Buried Dreams (4 page)

A hot summer night in 1944: Ma was just home from the hospital with three-week-old Karen. John, almost two and a half years old, and JoAnne, nearly five, were sitting at the dinner table when John Stanley Gacy exploded. Ma, Marion Gacy, never knew why.

“I don’t know what triggered it,” she said.

The Old Man picked up some food and threw it in his wife’s face, then he came up over the table and “he hit me square in the face and knocked my bridge out. I was all blood. I ran out. I got away.” John and JoAnne started to
scream. Marion Gacy, covered with blood, ran into the street, where she stumbled and fell. The Old Man was running after her, and a neighbor yelled, “Don’t hit her again! I’m calling the police!”

The Old Man went back into the house, bulled his way past the screaming children, got a gun he kept hidden somewhere, and left. The police arrived and advised Marion Gacy to take the children and leave the house “in case he came back.”

Ma had to borrow two dollars from a neighbor for a cab. She went to a sister-in-law’s house for a few days, then went to Domestic Relations Court. Of this court she said, “They couldn’t do anything, only tell him he would have to pay for my support and the children.”

Ma’s brother told her, “I can’t afford to keep two families.”

A few days later, “after I had calmed down,” Ma took the children back to the house at 3536 North Opal. Everything was just as she had left it. There was still food on the table and broken dishes on the floor. Ma cleaned up the kitchen, then cooked her husband’s favorite meal of boiled meat and potatoes.

“When he came home,” Marion Gacy recalled, “he had supper there. Nothing was said, but he ate and everything.” It was like the whole incident never happened: a make-believe happy family. “We resumed our normal life,” Marion Gacy recalled.

The docs would really fasten on the bad stuff like that, make the Old Man a real monster. They wanted John to talk about his father, but he couldn’t—he absolutely would not—come out and say he hated the Old Man. You had to do it like a theory or something, a supposition. Talk about yourself in the third person, like someone else, a whole other guy, who actually hated his dad.

That way—in the third person, as supposition—John could let it all out. From the beginning.

Just like the incident with the enamel. Little John helping the Old Man paint window trim. The enamel goes on hard, doesn’t spread easy, and John thinks, Well, if I put more on the brush, it’ll spread easier. Except that he had never painted before and didn’t know that enamel runs.

“Goddamn it,” the Old Man hollered, “now look at what you’ve done!” John Stanley Gacy, the almighty white wonder who never made a mistake in his life.

John Gacy tried to tell his father that it was the paint, and the Old Man said that these are things a man knows, that you’d have to be stupid, “dumb and stupid” to mess up windows like that. And then John turned to get something, and his brush hit the windowpane.

“Holy shit,” John recalled. “You’d think I busted the whole window. I said, ‘Can’t we let it dry, scrape it off with a razor blade?’ “

“You don’t want to listen!” the Old Man shouted. “You do something, you don’t make mistakes you have to fix. Because then it’s never right. You’re dumb and stupid, you don’t know that. You don’t want to learn.”

And Ma standing there, toe to toe with the Old Man, hollering right back. “What are you, perfect personified? Were you perfect when you started?”

The Old Man wouldn’t stand for that: Ma “conniving” with her son, the two of them so dumb and stupid they thought they could “outsmart” him.

Dr. Rappaport was interested in the Old Man’s secret spot, the basement, and John could tell by his questions that he saw some correlation between that and the crawl space under the house on Summerdale.

In 1952, when John was ten, the Gacy family moved to a bigger house, closer to Chicago proper, at 4505 North Marmora. The new house had a basement, and it was almost as though the Old Man lived down there, underground, in a sunless, subterranean world of his own. John thought of the basement as his dad’s vault, a secret hiding place, a sacred area. There were locks on the door leading down there, and no one but the Old Man had the key, so that when a fuse blew, the family had to wait for John Stanley Gacy to come home from work to change it. “And then,” John recalled, “we got our asses chewed out for overloading a circuit and blowing the fuse.”

The Old Man had other secret places. John remembered a dresser in his parents’ bedroom. John Stanley put a padlock on the top drawer, just drilled a couple of holes in it, completely ruined a good piece of furniture.

But the basement was his sacred spot. He’d come home from work—hardly even say hello—and go right downstairs into the cellar. John knew, even as a kid, that the Old Man drank down there and that his sudden rages had something to
do with alcohol. Ma and the kids could hear him in the basement, sometimes shouting, sometimes talking to himself in different voices. The family had to wait, upstairs, with the beef and potatoes boiling away into mushy slop. You couldn’t eat before the Old Man, and you couldn’t call down and say that dinner was ready. Not if you didn’t want the Old Man to fly into a rage.

Then, later, you could hear him stumbling up the stairs, drunk, ready now for dinner. And always an argument. “If my father said the sun wouldn’t rise tomorrow,” John recalled, “you couldn’t disagree with him. He’d argue you into the ground. But when I was young, I didn’t know. I argued with him, and he’d holler at me. Tell me I was dumb and stupid. Arguing with little kids, and every time he had to win. Never wrong.”

The Old Man always thought people were sneaking into the basement, violating the secret spot, stealing his tools. There was a big barrel of nuts and bolts down there, and he accused John of stealing and selling them—as if the man knew exactly how many bolts were in a barrel. And once, when he had a vat of tar in the basement, he said John had stolen some and sold it. Like a little kid is going to take a sand bucket, fill it with tar, walk down the street, and try to sell it to some adult.

“Do you think I’m dumb and stupid?” the Old Man hollered. “I know who took it. You’re dumb and stupid, think you can get away with stealing from me.”

If the Old Man misplaced a tool, John stole it. Even Ma’s brother, John’s uncle, after he helped move the family from Opal to Marmora, John Stanley said he stole some shit. And then when he found it later, he never apologized to Uncle Harold. Because he was never wrong. He’d find the hammer or the wrench he said John stole and just ignore the fact that he had misplaced it and blamed his son for stealing.

Ma tried to smooth things over, always excusing John’s behavior to the Old Man, the Old Man’s behavior to John. She said the drinking was a physical problem: John Stanley Gacy had a blood clot, a tumor on the brain. When he drank, the blood vessels swelled up and pressed on the tumor. Back then, John had a vision of some little dark thing, swollen with alcohol, pumping like a little black heart, pressing against his dad’s brain.

“So why doesn’t he go to the doctor to have it taken
out?” John asked, and Ma said that the operation would be too dangerous. What John had to do, Ma explained, was to “pacify” the Old Man, agree with him. She said some little argument didn’t matter, not even if John was being accused of something he didn’t do, not even if his father was dead wrong. What mattered was the Old Man’s physical condition: you didn’t want to argue with him, didn’t want to make him mad. The tumor could burst or something. You could kill the Old Man, arguing with him. It would be like an explosion inside his head, the little black thing bursting apart in an eruption of pus.

Subsequently, John had a theory about why his father drank alone in the basement every night. The Old Man was a master control assembler, a machinist. They have a master control board where you pour in all the ingredients. And in those days it wasn’t done by computer, so you had to know exactly how long to leave the valves open or you could ruin everything. Thirty years in the same job with all that pressure; a job where measurements had to be absolutely precise; a job where the technology was getting ahead of the workers, everything changing all the time, young guys coming in to train the Old Man: smart-ass college boys with their time-and-motion studies, telling him how to do his work.

John Stanley Gacy had to quit school to work at twelve, to help feed the family. At seventeen, he went into the First World War. So even though he read, the Old Man never had much of an education. Maybe by the time the kids got to high school, he thought they were passing him up, outsmarting him with education.

Because at work, young guys were coming in, getting promoted over him. So whatta you do? John Gacy’s father drank like a fish and took it all out on his son. Nobody was going to outsmart John Stanley Gacy in his own home.

That’s how John explained his father’s drinking when the docs asked him. As an adult, John could see clear reasons for the Old Man’s raging temper, but when he was young, he never understood. It was like (he could almost laugh about it after nearly thirty years) some dumb horror film. Little John sitting at the dinner table hears clumping feet coming up the stairs—fear on the boy’s face—and then, wham, the cellar door bursts open and there he stands, the Old Man, swaying back and forth, frowning, bleary-eyed, ready for battle. And right above the Old Man’s head, arching over like a rainbow,
there’s one of those blood-dripping monster-movie titles:
The Creature That Came Up Out of the Basement.

Doc Rappaport was working on the basement/crawl space correlation, but when John tried to express his feelings, the psychology of putting the two things together seemed murky, imprecise. What John remembered from those days was anger. And fear: like being afraid of the black hand, or afraid of the faceless men in black suits on the fire engine, only it was all jumbled together with fear of something in the basement, something dark, coming to get him, for no reason.

CHAPTER 3

ISOLATION,
Cermak Hospital:

John up there in the jail complex with a private room in 3 North, separated from the main population of criminal patients, where he wouldn’t have lasted a day. All the rapists and killers, the assault artists and thieves in agreement, child molesters are scum below scum. Niggers standing on the other side of the barred gate separating 3 North from the main population, all of them yelling for Gacy.

John would stand bravely behind the locked gate, saying, “Jump up, froggy. One more don’t make no difference to me.” Give the sons-of-bitches something to think about.

The next day, he’d look through the gate and see some nigger trying to hang himself out in the hall, pants all wet at the crotch where he lost control of his bladder, tongue sticking out of his mouth. John calling for Officer Pocious or one of them to save the guy.

“We got another swinger down the hall.”

One of John’s closest friends in 3 North was also accused of killing young boys. The guy used to cruise around picking young hustlers, and he had the car set up so the seat belt locked down on them once they snapped it on. “Buckle up for safety” was the joke. A schoolteacher, the guy told John he resigned when he realized that he was looking at his students, teenage boys, and thinking now much he’d like to kill them, and how killing them would be a way of actually helping them. John remembered the Old Man then, how his father thought punishment was teaching.

It kept getting back to the Old Man.

This guy with the seat belt, he had an inverted dick or something—always crouched over in the shower, ashamed of what he had between his legs—and John was sympathetic; he understood the guy’s problem. Something like that, it’s right out on the surface, and you didn’t have to tear a whole life apart to get to the meaning of murder.

John had to see the docs every day, every one of them poking and stabbing into a different area. Just like Morrison: she was trying to make something of his stealing. John could see her constructing a neat little theory, making correlations between petty theft and serial murder. When John looked back on it, he had been stealing all his life. Mostly just little shit, and half the time he gave it away. Maybe he wanted to be a big man, generous guy, something, John didn’t know.

The first time, when he was about six, walking home from the store with Ma, with a little truck that he had stolen while no one was looking. She turned him around and marched him right back to the store. “It was the longest walk of my life,” John recalled. And he had to tell the man he stole the truck, giving it back and apologizing. That night Ma told John Stanley, and the Old Man took the razor strop down from the nail.

“I’ll teach you to steal.”

Always swiping little shit. But once, when he was a teenager working at some discount store, Ma found a roll of bills wrapped up in a rubber band in her son’s dresser drawer. John didn’t make that kind of money. The same day, they called from the store asking about some stolen money, and Ma made John take it back even though she knew he’d be fired. She never told the Old Man about that one; she just made John do the right thing and then “it was over and nobody had to talk about it again.”

That was Ma’s way. She was fair, so trusting she was almost naïve.

Dr. Morrison seemed to think you could draw some kind of psychological line through the stealing, extending it right into the killings. Maybe John stole shit because he got away with it most of the time. So if you take the first murder—one of the five John vaguely remembered: an accident, self-defense—you could put it on a kind of graph.

First murder: January 1972.

Second murder: August 1975.

After that, the graph just kept going up, getting steeper and steeper, the dead line shooting right up off the paper. Of course, John couldn’t recall the murders and had to rely on bullshit newspaper stories. The rest of the victims: the way the state’s attorney’s office was working, they were matching up bodies the coroner was able to identify with names and asking around about the last time the kid was seen alive. By that count, 1978, the year John was arrested in December, Jack was killing some kid right there in the house about once every two or three weeks.