Buried Dreams Read Online Free PDF Page A

split the block. Streetlights but no sidewalks. Summer evenings and Ma’s rule: “Be home when the streetlights come on.”
    Fragmented images: caught picking corn in the neighbor’s garden and Mrs. Kranz—was that her name?—dragging the kids home to the Old Man. Wasn’t she the one with the pigeon coop? And the Polack—you could call him the Polack if you were Polish, too—the Polack with his chickens and turkeys. The turkeys so dumb you could put their heads under their wings, rock them in your hands, and put them to sleep in the middle of the day; just standing by the fence, youcould set them all to gobbling, that strange, strangled sound of outraged poultry, and the Polack would come bursting out the back door and you could hardly hear him hollering for the sound of the angry turkeys. The Greek whose goats ran free, always in the backyard, raiding the grapes that grew there.
    A big fort the kids built in the prairie, half underground, all scrap lumber and tar paper. Summer evenings catching fireflies in a bottle—all the kids screaming and laughing—so there would be lights in the clubhouse.
    A first train ride to Springfield, to visit an aunt and uncle. John was four and the train is one of his first coherent memories. But later there is a story told about him walking out the front door and wandering down a city street, naked as a jaybird, innocent as only a very young child can be. All the adults running and laughing, catching up to him, carrying him back to the house, dressing him. A funny incident: but did he really remember it, or had his mother just told him the story? John couldn’t be sure.
    There was some joke the adults had about his birthday: the boy a middle child, between JoAnne, twenty-eight months older, and Karen, twenty-eight months younger. He was born in Chicago’s Edgewater Hospital, the only son of a Polish father, himself the son of immigrants; and the boy, John Wayne Gacy, Jr., was born on St. Patrick’s Day, March 17, 1942. A bright green Polack, his father’s son, anxious to please, hungry for praise, but never quite good enough for the Old Man.
    Dad worked all day, coming home to fix anything in the house—the wiring, the plastering, everything—a perfectionist who made his own tools and was never satisfied, not with his work, not with the kids, especially not with his son. John Stanley Gacy was heavy on the razor strop he kept hanging on a nail, as an educational device:
    “I’ll teach you to steal corn.”
    JoAnne, the eldest, an idol, collecting all those garden snakes from under the front porch and bringing them in the house, the snakes slithering under the stove and the icebox, under the sofas and chairs. Dad taking the razor strop to JoAnne. “I’ll teach you to bring snakes into the house.”
    Karen, the tag-along little sister, toddling after John and JoAnne. Good times. All three of the kids sharing John’s model train set: a circular track, a big model gas station in themiddle that pumped water instead of gas into the model cars, the Packards and the Buicks and the Hudsons.
    A tree house built in an empty lot, and that summer the trucks and grading equipment coming in, the workers looking up at the tree house and the little boy sitting on a limb with tears in his eyes. The tree would have to come down, but the workmen saved that job for last. John coming every day to his house, sitting alone in the tree, waiting stoically for the tragedy that would destroy his entire life. The whole story funny now, but in a bittersweet sort of way.
    So much interest in building: the fort in the prairie, another by the coalyard, another in the backyard, this one right over the septic tank, built with a brick foundation and everything. The Old Man finally putting his foot down: “One house on one lot is enough.” The razor strop hanging on the nail, and the Old Man ready to teach him about the symmetry of houses and lots.
    “I’ll teach you . . .”
    Another playhouse, this one