John Wayne Gacy [Part 2]

I am in the process of re-publishing the pieces that vanished when I deleted my old blog, Leaving Los Angeles. The following was originally posted on October 30, 2003. Previous post here.

When the writer Paul Bowles died, my friend Tom Christie, who’d recently interviewed Bowles, and I had an email conversation about how Bowles’ narratives often include the fatal error, the act the character cannot recover from, and the belief that we carry the seeds of our destruction within us. Something along these lines was what I was thinking at 3 a.m. in a St. Louis punk rock club, when three black men came down the stairs, one stroking a gun. Rick and I had driven to St. Louis after being told by officers at Menard Correctional Center, in Chester, Illinois, that we could not see Gacy as scheduled, but to come back in three days. There was nothing to do in Chester (pop. 8,000), a depressed town full of rain-streaked brick buildings, just up from the Mississippi River. There was also no place to eat. The town’s one diner served me pancakes embedded with burnt meat scraps and gray grease and whatever else had gathered on the griddle in the past 12 months, and, after a steady 600-mile diet of off-brand peanut-butter protein bars bought at gas stations, Rick and I literally whooped with relief when we saw Chester had a McDonald’s, in which we ate every night before going to the bar where the locals wore “Fry the Killer Clown” T-shirts and where, when I asked a guy named Cletus is he knew where I could get a plate of pasta, said, “Shoot, I can git you a possum.”

So we drove the 60 miles to St. Louis, and got a motel room in the shadow of the arch. That night, we followed our noses to a bar that looked like Ye Olde Ice Creamery upstairs, but which downstairs was a punk rock club. The place was packed with college kids, watching a line-up of lame but fun bands. We met a guy named Dave, who followed me around like a puppy, and his friends Jeff and Maureen. Jeff was scrawny and hyperactive and looked like Paul Westerberg of The Replacements. Maureen was an Irish girl in fatigues; every time Jeff looked at her, he said, “The few, the proud… it’s Maureen.” Everybody was pretty drunk and/or high on mushrooms when the place closed, and Jeff convinced the owner, whom he knew, to let the five of us stay downstairs, with the lights out. Jeff was goofing off behind the bar when the guys with the guns came down the stairs. The one with the gun in his waistband asked some sort of diversionary question.

My first reaction was: Jeff knows what’s going on, this is his turf; it’s all going to be okay. I was watching him try to chat his way out of the situation when I realized he looked cartoonish, and not in a good way. I glanced at Rick; he was staying cool, and I trusted his instincts, but I thought, better not just wait and watch. My adrenaline, which had shot pretty high, leveled out, and I found myself calmly engaging in what little conversation was needed, as well as looking for another way out of the bar, as the men were blocking the stairway we’d come down. The night could have turned Bowlesian bad—what grain of stupidity had put us in a bar after-hours with people we did not know in a town we’d never been?—but did not; the mood neutralized, the gun-guys lost interest, and we walked out a door behind the stage. When we got outside, we piled into Jeff’s van, which he said his band toured in.

“Don’t you hate it when you’re at the end of the tour,” he asked Rick, “and all that’s left in the cooler is melted ice with a piece of baloney floating in it?”

We got to the house where Jeff and Maureen lived, and when I asked her if she had a Tampax, she said, “I only use pads. I’m Catholic.”

During the week we waited to visit Gacy, I stank as I have never stunk before. I brushed my teeth six times a day and applied deodorant three times that often, but I just burnt right through it. My liver, I suppose, was working at 108 degrees. We did get to see Gacy, and then we got on a plane to go home. When Rick and I settled in our airlines seats—we hadn’t slept in three days, and had just come from six hours in a maximum security prison—I took one end of the headphones he was wearing and started to speak French into them.

“I can’t do this anymore,” he said.

I got home and wrote the story, which I faxed to Joe Dolce. He told me to read a book called “Dead Elvis” by Greil Marcus and do a rewrite. Actually, his exact words were, “Be prepared for eight or nine rewrites.” I read the book, rewrote, and faxed it off. This was in early May, after Gacy had already been executed. By mid-June, I had heard nothing from Dolce, despite repeated and increasingly anxious phone inquires.

In late June, I went to New York, and to the Details office on lower Broadway. I asked the receptionist where Joe Dolce’s office was, and took a seat in it, unannounced. Joe came in ten minutes later and said, “Who are you?”

“I’m Nancy Rommelmann, and you told me to be prepared for eight or nine rewrites, and I’ve sent you the first one and you have not called me back. So I want to know what’s going on.”

Only someone totally green would do this. Dolce seemed amused if a little nervous, took a seat across from me, and said, “I am moving over to Vogue, and will not be editing your piece. You’ll be working with ___.” He paused. “By the way, how did you get in here?”

I went with my family to Martha’s Vineyard, and as my mother and daughter frolicked on the beach, I stayed in a cool back bedroom filled with pond-green light and learned how to write. I sat there for ten hours a day, getting my through line, figuring out how to tell the story. I would come out for dinner, words in my head, knowing what I had to replace. I did this for ten days, and then I went into the town of Vineyard Haven and faxed it to Details. When I got back to the house, I called my machine in LA; there was a message from the day before, from the woman at Details, saying they were killing the story.

I got back to LA feeling desperate. I asked my friend Anne Thompson, who I’d met because our daughters went to preschool together and who was at the time a columnist for the LA Weekly, what I should do. She suggested I send the story to Playboy, cold. I received a super-nice note from then-managing editor Jonathan Black, saying it was great story but not for them; why didn’t I try Esquire? I did; they didn’t want it. It was now August; Gacy had been dead four months, I was holding what felt like rapidly spoiling meat and it was killing me. I asked Anne again.

“Let me give it to my friend Harold Meyerson at the Weekly,” she said.

Three weeks later, I got a call from R.J. Smith, then an editor at the Weekly: the paper was interested in my story, could I come in to do a polish? I sat on a low chair at his feet, feeling like a novitiate.

“We’re going to use a drop cap here,” he indicated, at the start of a new graph.

“What’s a drop cap?” I asked.

R.J. was very gentle with me, and after an hour, said, “It’ll be in next week’s issue.” I did not have the nerve to ask if it would be on the cover. It was.

Rick and I were excoriated in letters to the editor (“If there was any justice in the world, Gaez and Rommelmann would be the next victims of the next John Wayne Gacy”), but I stand by the piece, which you can read here.

Next: Turn the Page

Comments

[Jackie]

I keep meaning to say: Joe Dolce gets a shout-out in Nigella's "How to be a Domestic Goddess" - he submitted his grandmother's NY cheesecake recipe for the book.