Buried Dreams (8 page)

Bodies all around: dead things, they didn’t care. A silver-gray coffin with white interior, open. John got inside with the body. He wanted to feel death, in the darkness. And there was a fear, a terrible fear, like someone coming who would discover him there, only there was no sound at all, no one to find him, and he was still afraid.

Later, when it was light, and the light would not burn away his fear, John called Ma in Illinois.

“Mother,” he said, “do you think Dad would let me come home?”

CHAPTER 5

IT WAS THE FEAR,
the crushing weight of darkness He felt inside the coffin that set John Gacy on the road back home. Back to a familiar place, where he wouldn’t be so goddamn lonely, where he didn’t have to feel like such a nothing. In Las Vegas he wasn’t much more than a transient, a failure, a nobody: the living embodiment of his father’s expectations. An asshole. Dumb and stupid.

Gacy’s family must have thought the three-month stint on his own was good medicine for the boy. Despite his lack of a high-school diploma, Gacy soon talked his way into Northwestern Business College, where he took the standard yearlong course. This time he did well, graduating with good grades and enough recommendations to secure a job as a “management trainee” for Nunn-Bush Shoes. Gacy was twenty-one, and when he later described the job, he systematically forgot the “trainee” designation. “In 1963, I traveled for Nunn-Bush, as a manager,” at sixty-five dollars a week.

Even at that salary, John had more drive than any four shoe salesmen combined. “The son-of-a-bitch could really sell shoes,” an acquaintance of the time remembered. The company transferred Gacy to Springfield, where he handled the Nunn-Bush line at Roberts, one of the larger department stores in town. It was a big promotion.

Gacy moved in with his aunt and uncle, and—finally free of his father’s constant disapproval, all those unvoiced suspicions—he set out to prove the Old Man wrong.

He dated frequently and, to replace the Chi Ro Club, he joined the Springfield Junior Chamber of Commerce. His life
was coming together, and the realization filled him with energy. The man was a dynamo, a prodigious worker on the job and a volunteer for any of the ongoing myriad of projects the Jaycees sponsor every year. In 1964, Gacy was chosen the Jaycees’ Key Man for April. He had been in town less than two months. In September, he married Marlynn Myers, another employee at Roberts.

That was the year that John helped promote the sale of savings bonds with Jaycees, that he organized the club’s annual boss’s night, that he ran the “largest Christmas parade in central Illinois.” Fellow Jaycees thought the ambitious young shoe salesman enjoyed working the parade so much because he got to drive around with a flashing red light on the dashboard of his car, just like detectives on TV. There was some sniggering about that—the guy was a “police freak”—but everyone had to admit, goddamn, not only could the son-of-a-bitch sell shoes, he also ran a hell of a parade. John Gacy just loved being in charge.

The next year, 1965, John was elected the Jaycees’ first vice president, named the outstanding first-year Jaycee and the third outstanding member statewide.

John reveled in the recognition. All he had to do was look at the plaques on the wall to see how wrong the Old Man had been about him. Marlynn was pregnant. He was the outstanding man. His father was an asshole.

They may have been the best years of John’s life: 1962, 1963, 1964, 1965. Both his sisters were married then, and he was happy for them. His parents had their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary in 1964, and the Old Man spent most of the party treating his son like an actual human being.

The Jaycee work was almost like therapy, and John would be the first to admit that he needed the recognition that came along with it. “I like being in the limelight.”

Even his health improved, though he was hospitalized in 1965 for what he said was “nerves” or “a mild stroke.”

Given his medical history, the sickness could almost be expected. There was only one truly bad thing that happened in Springfield during the good years: one mark on an otherwise unblemished life. “Just like I had my first sexual experience with a woman when I was eighteen,” John recalls, “I had my first sexual experience with a male in 1964, in Springfield, when I was twenty-two.”

John said it all happened before he got married that year. He was out drinking with an older fellow, a guy named Richard Stuart,
*
and they were looking to pick up women. After several hours and more than enough drinks, they decided to give up on it for that night. Stuart invited John to his house for coffee. “But instead,” John said, “we had more drinks. Or I did. And Richard was telling me, he said, ‘You know, you go out looking for women, you strike out, you probably go home and play with yourself. Me, I don’t give a shit who blows me. A mouth is a mouth. So if I strike out with women, I pick up a guy. Which means on any given night, I got twice the chance to score that you do.’ “

Looking back on it, John realized he should have just said what he believed: that it would be all right for Richard Stuart—John Wayne Gacy doesn’t sit in judgment on anybody—but that he himself didn’t go for that shit. Unfortunately, the drinks Stuart poured were stiff, and John was young and gullible. Naїve.

“I passed out,” John said, “and when I woke up, I was nude and Richard Stuart was blowing me. What are you going to do? You’re nude, you’re in a guy’s house, he’s going down on you?”

John said he wouldn’t lie about it, either. “It felt good, which, I suppose, is one of the reasons I didn’t stop him.”

When it was over there was the postejaculation sadness, and the hangover, and a depression so abysmal, so lasting, that John remembers the next months as one of the lowest periods of his life.

“I said to myself,” John recalls, “watch out for Richard Stuart. Go drinking with him, go to public places, but don’t go to his house. Because he outsmarted you.”

Being outsmarted in precisely that manner, it changed a person, killed a little part of him. Living with it, as a victim, was as lonely as constant illness, as castrating as a father’s rage; it was as dark and wrong and foul as the inside of a coffin; it was a dying that came before death.

That’s the way John said he felt about it.

The breaks began rolling John Gacy’s way. Marlynn’s father, Fred Myers, owned three Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurants in Waterloo, Iowa, where business was booming,
and he needed a manager. Myers never liked Gacy, but Marlynn was his only daughter, and he wanted her close to home. John could manage the restaurants. Myers said he would provide a home for the newlyweds and he paid his son-in-law fifteen thousand dollars a year plus 20 percent of the profits. Good money.

Gacy did the obligatory stretch at Kentucky Fried University, then brought his pregnant wife to Waterloo and began learning the business from the bottom up. He regularly worked ten-and fourteen-hour days, but he still found time to join the Waterloo Jaycees.

Gacy’s fellow Jaycees considered him their hardest-working member. He put in long hours managing the three Kentucky Fried Chicken outlets, but when the club needed someone to donate his time or skills on any of the forty to fifty community or fund-raising projects the Waterloo Jaycees undertake in any given year, Gacy would volunteer. When club members discovered one Thursday afternoon that the ramp for that Sunday’s soapbox derby was in shoddy shape, Gacy said he’d fix it. He worked late in the evenings, frequently until well past midnight, but he was up early in the morning, already doing business at ninety miles an hour. On Sunday morning, Jaycee organizers were delighted to see the ramp not only repaired but also newly painted.

Gacy put in tireless hours for the Jaycees. That was the word everyone used to describe him: tireless. He worked on as many as forty Jaycee projects a year. He could be overbearing, arrogant, and a braggart—"He had a hell of a big-man complex,” Steve Pottinger, a fellow Jaycee, recalls—but the “big man” was an invaluable member of the club. He was absolutely inexhaustible.

Once, in 1967, visiting his good friend Jaycee president Charles Hill, at the Clayton House Motel lounge, Gacy learned that the Jaycees were twenty-three members short of reaching their membership quota and that the deadline was fast approaching. Gacy went out that afternoon and personally recruited twenty new members. “John was a heck of a promoter,” Hill remembers, “and I would say you could classify him as a great con artist. He had a lot of con about him, he could manipulate people and get them to do things, both for the Jaycees and for himself, too.” And he was tireless. “The club,” Hill recalls, “was his whole life.”

Gacy often provided the Jaycees working on various
projects with free chicken from his restaurants, and he insisted that his employees and friends call him “Colonel.” People who worked for him or ate his fried chicken were inclined to comply. The colonel explained to his friend Hill that he was “a real colonel,” though not in the Marines, where he said he had served with some distinction. No, he had actually been commissioned an honorary colonel in the Governor’s Brigade of Illinois. Years later, Gacy would say, “I don’t know where he got that story. I’m an honorary colonel for the state of Kentucky. I have a certificate to prove it.” One can apply for this honor and certificate through the mail.

Gacy seemed to have a knack for club politics, though his machinations were sometimes baldly transparent to those who found his personality grating. Occasionally, even his friends and supporters saw a bizarre manipulative streak in the colonel, and there was talk about the time he offered his wife to the president of the club.

The two men and their wives had just finished dinner at Hill’s house, and while the women were in the kitchen, Gacy asked his friend if he liked the dress Marlynn had on.

“Yes,” Hill said. “It’s very attractive. . . .”

“Do you like her?” Gacy asked.

Hill said that he liked Marlynn. He had always liked Marlynn.

Gacy was happy to hear it. “She likes you, too.” He leaned closer to Hill and whispered, “Do you want her?”

Hill didn’t quite know how to respond. “Uh, John,” he said, “we’re friends, you know?”

And that was the end of it. Gacy treated his offer as a joke, and that’s how Hill took it.

In spite of this episode, Gacy rose rapidly through the ranks of the Jaycees. He served on the Board of Directors in 1967. In the next two years, Gacy turned the ordinarily nondescript office of chaplain into an influential and even powerful position. The boy who once thought he might become a priest conducted all the club’s religious activities. In 1967 he scored a coup of impressive proportions by bringing Bill Brownfield, the author of the Jaycee creed and perhaps the most influential Jaycee nationwide, to Waterloo for a prayer breakfast. Representatives from most every Iowa chapter attended the breakfast. Gacy, as chairman, organized the entire affair, which drew more than 225 people. It was one of the most successful club functions of the year.

Because he put in so much time working for the Jaycees, almost all of Gacy’s friends were club members, though he was a lot friendlier to some than to others. A persistent rumor had it, for instance, that a few of the younger Jaycees were involved in a bit of infrequent, old-fashioned, straight-ahead wife swapping. The club’s chaplain, the rumor held, was right in the middle of that clique. It seemed a bit naughty, not much more, just a case of praise the Lord and pass your wife. Nobody’s business, really. Gacy had, after all, been named best Jaycee club chaplain in the state of Iowa.

In addition to the long hours in the restaurants and the never-ending Jaycee projects, Gacy also put in time on the Merchant Patrol, a sort of auxiliary police force manned by ordinary citizens, designed to supplement police protection of various businesses. The patrol would look for suspicious activities around closed businesses, check doors, and provide a deterrent presence. Gacy, his friends noted, liked playing the cop. He carried a gun on patrol and explained that he needed protection because of carrying sums of money from the restaurants to the bank. He also had a flashing red light that could be placed on the hood of the car.

“We went to the Jaycee convention in Phoenix,” John remembers, “and one time we were late getting from the motel to the convention center: tied up in traffic, all the lanes full, creeping along at about twenty miles an hour. Charley Hill, Jaycee president at the time, says, ‘Goddamn it, I got business, I gotta be there!’ So I take and reach under the seat for the red light we used on the Merchant Patrol, just lean out the window and put the light on the hood. Then I pulled out around all the traffic, crossed the double yellow line, and took off like a bat. Lights flashing, the whole works. Went right through every intersection.

“We got to the convention center about two minutes early. As we pulled up, the governor was walking in. So we walked in right behind the goddamn governor, and everyone treats us like we’re with him, part of the party.” And people thought the light was part of some psychological cop thing he had.

John made no secret of the fact he was fascinated by police and police work. His cheap-ass father-in-law—who was becoming just like the Old Man: Freddy shoveling a shitpile of constant disapproval and suspicion every day—couldn’t
understand it. John would take free buckets of chicken to the cops, and Asshole would complain about the expense. He couldn’t see that these gifts were good public relations and that it paid to have the cops on your side.

There were other reasons, “nice little secrets” John wasn’t anxious to share with Freddy. The prostitution, for instance: John was pals with the fellow who ran the operation. In that business you want to buddy up to the right cop, provide the right girl, and keep your mouth shut. It’s like having a “get out of jail free” card in your wallet.

A thing like that, a guy gets a little drunk at some bar, he doesn’t have to worry about driving home so much. Someone shows a few dirty films in his home or over at Clayton House, there aren’t going to be any raids coming down. Have a stag party with a stripper/prostitute, how do you suppose a cop who screwed that same girl is going to bust you? When he knows that you know?