Buried Dreams (40 page)

Doctors at Holy Family carefully examined Gacy and found that there was nothing to suggest that he was having a heart seizure. Nothing at all. If the guy said he was having a heart attack, he had to be “bullshitting.” There was nothing physically wrong with John Wayne Gacy.

Daniel Genty, meanwhile, had dropped into the darkness and mud of the crawl space. It was there, in the southwestern corner of the house at 8213 Summerdale, on the first experimental excavation, that Genty’s trenching tool hooked the skeletal remains of a human arm. There were bits of white flesh on the bones, which hung from the blade of the shovel by an elbow joint. Genty shouted up to Joseph Kozenczak: “Charge him! Murder!”

CHAPTER 23

THE COPS USED THE
good guy/bad guy technique on John, who saw through it right away. The psychologists used their tests: crazy shit where you’re supposed to tell them what color your stools are or whether people are always following you, as if they didn’t know that the police had followed and harassed John Gacy twenty-four hours a day for eight days before they finally arrested him. The cops had their “confessions,” the lawyers had their strategies, but it seemed to John as if everyone wanted to play psychiatrist, even his lawyers. As his trial approached, the pressure became more intense. Dr. Morrison called and told John to stop lying, that she couldn’t help him, either medically or on the stand, unless he told the truth.

John could see through that one: she had called from his lawyers’ office, so it must have been Sam who put her up to it. They simply didn’t believe that he could remember only five of the victims and that even those memories were necessarily “rationalizations.” To find out about the other murders, they were going to have to talk to Jack. No one seemed to have been able to meet or talk to Jack, and that worried John, because he knew Jack was there, seething, raging, a killer lurking just under the surface of consciousness, hiding in the synapses, alive and laughing in one of those lobes Freedman showed him on a chart of the brain.

As the trial date approached, John begged for more time. The psychiatrists, the lawyers, his entire defense team were all pushing him, insulting him, getting tough with him. The defense team needed to meet Jack to save John’s life—and
if Jack was there, he was lurking in John’s mind like the mists of half-remembered dreams. John remembers that time well; he remembers how they demanded that he “take them cruising.” It was just another game they played, the lawyers playing psychiatrist, the psychiatrists playing lawyer. They sat him on a chair and insisted that he pretend he was behind the wheel of his big black Olds.

“Just tell us how you picked them up.”

“How should I know? I was just an observer.”

“Do it right-hand, left-hand. You’re on the left, Jack is
on the right. Tell us what Jack is doing. You be the observer, you tell us how Jack killed.”

“Jack doesn’t come out like that.”

“Let the son-of-a-bitch out!”

They wanted him to relive a killing—any killing—just so it wasn’t a reprise of his standard story, not his “rationalizations” about the five victims he vaguely remembered. They wanted him to start from the moment when drugs or drink or weakness put him in the big black car and sent him spinning down to Bughouse Square.

“What the hell,” John said at Menard Correctional Center in Chester, Illinois, “I took ‘em cruising with me.”

In the conference room at Menard, years later, John remembered how he took them cruising, how someone sat next to him, to his right, facing in the same direction, as if in the passenger seat of a car. Sitting in a chair at Cermak Hospital, he played their game. He drove an imaginary car down to an imaginary park and hoped he’d be able to pick up an imaginary kid. Maybe the kid would be a greedy little bastard, a hustler, and maybe that kid would meet Jack. He’d know what to do with a kid like that, Jack.

It was less than a month before the trial, and John needed more time. He was scared, and he could feel the pressure on his chest. He tried, he really tried: he played their half-ass game.

In his ankle irons, with handcuffs loosely connected to his waist chains, John hobbled around his chair, demonstrating how he took some members of his defense team cruising there at Cermak, before his trial. He is no mime, but his clowning experience has served him well, and his actions are entirely self-explanatory. John just opens the door, slides into the seat—which is really a chair in a prison conference room—puts the key into the ignition, looks out the back window,
stomps on the accelerator, and goes roaring back out of the driveway.

Spin the wheel. Hit the brake hard—John’s body rocks back in the chair as the inertia hits him—shift into drive, stomp the accelerator, and go tearing up Summerdale, right out to the expressway. It’s the park, Bughouse Square this night.

“They got me to go cruising,” John said, “and they tried to piss me off.”

He imitates a voice, a high-pitched voice that is perhaps a woman’s. He gives a silly, grating intonation to the voice.

“John, there’s a stop sign.”

“No, there isn’t.”

“Yes, there is.”

“Who’s driving, you or me?”

“You, but there’s a stoplight. Stop!”

John plays both parts, himself and the antagonist sitting beside him there in Cermak.

“There’s no goddamn stoplight. I know how to drive.”

“There is a light,” the high-pitched voice grates, “a stoplight and you just blew it, you asshole.”

Some part of John Wayne Gacy loves to perform, and he is performing now, getting into the part of John Gacy at Cermak: John the victim, pushed too far, rebelling, angry. It is difficult to figure out who is sitting beside him because this is only a supporting role—no need to change position, turn his head, show us the configuration of his antagonist’s face—it’s just a silly, grating voice that is pushing him. Pushing John. Forcing him to react. It is odd watching John’s angry face but hearing this earnest, high-pitched, indefatigable voice coming out of his mouth.

“Don’t tell me you know how to drive,” the odd voice insists. “You don’t know how to drive. You can’t drive. You just blew a light. Shit. You oughta let Jack drive. . . .”

“Jack don’t . . .”

“Look! Over there. Look at that guy. Tight pants. What is he, maybe sixteen, seventeen? Let’s pick him up.”

“Not my type.”

“Shit, just look at him. Young, nice ass, tight pants, blond hair . . .”

The whole game made John mad, really mad; you can see it in his face, in the tremble of his hands on the imaginary wheel of the imaginary big black car.

“Kid’s cock isn’t big enough,” he says, a naughty boy, trying to shock.

And the pushy, grating, insistent voice comes back: mean, sexy, insinuating, knowing. “Maybe not for you, you faggot, but Jack would like him. Jack would . . .”

Now it’s hard to tell if John is still performing, because his anger is intense, entirely real. “I’m not a faggot, you asshole.”

The woman’s voice is calm and soft but cuts like a blade, it is so knowing, so irritating and assured: “Yes, you are,” it purrs. “You’re a faggot. Jack told me. . . .”

John’s eyes are glazed, but he keeps his hands on the wheel, keeps staring off into the middle distance, like a man driving at night. “I told you, goddamn it, I’m not a faggot. I’m a bisexual. Not a faggot . . .”

“Oh, yes, you are.” A woman’s mysterious taunting voice. “Sure you are. You’re a fruit-picking faggot. Jack told me all about you. Just ask him.”

John is not going to ask anyone anything. His face is red, curiously swollen, and the eyes are deep as sin and shame, dark and empty as an open grave. Looking into John’s eyes now is like staring into a hole so deep that darkness swallows the light.

This is rage beyond performance, and John—or is it Jack? —rises from his seat, the imaginary car forgotten. His face is now devoid of expression, but there is a growling noise that seems to emanate from deep in his chest. It is guttural and continuous. Jack’s fingers are hooked like talons. His elbows are bent stiffly, but his arms are stretched out before him. Jack takes a step forward, unsteady on his feet. Then his eyes roll out of focus and he steps back, falling onto the chair in a rattle of chains.

There, at Menard, John slumps in his chair, his head lolling to the side, his eyes closed. He could be asleep; he could be acting out his pretrial performance for the lawyers and psychiatrists at Cermak. He begins to snore, which is something people do when they are asleep and something people often do when they are pretending to be asleep.

Minutes pass. Eventually the snoring stops and John struggles up out of sleep, moving ponderously. He can’t quite control the extremities of his body.

“What happened?” he asks, eyes swimming vacantly in his head. “What happened? Is everyone all right?”

John shakes his head and shoulders, throwing off sleep and confusion like a wet dog. “Was that Jack? I can’t . . . I thought I heard someone yell, ‘Sit down, Jack.’ I . . . are you all right?” He appears to be talking to someone on his right, and there is no one there. Sitting in chains at Menard, he is still at Cermak.

John turns and stares into the middle distance for several seconds. When he opens his mouth, a woman’s high-pitched voice, less confident-sounding now, says: “I’m all right.”

“What happened?”

“I was talking to Jack.”

“Yeah? What did he say?”

The woman’s voice is coaxing now, a tone you might use to encourage a small child to let go, to take the first run of his life down a shiny new slide. “Why don’t you ask him?”

“Cuz he don’t talk to me.”

“Try him.”

“I can’t. He don’t come out like . . .”

The high-pitched voice begins to grate again: “I know your secret,” it seems to say, “I despise your weakness “—and the tone is taunting, bleeding with contempt, falsely reasonable. “All I can say is that Jack confirmed my feeling that you’re a faggot.”

“Fuck you,” John says angrily. “You’re a liar.”

“No, I’m not. He called you a faggot. He knows all about you: You’re nothing but a faggot, a dumb, stupid faggot.”

“Jack wouldn’t, Jack doesn’t . . .” John’s face is red, swollen with a blood rush of anger, and he can’t find the words he needs to say. “Liar!” he shouts.

And out of the same burning face, out of the same shouting mouth, the woman’s calm, reasonable, taunting voice says: “You know I don’t lie. And you know I don’t want to talk to you. I want to talk to Jack.”

“Jack!” John howls. He is silent for a moment, then he speaks more calmly, imitating his own imitation of the woman’s voice. “Jack doesn’t want to come out.” The sentence is both a taunt and a challenge.

“Sure he does, John,” the womanly voice says, all appeasement now. “He likes to come out when you go cruising, doesn’t he? Let’s get back in the car again. Let’s ask Jack to come along.”

“Aren’t you afraid?” John asks, challenging again. “Aren’t you afraid that if Jack comes out he might kill you?”

“I want to talk to him. Just get in the car.”

Once again John stands, opens an imaginary door, takes a seat, starts driving. “Where are we going?” the woman’s voice asks.

“The park.”

“Bughouse Square?”

“Yeah, the park.”

“You going down Clark?”

“Yeah.”

“What do you see?”

“I see . . . I see the streetlights coming up the hood of the car. They’re like spotlights.”

“Are you in the spotlight?”

“Not my face . . . my hands.”

“How do they look?”

“Big. Strong. My hands on the wheel, they’re in the spotlight. They look . . . powerful.” John’s voice is dreamy; he sounds like a man reliving a pleasant memory.

“There’s a guy,” the woman’s says. Her voice is sticky with honey and sex. “He looks right, doesn’t he? Nice tight ass, not too tall, slender build, blond hair. He big enough for you?”

“He looks,” John says scornfully, “like a fruit.”

“Ask Jack what he thinks of him.”

“Fuck Jack,” John says, exasperated.

“Kid looks about eighteen, nineteen. How old does he look to you?”

“Maybe eighteen,” John says with a sigh, capitulating, playing the damn silly-ass game.

“How tall is he?”

“Five-seven, five-eight.”

“What’s he wearing?”

“White pants. Tight white pants,” John says without hesitation, “brown leather jacket, white T-shirt . . . white tennis shoes.”

“What color eyes has he got?”

“Who gives a shit?”

“Let’s ask Jack what he thinks of him.”

“Jack’s not coming out. Jack’s not coming out because I don’t want to pick the kid up.”

“You asshole!” The woman’s voice is no longer breathless and sexy. “You dumb stupid asshole.” The voice grates, like a rat clawing on glass. “I don’t want you to pick him up. I want
Jack to pick him up.” And now hard, like a slap at full force: “Jack says you’re a faggot.”

John’s head jerks back, as from a blow, and the woman speaks out of the mouth in his stricken face. “Jack says you’re a faggot. I don’t want to see a faggot pick this kid up. I want to see how a real man does it.”

Now John speaks in his own voice, softly, slowly: “Son . . . of . . . a . . . bitch . . . son-of-a-bitch . . . son-of-a-bitch, son-of-a-bitch.” The dead-level intensity of John’s voice is unsettling: it is like that strange green calm that settles over the Midwest just before a tornado howls over the land. “Son-of-a-bitch,” John says again, and his voice is deeper, more guttural, “son-of-a-bitch.”

“John!” The woman’s voice again. “John, keep your hands on the wheel!”

“Son-of-a-bitch.” Louder, deeper, hoarser.

“Jack,” the woman says suddenly. “Is that you, Jack?”

There is no reply, just a sepulchral mutter, a hollow, grinding rasp.

“What are you feeling?” the woman asks, and her voice is almost tender. “What are you feeling right now?”

Jack’s voice is that of a man wakened from deep sleep; it is a rumbling full of rust and broken glass. “I am going to kill you. . . .”

“Hello, Jack,” the woman says, sounding both shaky and certain.

John stares straight ahead with Jack’s tunnel-deep, unseeing eyes. There is a low vibration, a growling in the back of his throat, the sound of a large dog about to attack.