Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto

  This is probably because serial killing is the most modern of high crimes, even though it’s not new in any official sense (Jack the Ripper’s 1888 London spree is the most obvious proof of this, but there are certainly others). The metaphoric newness of serial killing has nothing to do with chronology; it has to do with its meaning. At least culturally, there is something accelerated about the notion of killing strangers for no valid reason. It’s one of those nightmare situations we collectively try to rationalize into nonexistence, almost as if it’s entirely fictional. And most of the time, that rationalization makes sense: If a man is trying to kill you, his reasons—though flawed—are still usually within the scope of explanation; perhaps he wants to shoot you because you’re sleeping with his wife (or perhaps he just thinks you are, which is just as bad). If someone is trying to break into your house after midnight, he probably has a clear motive; he probably needs money to buy crack or crystal meth or Wonder Bread. Most American crime is no random accident. I suppose nobody deserves to die, but it certainly seems like most people in America who get murdered have put themselves in a position where getting shot or stabbed is not an unthinkable consequence; their lifestyle dictates a certain degree of risk. However, that’s not the case with serial killer victims. I realize serial killers tend to ice prostitutes more often than anyone else, but they’re not killing them because they’re prostitutes; it’s not like serial killers are sexual moralists.1 Hookers are simply easier to kill (no one notices when they disappear). If given the choice, the typical serial killer would just as soon shoot a dental assistant. In fact, he’d just as soon shoot someone like you, and maybe someday he will. This is why serial killing strikes me as such a modern act: It validates the seemingly irrational fear that someone you’ve never met before will just decide to capriciously end your life. It’s not figuratively senseless (like a gangland killing, which is stupid but still explicable), it’s literally senseless (inasmuch as there’s no connection between the two involved parties and no benefit to the assailant, beyond giving him the opportunity to masturbate on—or into—a corpse).

  My obsession with serial killers began when I was ten years old. My fourth-grade teacher told our class that we should never hitchhike, because the only people who picked up hitchhikers were perverted serial killers. This advice was complicated by what my fifth-grade teacher told us the following year; she said that we would all have driver’s licenses in a few years, and the one rule we always needed to remember was never to pick up hitchhikers. This was because all hitchhikers were serial killers. According to what I learned in public school, every person on every freeway was trolling for destruction. I used to imagine nomadic, sadistic drifters thumbing rides with bloodthirsty Volkswagen owners, both desperately waiting for the first opportunity to kill each other. Hitchhiking seemed like an ultraviolent race against time.

  Keeping this threat in mind, I began casually studying serial killers in my spare time, mostly through TV documentaries on PBS and British books with comical names like The Mammoth Book of Murder and The Mammoth Book of Killer Women. Due to my age (and my interest in the band W.A.S.P.), I suspect part of me was intrigued by the necrophilia gruesomeness of the police reports. However, what I found more fascinating were the skewed details about the killers’ lives, all of which seemed more original and more clichéd than anything I experienced through literature or film. It didn’t “almost” seem funny; it seemed completely funny, pretty much all the time. I will never forget the 1985 arrest of Richard Ramirez, the infamous California “Night Stalker.” At one point in his court hearing, Ramirez held up his hand with a pentagram scrawled on the palm and hissed the word “Evil!” My cousin Greg and I were twelve when this happened, and we saw this particular image on television while attending a weeklong Catholic retreat that was hosted by local nuns. For the whole week, we drew pentagrams on our paws with ballpoint pens and constantly said “Evil!” in the hope of amusing the girls at this event, most of whom loved Culture Club and wore Esprit T-shirts. This was the same week we learned how to be altar boys.

  However, my interest in guys like Ramirez went a little further than Greg’s, since he only saw all this as comical. At a very early age, an understanding of serial killers seemed important to me. The fact that Ramirez and I had the same favorite AC/DC song ( “Night Prowler”) didn’t freak me out, but it certainly made me wonder if I was somehow predisposed to freakish impulses. My all-time favorite serial killer was the never-captured Zodiac, the San Francisco–based mastermind who bragged to newspapers about his murders through a byzantine code and may have actually killed people because of his interest in math.2 Somehow, that sounded like something I would come up with. I didn’t relate to these guys, per se, but I always wondered if I was a “serial person”—a Midwestern Zodiac who simply had no desire to kill.

  This is why I can’t resist badgering my acquaintances who have encountered genuine madmen; perhaps my obsession with serial killers has less to do with what makes them different from everyone else and more to do with what makes them similar to those of us who don’t feel compelled to kill hookers. As I said, I have three such chums: Beyond serving as a firsthand witness to Sarah’s dance-a-thon with the second-rate death machine Cowboy Mike, I also know a guy who became friends with John Wayne Gacy (the much publicized “Clown Killer”) and another who attended high school with Jeffrey Dahmer (the most stridently prototypical serial killer in pop history). Much to their unilateral annoyance, I continually find myself compelled to ask them different versions of the same question: What does it mean to know a serial killer? And it seems like the answer is the same every single time.

  It was on the last day of 2001 that I discovered I knew a man who knew John Wayne Gacy (or maybe it was on the first day of 2002, depending on how you quantify time). Near the conclusion of a rather dull New Year’s Eve party, I found myself chatting with a dude named Eric Nuzum, who works as the programming director for the National Public Radio station in Kent, Ohio. I was mostly arguing with his clever Asian girlfriend about the value of Bjork (she seemed to think Bjork was the cat’s pajamas), but the conversation somehow touched tangentially on the fact that Nuzum has one of John Wayne Gacy’s paintings hanging in his living room. I was immediately curious about this, but I found that Nuzum was reticent to talk about the subject (beyond casually admitting that he did, in fact, have one of Gacy’s paintings and that he did, in fact, carry on a friendship with the sociopath for roughly three years while the ex-clown sat on death row). I managed to pry a few more details about this relationship from him at the party, but I could tell he wasn’t exactly stoked about being hammered with questions about Gacy in the context of a New Year’s Eve fiesta. However, I asked him if I could interview him at length about Gacy at a later date, and he said, “Oh, probably.” When I e-mailed him about that possibility a month later, he was clearly more enthusiastic about having such a conversation. And by the time I finally showed up at his house, he seemed downright excited to be talking about John Wayne Gacy, at times behaving like I was a psychiatrist and he was a patient reminiscing about formative experiences from his childhood. It almost felt like the old Bob Newhart Show.

  What happened, I think, was that my journalistic interest in Nuzum’s relationship with Gacy—as opposed to my prurient interest in Gacy himself—sort of jarred Eric into realizing that there was something noteworthy about having made small talk with someone who was about as nocuous as any twentieth-century American. This is especially true when one considers that Nuzum was not some kind of obsessive death groupie; his involvement with Gacy stemmed from involvement with an anticensorship group called Refuse and Resist (Nuzum is something of a First Amendment fanatic, having written a book titled Parental Advisory: Music Censorship in America). It seems Nuzum had discovered that Gacy was the only inmate in the entire Illinois penal system who wasn’t allowed to sell his paintings commercially, and—being the spunky twenty-four-year-old idealist that he was—Nuzum decided to remedy this injustice. H
is first step was contacting Gacy by mail (he had to make sure Gacy wanted to be liberated), and things just kind of took off from there.

  Like most incarcerated humans, Gacy loved mail; unlike most incarcerated humans, Gacy was picky about his friends. When anyone wrote to him, he returned a typed, two-page survey that asked fifty-two questions about artistic affinities, political ideologies, and personal values. Nuzum still has that form. The most ironic section of the questionnaire asks the applicant to describe what kind of advice he or she would offer to children; one assumes Gacy’s honest advisement would have been, “Don’t struggle while I sodomize you.” But the bottom line is that Nuzum responded to the fifty-two questions and slowly found himself a new pen pal. After a year of writing, Gacy began calling him on the telephone (collect, of course).

  “He had HBO in his cell, so we talked about what was on HBO a lot,” Nuzum recalls. “He liked classic movies, but he really seemed more interested in mainstream crap like Footloose. His tastes weren’t very sophisticated. But sometimes I suspect that he liked big, bang-up Hollywood movies like Patriot Games because he knew they were culturally popular with people on the outside, and that made him feel more normal.”

  While Nuzum was telling me about Gacy’s appreciation for the early work of Kevin Bacon, I found my eyes drifting over to the rudimentary portrait of Elvis Presley on his wall. This was the painting he had mentioned at the party. The image was of a relatively young Elvis, sadly staring at the ground against a sky-blue background. In the lower right corner, I could see the signature of “J.W. Gacy.” It’s not a stellar painting; I doubt Nuzum would hang it in his living room if it didn’t come from someone who snuffed the life out of thirty-three Chicagoans and stuffed them into the crawl space beneath his home.

  Now, I realize there are people who would find Nuzum’s decorating decision pretty fucked-up. They wouldn’t hang one of Gacy’s paintings in their house if he had twice the talent of Picasso, and some might even suggest that Nuzum inadvertently perpetuates the gothic glamour of mass murder; by hanging a mediocre painting in this living room, it proves that (a) Gacy is a celebrity, and (b) killing people warrants celebrity stature. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that America is the most celebrity-driven culture on earth and the homeland for more serial killers than virtually every other country combined. Serial killing is glam killing (or at least it seems that way after a culprit gets caught).

  But here’s where things get complex: Nuzum is barely interested in Gacy’s murders. It’s really the one aspect of history’s most sinister clown3 he doesn’t enjoy discussing. However, I don’t think it’s because he’s in any sort of denial; Nuzum is certain that Gacy did terrible, terrible things. It’s just that Eric happens to be one of those hyperkinetic NPR liberals who spends his free time rescuing kittens from the pound. The deeper reality, I suspect, is that he feels sorry for John Wayne Gacy, and that—somehow—he was part of a society that makes people like Gacy exist.

  “I guess I always had this image of a brilliant, maniacal genius who constructed these complicated plans to satisfy his sexual urges and kill, kill, kill,” Nuzum tells with his fingers interlocked behind his head and his pupils fixed on the ceiling. “But the fact of the matter is that he really wasn’t that smart. There’s such a vast difference between trying to understand this kind of crime and trying to understand anything else. With someone like O. J. Simpson, you could argue that he killed two people and he knew exactly what he was doing. With someone like Timothy McVeigh, one assumes he was able to rationalize the 168 people he killed as causalities of war. But this is different. You know, Gacy always insisted to me that he never killed animals when he was younger, which is usually common with serial killers. For him, it was all sexually based. That was his motivation for everything. But what does that mean? I still don’t understand it.”

  It sort of dawned on me that—the more I talked to Nuzum about this—the further our conversation devolved from the original “What does it mean to know a serial killer” question, which indicated to me that I probably wasn’t going to find the answer from him. All I really learned was that I am less compassionate than just about everyone I know. If I had known John Wayne Gacy, I suspect I would have been fascinated by his impending execution; I would have constantly asked him about his thoughts on death and his expectations for the afterlife, and how the experience of living changes once your life suddenly has an exact expiration date. To me, his lethal injection would have been the summit of our rapport. But Nuzum didn’t see it like that at all.

  “I was very upset when he was put to death,” Eric told me. “In fact, when it became obvious that it was just a matter of time, that’s when our relationship ended. I stopped accepting his collect calls. I would like to say that I cut things off because his phone calls got weird—and they certainly did near the end, because he’d ramble for twenty minutes and I wouldn’t even say a sentence—but the truth is that it just got hard to think about what it was going to be like when he was dead.

  “If I learned anything from the time I knew him, though, it’s that I think I now have a wider view of heinous crimes than most people. Once you get to know a murderer as a person, you actually start to rationalize things less, and you start to see things more clearly. For example, one time we were talking on the phone very casually about television, and one of the guards happened to walk by Gacy while we were talking. Gacy immediately freaked out and started raving about how this person had woken him up the night before by shining a flashlight on him. Judging from Gacy’s reaction, you would have sworn this guard raped his mother. He lost control and just went ballistic. But thirty seconds later, he was completely fine. And I remember thinking, ‘I can totally see how this person could kill children.’ He was just a guy with a huge problem.”

  Jeffrey Dahmer had a problem, too. In fact, he had a bunch of them, and they kept getting worse. He was an alcoholic (not good). He was a self-loathing homosexual (even worse). He was a murderer (which downplays the sexual struggle), he was a cannibal (maybe the only habit that makes murdering people seem borderline normal), and he longed to surround himself with corpses in the hope that they would become surrogates for the human relationships he could not sustain in day-to-day life (’nuff said). There isn’t a dimension of serial killer lore that Dahmer didn’t embody, including the obligatory tortured adolescence. When he was a high school student in Ohio, Dahmer life’s was profoundly sad and predictably disturbing. I know this because that’s when Derf used to hang out with him.

  “Derf” is John Backderf, a comic book artist I worked with at a newspaper in Akron, Ohio. Dahmer is a huge deal in Akron, because that’s his hometown. Technically, he graduated from a joint educational facility called Revere High School, which was comprised of kids from two small towns: Bath (a relatively affluent suburb) and Richfield (a town best known for hosting the now-destroyed Richfield Coliseum, the former home for countless hair metal concerts and the Cleveland Cavaliers). But for all practical purposes, those communities are just extensions of suburban Akron. And what’s interesting about Akron is that—due to a variety of socioeconomic reasons—the community tends to spawn things that could not have come from anywhere else in America. The band Devo is one example. Jeffrey Dahmer is another.

  I had been working at the Akron Beacon Journal for less than a month when someone told me that Derf grew up with Dahmer, which was weird for two reasons. The first is obvious—it’s always surprising to meet someone who used to have gym class with a cannibal. However, what was even stranger is that I had never even met this Derf character; some coworker just felt compelled to tell me there was a person on staff who went to high school with J. Dahmer. This same person also told me that the legal name of Derf’s little son Max was supposedly “Maximum Volume Backderf,” which seemed only slightly less unreasonable than eating from the corpse of a Milwaukee homosexual.

  When I eventually met Derf that summer, he turned out to be very cool; he was sort of this über-sarcastic,
unrepentant, aging punk rocker who always wore a Greek fishing hat and would stroll by my desk twice a week to tell me that every band I liked was terrible. And when I finally asked him if he really knew Dahmer, his reaction was to say, “Well, of course I did,” as if I had just asked him if he hated Pink Floyd’s The Wall. He proceeded to give me a comic he published titled My Friend Dahmer, an illustrated twenty-six-page narrative of his youthful memories of a demented scamp known simply as “Jeff.”

  Without being the least bit exploitive, My Friend Dahmer paints an eerily vivid portrait of the young Akronian weirdo and suggests that all the signs of his future monstrosities would have been clearly visible to anyone who had cared enough to pay attention. The title is technically misleading, as Dahmer appears to have had no real friends whatsoever in high school—but Derf and his geeky cronies were probably the closest approximation. They would pay him $35 to go to the local mall and perform his “Dahmer shtick,” which amounted to him pretending to have cerebral palsy (it seems his mother’s interior decorator suffered from the condition, prompting Dahmer to mimic the spastic, seizure like movements). Dahmer’s preperformance ritual was to shotgun six beers in the backseat of a car, which was the same thing he did every single day before school. Beyond the summer after tenth grade, Derf can’t recall ever seeing Dahmer when he wasn’t either “in character” or completely and utterly intoxicated.

  People picked on Dahmer, but he didn’t respond; he mostly existed as a zombie who occasionally blurted out the indecipherable phrase “Baaaa!” at inappropriate times. He was a victim waiting to become a victimizer. And he finally made that transition one month after he, Derf, and two hundred other kids graduated from Revere. It was the summer of 1978, and Jeffrey destroyed his first human.