Buried Dreams

by Tim Cahill

  That’s what John told the docs up on 3 North: The seeds planted in Carol’s mind by her mother sent John Gacy out after midnight, looking for sex. That was in late 1974, early 1975, the time when Jack Hanley began to surface. Jack wasn’t some alternate personality, John said, none of that science-fiction shit. Jack Hanley was just a name he used, because everyone on the streets used false names. It was part of the game they all played, trying to outsmart one another. John outsmarted the young hustlers with Jack Hanley.

  In May 1975, when Gacy made his Mother’s Day announcement, both Carol and John knew it was only a matter of time before the inevitable divorce. John was out most nights. It was like a compulsion for him, an uncontrollable urge to become Jack Hanley and haunt the night streets of Chicago.

  It was also in May that Tony Antonucci met John Gacy while the contractor was remodeling the Antonuccis’ house. Tony was fifteen, and John offered him a summer job at three dollars an hour. He often did that, hired boys he’d just met. In late May, John had young Tony doing tiling, plumbing, electrical work, and general clean-up. Shortly after he started with Gacy, sometime in June, Tony helped John clean up the Democratic headquarters on Montrose Avenue. They were working alone and it was about eight at night when Gacy began making advances. “He asked about giving me a blow job,” Antonucci said, “and I said, ‘No.’ “

  Gacy suggested they sit on the couch. He produced a bottle of whiskey and encouraged Antonucci to have a drink with him. Then, Antonucci said, “he started asking me about homosexual activity. Offered money.” Gacy was talking fifty or a hundred dollars.

  Antonucci said he wasn’t interested.

  Gacy applied some heavy pressure. “What if it meant your job?”

  And Antonucci said he said, “ ‘No.’ I just continued with ‘No’ replies.”

  They went back to work then, and Gacy made the incident seem as if it had been a kind of exam. Antonucci thought his boss had made the proposition “to see how I would handle pressure.” He knew Gacy had a wife and two kids; he had heard him make derogatory comments “about fags.” Tony thought his boss was testing him.

  But then Gacy started grabbing at the boy’s crotch and buttocks until Antonucci finally “picked up a chair, like I would swing it.” Gacy “sort of laughingly asked me why didn’t I just say, ‘Stop’?” It was horseplay, John said: just a joke.

  First a test, then a joke.

  Later, after work, Gacy took Antonucci out for a hamburger and explained that the incident had, in fact, been a “test of morals.” Gacy was the kind of boss who needed to know if his employees would “break under pressure.”

  About a month later, in July 1975, Antonucci was sitting in his parents’ home. His mother and father were on vacation. Tony had stepped on a nail at work the day before, and Gacy knew he was home alone, injured, so when John knocked on the door that night, Antonucci thought his boss was just stopping by to see if he was all right.

  It was about midnight, and John said he had just been to a party. He had a bottle of wine with him. The boy and his boss drank some of the wine and, after about half an hour, Gacy said he had seen some stag films at the party. The films and projector were in his car. Did Tony want to see them? Gacy “asked me persistently,” Tony recalled, “and I said, ‘Okay.’ “

  They were heterosexual films, men and women, and after they were over, Gacy grabbed for the boy and started “wrestling around.” It was just “regular collegiate-style wrestling,” Tony recalled, all armlocks and headlocks, more horseplay, and not at all a serious fight. The boy was careful not to humiliate his boss, but after a minute or so, he felt Gacy trying to slip “a handcuff on my left wrist.” Tony swung his other arm around but Gacy got hold of it and managed to get both of Antonucci’s wrists cuffed, behind his back. They had been in a standing position, but now Gacy knocked the boy to the floor.

  Tony Antonucci lay face up, his hands cuffed behind his back, and Gacy “started to unbutton my shirt and unbuckle my pants and pulled my pants down halfway to my knees.” Nothing was said. Gacy went into the kitchen. Tony never knew why Gacy left or what he was looking for in there. The boy could feel that the right cuff was very loose on his wrist. He managed to work it off, but he lay, waiting, watching the entrance to the kitchen, hands behind his back, as if still cuffed. When Gacy stepped back into the room, Antonucci hit him with a football tackle at the knees. The boy weighed 150 pounds; Gacy weighed 230, but Antonucci wrestled on the high-school team, and this time he was fighting seriously.

  The boy “took the handcuff that I removed from my right wrist” and slipped it onto Gacy’s wrist. “I found the key”—Antonucci couldn’t recall if he got it out of Gacy’s hand or his pocket—"and unlocked the handcuff on my other wrist.” Antonucci put the other cuff on Gacy so that he had him lying there, face down, both hands locked behind his back. The boy held his boss down for a minute, maybe two, then got up and let Gacy lie there, face down on the rug, for five minutes or so.

  There was some conversation then: no cursing, no threats, everything very rational, and Tony recalled, “It was agreed he would leave. I just let him up. He didn’t do anything then. Just left.”

  After Gacy was gone, Antonucci thought that one of the strangest things about the incident was the first thing his boss had said as he lay on the living-room floor with his hands locked behind his back.

  “Not only are you the only one that got out of the cuffs, you got them on me,” Gacy said. Like the guy went around putting handcuffs on people all the time: Antonucci couldn’t make any sense out of the statement, “It really didn’t have any meaning,” it was “strange.”

  About a week later, another of Gacy’s employees, John But-kovitch, failed to get out of the cuffs and was never seen alive again.

  *Name changed.

  * * *

  * * *

  CHAPTER 12

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  * * *

  TOO MANY ECHOES OF Iowa: a managerial position, young boys working for him, wrestling matches, boys with hands chained behind the back, a variation of Kinsey crock working well, boys whose jobs might or might not depend on sex. But now a new element: the Jack Hanley character, John’s nighttime persona, was taking on a life of his own, a life wholly separate from that of John Gacy.

  Maybe if the marriage had gone better, if Carol’s mother had gotten out of there just half a year earlier; maybe if the work wasn’t so demanding that “normal sex” could be a pleasure rather than a duty; maybe if Carol had been more aggressive in bed; maybe if he hadn’t taken on so many jobs for PDM; maybe if he hadn’t joined the Moose, or started performing as a clown for hospitalized children; maybe if he hadn’t gotten so deeply involved in Democratic politics at the local level; maybe if he hadn’t agreed to work like a bastard directing the Polish Day parade; maybe if he had learned how to sleep like any normal man . . .

  Carol thought John looked “tired,” “worn out,” even “very . . . older-looking.”

  All this in the summer of 1975, a time when his business needed him more than ever; a year when he began drinking more steadily, more heavily, probably because the divorce was looming up, surely only months away now.

  The way John saw it and explained it, in that summer when the Other Guy finally surfaced, circumstances had conspired to destroy him, to defeat him with anxiety and fatigue. Always on the go, never thinking about himself, never sleeping, working himself into the ground.

  Then a period of blackout, and John Butkovitch was dead.

  John Butkovitch was sixteen and working in a hardware store when Gacy offered him a job in construction. It was good work and good pay for a boy who had not finished high school.

  Butkovitch, John said, “learned fast,” a tireless kid. Carol thought “he was a very nice boy. He was over, spent several times with us, had dinner with us.” Sometimes the boy would come over to pick up his paycheck and spend an hour or two, just playing with Tammy and April before he left.

  When Ma moved to Arkan
sas to be with Karen and her family after they moved down there, John Butkovitch helped her move.

  John Butkovitch and John Gacy: Carol called them Big John and Little John. They’d argue sometimes. Big John always argued with the teenage boys he hired to work for him.

  Once Carol said, “Boy, if I ever worked for you and you did that to me, I’d turn around and say, ‘The heck with you, John.’ Because he was on them all the time, hollering. I said, ‘Is it necessary to holler?’ “

  “You have to,” John said. “I have to keep them in line. I have to make sure that they know I’m the boss. Otherwise they take me for granted.”

  Sometimes the arguments would degenerate into wrestling matches. Not serious fights, but a kind of wrestling where John just rolled around on the floor with one of his employees.

  John argued with Butkovitch about money, or more properly, about the hours Little John claimed. Carol said, “Big John always felt that the boys would end up putting too many hours on the card anyway, so it was a little argument over the hours that Little John did spend on the job that Big John didn’t think he did.” Big John said he didn’t owe Little John that money.

  Little John worked almost a year for Gacy. During that time, as their marriage degenerated, Carol did a lot of traveling with the girls. She’d go to nearby Shaumberg to visit Karen’s family before they moved, or to Indiana to visit her relatives there. In July and August 1975, she went to Arkansas to help Karen care for Ma after she broke her hip.

  When she came back from that trip, Big John told her that Little John had quit, run away, something. She never saw Little John again.

  The Other Guy surfaced for an hour, maybe less, in the early-morning hours of July 31, 1975.

  Little John Butkovitch was home early in the evening, complaining that Gacy hadn’t given him a check for his last two weeks’ work. His father, Marco, a Yugoslavian immigrant, had taken the money he earned as a janitor and invested in several apartment buildings. John, his son, was living rent-free in an apartment building the elder Butkovitch owned. Knowing a little about how the system worked in the new country, the father suggested that if Gacy did not pay up, young Butkovitch should threaten to inform the authorities that his boss was not deducting taxes from employee earnings, as required by law.

  John Butkovitch and two friends left for Gacy’s house that night.

  The way Gacy remembered it, Carol was off on one of her visits when Butkovitch arrived with three friends at the house. John said, “They threatened to kick my ass unless I gave him his check.” Gacy talked fast: “John,” he said, “I’m not going to hold back your check because you earned the money, but let me just go get the file on you.” Gacy offered the boys a drink while he sorted through the records in his office. When he came back into the living room, things had calmed down, and no one was going to get his ass kicked until the evidence was presented.

  “Okay, look,” John said. “Butkovitch has a hundred seventy dollars coming from work. But look here, it’s all invoiced out.” The records showed that Little John had spent six hundred dollars redecorating the apartment his dad gave him and had charged materials to the Gacy account to get a contractor’s discount. Not only that, but he’d also been paying Gacy back out of his paycheck and still owed three hundred dollars.

  “Look,” Gacy argued to Butkovitch and his friends, “if John didn’t owe me the money, why would he pay me back? Now, he has a fight with his dad, his dad’s going to take away the apartment, and John wants to leave town. Why should I get stuck with a three-hundred-dollar debt?”

  Butkovitch said, “The carpeting is worth three hundred dollars. Get the money from my dad.”

  “John, you signed for the carpeting. We got it for you. Your dad isn’t going to pay me.”

  A compromise was reached. Maybe Little John could tear up the carpeting and take it back to the store for credit on the Gacy account. Then Big John would give Little John his check.

  “Butkovitch and his buddies agreed to this,” Big John said, “and we smoked some grass, drank some beer. I drank Scotch, and I must have got bombed.”

  Big John never said anything about a threat to expose the little tax dodge he was running. “We just all came to a reasonable conclusion, smoked and drank, and they all left together.”

  So Big John was alone in the house, stoned on the marijuana, drunk on the Scotch, and, because he was exhausted as usual, he fell asleep, right there in the big leather chair.

  It had been happening more and more lately. John would drift off into a dreamless sleep, a sleep as dark and empty as death. But then he’d wake inside his car, “cruising” the streets as a cop named Jack Hanley.

  “I wasn’t out looking for Butkovitch,” John recalled. The farthest stop south on his cruising run was always Bughouse Square, a one-block park on the near North Side where male hustlers congregated. From there, Jack Hanley would drift up Wells, past the gay area in New Town, then turn back down Diversey, toward the lake, to cruise Clark and Broadway. Nothing doing that night.

  Jack Hanley might have given it up then and driven right back to Norwood Park, but there was one last area to cruise, and it was just a bit north, on the way home. There were always hustlers, poor kids with parents just up from Appalachia somewhere, hanging out in the doorways around Montrose and Lawrence. Maybe Jack Hanley would get lucky. He liked ‘em poor, just in it for the money.

  So Jack was checking out the dark streets, and there, at Sheridan and Lawrence, he saw John Butkovitch getting out of his car, waving. Jack stopped, and the John Gacy personality took over.

  “I wanna talk to ya,” Butkovitch said, and Gacy, drunk as he was, could see that the boy had also been drinking quite heavily.

  “Jump in the car,” Gacy said. “Hurry up, there’s someone behind me.”

  They started driving toward the Norwood Park. Butkovitch wanted to go get the carpeting out of the apartment right then, but Gacy said, “I’m not breaking into your dad’s building, you asshole.”

  Butkovitch was so drunk he could hardly talk. “If I was gonna kick your ass, I wouldna needed them other guys,” he said, then switched subjects and said he wanted another drink. He looked in his pocket and couldn’t find his wallet. John said he didn’t have any money with him. They could go up to the house on Summerdale, have a drink there.

  John Gacy later told the docs in 3 North that he remembers every bit of the conversation, even though it was one of the nights he woke up to find himself “cruising.” He remembers driving up the Kennedy Expressway to Norwood Park, remembers parking, going into the house, and recalls offering Butkovitch a joint. It’s all very clear. He liked to keep them in the refrigerator, already rolled, for the boys. Butkovitch had another drink and it dropped him over the edge, into a new rage.

  “You shithead,” the boy shouted, “gimme my check! I could pound the crap out of you right now!”

  Gacy was soothing. “You know I got a heart condition. No way you couldn’t kick my ass. Just the excitement alone, that could put me in attack. Probably kill me. What would you want to kill me for, John? For a carpet? You want to kill me for a carpet?”

  John told the docs that the boy was drunk, ready to fight one moment and apologizing the next. “I figured I had to . . . subdue him some way,” John said and, in later years, he’d act out the way it happened, how he got the handcuffs on Little John.

  The cuffs—the same ones John had used on Antonucci a week earlier—were on the bar. John kept them on the bar or on the dresser in his bedroom and he said, very brightly, like there was an interesting story here: “Holy shit, you should have seen it; just before I picked you up, this cop threw a guy up against a car and put the cuffs on him. Man, you should have seen it.”

  Butkovitch was sulky, sullen. “Big deal.”

  “No,” John said, picking the cuffs up from the bar, “you should have seen it.” He was standing now, the cuffs dangling in his right hand. “Lemme show you what this cop did.”

  “Why ya got
ta show me?”

  “Cuz then you’ll see. Here.” John Gacy put a cuff on the boy’s right wrist. “Okay, now put your other hand behind your back. C’mon, I’m just going to show you something . . . just for a second.”

  When the second cuff was on and both the boy’s hands were fastened behind his back, John didn’t have to make soothing noises anymore, he didn’t have to talk about his bad heart.

  “Now,” he said, “you ain’t gonna kick anyone’s ass, you ain’t gonna wreck anyone’s house.”

  John, mimicking the boy’s voice, said: “Motherfucker, I’ll kill you when I get these off.”

  John, very cocky, said: “You ain’t gonna get them off.”

  “I’ll kill you.”

  “You just relax,” John said. “I don’t take the cuffs off until you sober up. Could take all night.”

  Butkovitch pulled at the cuffs, a futile effort that overbalanced him, and he stumbled. John “helped him to the floor because he was stumbling and he could hit his head on a coffee table, hurt himself.” Once he got Butkovitch on his back, John thought he might “have sat on the kid’s chest for a while.”

  “When I get these cuffs off,” Butkovitch threatened, “you’re a dead man.”

  But John Gacy was still John Gacy, because he remembers very well what he said. “Anyone gets killed, it’s you, John. Just sober up, okay?”

  Gacy told the docs that he himself drank a few more shots of Scotch—"I had been bombed earlier and I got rebombed"—then lay down next to Little John. He was going to lay with him all night, that’s what John told the docs, he was going to lay there keeping the angry, drunken boy company until he came to his senses. “It must have been about three in the morning,” John said, and that final act of compassion, laying down with the drunken boy, was the last thing John Gacy remembered that night.