Buried Dreams

by Tim Cahill

  The party began to break up at about 12:30 A.M. John’s mother wouldn’t get in the car with him. They argued briefly, but Ma just wouldn’t drive with anyone who had been drinking. That was one of her rules; she told John that you never could say anything to a drinker. He’d just go and get belligerent and start to holler and that made driving with him doubly dangerous. Ma decided to stay with Aunt Ethel.

  That was just another one of those details you could check out. John had no special plans that night. He never thought, This is the night I’ll go out and kill the first one. He wanted to take his mother home. He argued about it in front of Aunt Ethel. If his mother had just driven home with him that night, the Greyhound bus boy might never have died. And maybe, if there hadn’t been a first one, then there might never have been a second, or a third, or a thirty-third. John would never want anyone to think—God forbid—that his mother was to blame for a half-dozen years of killing. It was just one of those things you had to think about, another proof that there was never any premeditation. You could check it out.

  John stepped out into the new year and walked to his car. The air was cold, bracing, and the Scotch had done its work on him. He wasn’t tired. He wasn’t thinking about the death of his aunt. He felt inexplicably charged up and thought he’d go out “looking around.”

  John started driving, and the car turned toward the downtown area. Maybe he’d just go down to the Civic Center and look at the ice sculptures. Of course, he knew that the Greyhound bus depot was very close to the Civic Center; and he knew from Manny that you could go down there to pick up “chicken hawks.” John never quite got that terminology straight: it was the older men, cruising like sharks in the big cars, who were called chicken hawks. They picked up young men and boys at the bus station. The boys were chicken.

  These definitions are not exclusive to the gay community. Cops use them. Straight people used to refer to a defunct burger joint near Clark and Broadway as “chicken delight.” The place was a hangout for young hustlers; and blatant deals were struck with older men, there under the glare of fluorescent lights and amid the smell of frying burgers.

  But John never quite got the terms right. He had seen his share of gay pornographic movies, kept gay pornographic magazines in his house; he had picked up hundreds of men and boys—by his own admission—over the years, and yet, even with an IQ tested in the upper 10 percent of the population, he called the boys he picked up “chicken hawks.”

  What could the doctors do with that one? You could suppose that he was naïve, that he hated the dark, night-stalking part of his life so much that he refused to think seriously about it or apply the proper definitions to himself. You could assume that he had heard the terms and thoughtlessly applied them to his own case. It was, after all, John Gacy who was the innocent, the chicken. The young hustlers were bent on outsmarting him, on cheating him out of his money, on blackmailing him. They were the chicken hawks.

  At one or two o’clock on a cold January morning, after a long, lonely holiday weekend, what excuse did young men have for hanging around the bus station so late on such a frigid night? They weren’t fooling anyone. Everyone knew that you could pick up the young ones there, the unsophisticated boys away from home for the first time. There were also some slightly older guys, hustlers who “got into it for money.”

  John knew a little bit about how the sculptures were made. It was “really an art.” You have to hit the ice just right with the chisel, or the whole cake will break or shatter. It was something a professional chef could do and something John wanted to learn, so he went down to the Civic Center, near the station, to study the technique of ice sculpture at 1:30 A.M.

  “I went down to look at the ice sculptures,” John said. “But then, after I seen it, I got back in my car.” There were people walking around, and across from the Civic Center he could see the Greyhound bus depot. “So I drove around the block and pulled up in front of there. That’s when I seen the kid.”

  Picking up the kid was a fluke. This first one was an accident.

  Up to this point, you could verify every detail of John’s narrative. Carol’s story would be substantially the same as John’s. Records would show the exact time of Aunt Pearl’s death. Ma would remember that she stayed with Aunt Ethel because John had been drinking. A quick call downtown would confirm it all: The ice sculpture exhibit was still standing outside the Civic Center in the early-morning hours of January 2, 1972. Everything John said was the truth. It all checks out.

  The problem of verification comes after John picked up the Greyhound bus boy, because from that point on there are no witnesses and John must be taken at his word. The only other person who might have testified as to what happened that night is dead. John talked about the events leading up to the murder in dozens of interviews and, like the events leading up to the pickup, the story was always essentially the same. John had told the truth up to this point, had gone out of his way to supply a wealth of nonessential details, and he seemed to feel that if that part of the story checked out and was consistent, then the rest of the story should be believable as well. And the way he told it, the chronology of that first murder was at the very least consistent, even if it couldn’t be verified. Why should he lie about something that only lived in his memory like a gauzy dream of death? He had nothing to hide, and he wanted to know. He really wanted to know.

  John was frank about his thoughts at the time. He admitted things he never would have talked about had he not been arrested. Working with the psychiatrists, he was discovering things as he went along, just as they were.

  John pulled up, rolled down the window, and as nearly as he could remember, said something like, “Hi. Whatta ya doing?”

  The Greyhound bus boy, as John remembered him, was just about right: he wasn’t tall, but he was well built, and young, maybe eighteen or nineteen, with “light or blond hair.” He was wearing a plaid shirt and a pair of Levi’s. There was a big buckle on his belt. John remembered the big buckle. The buckle stuck in his mind.

  The kid said, “I ain’t doing nothing. I got twelve hours to kill.” He told John he had just come in from somewhere like West Virginia and was going somewhere else—or maybe he was going to West Virginia—and his bus wasn’t due until noon or a little later. John couldn’t remember where the hell the kid was going: he was just passing through, a naïve kid with no family or relatives in Chicago.

  “You wanna drive around?” John asked him. “You wanna see the sights?”

  They drove north, up toward the Old Town/New Town area, and John acted as tour director and teacher. “This here is the gay part of town,” John told the kid. He mentioned that there were hustlers around, guys who got into it for money. John remembered that they talked about sex and he asked, “You ever get into it with a guy?” He couldn’t remember what the kid said, whether he had or he hadn’t, but they talked about it and both of them sort of concluded that there was probably nothing wrong with it. John thought he remembered that the kid might have been curious about it, but had never had the opportunity. Something like that.

  Anyway, the kid was getting hungry, and they ended up at the house on Summerdale, and John fixed him something to eat. A sandwich with some lunch meat. John had to cut the meat from a big slab. He worked in a restaurant and knew that you saved money buying in bulk. So he cut the meat for the sandwich with a big butcher knife.

  John left the knife in the kitchen and brought the sandwich out to his living room, where the kid was sitting right next to the bar. John mixed a couple of drinks. He might have had a beer, but the kid drank some 190-proof clear grain alcohol. John warned him about it, but the kid was bent on proving he was a man or something and threw down a couple of hefty slugs.

  Sometimes John remembered to tell about the grain alcohol, sometimes he forgot, but what came next usually was the same. The conversation veered around to sex again, and the two of them “got into oral sex, both ways.” Sometimes John said there was a discussion about who would go f
irst. After it was over, John felt tired and said he wanted to go to sleep. He told the kid he could sleep in the house. He would drive him to the station in time for his bus at noon.

  John lay down in his own bed and instantly fell asleep. Then—"it hadda be around four in the morning"—something startled him. Maybe it was a noise. Maybe he just felt a presence in the room, but John woke up. He looked to the doorway and saw the kid standing there, backlit from a light in the other room. It was almost like a dream, except the kid had a butcher knife in his hand—the same knife John had used to cut the meat—and he was walking slowly toward the bed.

  John tells the story without any real feeling: he might be describing something he once saw on television. The emotion he says he felt was confusion. “I didn’t know what the hell to do.” He found himself leaping from the bed, charging the kid, grabbing for the knife. It could have been a dream.

  They wrestled, and John thought, What? Why? The knife grazed John’s arm, cut him. He still has the scar. They might have talked, shouted at each other, John doesn’t remember. But if he said anything, it would have been, “What are you doing, for Chrissake? Why are you doing this?” And the blood was flowing from the wound on John’s arm and they wrestled, fighting for possession of the knife.

  It was, in fact, like something you might see on television, because they both lost their footing, and John didn’t really stab the kid. “He just fell on the floor and I think he fell on the knife. He stuck himself with the knife because I had hold of his hand and I had turned the knife inward, toward him, toward his stomach or his chest, and he fell on it and I fell on top of him.”

  The chronology of events is not entirely clear in John’s mind. He doesn’t recall all the details, and those he does are not perfectly clear. There is a heavy, somnolent aura to his narrative: the sense of a man describing a confusing but particularly vivid dream. For instance, it seemed to John that after they fell, the kid just lay there, but then he remembered that he might have gotten the knife while they were wrestling; he might have stabbed the kid “four or five times.” He might have stabbed him in the chest because—John seemed to dredge these details up from a great depth—he remembered the kid had no shirt. He was wearing the Levi’s and had his socks on, but he was naked from the waist up, and John thought he might have stabbed him in the chest. The kid never moved after he fell.

  None of this is very clear in John’s mind. He remembers he got up from the kid, with the knife in his hand. He went into the bathroom and washed the blood off the knife, then washed the blood off his own body. In the bedroom he could hear this sound—a “gurgulation"—that seemed to go on and on and wouldn’t stop. John walked through the house. He put the knife back in the kitchen where it belonged. He walked back to the bathroom, skirting the bedroom, then walked back to the kitchen, all the time listening to that never-ending gurgulation. When it finally stopped, he went back into the bedroom. The kid lay still as stone, silent as death. John assumed he was dead and tried to think what to do.

  The kid had attacked him, so he could call the police. But no, he couldn’t do that. The police would discover that he had a sex record in Iowa. Right away they’d say John attacked the kid. They’d framed him there in Iowa, so who would listen to him in Chicago? No, he couldn’t call the police. The cops and the courts would just twist everything all around, the way they did in Iowa. No one would ever believe him. He had defended his life in his own home and he was going to have to keep it a secret.

  These feelings and thoughts were hard for John to recall: he had successfully put them out of his mind for years. He knew he made no plans that day. It just didn’t seem entirely real. Except for the blood and the body. The first thing John did was clean up the blood. When he had finished with that, he dragged the kid to the bedroom closet, opened up the trapdoor to the crawl space, and “just pushed him over into it.” John couldn’t bring himself to go down there, so he put the board back into place. It was easier to think then.

  Ma would be home later that day. John walked around, checking for bloodstains he might have missed. Then it was time to pick up his mother at Aunt Ethel’s and go to the wake for Aunt Pearl. John was running from corpse to corpse in the aftermath of the Christmas holidays, but if he saw some dark or sinister significance there, he never mentioned it.

  At the wake, John’s sister Joanne saw the cut on his arm. “What happened to you?” she asked. They were standing in the funeral home, and John lied. If you do a lot of good things in your life and only do a few bad things, you have to lie. It’s best not to think too intently about it. It’s best not to think of it at all: just let the explanations flow naturally. John hated lies and liars.

  “I did it cutting carpet in the kitchen this morning,” he said. “I slipped with the knife.” Joanne, who had studied to be a nurse, was concerned. It was a deep cut, one that needed stitches, a cut that could lead to a serious infection. She advised John to have a doctor look after the arm right away.

  There was a lesson to be learned there in the funeral home, one that John may have absorbed quite unconsciously. No one can see murder on your face: there is no brand that sets you apart from the crowd, no outward sign that the dark flower is growing in your soul. People will see you as they’ve always seen you if you can only bury fear and confusion and remorse along with the evidence. There is no reason a justified killing should have any effect on the life of a just man. You can see the truth of that in people’s eyes as they speak to you, especially if you are hurt or ill. Sickness can be a measure of how much people care for you. It’s good to feel that sort of sympathy at certain times. At certain times you really need someone to care for you.

  John appreciated his sister’s sympathy, and he took her advice. He left the funeral home and drove to the emergency room of St. Elizabeth’s Hospital. After the doctor sewed up his arm, John went back to the funeral home, picked up Ma, and returned to their house, where the corpse of the Greyhound bus boy lay unburied in the crawl space.

  Ma didn’t often leave the house, and John knew that there would soon be an odor. It was the kind of problem a good, fast-working contractor could solve in a few hours. John took the board off the trapdoor in the closet, lowered himself into the crawl space, and, crouched over nearly double, with only two and a half feet of headroom, he dug a shallow grave and buried the remains of the young man the psychiatrists would eventually call the Greyhound bus boy.

  That’s why John started burying them in the crawl space: because of Ma. “It was just a nicely kept secret,” John explained later. “Nobody knew about it.”

  In July, seven months after the first kill, John and Carol were married. They made love in the room where the Greyhound bus boy had died, just above the shallow grave where he was buried.

  “If something works,” John Gacy often said about his construction business, “you don’t change it.”

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  CHAPTER 11

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  MA AND JOHN, ALWAYS BICKERING about the little things. Just like while John and Carol were talking about getting married, Ma thought she was the matchmaker for her son. “Carol,” Marion Gacy recalled, “lived with two children. I had John bring her home to Summerdale because they were on welfare and she was by herself and couldn’t pay the rent. And I said she might as well move in with us.”

  This was just after the Christmas holidays in 1971. A few months later, when Carol and John announced their engagement, Ma said she would move out because “no two families should live together.” She rented an apartment for herself in May. John and Carol were married on July 1, 1972.

  Nine days before the wedding, John Gacy was arrested on charges of aggravated battery and reckless conduct. Police said that Gacy had picked up a young man on the near North Side, Chicago’s nightclub district. The bridegroom-to-be had flashed a badge identifying him as a deputy sheriff; he had ordered the boy into his car and forced him to perform oral sex. Gacy then drov
e the young man some twenty miles north, apparently resting up for a repeat performance, but when they stopped, the boy jumped out of the car. Gacy chased him in his big Olds, trying to run him down.

  Mysteriously, the charges were stricken and the case never came to trial. In later years, after John Wayne Gacy was charged with thirty-three murders, some reporters felt the case was dropped because of Gacy’s Chicago-style clout, but it is doubtful he had much political sway in the summer of 1972.

  Gacy’s version of what happened is that a deal for sex had been struck and that he took the kid to a restaurant in Northbrook, where John held a temporary job as night manager. It was late, the place was closed, but Gacy had a set of keys. He didn’t want to take the kid back to his house, back to Carol and Tammy and April. “What happened,” John said, “this kid wanted me to take my pants off. I figured, shit, and let him run off with my pants and my wallet? Try to chase the son-of-a-bitch bare-ass? So I wouldn’t, and he ran out the fire door. The sneaky asshole got his money up front. Fifteen dollars. Fucker outsmarted me. So I took after him in the car.”