Buried Dreams Read online

  With all the odd pressure—the lack of acceptance, the fear of his father, the strange compulsions—John Gacy thought for a time about becoming a priest. Make a life for himself helping others.

  The priesthood, John imagined, would provide the kind of clean, caring life that would fill him with clean, caring thoughts, that would keep him holy, eliminate the bad daydreams, and finally earn him a measure of respect: how could anyone have certain suspicions about a priest? Priests exert a sort of unassailable moral authority—you could think of them as God’s cops—that puts them above suspicion.

  John began thinking this way while he was “rolling” with St. John Berchmans’ parish Holy Name Society bowling team. John wasn’t a half-bad bowler, and that was good because at least he could get some small amount of respect—some reduction of suspicion—from such important team members as Ray Kasper and his father. His mother bowled with them, but John knew he had her trust, even if she was “naïve.”

  Bowling led to work within the parish organization and some involvement in its politics. John became a member of the Holy Name Society. Immediately, at eighteen, he could see the parish wasn’t properly serving people in his age group. Few of the young men he knew were active in the Church. John felt older teenagers were under so much outside pressure—sex, new jobs, social responsibilities—that they just fell away from the Church. It was like a syndrome, and it lasted about four years. Between the age of eighteen, when people graduated from high school, until the time they married, at about age twenty-two, there was little in the Church for them to do.

  St. John Berchmans’ had a problem, and John Wayne Gacy had a solution. He organized a young adults club, the Chi Ro Club, that would stop the drift away from the Church he had seen in eighteen- through twenty-two-year-olds. One of his coorganizers—John remembers to this day—was an alderman’s daughter. It was an important concept and an important club supported by important people.

  When the young adults club held their formal winter dance, the “Snowtillion,” John organized the event in military style. It was all white crepe paper, demure romance, and no goddamn sloppy pageantry, not with John in charge.

  The club was a minor success, a step toward solving one of the Catholic Church’s perennial problems. Still, it was something conceptual, and even as an eighteen-year-old, John understood that success and improvement are seen in practical things, pragmatic improvements a guy could point to with pride. He helped build booths for the carnival, helped with the organization of that event, and he was also on the parish building committee. When the church needed repainting, John figured they could save the cost of professional painters if they did it themselves. All they needed was a man with the knowledge of a professional painter to head the job. And young John had learned well from his father about painting. John volunteered to “work his ass off’ and get the church painted properly, perfectly. The church looked great when John and his crew finished with it.

  He spent so much time at the church, so much energy doing good works, that it could sometimes be embarrassing. You’d go into the confessional, and it would already be a little weird, because how many eighteen-year-old males do you see there, anyway? Most guys saved up their sins and came in to make their yearly Easter duty—the one confession a year—and that was it. But John confessed regularly: he liked the clean feeling, the knowledge that he was, at that moment, beloved of God. It was a warm sensation that started in your chest and made you feel good from the inside out.

  Each time John went to confession, the other people scattered sparsely about the church were very devout older women. They always wore wraps around their necks: some ratty animal with little beady eyes biting its own tail.

  John would wait his turn and then go into the dark confessional with its odor of leather and wood, only the opaque screen between him and eternal salvation. “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.” John confessed to the few little lies he might have told that week—a series of the most venial sins—and the priest would give him about three Hail Marys as a penance. But sometimes, just as he was ready to leave, the priest, who knew him like a son and recognized his voice, would say, “Uh, John, as long as I got you here, you know anything about weather stripping? I only ask because the wind just whips through the sacristy door in the morning.”

  And John’d end up talking about weather stripping in the confessional. Spend twenty minutes discussing the cost of materials, the amount of labor and time necessary to do the job, the best day of the week to do it. By the time he got out of the box, some of those older women would give him a strange look and glance at their watches. John imagined they were thinking, Half an hour with Father, oh, my, what could he possibly have done? What a dirty, dirty sinner that boy must be.

  It pleased John to start the Hail Marys on the way back to the pew, kneel for about fifteen seconds, and then be gone, lickety-split, just like that: a man of mystery as far as sin was concerned, and a wonder to the devout elderly of St. John Berchmans’.

  Sunday nights, John usually was at the rectory, playing cards with the parish priests. And both of them—perfect Chicago Irish priests—would talk to the teenager about a possible vocation. “John,” one or the other of them would argue, “you’re around the church six, seven days a week as it is. Maybe God is speaking to you in a very special way.” John’d play a card and really consider it. Doing things for people made him happy, helping poor people made him feel warm inside. The respect sanctity brought scoured a soul like steel wool cleans a soiled pot.

  There wouldn’t be any problem with the chastity thing: “Oh, sure,” John explained later, “I was dating broads and getting laid, but there wasn’t anything serious. And why would you wanna get married? Why take on the burden of having some stupid broad around you day and night?” Being a priest was a natural, John felt, because he was different from the other boys. “I was sickly, and I certainly wasn’t no physically built individual, and I didn’t have no sex drive, so being a priest seemed perfect, a natural thing to do for a kid like me.”

  He would wear the robes with dignity; he would be compassionate and help the poor and the homeless and the bereaved. People could come to him for advice, and one thing he’d know is that every problem, everything in life, has two sides. Nothing is just one way. As a priest, Father Gacy would use that knowledge to help others. When people came to see him, he would be understanding and liberal, very different from the way his father was.

  He’d be a good priest.

  “You’re going to be queer just like your friend Barry,” the Old Man said.

  A bookish boy who collected antiques, Barry was one of John’s few close friends. Barry was interested in Illinois history and landscaping. He and John talked about flowers, shit like that. Neither of them liked to repair cars, neither liked sports or, especially, fishing. “The kid’s a fairy,” the Old Man said.

  John never remembered the Old Man telling him he was going to turn out “queer,” but his sister Karen recalled it clearly. “Dad had an attitude about John and was hard on him because of it. He thought John was a mama’s boy just because Ma was a buffer between the Old Man and John. Just because John could talk to Ma.”

  “My dad,” John said, “I don’t think he ever mentioned homosexuals in the house. Never said anything about them. Just like, there was this lesbian couple, they lived down the block, and I remember he made fun of them. They sold brushes and one came to the door dressed like a man. Dad called her a he-she. But he never came right out and called them homosexuals. You just knew they were bad people.” So bad, in fact, the subject wasn’t fit to discuss. “Nothing had to be said.” If you weren’t dumb and stupid, you just knew.

  There was some spectacular murder case with homosexual overtones in Chicago at about that time, and the Old Man kept harping on how it happened early in the morning. “It’s what comes of being out after midnight,” he said. Anytime you were out after midnight, the Old Man knew you were up to no good. That’s when they all came out,
like some dark flower that bloomed only at night: the fairies and the he-shes, perverts up to no good, killers. You got what you deserved after midnight.

  Strange, then, that it should be late at night, after midnight, when troubling thoughts invaded John’s mind. In the dark, when it was lonely and quiet in his room, or in the hospital, John would wonder how it would be to hug one of his friends, hold him tight, just for a moment. No sex thing. It was a kind of compassion, all tangled up with a desire to help people, like being a priest, except that you could get an erection thinking that way, and John didn’t like to talk about it. Nearly twenty-five years later, the idea still bothered him.

  Bad dreams, and who could you go to? Where could you talk about the thing that bothered you the most? Whine to your buddies and let it get around that you’re about half queer? Wouldn’t the Old Man love that. Ask the priest? Sure, right in the middle of confession when Father so-and-so’s getting a bid on weather stripping the sacristy. “We could do it for less than eighty-five dollars, and what does it mean when you want to hug your best friend and he’s a boy?” No, those thoughts were little secrets, something best kept to John Gacy and no one else.

  Except the Old Man knew!

  He never said anything, but he had a way of looking at you like he could see right through you. Come home from a date, the Old Man’s still up. Sit down and tell him how you scored with some broad. No smile, no wink. The Old Man just looked at you. Because he knew you didn’t score at all. So you’d make up some details talking to your father man to man, and he’d just stare, no emotion, cold as ice.

  John figured that sexually he was a late bloomer because he was all of eighteen before he really did “score with some broad.”

  Just like there was this one time he was parked with a broad: they were necking in John’s car, really getting somewhere, and John got her blouse off, then her skirt, and she was naked right there in the car, and it was all going to happen.

  The next thing John knew, she was all dressed again, and his head ached because he’d passed out, just slumped over on the seat, unconscious for he didn’t know how long, with this naked broad probably getting all hysterical next to him.

  And the Old Man thought he was lying for some reason. “You don’t just pass out,” he said. “You hadda be doing something, wrestling, horsing around.”

  John told him exactly what he was doing, because they were arguing again, hollering at one another. The Old Man screamed that John wasn’t really sick, that he “faked” passing out, that he “faked” heart problems so that he could skip school, draw attention to himself, avoid situations that scared him. But John had learned to argue from a master, and he turned the whole thing around on his father. “If I pass out to get attention, why would I pass out when something good is going on?” Reversing the Old Man right there. “Why would I fake passing out when I’m just about to score with this broad? Go on, answer that.”

  The Old Man just stared at him, disappointed, the bleary, drinker’s eyes icy with unvoiced suspicions.

  Years later, after John was charged with the murder of thirty-three boys and young men, Marion Gacy told police that her husband absolutely despised homosexuals. If John Stanley Gacy thought his son was a homosexual, Ma said, “I think he would have killed him.”

  It was his fourth high school in as many years, another vocational school, where he had to work with machines. The administration was worried about John’s health. What if he passed out, fell into the teeth of some grinding machine? Ma couldn’t get him into any other high school, and the military took one look at his medical records and classified him 4F.

  John was nineteen, unable to finish high school, and all he had was his car. The car and Civil Defense work with the flashing blue light.

  It wasn’t even his car. The year before, the Old Man had bought it for him. John had enough money of his own to buy a used vehicle, but the Old Man wouldn’t hear of it. “Why buy someone else’s problems? Get a new car, you know it’ll be right.”

  So the car was in his Old Man’s name. John was paying him off monthly. This was, John came to realize, pretty dumb and stupid, because the Old Man had the final say about how “his” car was to be used. John Stanley would just take away the keys, refuse to let John drive anywhere until the boy did as he was told. The Old Man had outsmarted John, with money.

  John Stanley was a good provider, but he was careful with the money he made. The kids never had more than one pair of shoes. “You can only wear one pair at a time,” John Stanley said. “Why would you need two pairs?”

  It made hard sense, but as John got older, he saw how the Old Man used money as a club. His mother hadn’t left the Opal Street house when the Old Man busted her in the face because she couldn’t support herself and the three kids.

  In the late 1940s, the Old Man gave Ma thirty dollars a week for household expenses. She was supposed to buy food and clothes for the kids out of that. Thirty dollars might have been enough then, but in the late 1950s, the weekly allowance wouldn’t cover both food and clothes. The Old Man saw no reason to shell out any more. They could get by on thirty dollars, just as they always had. John remembered Ma buying good, clean clothes at the thrift shops. She was incredible at making the money last, and the Gacy family was never in debt. Finally, Ma had to take a job herself to make ends meet.

  Of course, there were no luxuries, no meals out, none of that. Ma said restaurants were “a foolish waste. You can eat for a week on what you spend in one night at a restaurant.” Half the fights at the dinner table, if they weren’t about being sick, were about money. Having your own money meant you didn’t have to take so much shit off the Old Man. “Consequently,” John said, “my sisters and I are real skinflints to this day.”

  John bought himself an extra set of keys after some argument and drove the car even though the Old Man had denied it to him. He thought he had outsmarted the Old Man, but the next time, John Stanley just went under the hood and pulled the distributor cap, outsmarting John, who was so dumb and stupid he didn’t even know you could go down to the auto parts store and buy a new one.

  John was twenty then, and the Old Man kept the distributor cap for three days. It made John sick, physically sick, affecting his heart in such a way that he had to stay home from work, too ill to take a bus. That day, the day the Old Man put the distributor cap back, Ma called John from her job. She felt nauseous and wanted to know if John was well enough to drive down and pick her up. John could have been dying, he would have gone to get Ma. When they arrived at the house on Marmora, John said, “Ma, I better get some air in the tires.”

  Marion Gacy waited for her son, but “he never came back. He was gone for three months. I had them looking for his car and the police called me at work and nobody knew where he was until I got a medical bill from the White Cross Insurance Company.”

  The bill was from Las Vegas, Nevada. Marion Gacy called the hospital, to find her son was paying off the balance of his medical bill by working at the Palm Mortuary. He had started with the mortuary’s ambulance service, but when they found that he wasn’t yet twenty-one—not yet eligible for that sort of work in Clark County—he was transferred to the mortuary proper, where he worked as an attendant. John told Marion Gacy that he was living in the mortuary, sleeping on a cot behind the embalming room.

  Years later, George Wycoski, manager of the Palm Mortuary, told police that John Gacy helped unload the ambulances but that he couldn’t have had much contact with the bodies.

  “I always say I ran away from home,” John said, “but I was twenty at the time, old enough to be out on my own.” Still, it seemed like running away, it sure felt like running away, and the reason it did, John theorized, was that he still owed the Old Man money on the car. He had outsmarted John Stanley with distance.

  Working with the ambulance service, speeding through traffic with the lights flashing and the siren blaring, had almost been fun. And it was enlightening. You could learn shit. Like people lose control
of their sphincters, sometimes even their bowels, when they die. Some poor guy has a heart attack in his room at some hotel on the Strip, you walk in to an awful smell.

  When John had to move over to the mortuary because of his age, it was like a demotion. Not as much excitement, no sirens, no flashing lights. In the mortuary there aren’t a whole bunch of people gathering around all the time and you never get to say, “Stand back, please. Will you please stand back.”

  Mortuary attendant: it’s a transient’s job, a job for somebody dumb and stupid, somebody who’d never amount to anything. Working there was proof that he hadn’t outsmarted the Old Man at all.

  Just like the time he passed out in the car with that naked broad. Even while he was working on the buttons of her blouse, John had a feeling that he was doing something that was expected of him. Like it was a duty to go ahead and bang this broad. And all the time he was getting her blouse off and unsnapping her bra, he was thinking about how he had to be gentle and that what he was about to do was beautiful, one of God’s miracles.

  Because it was Ma who taught him about sex. The Old Man never said jackshit about it. For all John knew, John Stanley didn’t even have a dick. Except that he had three kids, so he must have gotten it on once in a while. Maybe the Old Man jagged off in the basement. Maybe he had some dirty magazines locked up down there or something.

  Ma was in charge of John’s sex education. She was not ashamed to tell her son the things he needed to know, and the way she described the act, it was almost like a sacrament of the Church. Ma said the act took two people, in communion, in one effort. Sex is not just for the enjoyment of one individual; it was not for quick animal gratification. The sexual act is a way to communicate feelings and emotions, to express love. The beauty in it is in the sharing, in mutual satisfaction. If you could satisfy your partner, then you would satisfy yourself. You had to satisfy your partner first.