GOING TO GACY
A cross-country journal to shake the devil's hand
I once read that serial killer John Wayne Gacy's brain was missing. Someone had stolen it. Following Gacy's execution, the brain was extracted in hopes that probing the gray matter might shed some light on why killers kill. Though the theft is ludicrous, it also makes sense. The public had an insatiable appetite for Gacy while he lived; post-mortem, we were still trying to get a piece of him.
I've got mine: a pack of prison cigarettes and several photographs from when I visited Gacy in May 1994. The following week, the No. 1 serial killer of our time was executed for thirty-three murders he committed throughout the 1970s, most of which included handcuffing young men --- some of whom were lured to Gacy's home for paid sex, others with the promise of employment in Gacy's contracting company --- to a specially made board, then choking them to death with a knotted rope over a matter of hours or sometimes days. He stuffed twenty-seven of the bodies into the crawlspace beneath his Chicago-area home; two were found buried in his yard, four in the nearby river. Once a pillar of his Des Plains community, Gacy denied the murders; in 1980, a jury found otherwise and sentenced Gacy to death. His fight to postpone the inevitable ended when the state of Illinois rejected his final appeal; the May 10 execution took place as scheduled.
Before his death, family, friends and people he had never met besieged Gacy for mementoes. One was a 26-year-old musician and artist from Los Angeles, with whom Gacy had been corresponding for two years. On Gacy's urging, Rick Gaez made the 1,500-mile journey to visit his pen pal "before it was too late." Rick asked me, a casual friend who also was a writer, to accompany him and document the encounter.
I took a lot of flak for it. Wasn't I scared, wasn't I sickened? How could I explain I was looking forward to it? A crime-TV junkie, I can tell you every schedule change America's Most Wanted has made in the past two years. The re-enactments, especially the ones involving murder, drive me off the couch screaming, "You sick fuck!" at the perp's mug shot. No matter how heinous the crime, I look. Meeting Gacy meant facing the horror I'd only so far confronted on the nightly news, my front door double-locked.
The anticipation made me feel as though I were filling with helium. Certainly, I had never knowingly courted a murderer. Going to Gacy was walking into the den of the beast. Shackled, de-fanged, yes, but even under the most proscribed circumstances, it was thrilling.
We took to the road to meet a killer.
Driving out of Los Angeles in a rented Tempo, forsaking natural disasters for ones man-made, I try to remember Gacy's 1978 arrest. I vaguely recall some big white man in handcuffs, sheet-draped bodies bobbing past prying cameras. But it was a world away from New York City, where we'd recently been held hostage by local serial killer Son of Sam. Daring to stay out past midnight became a nervy drama; the killer could be anywhere. With our nightly lives hanging in the balance, the city crackled.
Cruising through Death Valley, Rick agrees part of Gacy's allure was the proximity to danger. But insists the initial contact was predicated on something more tangible: the killer's art.
"In 1992, I saw one of Gacy's paintings. It was odd, really bright and flat,” Rick says. “I knew I wanted one, so I wrote him, and enclosed a picture of myself when I was seventeen, really clean-shaven and pretty and boyish, figuring that's about what he goes for."
Rick knew he fit the profile of Gacy's victims --- young, good-looking --- and used this to entice Gacy into painting his portrait, which Gacy did, at a discount. But why would Rick, the product of a close-knit Catholic family, a popular guy very much on the L.A. scene, keep communicating with a middle-aged sex offender and serial killer?
"I've always been attracted to extremes, to deviants. Like my father said, 'You never know how cold the devil's hand is until you shake it.' When I got the opportunity to shake Gacy's hand, I took it. People think it's wrong, but that's a judgment call on their part. Why shouldn't I communicate with this guy? He's part of 20th-century history, and I'm getting to meet him."
Why Gacy? Why not the Pope?
"The Pope is boring, and anyway, meeting Gacy puts a little black in my life. Growing up in Orange County, life was comfortable, boring, suburban. Writing Gacy was like becoming a punker when we were kids, shouting 'Fuck you!' just to break the monotony."
I ask how the letter- writing started.
"He sent me a questionnaire, stuff like ‘Favorite Movie,’ and sent me his responses. I started to get a letter every month or so, and my girlfriend and I would just laugh, it was so weird. And all my friends thought it was wild; they couldn't believe I was writing this guy. They all wanted to, but nobody actually did. The people I know are talkers, no one's a walker. No one follows through with the things they say they're going to do. But I was really glad no one else wrote him. I think the novelty would've worn off if seven of my friends had said, 'Dude, I got a letter from him, too.’ '."”
Gacy letter to Rick, April 30, 1993: "I think what I enjoy about your letters is you're open and honest . . . t... you live in a town that is based on fantasy, so you're right, you have a lot of phony people, but some honest ones, too. Hell, I seem to have found one . . ...."
Once in Vegas, we bypass the glitzy Golden Nugget for the dustier El Cortez, where geriatric gamblers play the slots, dropping in nickels with the slow determination of cows at a salt lick. Rick and I head to Glitter Gulch, where the girls dance topless to trash-rock. For $1 tips, they grind with various degrees of enthusiasm, each failing to get a lap dance out of the young farmer to my right, who sits stock-still each time a silicone-inflamed mammary hits his nose. I chat up two Aussies who say they are part of a band called the Hoo Doo Gurus. When I them we're headed to see Gacy, they shout "Fair dinkum!" and I think: Because Gacy killed in the 1970s, I am sitting in a strip joint in Vegas in 1994. The, "If a butterfly flaps its wings in Beijing . . . ..." theory of chaos occurs to me, but this feels like an easy out. In the here and now: We are taking a piggyback ride on the backs of thirty-three dead boys, contributing to the cottage industry Gacy has become.
It's serial killers who make the banner headlines, who get our attention, sometimes for decades. Gacy languished fifteen years on death row, and his popularity only went up. He is the basis of books, of films; a 900 number gave listeners twenty minutes of Gacy proclaiming his innocence. He wrote 23,000 letters, painted more than 2,400 paintings. Rick owns four, including an unsettling clown-skull emboldened by the words "Live While You Live."
Whereas we won't let inside the proselytizing Jehovah's Witness, we opened the door to Gacy . . . … sort of. We don't want full-on confrontation; no one is going to pay to be locked in a basement with John Gacy. We want a peek, a holographic image just clear enough to simulate a sense of peril.
Gacy letter to Rick, February. 28th, 1993: "You asked how I spend my many hours, hell, there are days I don't have the time I need. I have to answer 85[j4] letters this week, plus do some 35 paintings I am working on since we had a show in Florida and thought we would do well but the response has been overwhelming . . . ..."
Riding out of Vegas in a whirl of dirt devils, I fill out the questionnaire Gacy has requested; apparently, he likes to know with whom he is dealing. Some of the questions are ironic ("Behind My Back Tthey Say . . ...." "Advice for Children"), some patent, like "Greatest Fear," to which I write, "That my daughter will be abducted." But I catch myself: Wwhat if Gacy is part of some underground network of psychopaths who do one another's bidding, and he calls someone in California, and they find out where I live?. It is irrational, but I double-cross- out my answer.
I ask Rick if he was ever scared of Gacy.
"Yeah, a little. Everything was cool until I got this call on my machine, an automated operator saying 'This is a collect call from Menard Correctional from—” Then I heard this voice say 'John Gacy.' And he kept calling, four times a day. It was really scary --- I'd been tracked down. But I figured, what the hell; I'm out here in Los Angeles, he can't do anything to me. It's funny, but speaking to him on the phone actually humanized him. Then, when I started having trouble with my girlfriend, it just seemed easier to talk to Gacy, a stranger, than to my friends. In one of my loneliest moments, he called. It was really weird, but also very comforting. That's when I decided: This guy has been nothing but good to me. Regardless of what he's done before, what he's been convicted of, I wanted to reciprocate. I wanted to visit him."
The inclination to imbue the incarcerated with special insight into our private lives is not uncommon. In northern California, Richard Ramirez ("The Night Stalker"), a murderer and Satanist who killed as many as thirty, is coveted by dozens of women. For them, the relationship with Ramirez proves ideal: they choose when to be accessible, they don't have sex with Ramirez; they fill in the blanks. In other words, they're in control, just as Rick is in control of his relationship with Gacy. After all, killers call collect.
Gacy letter to Rick, November. 14th, 1993: "I hope our conversation put things in a better light for you . . . ... but don't assume I have all the right answers, just giving you food for thought from my own experiences. But that's what friends are for, to share not only in the good times but when someone is down as well."
We pull into Albuquerque late, squatting at a University of New Mexico house for the night. The four inhabitants, young men in their mid-twenties, have an opinion on our destination. Safe in their daily lives as graduate students, fueled by too much Shaeffer and not enough sleep, they let us have it.
"If I was going to meet Gacy, I'd just piss in his face and tell him he was a wanker faggot piece of shit. If people want to get to know him, then they respect him. Kurt Cobain killed himself and nobody even remembers it. It depressed millions of people, and now it's over. But Gacy goes on. It's fucked."
"That America finds Gacy entertaining doesn't bother me at all. Anyway, I'm against the death penalty."
"How can you be against the death penalty? What if it was your kid he butt-fucked and killed? How can you have any compassion for this guy?"
"Hook him up to the monkey machines!"
I expect the yelling to escalate, maybe they will start breaking the furniture, but they don’t. They deflate.
"Well, maybe we're so down on the guy 'cause he did what we only think about doing."
"Hell, I'd probably be happier if I'd offed eight or ten people from my life."
The young men go silent, stewing in undigested feelings for a stranger who had the guts to do what they fantasize about. Serial killer as someone on whom to pin a grudging respect: overlook the act; glorify the actor.
Gacy letter, March 30, 1993: "80 % of what is known about me is fantasy and hype so as the greedy media can make money off this blood-thirsty society we live in . . . ... the people who are down on you for writing me ought to get a life as they haven't amounted to anything thus far."
Making that long trek through Texas, Rick talks about why he and Gacy kept it up.
"It was very entertaining. I wouldn't have kept writing him if it weren't. The letters became part of my weekly routine, and I thought, 'If I want him to play hardball, I'm going to have to play.' If I wanted more juicy or gruesome things…"
He wanted gruesome things?
"I thought I wanted anything, so I started share more personal stuff. I'm a musician, doing all kinds of crazy stuff, and he's a very social guy. He started to live vicariously through me. He's locked up --- what else can he do? We'd talk about sex, partying, I didn't mind. The more we talked, the more I thought he might come clean with me; that he might admit his crimes and that he enjoyed them. That was the optimum goal . . . ... to hear really perverse things."
Like rubbernecking on the highway, hoping the accident is really bad?
"Exactly. But Gacy hasn't cracked yet. I guess that's why people stay interested. Not admitting his guilt is the smartest thing he can do. It's good business."
We pull into tiny Shamrock, Texas in a driving rain, and run for the "Members Only" hotel -lounge, where the locals are eager to show off, including a drunk grandmother who hangs a moon and asks Rick to look at her “tattoo of a mouse."
"I don't see anything but your big white butt,” he says. “There's no mouse."
"That's 'cause my pussy eat it!"
The big-screen TV cuts in with CNN's coverage of the upcoming trial, whereby Gacy's lawyer will challenge the May 10 execution, saying it violates the Illinois state constitution guaranteeing each citizen "the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."
The bar patrons howl. They're absorbed by the process of Gacy, the footage of his capture, the legal entanglements; how “that that asshole is still alive shows just how screwed the legal system is." They take offense to him personally, and shout vituperative, boozy epithets at the television. The exception is a wallpaper-hanger on the barstool next to me, who hangs his head.
"This man is still a human being. He deserves to be understood. I guess people are fascinated because they're trying to understand what made him do it."
Understand, or be entertained? This month's brutal tragedy is next month's made-for-TV weeper. The NBA finals are interrupted by O.J.'s Bronco ride to nowhere. Both Jeffrey Dahmer's father and Gary Gilmore's brother have books out this year. Killers provide hours of media-feed, the frisson missing from our day-to-day lives, a target at which we aim our rage. Just tell us when to tune in.
Gacy letter to Rick, January 1. 1st, 1994: "The (execution) date of May 10th was set by the state, I guess as a Christmas present . . .... I am an embarrassment to the justice system, but I won't give up fighting . . ...."
We slide into Oklahoma, to the home of my in-laws, Native Americans who raise an eyebrow when I tell them where we're headed. ("You sure you gonna be comin' out of there in one piece?") They bring me to Bible Study at Okmulgee Baptist Indian Church, a clapboard house in the bottoms. The preacher speaks, in Creek, in English, about sin, about forgiveness. He welcomes me; the parishioners pray my road will be a straight one. I am asked to stand, to shake everyone's hand; I hold down the lump in my throat. I imagine people across America praying for Gacy's soul. My daughter’s uncle tells me, that's true, though another couple, real Bible-thumpers, tell me they believe in "an eye for an eye." With Jesus, all avenues are open.
Driving Interstate 40 through Missouri, pretty highway dotted with auto graveyards and buffalo-burger shacks, I ask Rick if he ever finds Gacy's clear culpability distressing.
"No. There was nothing I could do about that."
Not being able to do anything about the crimes means he can dismiss them?
“Oh, come on! We completely dismiss murder at this point as a ‘social problem.’ You turn on the TV, and some kid in South Central shoots some other kid. It's not even real anymore. You can't even take it seriously it's so redundant. I know what Gacy did, I'm aware of it and it's disgusting, of course, but that's not who I'm dealing with."
He admires him as a friend, rather than, as a killer.
"I guess. I think people relate to him because everyone would love to kill someone, and you almost admire the person who actually goes through with it. I'm passive by nature. Friends of mine do the macho thing --- tattoos and muscle cars and guns --- but I'm not violent, not confrontational. But it doesn't stop me from communicating with a killer, not at all."
Rick acknowledges it is the repellent nature of Gacy’s crimes that initially attracted him to the man, but not now. Now, he says, he feels more like a caretaker.
"Sometimes. I find myself defending the guy because everyone's so automatically down on him. It’s like, 'Gee, you hate a serial killer? What a stretch.' Maybe part of the reason I tell people he's a good guy is to justify my relationship to him, but he's honestly been very good to me, very kind. He's like your friend's dad who tells the dirty jokes."
Gacy letter to Rick, February. 26, 1994: "Big fucking deal, so you're getting laid. I know you don't want to be the bottom man, having it slipped between the tight hot buns until the sweat is beading all over your body and you chew a hole in the pillow when he is slamming it in and out and you're wondering why you waited so long to find out what good clean fun it can be and so exciting to feel your massive rock hard cock doing a number on the sheets as the clear precum surfaces just before you feel your balls drawn up to the point until your love muscle seems like a steel driven spike as you release spurt after spurt onto the sheet against your belly while your buns are experiencing the other dripping hard muscle expand going in and out until you feel that warm creamy load explode inside you and you feel like you never had before. Well, now that I have your attention, ha ha . . . ..."
The oldies station plays a medley of "Johnny Angel" and "You're the Devil in Disguise" as we speed over the Mississippi River into Chester, Illinois. Braced atop the cliffs is Menard Correctional Center, impregnable and almost beautiful on a full moon night. Windows of light stare like so many yellow eyes. I am mesmerized. The man responsible for so much misery and terror waits inside for us.
The following morning Rick and I make our way to the prison, an imposing brick fortress surrounded by a triple -wall of razor wire. A musical moaning comes from the windows. After we are buzzed in with a stunning jolt, a thickset prison matron asks for ID and tells us to fill out forms. Four intercom calls later, we're told Gacy's used up his visits for the month; that our names are not on the list; that because Gacy's being executed within the month he cannot receive visitors; that only members of the immediate family are being allowed in; that Gacy is allowed another round of visitors starting on the first of the month, three days away. We can visit then -- —if they don't move him up to Joliet during that time. No guarantees. We sense she'd like to slam the big iron door in our faces and backpedal without protest.
Rick sees the irony of the situation.
"Saying we're friends of Gacy's and would like to see the guy before he's killed must be hilarious to the guards. Like they're gonna give Gacy what he wants. They're probably thinking, ‘'Wwe're almost rid of this asshole. Fuck him.’ '."
"You folks ain't from around here." The waitress at the local diner pours us coffee. We figure we'll play it cool in a town as small as Chester (pop. 6,000), and tell her we're in town to do a story on Gacy, but not Rick's intimate relationship with the killer. The fry-cook ambles from the kitchen when he hears Gacy's name.
"When's he gonna get it, May 10? I'm gonna have a special that day, 'fried goose'. Haw!"
The waitress nods.
"Citizens paid to put up a sign years ago, when Gacy was first gonna get burned, sayin' 'It'll be a hot day in January when Gacy fries!'"
Customers are enthusiastic when speaking about Gacy. This one's sister used to take him his medication ("I don't know what fer, probably so he could sleep at night"), that one knows “for a fact” that Gacy , "don't do his own paintings." All gripe about the high cost of keeping him alive.
"Those are our tax dollars keeping that man breathing. I say they shoulda killed him the day they caught him. And good riddance."
There are two bars in Chester. We choose Molly's Moon, the kind of bar where when I ask where I can get a nice plate of pasta, I'm directed to a place that serves a nice plate of possum. We drink cheap cocktails and listen to tales of Menard's most notorious prisoner. Eighty-four- year-old man-about-town Gus hits us with his best Gacy story.
"Gacy flew a young woman out here from back East. She was pretty and kinda loud, bragging about how Gacy was payin' for her hotel and everything. Well, she got real drunk, and started shaking around. So she comes up to me, tellin' how she's gonna see Gacy, and I says to her, 'I wouldn't be on so much 'bout Gacy. We here in Chester think he shoulda been burnt a long time ago.' We never did see her again."
My barstool neighbor is a major at Menard Correctional. His shoulder occasionally bumps mine. It feels like a cinderblock.
"Been there fifteen years, seen when they brought Gacy in, through the back way, all the media out front. He's a model prisoner; most death-row inmates are. I guess people are fascinated because it's weird, but at the same time, it's real."
Another slug of beer, and the major's hand travels to my thigh. "If Gacy don't get fried, they oughta get rid of the death penalty. Sometimes it gets me really angry."
He's got a death-lock on my knee just as an auto parts salesman joins in the conversation.
"Yeah, it's really bad they're gonna take Gacy up to Joliet, after these guards here put up with him all these years. They ought to put Gacy in the prison yard and give every one of those men who had to deal with him one round."
I jerk loose. The major doesn't react as he turns back to his beer.
There are tornado-watch winds outside. They whistle, and then it booms. We have a lightning storm. For hours the skies north of the Mississippi flash, illuminating the prison on the hill in electric white.
We drive to St. Louis, to a club where we by chance meet another of Gacy's regular correspondents. Chuck has been writing Gacy for a year, though isn't quite sure why.
"I was fascinated with the guy, fascinated and disgusted. Sick as it is, I thought it was cool to write him. Look, I don't have any respect for what's he's done, but I dig talking with him. We mostly talk about the Chicago Bears, and Kentucky Fried Chicken [where Gacy was a "Colonel" in the early 1960s]. I own one of his paintings, and I did an article about him in the fanzine I publish. But really, I don't know why I write him."
Chuck's buddy is drunk, and disgusted by the lot of us.
"You're all full of shit, writing about this. People are so fucking bored that they'll read this Gacy crap. It's all about selling magazines. It's wrong. It's fucking wrong."
I ask, if he had five minutes to wait in a dentist's office, and Time magazine had articles on health care, Haiti and Gacy, which would he read? He says he would read about Gacy, but blames that on the media.
"It's all a fucking business, making money on people's misery."
Gacy sells because most people have the same low opinion of the guy. He's the great unifier; we cover our collective mouth at the stench of thirty-three kids murdered. We choke on and then regurgitate the carnage in an effort to inspect the great unknown: death. Like animals sniffing at offal, getting a whiff of what's ahead.
Passing back over the Mississippi's choppy current, my gut gets tight. Rick is likewise nervous as we climb up the hill to the prison. It's dawning on him he's not going to meet just Gacy "the friend," but Gacy the killer, in a killer's house. All week, Rick's subjectivity has been challenged. Gacy's crimes, like bloody flags, have been waved before us again and again.
And again, we are denied access. This time, it is Gacy's call: he's got relatives there, and will not bump them to see us. Leaving the prison, I ask Rick whether he Gacy is manipulating him, something he has proved pretty good at. Rick chews on this.
"No. I don't believe he'd have me come all this way just to fuck with me."
"Hey! I heard they're moving Gacy to Joliet tonight at midnight!" the bartender in Molly's Moon shouts. A cheer goes up. Chester's population is unified in wanting to “see Gacy burn." There's a party planned for May 10; T-shirts have been printed. I sense a mob mentality, and realize this is the flipside to Gacy's celebrity: After we've examined his crimes, we want to be involved in his demise. John Wayne Gacy: scrutinized, patronized, and obliterated. Evil incarnate given a purgatorial punt.
We get to the prison the next morning my seven. Things look like they will go smoothly until the arrival of a flash trio, two heavily made-up and obese women and a man who reminds me of Mephistopheles, overdressed and dandified and with a pointy Van Dyke. They have come to see Gacy and another death row inmate named John P. They have been here before; they write letters and accept collect calls and fly in monthly. They are, we realize, death row groupies. It's decided Rick and I will see Gacy, while the trio hang with John P. in the adjoining visitors’ room.
“And we can kinda go back and forth. Hey, both are good guys. I know what they've supposedly done, but we've found evidence that supports each man's innocence," says the man, who says he's a lawyer. The women, who are "hair designers," dig the physical attention they get from appreciative inmates.
"John P. spends all day working out with weights. He's got a build that's like 'Wow!'” says the one with the black bouffant. “Last time I was here, I sat on his lap and, ya know, gave ‘it’ a squeeze, just so I'd know what I was dealing with!"
She laughs, her two- hundred- pound-plus frame shimmying braless beneath a completely transparent mesh top.
"Hey, better to be looked over than overlooked, right? Come on, I'll show you how this is done."
The five of us go through the routine: leave all belongings, frisk-down, buzz through the main gate into the prison itself. There's yelling coming from the windows, catcalls for the woman in the mesh -top. She waves at faces she cannot see, acknowledging her captive audience. After tossing ten bucks into vending machines ("Get Gacy sweets --- he likes candy"), we are ushered up a narrow winding stairwell with walls of stone, which are wet. There is clanging from all parts of the prison --- keys, locks; steel- toed boots. There is shouting from prisoners we cannot see, angry voices, pleading voices. For the first time, I feel anxious. The walls of the stairwell are very close, and I think, what if this isolation was your life? There is a quickening in my ribcage. It feels like a hummingbird trying to get out.
We enter the visitors’ area, six rooms lining a tiny hallway. Gacy is not there, but John P. is. A big Italian imprisoned for a contract killing, he flirts loudly, first with the woman in the mesh -top ("Baby, those aren't tits, they're rafts!"), then with me, taking my hand in his cuffed hands, saying Gacy is a lucky man to have "such a beautiful visitor."
Rick and I wait in our eight-by-eight-foot room. There are three chairs, a trash bin and a can for butts. No guards, no bars. It does not seem like the venue in which to meet a serial killer. I do not speak. I am conjuring the man about to enter, and in my mind he is nine feet tall and raging; there is no rationalizing with him. Were the circumstances different, there would be no one to hear, no one to help. The hummingbird is bashing itself to bits as I hear a lock give, a shuffling of feet, a heavy breath . . . ...
John Wayne Gacy --- squat, gray, about as imposing as your dry cleaner --- enters carrying two packs of Pyramid -brand cigarettes. He apologizes for his handcuffs, explaining they're "just one more way the prison system chooses to humiliate people." Rick is up and half-embracing Gacy when the prisoner takes my hand.
"I'm really sorry you kids had so much trouble getting in. Hey, I brought you some smokes; they make 'em here in the prison. So, Rick, you finally made it. Stayin' out of trouble, working hard? I'm a workaholic; only sleep about three hours a night. 'Course, nobody knows that. The media paints a picture of me as a devil with blood coming from my mouth . . ...."
Without the creepy music, the chilling intro, Gacy is a fat man in drab prison clothing. Still, there is a nervous flutter as I remind myself what he's capable of. Only right now, he's goofing off, pantomiming horns and a tongue dripping with blood.
"Do I look like a monster to you?"
Lighting our cigarettes and buying us sodas, Gacy looks like the popular Midwestern contractor he once was. That was the way he lured his victims: he was a regular guy, a Charlie Vanilla with a bawdy sense of humor and a big appetite for life.
"Did I tell you that Geraldo's wife visited me, wanted me to go on his show? I told her, 'The only way your husband can interview me is if he gets on his knees and talks into my mic.' Yeah, Geraldo's a phony. I can spot phonies a mile off. They go to a gallery in Beverly Hills and spend twenty thousand dollars on a painting of mine, when they could write my nephew and get one for two hundred. Everybody wants a piece of me, but nobody wants to admit it. I got a lot of famous people who own my work. Oliver Stone, Robert DeNiro, Robin Williams, John Waters, Johnny Depp. Oh, he's such a little faggot. When they asked him about the painting he bought, he talked about how 'eerie and creepy' it was; that the clown's eyes 'followed him around the room.’'. What a phony."
Gacy orders us two prison lunches. The guard enters with the trays, and asks Gacy what he wants for his last meal. Gacy says he doesn't want to think about that, then smiles and shouts into the next room.
"I want John P., with an apple in his mouth!"
"You wish!" the hit man calls back.
As I wolf down Menard McNuggets, it occurs to me Gacy might be jealous I've come along. He doesn't get Rick all to himself. Or maybe that's not the point. Maybe it's an audience he wants, any audience. He engages in a form of manly flirtation, guffawing as he asks if Rick wants to be his "bunk boy"; tells me "the tongue is the most sensual part of the body." Every line sounds scripted. It's a taping of “The Gacy Show,” and the master of ceremonies has us where he wants us. Mid-chew, I notice Gacy staring at me.
"I think Rick's a very sentimental guy, don't you? He's always been very open, very honest. And I've been that way with him. Hey, I never denied that I was bisexual. The media's been all over that, saying I was gay. My preference is women, but I never turned down an opportunity. What about you, Nancy, have you ever been with another girl? How did it happen? You can tell me . . . ..."
Gacy asks as if it's the most natural request in the world,; as if I should see the benefits of having him --- wiser, older, more experienced --- as a confidant. Gacy as nasty father figure; he wants it hard and he wants it now, May 10 is but a week away. So we talk sex, what extremes we've flirted with, what we would and would not do. In the end, Gacy has a longer laundry list than either Rick or me.
"To me, nothing is taboo. As long as you don't force yourself on anybody, it's okay. My first wife and I, we were swingers, but my second wife, she was confused. When I told her I was bisexual, she just didn't get it. We'd go to the bowling alley, and she'd point to a guy and ask, 'Do you like that one?' And I'd say, 'Carol, it don't work that way.' What can I say? I never refused a blowjob. I'm very open-minded. I feel very fatherly toward the kids I write. I take a genuine interest in their lives. I've had kids write to me who wanted to commit suicide, and I've talked four of them out of it. I lost one, though."
Gacy looks down, as though this genuinely grieves him. The crocodile tears I anticipate do not come.
"I used to work as a clown, you know, 'cause I loved making little kids laugh. The media got a good sound bite out of it, 'cause I said, 'Clowns get away with murder.' I'd said that in the context of how everyone lets a clown do whatever they want. I'd be walking in a parade, wearing my clown outfit, and I could do anything. I could go up and pinch some guy's wife's tits, and he'd say, 'Hey, isn't that funny --- the clown pinched her tits!' That's why I said clowns get away with murder."
When Gacy leaves the room for a phone call, I ask Rick in a whisper what he thinks.
"He seems like such a nice guy, but also slick."
Is he scared?
"Sort of. One minute, I think, 'This is it? This is John Gacy?' But then I think, 'Any minute now, he could take his pen and reach over and stab me in the eye and then kill you, all before the guards could get in here . . . ...' "
Fabricating fear keeps it titillating; a tiny trill goes up my spine as Gacy re-enters.
"Sorry, kids, that was my lawyer. He thinks we might get the stay of execution. I'm keeping a positive attitude."
Gacy goes on to speak about his children ("My son was fourteen when I was arrested, and it really did a number on him"), his alibis ("Three of the killings they say I did, I wasn't even in town when they happened!"), his position as favorite flogging-boy ("They asked me if I wanted to file an Executive appeal with the Governor. After the way he's used me as a political football? I told him he can kiss my ass!"). He opens an enormous leather-bound book and shows us his meticulous lists: daily schedules, what he's eaten, with whom he's corresponded. There are legal documents, including one that claims execution by lethal injection is "unusually cruel.”
As the visit stretches over five hours, I get spacey. But Gacy does not weary; on the contrary, he's gaining momentum, pushing harder. The party-guy, the three-time Jaycee 'Man of the Year' is on the podium, and he's not going to squander it, not at this juncture. He is ravenous to communicate, to verbally get his nut.
"Ask anything you want. I'm not ashamed of anything I've ever done."
He is goading us to ask questions that have been asked a thousand times before, wanting to reiterate the patent alibis ("My employees had keys to my house. Like I told the cops, these people could've put those bodies there!"). But I can see that Rick, initially enamored of Gacy's crimes but eventually adopting him as a friend, is a little freaked, a little exhausted. He will not take a dip in the bloodbath.
"Okay, John, if you got out tomorrow, where would you go?"
"Not Disneyland."
Humor from the clown, but it's rehearsed; I can hear it.
"How do you feel about the May 10 deadline?"
Silence. Gacy bites into the Ho-Ho we've brought him.
"Well, there's no point in being negative, right? You know the Serenity quote? Well, I say a little different: 'God grant me the strength to change the things I can, to accept the things I cannot --- and fuck the rest.'"
Gacy chuckles, but his eyes are losing focus, his conversation growing rhetorical.
"You know, they accuse me of killing all these boys, young guys from, what, twenty-five to fifteen or fourteen? Now why would I do that? I had all the sex I needed, I didn't need to kill nobody for it."
With his cuffed hands, Gacy sketches a picture on a matchbook.
"You know, I used to give these big dinners for the Elks, hundreds of people. I love people. I love kids. I remember when I was working at a hospital as Pogo the Clown. I walked into this room, and this boy was in traction. He’d been hit by a car, and he was just lying there, his mom at his side. So I come in and start joking with him, pretending I'm gonna fool with his apparatus, and the kid smiles. I look over, and his mom's crying. I apologize, thinking maybe I offended her or something. But she says, 'No, it's just that's the first time he's smiled in ten days.' I tell you, I went down the hall with tears in my eyes, I just felt so good."
He slides over the matchbook with the doodle. It’s Hitler in profile.
"Here, Rick, for you."
I look at Gacy, trying to marry the man with the monster, the social creature with the sociopath. This gregarious contractor from Illinois has directly destroyed thousands of lives, indirectly influenced millions more. And he is still reaching out. And we are reaching back. Rick toys with a silver saint’s medal hanging from a chain around his neck.
"John? Can I give you this?"
Gacy leans in close.
"Well, I'll tell ya, they've got a video -camera trained on us, and they won't allow it. Maybe you can sneak it to me in the hall. Hey, let's get some pictures."
A guard snaps off six Polaroids, Gacy smiling like he is at a convention. He pulls out some photos of himself as a clown, signing them to Rick and me, and one for my four-year- old daughter ("As you go through life . . . ... 'Smile,' from Patches the Clown, a.k.a. John Wayne Gacy").
"Two o'clock - let's go!" a guard yells from the hall.
I see Rick intent on slipping Gacy the medal, but as we say what will surely be our final goodbye, Gacy's eyes are down the hall. For all his talk about "honest and open," the man has tossed the mask, the one that says he cares about you, really. He has slammed the door, there is no real way in. As if we would take it if there were.
"I got an appeal coming up this week. I'm keeping a positive attitude."
We cannot make eye contact.
Rick keeps his medal.
Passing over the muddy Mississippi for the last time, Rick and I are dazed, and drive fifteen minutes before we realize a cop is trying to pull us over. We don't tell him where we've been, that we are late for a plane; we have already missed it. Rick drives slower. I ask if Gacy was what he expected.
"Not really. He was kind of on autopilot. When you're on the phone, you can't see his eyes; in person, you see it's rehearsed, it's an act. He doesn't spill anything he doesn't want to spill."
Did he get what he wanted?
"Yes and no. I had wanted him to like me, and I think he really did. When he showed us that phone list, and I was number seven out of three hundred? That made me feel special. But I also wanted him to trust me, to be the one he'd share exclusive things with. And that didn't happen. Still, the best part of the relationship was coming out here and seeing him.”
Why the best part?
“I have something really valuable that no one can buy, that no one can take away. I have the memory of meeting him."
I look at Rick. He has specks of black dirt across his cheekbones, streaks of it on his neck. I smell like B.O. We are too tired to talk.
"It's odd,” Rick says as swing into the airport. “Closing this Gacy thing was the reason for coming, but meeting him also made me realize I've been wasting a lot of time the past few years. I don't want to do that anymore. It seems like this is the end of a chapter of my life. And Gacy was the marker."
Serial killer as catalyst, as vital guide, "Live While You Live."
Gacy letter to Rick, February. 26, 1994: "Hey, life is an adventure, and when we close our eyes to it, we are the ones who lose out . . . ... anyone can talk, what you have to do is experience it, then decide . . . ..."
Back in Los Angeles, everyone wants to know: Was he scary? Was it great? Have we got a spare autograph, a drop of his blood? They don't want to hear that the man was pleasant if prurient, more unsettling than scary. They want the savage, the tabloid-rendition. They want to smell the blood.
Rick and I and the rest of America tune in early for the May 10 execution. The network news shows college kids waving "Gacy's Gonna Fry!" signs behind Citizens Against the Death Penalty. CNN reports Gacy is "in denial.” The local channel plays To Catch a Killer, a cheesy Canadian production of Gacy's life and crimes.
We cruise the channels, stopping at an interview with "a Hollywood director and producer who wishes to remain anonymous." The blackened form speaks with a lisp and explains he wrote Gacy to "get into the mind of a serial killer, as research for my next film." He corresponded just long enough to buy a painting of Gacy's, then immediately stopped writing. But "Gacy somehow got my phone number, so I changed it. I had no interest in speaking with him." He's now interested in selling Gacy's artwork to the highest bidder.
It's 10:01 when they break into scheduled programming: we're "Live!" outside Joliet. The execution is underway; the three drugs, delivered intravenously, ought to kill Gacy in about twenty minutes. They will, we are told, break in with a report when it is over. At 10:30, there is still is no word. Eleven, and still nothing, and I think, maybe Gacy is simply refusing to die; his hold is that powerful. At 11:20, the deed is done. Gacy is gone.
Rick changes channels.
"I heard on Howard Stern today how some guy bought $7300 worth of Gacy's paintings, and burnt them, to set an example for parents. If that's how he wants to deal with the man, that's fine. I did what I set out to do. I met him, said goodbye; finished what I started. It's over."
Of course, it's not over. For weeks, I have the lurking sense that Gacy is not really dead. That by executing him we have not eliminated him. His legacy will endure because, after all, isn't that what we've been sucking on for the past fifteen years? Not the real -deal, but a facsimile. (Picture Jeffrey Dahmer slack-jawed in the courtroom, Charles Manson babbling for clemency, pathetic placeboes of their former selves.)
I came face-to-face with Gacy and was not introduced to this human being's phenomenal capacity for cruelty. Evil did not open its door. That is not its nature. True evil germinates in dark isolation, not the alchemic light of the media. By the time I got to Gacy, he'd been converted to a caricature, a clown playing one last show for an audience crowing for the finale, and the next act.
Just tell us when to tune in. If we can name our enemy, we can hate him, and participate in his defeat. All we ask is a chance to stand near the pyre as the paper image we spend so much time creating explodes in a furious wall of flame.
