Buried Dreams (29 page)

If you really wanted to examine “the crimes” independent of the sexual component, John thought you had to look at all the drugs as well, you had to analyze yet another aspect to his personality: John Gacy, the drug taker. If drinking to black out didn’t develop mistrust in and of itself, maybe all the other drugs he took in tandem worked like one deadly chemical cocktail to bring out “the Other Guy,” the killer. John used Lasix, a diuretic, because “I hold water.” He popped one pill two or three times a week. He took a prescribed pill, some little brown thing, for his thyroid, and a little yellow pill to curb his appetite. He was smoking marijuana after work with his employees, and with some of the hustlers he picked up.

In 1976, when his divorce from Carol became final, John began hitting the Scotch heavier than ever. He also started taking Valium: at first only one ten-milligram pill a day.

The next year, John said he began dropping twenty-five or seventy-five milligrams of preludins every twenty-four hours. He needed them to counteract the Valium, to speed up, to complement his natural drive. But it was like a seesaw: with all the preludins, he needed more Valium to calm himself down, and in December 1978, just before he was arrested, John figured he was consuming at least four Valium a day.

The pills were easy enough to get. While remodeling drugstores all over Chicago and as far away as Detroit and Oregon, he would talk to some of the pharmacists about his health problems—his strokes and heart attacks and leukemia—and sometimes they’d give him pills right off the shelf. There was never any need to steal drugs from a jobsite. He could get anything he asked for. Some of the pharmacists talked
about how they laid broads in the back room in exchange for drugs. You could get anything you wanted from these guys, and you didn’t have to steal. Police and prosecutors tried to say that all the drugs they found in the house on Summerdale were stolen, but John insisted that they were actually given to him by pharmacists in exchange for construction favors.

However he got them, by 1978 John would wake up from two hours of sleep, walk to the bathroom and pop two Valium, a Lasix, the thyroid pill, a seventy-five-milligram preludin, and rush out to put in a sixteen-hour day. Back home he might drop two more Valium, smoke some marijuana with one of the employees, drink half a bottle of Scotch, take a sleeping pill, and fall asleep in his big reclining chair.

And the strange thing: An hour later, two hours, he’d wake up and find himself driving around the park and “not know what the fuck I was doing there.” Maybe drugs and alcohol set loose the Other Guy tilt to his personality, the thing inside him that ruined his marriage to Carol, that wanted the house to itself. There was, John told the docs, a lot of the Old Man in the Other Guy tilt. Now, take the Other Guy tilt during a blackout and apply it to some greedy little hustler. You would get an angry, punishing father, an irrational alcoholic father who had to strike out, who. thought he had to fuck the world before it fucked him. The corpse would be found in the morning with the dawning of sobriety, and it would be hidden in a father’s hiding place, in the basement, to be covered over and forgotten, like a father’s helpless drunken ravings.

If drink and drugs set loose the killer, it would explain one thing that John said puzzled him. Looking back on his life, trying to recall the crimes, was almost like waking up with a bad hangover and knowing that you must have done a lot more last night than you remember.

With Butkovitch, John could see only broken fragments of the time he lost in a darkening mist. It was so goddamn crazy, he told the docs, because an image came up, a flashback maybe, but it wasn’t at all as if he was seeing it out of his own eyes. During these flashbacks, he seemed to be standing off to one side, like a ghost or something that couldn’t talk, couldn’t even be seen. One of the figures he saw was a boy, some kid who looked like Butkovitch, but he couldn’t really be sure because there was a hazy fog in the room, a glittering
mist that flickered like a failing light in a storm. What gave him the creeps was the other figure. “It was me,” John told the docs. “Or similar enough in build to be me.” When the rope came out, the fog would purple down into blackness, and John never saw the image of himself committing the crime.

He’d been having these flashbacks even before he was arrested, John told the docs, but the witness in him wouldn’t go to the cops and confess. How could you turn in an image of yourself seen through a darkening haze? “You’d look dumb and stupid.” They’d think you were nuts. So you keep your mouth shut about it. Out of fear.

Same thing with the images John saw in flashback. Same fear. That’s why he buried the bodies in his own crawl space, where no one would ever find them. Out of fear.

John told the docs that looking into the fog like that, searching for a motive, was like working on a jigsaw puzzle. The problem was, he had only a few of the parts. There was a smooth, white piece you could label “compassion,” and a dark, jagged one you could think of as “outsmarting the other guy.” Then you had John Gacy the alcoholic drinker, and John Gacy the drug taker.

There were other pieces, and John began isolating them for the docs. He sat in his room in 3 North, ripping his personality into little shreds he called characters. The first one was “John Gacy the workaholic,” the top dog of them all. Other characters included the person who was naїve, the religious person, and the lonely man; there was the guy with the sex drive, the sick person, the politician, and the criminal who was always stealing. You had Pogo, who split into the compassion clown and the hatred clown. Many of the characters John developed contradicted one another: On one side you had Gacy the miser, the tightwad. On the other there was Gacy the do-gooder, the selfless, community-minded man.

It took weeks to break John Gacy down, but eventually there he was, scattered all over the yellow legal pad, his whole life spread out like a puzzle ready for assembly. And he came to see soon enough that there was a split in the single person he knew as John Gacy: all these contradictory characters were battling with one another, right there on a lined sheet of paper.

You could divide these ill-fitting pieces on two sides—call them right-hand and left-hand. On the right was his mother’s side, and the pieces that belonged there were the religious person; the do-gooder; the softhearted person; Pogo the Clown; and the trusting, naїve person. Put sex drive on Ma’s side, too, but make it the good, wholesome kind of sex that involves love between a man and a woman.

The left was John Stanley’s side. Most everything over there was a contradiction of the Old Man, and John told the docs that in what he was doing in his life, he must have been trying to “destroy the father image.” You only had to look at the left-side character pieces to see that. The Old Man hated politicians, so John became a politician. Dad didn’t like being an alcoholic, so John became an alcoholic drinker. John Stanley despised drug takers and criminals, so his son took drugs and became a criminal.

There were some good aspects on the left, though. John could be a tightwad, just like the Old man, but in its best light, you could think of that as being thrifty. The distrustful John Gacy could be a con man, sure, but “by the same token, most people are bent on fucking over you,” and it’s dumb and stupid to imagine that they aren’t. Thinking the worst about anyone—it was only being “smart.”

When John thought he had the pieces pretty well divided between the right- and the left-hand sides, he took the Bible a visiting priest had given him and sketched in all the characters on the flyleaf. The drawing looked like a big tree with branches on either side. The top dog, the workaholic, was the trunk, and he nourished everyone on both sides of the tree.

John told the docs that the workaholic “derived from never being accepted, never being good enough.” And when John thought about it, he realized “I was a slave to myself, constantly striving for acceptance.” Little John Gacy yearning for one kind word from the Old Man.

Talking with the docs, John was able to add a few more characters. Pogo was on the right, with Ma, but that was Pogo as a compassion clown. When he was a hatred clown, Pogo belonged over on the left, with John Stanley. And then, sitting there talking with one of the docs, John had another revelation. There was a split in the sex-drive piece! Because, okay, you had sex between a man and a woman, and that was like a sacrament, done with love. But over on the left side,
sex could be had coldly and without emotion. On John Stanley’s side, sex could even be a hatred drive.

John Gacy on the right-hand side: He wanted to have loving sex with a woman, but goddamn it, the workaholic didn’t have the time. Still, there was a physical need, a drive, and the fastest way for “the motor-driven John Gacy to get his rocks off” was to pay for it. Relieve himself and get back to work. But even with a whore John said he felt emotion slipping in there. That and the infuriating thought that he had to waste his time actually trying to satisfy her. He kept slipping over to Ma’s side with a woman.

The part of him that simply needed sex and no more, wanted it cold, hard, and fast: sex “reduced to an animal status.” The workaholic, with no time to waste, “came down to the point where he could just relieve himself with a male.” Some kid on the street, you don’t have to satisfy him. There’s no “fondering”: you don’t make love. And you never go back to the same one twice: too much danger of emotional attachment, which is the very thing you’re trying to avoid.

That was how John rationalized it, sex on John Stanley’s side. He could even put a name on the sex-drive character over there. The guy who went cruising for animal sex with males was named Jack Hanley.

Police reports on his arrest said that John Gacy had drawn a map of the crawl space, dropped his head, as if asleep, and then looked up and said, “Did Jack . . . I see Jack drew a diagram of the crawl space.” Well, that was bullshit. John couldn’t recall ever drawing such a map. The cops probably drafted it themselves in “a self-serving” effort to make him a “scapegoat.” Also, to the best of John’s recollection and with God as his witness, he never said anything about someone named Jack. Jack Hanley was just a name he used when he was out cruising for animal sex.

The docs, however, took that seed, Jack Hanley, and let it grow. Freedman was even asking to meet him, like Hanley was actually the Other Guy Gacy found himself fighting during the divorce with Carol. Like the Other Guy was his own person, “a whole other personality” lurking inside, raging against the person he knew as John Gacy. The way John saw it, the docs actually planted the Jack seed in his mind. They brought it up. Now they were going to have to convince him
they were right, that Jack was the Other Guy John saw in his flashbacks.

At first John wouldn’t accept any of this crazy crap. He told the docs he didn’t want to apply that Jekyll and Hyde shit to himself. He didn’t even want to think about it because “that’s running away from reality.” John was committed to honesty in analyzing himself, and he hoped the docs could see that. He told them he wasn’t going “to blame somebody else” for something he did. The problem was that none of the docs had been able to convince him he had committed “the crimes,” which forced him to examine seriously their split-personality theory. What if there really was someone else inside who killed people and left John to shoulder an unearned guilt?

So, okay, since the docs made the suggestion, he’d consider the possibility that he had “a dual personality.” The personality tree, with all the characters branching out on right and left, was a first step in helping the docs pry the Other Guy to the surface.

Even so, it sure was hard to conceive of two people living in the same body. The whole concept was a real brain buster. John told the docs that he had never caught himself actually going from one person to another. Then again, there were long periods of time—hours upon hours—when he couldn’t recall anything at all. Every time that happened, the return of consciousness brought him another boy to bury. And then, in flashbacks, John could see the image of himself with some boy he knew was dead, a boy already buried in the crawl space. But the kid was alive in the misty vision, and the two of them, man and boy, were laughing, drinking, arguing. John could see the rope dangling from his hand, see the hammer handle, and then the mist became an opaque fog, thick and black.

Looking for the Other Guy:

Examine the tree, right-hand side, left-hand side. If death was a gift, it was given out of compassion, but the killer clearly couldn’t split from John Gacy the do-gooder. The Other Guy didn’t belong on Ma’s side at all. John concentrated his search on the Old Man’s side of the tree.

And it kept coming back to the sex-drive guy, Jack Hanley. Through the haze, John said he could see elements of the drug taker and the alcoholic drinker, the con man, the
tightwad, and the criminal. But these characters, in and of themselves, weren’t “strong enough or smart enough” to split off into the Other Guy.

Which left Jack Hanley standing alone over there on the Old Man’s side. But Hanley was nothing more than a convenient name John Gacy used to hide his identity when he went cruising for animal sex. Like everything else in John’s life, though, the name had a double meaning.

John Gacy told the docs he knew all about Jack Hanley. When John got drunk or stoned, Jack came out and went down to the park because John Gacy, sober, didn’t have the courage. Jack was just a braver, more aggressive version of John. So how could he split off into someone John didn’t know? How could he become the Other Guy?

It was like following a path that kept doubling back on itself, a trail that eventually disappeared somewhere in the fog. That’s how John saw it. And then he had another revelation: It seemed as if he had actually been, well—it sounded crazy—fighting with Jack Hanley from the time he invented the name. It was almost as if Jack was a real guy, sort of a semipersonality on the left who had set himself in opposition to everything that was good on the right-hand side. John followed that trail all the way down into the mist, and he used a car he’d bought in 1977 to get there.