Buried Dreams by Tim Cahill Page B

case anybody wanted a conflict with him.”
    There was no protecting John from the Old Man, though. When the boys were fifteen and sixteen, Dalke saw John Stanley Gacy swing at his son on several occasions. “I can remember once being at the house when his dad came upfrom the basement, started swinging and yelling at him, and his mother stepped in, tried to protect him. John would never strike his father. He always just put up his hands and tried to protect himself.”
    Dalke recalled that there was no provocation at all. When it happened, he said, “We were usually sitting around talking or just coming into the house.”
    It was like a contest of wills between John and his father. Was the boy really sick, or was he looking for sympathy? In 1957, at the age of fifteen, John had his tonsils out. You couldn’t argue with that one. But when he complained of a severe stomach ache and the doctors could find nothing wrong, the Old Man thought he’d scored a point for his side. Except that John’s appendix was placed oddly, back behind the spleen or something. The doctors made a mistake, and when John was in so much pain that Ma finally took him back to the hospital, the appendix had burst and the boy very nearly died. Because the Old Man thought he was faking.
    That was one John won.
    A year later, in August, the Old Man scored big.
    John’s sister Karen thinks it started when “he and dad had an argument. It was something over the car. John walked out. Dad held back the car on him. It was like a punishment. If you don’t do things my way, I’ll take the keys.”
    Later that night, John was playing cards with Richard Dalke and Ken Dunkle in Bill Lambert’s basement. The boys had each drunk a beer or two. Richard Dalke remembers that John passed out, fell on the floor. “We called the fire department again and they came to take care of him. We thought he was having a severe heart attack, and somebody called one of the priests from the nearby church.”
    Marion Gacy was notified, and she arrived just as the priest was giving her son the last rites. “I wanted to get him to the hospital,” Marion Gacy recalled, “so I took an ambulance over to Northwest Hospital.” John was there for three weeks until the Old Man came to sign him out.
    Back at home, John passed out again. “I found him laying on the floor, in the bedroom,” Marion Gacy said, “and when the doctor came he was going to give him a shot to bring him to. He said that John had like an epileptic fit. And John began fighting and kicked him. Fighting and kicking just like a madman. My husband came in and held him down, andthe doctor gave John a shot. Then they put him—we had to get him to a hospital and put him in a straitjacket.”
    At Norwegian American Hospital, extensive tests were administered. The Old Man would visit once in a while, just sit in the bedside chair, silent, suspicious. After a month in the hospital, a doctor took Marion Gacy aside and suggested that her son be sent to Cook County Hospital for psychiatric evaluation.
    The Old Man loved that. It was a kind of proof to him that John was never sick at all, that it was all in his head. And John begged his mother, “Don’t send me to the psychiatrist ward, I’ll be good.” Like you can promise not to pass out.
    Those were a few of the bigger battles in what amounted to a six-year war. As John got older, the issues at stake expanded. Years later, John would say that the Old Man had a way of looking at him, a cold, dark glare beyond disappointment or even disgust, a way of staring at his son as if the boy was beneath contempt. As if he could see into John’s soul and there were crawling, slimy things in there; as if he knew something about his son that John himself didn’t know.
    John had another seizure, a kind of epileptic fit in a bowling alley called the Fireside Lanes. He kicked one of his friends in the neck and broke the boy’s glasses. The paramedics had to strap John down to a