling Washington Park Bughouse Square.

In the 1960s, the neighborhood began to deteriorate. Hotels that once strove toward a sort of genteel elegance became seedy, some of them little more than flophouses for transients. Within sight of the park, one of the larger bars began catering to the rougher homosexual crowd.

And Bughouse Square became a hangout for young male hustlers. On sunny afternoons, elderly people eat their lunch on the park benches, but after midnight, the park belongs to young men trading on their youth and looks. Their customers are older men, generally from nearby suburbs, who drive down Chestnut Street, staring at the young men standing under the streetlights or sitting on the hoods of cars.

A car pulls to the curb; a young man steps over to the open the passenger window, but not before thrusting his pelvis forward—"throwing the basket"—so a heavy bulge at the crotch is clearly visible. A pair of socks stuffed down the front of the pants makes for a more impressive basket and helps bring a better price.

The exchange of service for money at Bughouse Square is often characterized by a sort of mutual contempt. Many of
the boys do not consider themselves homosexuals: they’ll sell what they have to the pathetic old jerks who need to buy it, but the hustler’s attitude is one of swaggering superiority.

Negotiations are marked by mutual distrust. The men in the big cars often consider the boys whores, to be taken advantage of, to be cheated. There is always an argument about money: how much, for what, whether it is to be given up front, “jack rollers” will perform if they have to, but they’ll run if they can get the money first.

It can be a rough place, Bughouse Square after midnight. Men have been beaten and robbed by groups of boys. Some of the young hustlers have been badly injured by the men who picked them up. A few boys, after a month or a year, have simply disappeared, perhaps gone to another city. There are always rumors of death.

Jack thought of the boys of Bughouse Square as “scum, weak, stupid, degraded.” But something about the park drew him to it, “like a compulsion.”

If nothing was happening at the park, Jack would cut over, making a slow run through New Town, a neighborhood of young singles with some elegant cafes and restaurants and a sprinkling of gay bars. Prostitutes, male and female, work the bars and streets of New Town, and Jack knew that if a young man caught his eye, it was a signal.

John said, “I’d just pull over, ask them what they were doing. Sometimes they’d say they were homosexuals, talk about how long they’d been out of the closet and shit, and then I found that I didn’t really like to go with them.”

From there, it was only a few blocks east to the corner of Clark and Broadway, where there are a number of gay bars and a few hustlers hanging around: young men standing on the corners, looking to pick up twenty or fifty dollars for a quick trick after midnight. Boys anxious to earn a few bucks from older men cruising the dark in their big cars.

“I didn’t want to be down there, cruising,” John said. “But then, I always said, ‘As long as I’m here, I might as well get my rocks off.’ Because I didn’t have the time to be doing that, and if I was there, I could get it over with, and the next night I wouldn’t wake up and find myself out cruising again. Because anyone who knows me knows the one thing I always say. I always say, ‘I haven’t got the time.’ So if I was already cruising—even though I didn’t consciously set out to—I would look for someone who’d do it quick: you know, ‘Blow me and
get the fuck out of my sight, you piece of shit.’ “ It was “a quick animal thing” John wanted, and he used Jack to get it.