Free Buried Dreams by Tim Cahill Page B

with the money he made. The kids never had more than one pair of shoes. “You can only wear one pair at a time,” John Stanley said. “Why would you need two pairs?”
    It made hard sense, but as John got older, he saw how the Old Man used money as a club. His mother hadn’t left the Opal Street house when the Old Man busted her in the face because she couldn’t support herself and the three kids.
    In the late 1940s, the Old Man gave Ma thirty dollars a week for household expenses. She was supposed to buy food and clothes for the kids out of that. Thirty dollars might have been enough then, but in the late 1950s, the weekly allowance wouldn’t cover both food and clothes. The Old Man saw no reason to shell out any more. They could get by on thirty dollars, just as they always had. John remembered Ma buying good, clean clothes at the thrift shops. She was incredible at making the money last, and the Gacy family was never in debt. Finally, Ma had to take a job herself to make ends meet.
    Of course, there were no luxuries, no meals out, none of that. Ma said restaurants were “a foolish waste. You can eat for a week on what you spend in one night at a restaurant.” Half the fights at the dinner table, if they weren’t about being sick, were about money. Having your own money meant you didn’t have to take so much shit off the Old Man. “Consequently,” John said, “my sisters and I are real skinflints to this day.”
    John bought himself an extra set of keys after some argument and drove the car even though the Old Man had denied it to him. He thought he had outsmarted the Old Man, but the next time, John Stanley just went under the hood and pulled the distributor cap, outsmarting John, who was so dumb and stupid he didn’t even know you could go down to the auto parts store and buy a new one.

    John was twenty then, and the Old Man kept the distributor cap for three days. It made John sick, physically sick, affecting his heart in such a way that he had to stay home from work, too ill to take a bus. That day, the day the Old Man put the distributor cap back, Ma called John from her job. She felt nauseous and wanted to know if John was well enough to drive down and pick her up. John could have been dying, he would have gone to get Ma. When they arrived at the house on Marmora, John said, “Ma, I better get some air in the tires.”
    Marion Gacy waited for her son, but “he never came back. He was gone for three months. I had them looking for his car and the police called me at work and nobody knew where he was until I got a medical bill from the White Cross Insurance Company.”
    The bill was from Las Vegas, Nevada. Marion Gacy called the hospital, to find her son was paying off the balance of his medical bill by working at the Palm Mortuary. He had started with the mortuary’s ambulance service, but when they found that he wasn’t yet twenty-one—not yet eligible for that sort of work in Clark County—he was transferred to the mortuary proper, where he worked as an attendant. John told Marion Gacy that he was living in the mortuary, sleeping on a cot behind the embalming room.
    Years later, George Wycoski, manager of the Palm Mortuary, told police that John Gacy helped unload the ambulances but that he couldn’t have had much contact with the bodies.
    “I always say I ran away from home,” John said, “but I was twenty at the time, old enough to be out on my own.” Still, it seemed like running away, it sure felt like running away, and the reason it did, John theorized, was that he still owed the Old Man money on the car. He had outsmarted John Stanley with distance.
    Working with the ambulance service, speeding through traffic with the lights flashing and the siren blaring, had almost been fun. And it was enlightening. You could learn shit. Like people lose control of their sphincters, sometimes even their bowels, when they die. Some poor guy has a heart attack in his room at some hotel on the Strip, you