Free Buried Dreams by Tim Cahill Page A

the idea still bothered him.
    Bad dreams, and who could you go to? Where could you talk about the thing that bothered you the most? Whine to your buddies and let it get around that you’re about half queer? Wouldn’t the Old Man love that. Ask the priest? Sure, right in the middle of confession when Father so-and-so’s getting a bid on weather stripping the sacristy. “We could do it for less than eighty-five dollars, and what does it mean when you want to hug your best friend and he’s a boy?” No, those thoughts were little secrets, something best kept to John Gacy and no one else.
    Except the Old Man knew!
    He never said anything, but he had a way of looking at you like he could see right through you. Come home from a date, the Old Man’s still up. Sit down and tell him how you scored with some broad. No smile, no wink. The Old Man just looked at you. Because he knew you didn’t score at all. So you’d make up some details talking to your father man to man, and he’d just stare, no emotion, cold as ice.
    John figured that sexually he was a late bloomer because he was all of eighteen before he really did “score with some broad.”

    Just like there was this one time he was parked with a broad: they were necking in John’s car, really getting somewhere, and John got her blouse off, then her skirt, and she was naked right there in the car, and it was all going to happen.
    The next thing John knew, she was all dressed again, and his head ached because he’d passed out, just slumped over on the seat, unconscious for he didn’t know how long, with this naked broad probably getting all hysterical next to him.
    And the Old Man thought he was lying for some reason. “You don’t just pass out,” he said. “You hadda be doing something, wrestling, horsing around.”
    John told him exactly what he was doing, because they were arguing again, hollering at one another. The Old Man screamed that John wasn’t really sick, that he “faked” passing out, that he “faked” heart problems so that he could skip school, draw attention to himself, avoid situations that scared him. But John had learned to argue from a master, and he turned the whole thing around on his father. “If I pass out to get attention, why would I pass out when something good is going on?” Reversing the Old Man right there. “Why would I fake passing out when I’m just about to score with this broad? Go on, answer that.”
    The Old Man just stared at him, disappointed, the bleary, drinker’s eyes icy with unvoiced suspicions.
    Years later, after John was charged with the murder of thirty-three boys and young men, Marion Gacy told police that her husband absolutely despised homosexuals. If John Stanley Gacy thought his son was a homosexual, Ma said, “I think he would have killed him.”
    It was his fourth high school in as many years, another vocational school, where he had to work with machines. The administration was worried about John’s health. What if he passed out, fell into the teeth of some grinding machine? Ma couldn’t get him into any other high school, and the military took one look at his medical records and classified him 4F.
    John was nineteen, unable to finish high school, and all he had was his car. The car and Civil Defense work with the flashing blue light.
    It wasn’t even his car. The year before, the Old Man had bought it for him. John had enough money of his own to buy a used vehicle, but the Old Man wouldn’t hear of it. “Whybuy someone else’s problems? Get a new car, you know it’ll be right.”
    So the car was in his Old Man’s name. John was paying him off monthly. This was, John came to realize, pretty dumb and stupid, because the Old Man had the final say about how “his” car was to be used. John Stanley would just take away the keys, refuse to let John drive anywhere until the boy did as he was told. The Old Man had outsmarted John, with money.
    John Stanley was a good provider, but he was careful