Buried Dreams Read online

  Just like the summer John was eleven when the Old Man finally took him fishing. Fishing was one of the important things in life to the Old Man.

  He liked fishing so much, it was a sort of affectionate joke around the house on Marmora. Ma even wrote a joke poem about it. It went something like this:

  F is for the fish he always catches,

  A is for the angling that he does,

  T is for the tales he tells about them,

  H is for how he hopes for big ones,

  E is for . . . some shit, John forgot,

  R is for the rowing out to get there,

  Put them all together they spell father,

  And something something ratta tat tat.

  No, wait, E is for his eyes with fishlight shining. Eyes with fishlight shining. John Stanley kept his rods and reels, his tackle box, in the basement under lock and key. Like somebody might want to steal them.

  Two weeks a year, on his vacation, the Old Man could go up to Wisconsin to fish. And in 1953, they went fishing together, man and boy. In the Catholic church that John attended, they had a sacrament called confirmation where you became a “soldier of Christ.” It was like officially becoming a man, and you were confirmed at about the age of eleven or twelve. In the Gacy family, being confirmed, becoming a man, meant that the Old Man asked you to go fishing with him.

  The women went on their own separate vacation: they took the train down to Springfield to visit John’s aunt and uncle. The menfolk went fishing.

  Except that there was a lot of rain that year, heavy midwestern squalls rolling across the lake; rivers and streams dark with runoff making the water muddy; the rain like something out of the Bible, the water pounding down in sheets, driving the fish deep, where they lay indifferent to bait or spoon. The fish waiting out a two-week spate of bad weather that just happened to coincide with the Old Man’s yearly vacation.

  “So,” John recalled, “he drank. And the more he drank, the more he figured the rain was my fault. And then, when it was nice, we still didn’t catch fish, and that was my fault. What the hell, an eleven-year-old kid, he doesn’t have the same attention span. If I started to fidget, I was making waves, scaring the fish. And you couldn’t talk. You just had to sit there. And everything was your fault.”

  The next year, when John was twelve, the Old Man went fishing alone. John went to Springfield with his mother and sisters. He wasn’t man enough to fish. He would never be man enough to fish with his father.

  “Consequently,” John recalled, “one thing I always hated, I always hated fishing.”

  Looking back, John could see that Ma’s encouragement, her uncritical acceptance—her mother’s love for an only son—was often expressed in clichés. A young boy doesn’t know these sayings are supposed to be corny. He’s never heard them before, and they settle in his mind and inspire him. “No matter how hard it seems,” Ma said, “you just gotta keep working at it.”

  For Ma, things were always darkest just before the dawn. She knew that God worked in mysterious ways but that he helps those who help themselves. Love conquers all. Winners never quit, quitters never win.

  While the Old Man was harsh and smart and violent, Ma was fair and accepting but maybe just a little too trusting. Naïve. She thought everybody was basically good; the Old Man figured people would fuck you any way they could. You had to stay one step ahead of them, you had to outsmart them. Trust was weakness.

  After the panties incident, there seemed to be no pleasing the Old Man. Go out to the quarry with a wagon, bring back over nine hundred pounds of limestone, make a walkway to the house on Marmora, and the Old Man said it wasn’t straight. The Old Man, who spent an hour with a tape measure before he’d hang a picture. “I was never good enough for him,” John recalled. “Never accepted.”

  “You tried,” Ma said, “that’s the important thing.”

  He was eight when John learned from Ma that he moved his bowels when he was born and almost died. His health problems started at birth. He had never been a strong child, and it wasn’t his fault. Ma said there was a physical explanation for it, just as there was a physical reason for the Old Man’s rages. John had been born with an enlarged bottleneck heart, a serious condition. Baseball, football, any kind of sport at all could kill him just as surely as an argument could pop the Old Man’s tumor.

  “So I was a disappointment to my dad,” John said, “because I was weak and he was strong. He hated the weak person. Even in emotions. We’d go to funerals for someone in the family, and he’d never get tears in his eyes. At a party, he’d never laugh. A strong, somber individual. Emotion was a weakness. Physical illness, even when it couldn’t be helped, was a weakness. I remember once he was so sick he couldn’t get out of bed, and Ma finally called a doctor. The doctor said, ‘How long have you been like this?’

  “My dad said, ‘Ten days.’

  “The doctor said, ‘Why didn’t you wait another day and just call the undertaker?’ And it turned out my dad had pneumonia.”

  By contrast, John was sick as long as he could remember. A heart problem from birth; then, at the age of ten, something seriously wrong with the brain. He began passing out for no reason at all.

  The Old Man tried to connect it to school. Early on, John attended St. Francis Borgia Grade School, and he feels he truly became a Catholic there, at the age of eight. When the family moved to Marmora Street, John transferred to the public school. That school was different, the teachers assholes, and John began getting failing grades. He couldn’t bring himself to attend classes: he’d walk his sister Karen home for the lunch he was supposed to make while Ma and the Old Man were at work.

  Karen and John would take a vote, very democratic, and decide that the afternoon would be better spent eating puddings and Twinkies that they bought on their lunch money.

  John’s parents were called in for conferences, and Ma thought it might be a health problem. The boy sometimes just fell over, passed out for ten minutes at a time. They took him to the hospital a dozen times, and no one could ever tell them just exactly what the physical problem was. Maybe psychomotor epilepsy. Recurrent syncope. Nothing definite, though, no way to explain the symptoms.

  The Old Man knew, though: the kid was skipping school when he was healthy, so he was probably pretending to pass out so he wouldn’t have to attend classes. Drawing sympathy to himself. Faking.

  “I’d pass out for ten minutes at a time when it started,” John remembered, “then later I’d be out for, oh, half an hour. Even longer. Sometimes they’d find me and no one would know how long I’d been out.” John figured that he spent over a year, all told, in the hospital between the ages of fourteen and eighteen.

  “My dad,” John said, “thought it was an attention-getter.”

  If it was an attention-getter, why would you pass out when no one’s there? Richard Dalke, a boyhood friend of John’s, remembers looking for him at school one day. Both boys were fourteen. “I went into the office,” Dalke said, “and I asked one of the secretaries, ‘Where’s John?’ She said, ‘He’s in the next office.’ And I went in there and I didn’t see him. I came back into the office and she said, ‘He just went in there five minutes ago.’ So I went back into the office and there was this big desk and he was on the other side, passed out on the floor.”

  The fire department was called, and John was revived by paramedics, who took him to the hospital. The Old Man stood in the hospital, telling John to his face that he was faking.

  John’s friends—Barry and Ken and John and Richard—never had any doubts about John’s physical problems. “I always thought he was sick,” Richard Dalke recalls. “He had heart problems, and more or less we were around to protect him in case anybody wanted a conflict with him.”

  There was no protecting John from the Old Man, though. When the boys were fifteen and sixteen, Dalke saw John Stanley Gacy swing at his son on several occasions. “I can remember once being at the house when his dad came up from the basement, started swing
ing and yelling at him, and his mother stepped in, tried to protect him. John would never strike his father. He always just put up his hands and tried to protect himself.”

  Dalke recalled that there was no provocation at all. When it happened, he said, “We were usually sitting around talking or just coming into the house.”

  It was like a contest of wills between John and his father. Was the boy really sick, or was he looking for sympathy? In 1957, at the age of fifteen, John had his tonsils out. You couldn’t argue with that one. But when he complained of a severe stomach ache and the doctors could find nothing wrong, the Old Man thought he’d scored a point for his side. Except that John’s appendix was placed oddly, back behind the spleen or something. The doctors made a mistake, and when John was in so much pain that Ma finally took him back to the hospital, the appendix had burst and the boy very nearly died. Because the Old Man thought he was faking.

  That was one John won.

  A year later, in August, the Old Man scored big.

  John’s sister Karen thinks it started when “he and dad had an argument. It was something over the car. John walked out. Dad held back the car on him. It was like a punishment. If you don’t do things my way, I’ll take the keys.”

  Later that night, John was playing cards with Richard Dalke and Ken Dunkle in Bill Lambert’s basement. The boys had each drunk a beer or two. Richard Dalke remembers that John passed out, fell on the floor. “We called the fire department again and they came to take care of him. We thought he was having a severe heart attack, and somebody called one of the priests from the nearby church.”

  Marion Gacy was notified, and she arrived just as the priest was giving her son the last rites. “I wanted to get him to the hospital,” Marion Gacy recalled, “so I took an ambulance over to Northwest Hospital.” John was there for three weeks until the Old Man came to sign him out.

  Back at home, John passed out again. “I found him laying on the floor, in the bedroom,” Marion Gacy said, “and when the doctor came he was going to give him a shot to bring him to. He said that John had like an epileptic fit. And John began fighting and kicked him. Fighting and kicking just like a madman. My husband came in and held him down, and the doctor gave John a shot. Then they put him—we had to get him to a hospital and put him in a straitjacket.”

  At Norwegian American Hospital, extensive tests were administered. The Old Man would visit once in a while, just sit in the bedside chair, silent, suspicious. After a month in the hospital, a doctor took Marion Gacy aside and suggested that her son be sent to Cook County Hospital for psychiatric evaluation.

  The Old Man loved that. It was a kind of proof to him that John was never sick at all, that it was all in his head. And John begged his mother, “Don’t send me to the psychiatrist ward, I’ll be good.” Like you can promise not to pass out.

  Those were a few of the bigger battles in what amounted to a six-year war. As John got older, the issues at stake expanded. Years later, John would say that the Old Man had a way of looking at him, a cold, dark glare beyond disappointment or even disgust, a way of staring at his son as if the boy was beneath contempt. As if he could see into John’s soul and there were crawling, slimy things in there; as if he knew something about his son that John himself didn’t know.

  John had another seizure, a kind of epileptic fit in a bowling alley called the Fireside Lanes. He kicked one of his friends in the neck and broke the boy’s glasses. The paramedics had to strap John down to a stretcher.

  But it was a physical problem, not his fault.

  The Old Man continued to drink, and the tumor Ma said was there throbbed inside his skull, pressed into his brain, pushed him to violence. “I thought one time he was going to kill me,” John remembered years later. “He was swinging on my mother and I yelled something at him. He told me to mind my own business or he’d take care of me, too. I hollered right back and he came for me, swung on me right there. But he was drunk and he hit the refrigerator. He turned and came at me again. I pinned his arms to his sides and pressed him up against the wall. I couldn’t hit him. I just couldn’t hit him. But if I let him go, he’d swing on me again. So we struggled like that. And I must have held him with his arms pinned for ten minutes.”

  Father and son stood face to face in a sort of rough embrace. John said, “I can still picture that: my dad’s face looking right at me. The glare in his eyes. Through his eyes I thought he was going to kill me. And I was crying and upset . . . you know, thinking, he can’t kill you, he loves you. It was such a mixed-up feeling. . . .”

  John remembers the Old Man’s breath coming ragged in his throat, recalls smelling the alcohol there. He was looking into those spinning eyes and seeing a rage like murder, seeing the Old Man’s special knowledge burning like fire. John was sobbing, pressing his father’s back into the wall, hugging him in a confusion of love and murder.

  Something else. John felt it in his groin. Just a faint stirring down there.

  * * *

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  CHAPTER 4

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  * * *

  FIVE FEET EIGHT AND already bloating up toward two hundred pounds. An eighteen-year-old should be hard, muscular. He shouldn’t have a body like a sack of flour. And just look in the mirror: a face like Mr. Potato Head, that toy for kids, a bunch of goddamn plastic mouths and eyes and shit that you could stick into a lumpy old spud and make it just as fucking ugly and funny-looking as John Wayne Gacy, Jr., himself.

  No wonder he didn’t care that much for dating; no wonder he didn’t “have much of a sex drive.”

  Instead, he worked. John was a worker as long as he could remember. He had a paper route, some lawn-mowing jobs; then, at fourteen, he nailed down his first real job: delivering groceries for the local IGA store. He also helped Ma around the house, moving furniture, painting rooms.

  And there was the stuff he did free, volunteer stuff, like yardwork for an elderly neighbor. Once, when John was twelve, a big storm knocked down some power lines over a neighbor’s garage. John took it on himself to warn the woman who lived there that stepping in a puddle out behind the house could kill her. “I didn’t know that,” this neighbor said years later. “I might have gone out there to look. He might have saved my life. And John stood by the garage all day, waving traffic away, making sure no one got hurt.”

  When John transferred from the public grammar school—where he was skipping classes and failing—to the vocational school, he got so far out ahead of his class in science that the teacher said he didn’t need to attend that class; he could work in the office. John ran errands for the teachers—"call me a teacher’s pet, I enjoyed it, I got along with all the administrators"—and worked as an assistant to the truant officer. It was a big switch from being a truant to becoming a truant officer. “I wasn’t any snitch,” John said. “I just had to call parents and see if kids were really sick at home.”

  In high school, John was a Civil Defense captain. A boyhood friend remembers, “He pretty much organized the whole thing. Like for fire drills, where each fire marshal had to stand to make sure everyone got out.” Civil Defense captains got a portable flashing blue light they could put on the dashboard of their cars to use on official business.

  Years later, Ray Kasper, who eventually married John’s elder sister, JoAnne, said that Gacy, as a teenager, had “a hang-up” about uniforms. In later years, John always referred to Ray as “my asshole brother-in-law.” John thought Ray “could find something wrong with anything I ever did.” Still, even John’s sisters, Karen and JoAnne, said he got a little excessive, playing cop, speeding off to any fire or accident with blue light flashing.

  At eighteen, John began to get involved in Chicago politics. He worked as an assistant precinct captain on behalf of the Democratic candidate for alderman in the Forty-fifth Ward. “My dad,” John recalled, “said I was a fool. He said, ‘all those politicians are crooks and phonies.’ But, son-of-a-bitch, I worked my ass off on that campaign. Because a politician does
n’t always have to be a phony; sometimes a politician can help the little people; sometimes he can show compassion and do good.”

  When John looked back on it, he could see some other reasons why he got into politics. “Maybe it was a way to antagonize my dad. In part. And maybe it was a way to get acceptance. I was always looking for acceptance because my dad made me feel that I was never good enough.”

  John sought acceptance in volunteer work, in politics, in just helping people because it made him feel good. The Old Man thought John was “stupid,” “softhearted,” “an asshole.” Why would you go out of your way to do something for someone else when you know that person will turn around and fuck over you the first chance he gets? Because it’s dog eat dog, and everyone’s looking to outsmart the other guy. Only an “asshole” is gullible enough to do something for nothing.

  Even at his best, even when John was giving of himself, giving out of the fullness of his heart, the Old Man could find a way to make him feel “dumb and stupid.”

  Maybe if he was just a little better-looking. John knew he was “an ugly duckling.” And there were strange thoughts, little compulsions that shamed him. He was “different,” “the odd man out.” The things he saw in lazy daydreams, all those unwanted desires, they were “feelings.” Having feelings made him “weak.” And the Old Man: nothing was ever said, but John felt the Old Man knew. He had that way of looking at you.

  “Consequently,” John remembered, “from about the age of sixteen, I was thinking of death.” Not suicide. John was a devout Catholic, and suicide was a mortal sin. No, death, like the shameful daydreams, should arrive unbidden, a faceless figure that emerged out of the dark, a shadow blacker than the night itself. Death had to come from outside of himself, like a favor from God Himself. Death was the Lord’s ultimate blessing.