Gacy and Trump: the surprise connection

"The Farce is Over," by Honore Daumier (Metropolitan Museum of Art).

     John Wayne Gacy sued Des Plaines and its police department. For harassment. For illegally searching his home in unincorporated Norwood Park. For insisting on following him around, prying into his affairs, undermining his reputation as a pillar of the community with their relentless questions, implying some kind of link between him and missing young men.
     His lawyer filed the suit on Dec. 19, 1978, seeking $750,000. Two days later, bodies were discovered in a crawlspace in Gacy’s home.
     Consider the chutzpah of the criminal. Their minds are skewed, warped. They have already deceived themselves into believing they have the right to do evil, to rob, to kill, to rape, to satisfy themselves while hurting others. They also are skilled at fooling their victims, tricking them, luring them into ruin. And so certain criminals believe, not without reason, they can deceive you, too. Because they are so much smarter, in their own minds.
     Part of the contempt that allows a person to do evil is an unshakable sense of superiority. Gacy claimed self-defense. As the bodies piled up, he confessed. Later, he insisted he didn’t do it. This shape-shifting dynamic — squinting, evaluating any current situation and then trying to squirm out of it — is the grease sociopaths skid through life on. Or try to. The baldness is shocking.
     When the FBI executed a search warrant at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate on Aug. 8, the range of excuses immediately offered by the former president and his army of enablers almost exhausts the range of human imagination. These are just mementos. No, the papers were overlooked briefings, brought home by our hardworking chief executive. No, the classified documents weren’t classified, because he said so. No, it was all a plot. No, the papers were planted. And on and on.
     The brio is breathtaking.

     I know we’re not supposed to be surprised at this point. But any decent person almost has to be surprised. There is a baseline assumption of truth, rationality, that holds back law-abiding citizens, causing us to lag many steps beyond those who leap ahead, unhindered by any pang of conscience or shred of humanity.
     That’s why we still remember Gacy after nearly half a century. We know killers exist. We know Gacy was a killer. But the specifics of his crimes are still shocking. He raped and tortured and killed 33 young men and boys. We don’t want to live in a world where that’s ordinary, accepted, forgettable.

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A new stain on my reputation

     No one has ever asked me what I plan to do in retirement. But if anybody ever does, I have a ready answer: work on the house. A 115-year-old farm house that wasn't constructed all that well in the first place is constantly in need of repair, and as the years go by, I try to do some of the work myself. 

     It's very satisfying. And cheaper. And often better 

     For instance. The house has an unusually large deck in back — originally there was a free-standing 16-foot pool in back, that the deck connected to, and my wife insisted the pool be removed, lest the boys drown themselves.  We had a handyman square it off. You could land a helicopter on it.     

     A few years after, I hired a neighbor who had a house painting company to stain it. He charged a lot and his crew splashed stain on the siding. A decade and a half went by. Whatever protective qualities the stain might have ever had broke down. The deck grew grimy, dark, mildewed, almost slimey. For the past three or four years, I'd greet the summer with, "I should treat that deck before it rots." This summer I resolved to actually do it, and — this is key — borrowed a power washer from a friend (Thank you Sandi!)

     Power-washing the deck was an epiphany. Layers of mold and black grime blasted away with a sweep of the gun, returning the wood to a near pristine state. I can say without hesitation that nothing I wrote this summer was half as satisfying as powerwashing that deck. And nobody complained.

     Then I sanded it. A sane man would have bought a large circular sander, or even rented a floor sander. But I already had a six-inch reciprocating hand sander, and the deck does have all sorts of posts and rails and steps and such. So I crawled over the deck, sanding it with this ridiculously small tool. Which allowed me to sand it really well, and pound in the nails that were up, and find zen-like escape from the various nightmarish situations percolating on a national and personal level. It took days.
     "And to think I almost paid somebody to do this," I thought, astounded that I got to do it for free.      

Good stuff.

     Finding the right color stain was the most difficult part. We started out thinking blue, for some reason, probably insanity, but went through three or four shades, which didn't seem right, then three or four browns, until I was guided to Ready Seal pecan, with help from Rick at J.C. Licht, who probably just wanted my wife and me to stop coming by for more samples and get on with it. It went on easily, without streaking. Rich and slightly red. 
      I rolled it on, doing details with a brush. At first I thought I'd need three gallons; I ended up using eight. Toward the end of the third week —in my spare time, on nice days—the job neared completion. The other day, I bought new hardware and replaced the rusty hinges and latches on the gate. The thing is like new.
     That's it. No flight of poetry, no message beyond DYI: do it yourself. If I can, anybody can. I plan to take a short break, then start in on painting the trim in the entrance hall. God knows the hall needs it.

It looks best after a rain.

‘We draw you in with beauty’

     Humanity’s first home was a garden. And while biblical Eden is no longer available to stroll through, alas, the Chicago Botanic Garden is very much with us.
     I’ve visited hundreds of times — the place kept my wife and me sane during COVID. While encouraging people to visit isn’t in our selfish interest — crowds — going at least once certainly is in yours.

     Particularly now. This summer the garden is celebrating its 50th anniversary, showing off 10 large commissioned outdoor artworks, and the second half of August might be an ideal time to explore a place I often describe as “heaven-like.” (“Edenic” just doesn’t quite roll off the tongue.)
     Half the size of New York’s Central Park — 385 acres — the Chicago Botanic Garden isn’t actually in Chicago, but Glencoe, immediately east of the Edens Expressway between Lake Cook and Dundee Roads. 

Chicago Daily News
Jan. 27, 1965.

     

     Visitors are led through the wide range of natural habitats, from formal English walled garden to wildflower-bedecked prairie, from a carefully-cultivated Japanese island garden, complete with teahouse, to a woodland walk under towering oaks where only the blazed trail lets you know you’re not in virgin forest.
     There are vegetable gardens and groves of birches, water lilies and desert cacti. I’ve seen deer, otters and, on one memorable occasion, a hooded merganser duck. One of the joys is shifting in scale and perspective, lifting your gaze from close-up examination of a gorgeous lily to peer across the lagoon at a bridge in the distance, flanked by weeping willows.
     The place is so big, we recently spent an hour there walking and never went inside, merely circled the perimeter.
     One of the more astounding aspects of the Botanic Garden is, no matter how often times we visit, and we often go three times a week, it’s always fresh, new, interesting, because of the changing light at different times of day, the seasons of the year, plants waxing and waning, annual shows — orchids, jack-o-lanterns, a light show at Christmas. My wife and I visit in February when it’s 20 degrees, as the garden is beautiful in snow.

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"Be secret and exalt"

     "Now all the truth is out," William Butler Yeats writes. "Be secret and take defeat/From any brazen throat."
      The beginning of an odd little 1916 poem with a breathtaking title: "To a Friend Whose Work has Come to Nothing." 

     Easy for Yeats to say, who straddled the world in his own lifetime, and would linger longer than most. Whose lines are used as movie titles: "That is no country for old men..."
      In the poem, he seems to brace his unnamed friend, "Bred to a harder thing than triumph," presenting his own success as somehow unfair. 

Being honor bred, with one
Who, were it proved he lies,
Were neither shamed in his own
Nor in his neighbor's eyes?

     It might seem odd that Yeats might cast himself as a liar, but it's a theme he would return to, such as in an even shorter 1916 poem, "The Coming of Wisdom with Time." This is the whole poem:

I swayed my leaves and flowers in the sun;
Now I may wither into the truth.

For how can you compete 

Though leave are many, the root is one;

Through all the lying days of my youth.

      It's unclear whether it's himself or the days of youth that are lying; my bet is both. Either way, withering into the truth sounds painful. Though not without advantages. The life work of most people either comes to nothing or very close, on the grand scale, and whatever impact anybody manages merely holds back obscurity for the briefest time. 

     This is a long way of saying, I had mixed feelings when my colleague Eric Zorn returned to the John Kass well for a definitive drink, "The truth about John Kass’ dispute with the Tribune and the Tribune Guild." He begins well, promising he will "summarize the controversy," though I don't believe any piece of writing nearing 5,000 words can be considered a summary unless it's addressing the history of the world. 

      While I'm confident that Eric has certainly stylishly and thoroughly retired the topic, I hope, if not buried it in a lead-lined coffin, I was still tempted to pick up the theme he began, like one jazz musician riffing on another's melody, and expand upon it, as we did to so much fun and effect earlier last month. 

     That post got 20 times the average readership, so obviously people, for whatever reasons, are primed to laugh at John Kass. Unlike Yeats's friend, splashing around in the kiddie pool of untruth does not shame Kass in his own eyes, apparently, though it does him in a negative light with certain others.

     But my heart isn't in it. Nobody is entirely bad. I have a colleague who tells a story about Kass. She was in the City Hall Press Room when some disturbed person, upset over something she wrote, burst in, shouting, and made to attack her. But Kass leapt across a desk and tackled the man. He saved her.  

"To a friend..." first appeared in the
May, 1914 issue of Poetry Magazine.

    Does a moment's physical courage counterbalance years of caustic fuckery?  Hard to say. Remember, the people he writes for are already debased, soul-dead Trumpies, lost, looking for their daily fix of fear and self-victimization. If Kass didn't sell it to them, someone else would. It isn't as if, were he unavailable, they'd start reading David Hume instead.

     Bigotry is the collision of ignorance and fear. As much as the hostility and damage caused by haters tempts the clear-eyed to simply hate them back, we have to consider the keyhole view of life they limit themselves to, all they miss, the essential tragedy of their condition. They can't listen and they can't learn and so they wander, dazed survivors after an accident, in the sunlit center of a glorious world, eyes squinched shut, lashing blindly out at their imagined enemies. They're hurt and hopeless and you can't scorn them, for long. Or shouldn't, anyway.

     So as much as I enjoy heartily ridicule, I tend to eventually come out the other side, shaking contempt off like a dog after a bath. I grew to genuinely pity Jay Mariotti, and wish I had been nicer to him, wondering whether he might not be genuinely ... well, he's a litigious cuss, so I'd better not say. Afflicted with problems more severe than just being an asshole. 

     Even Bob Greene. I don't regret a bit of BobWatch. Fun, and well-deserved, at the time. But should he pitch forward today into the sand at Sunset Bay, metal detector pinging plaintively beside him, unheard, I don't think I'd use the opportunity to revisit his shameful exit or the deeply weird nostalgic rathole he plunged down.  He did hang with Michael Jordan — I certainly didn't hang with Michael Jordan — and had a column in Esquire, and a regular gig on "Nightline," and rang the journalism bell far more loudly than I ever will. That he could vanish so completely is a reminder of just how completely we all vanish, good bad and indifferent. That's the lesson. The warning.

     "Be secret and exult" Yeats ends his poem. "Because of all things known/That is most difficult."

     Or so imagines Yeats, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature. As so often happens with those simply guessing at life, based on themselves, he's quite wrong. It's not difficult at all. In fact, it's easy. Almost mandatory. What other choice is there? "Soul clap its hands and sing," as Yeats himself instructs in "Sailing to Byzantium." Now there's a plan.

 

 

Northshore Notes: Howl at the Moon

     I don't know why it never occurred to me before. But I was reading today's report by Northshore Bureau Chief Caren Jeskey, and suddenly it struck me. "Here, I always thought Austin, Texas was this quirky, cool place, where EGD's correspondent was bopping around, gathering color. When in reality, it could be as boring an anodyne as a generic shopping mall, with Caren generating her own heat and light, as she does here. Well, aided by the moon.

 By Caren Jeskey

“Humans aren’t entirely rational beings; we’re aesthetic beings, we’re romantic beings and, as Sagan hinted, we are also frightened beings — haunted by our own mortality and the enormity of a universe we only partly comprehend. If a supermoon serves as a comforting night light, we’ll happily take it.”
                            —Jeffrey Kluger

    Thursday night boasted the last supermoon of the year. It pulled me to the lake for the moonrise. For my last client of the day I headed over to Mallinckrodt Park, in all of its midsummer full bloom glory. It’s been a great season for things that grow in the Midwest, as you have noticed if you’re here. The grassy fields and bountiful fragrant roses of the park dance and preen for us.

     I found a soft patch of grass under my favorite local weeping willow tree. When we hopped on Zoom, my client got to see the fronds of this magnificent tree gently swaying in the breeze, with the expanse of a perfectly manicured field and a very blue sky behind me. She smiled broadly. It’s amazing what a change of scenery can do. My client does not live in the safe bosom of Kenilworth Gardens as I do. When we were saying goodbye she cautioned me to be careful in a park alone. “I watch too many crime shows not to worry.” I assured her that I would.
     I took my leave from the willow’s canopy and started the trek. After a quick stop at a coffee shop for a pick-me-up of green matcha, I crossed Sheridan where I’d planned to hop the fence to the beach. Luckily for me, since I really don’t want to be cited, they’ve posted a hundred more signs than usual reading “No Beach Access,” and they also repaired the area of the fence where ne'er-do-wells like me used to pop over to prevent having to walk another quarter mile or so. This led me to walk south like a proper person to a proper beach entrance.
     There’s a little spot secreted between lakefront homes that leads to a mountainous sand dune. When you step off of the street and into this haven, indigenous trees and green and flowering things adorn the well manicured landscape. Sometimes you’ll find a person or two scanning the area for invasive vines, pulling them firmly so the roots come out, and bagging them up to be destroyed. It’s a well appointed area with trash and recycling bins and bike racks. There are stairs built into the sandy cliff, which descend to a winding path that’s peppered with charming wooden benches. There you can take a quick rest, or sit the afternoon away — a view of the lake visible though obscured by old, tall conifer trees.
     Emerging at the lakefront, I headed along the water’s edge to a clump of boulders. It was nearing dusk and the lake was full of movement. A couple of boys were tossing boogie boards into the wet froth, gingerly jumping aboard and riding them back to shore, gracefully skimming the water. Deeper in, gaggles of teens were hopping the five foot waves. Their screams of delight were muffled pleasantly by the thunderous volume of lake sounds.
     I spontaneously sang and howled for fun (no one could hear me) and felt like a carefree child. I stretched, and let the wind give me an invigorating bath. 
     It was 8:03, 13 more minutes to the scheduled moonrise. Gradually I noticed what looked like sun rays radiating out of the horizon to the southeast. Moon rays? I’m not sure I’ve ever seen moon rays before. Not like these. Then the whole sky dimmed to a darker blue cloudless dusk.
     It was windy. I started shivering but it felt good, not like winter shivers. It was a much cooler night than I’d planned for. I left my rocky perch and nestled down on the beach. I tucked my knees close and draped my dress over them, tucking the bottom under my feet. Warmer, and cozy, I rested my back on a sandbag hill at the base of a “lawn” of one of the homes (that would be more appropriate as a public park if you ask me). I hoped no one would shoo me away. Alas, a heretofore unnoticed guard beelined towards me almost immediately. (‘How can a person OWN the beach?’ my mind screamed). I got up and found another place to sit, closer to the laughably tiny public beach area with a good crowd of people drying off, lying around, and creating TikTok clips.
     At the best drive-in ever, I kept my eyes towards the screen of the horizon, and wondered where that moon was. At about 8:20 I finally noticed a flaming orange chord of a circle start to peek up over a retaining wall in the southeast sky. Thar she blows! She rose quickly. I leapt up and walked briskly towards her. I wanted to keep walking to her face, and gaze directly up at her like so many Disney characters have gotten to do. Dozens of people of all ages were on their feet now, from the Plaza del Lago condos all the way to Gillson Beach. Everyone was staring, laughing, talking animatedly, or taking photos and videos.
     I gazed for a good long while until she was much higher in the night sky. I felt complete, and was ready to make the few mile journey home. I walked barefoot down a paved path in the middle of the parking lot, and noticed how tall the flowers, bushes, and prairie grasses had gotten since a few short weeks ago. I popped my Birks back on and as I ascended a pedestrian incline back to the street, I thought I heard a voice calling out to me. I wrote it off to the wind. But then there it was again. A lovely woman, visiting from Phoenix, was calling out to ask me to walk with her. “Buddy system. Safety in numbers,” she said. "Of course," I replied, then I assured her that we were as safe as Norman Rockwell characters. We chatted for a while, found a lot of common ground, and entertained the people passing us who could not help but comment on the spectacle of the moon we had all just witnessed together.
     One of the passers by was a lady named Mary Jane Kale. Somehow it came up that she had gone to Mundelein College, where my mother went, and where I went to preschool. Modern feminist badass women like Mary Jane and my mother call themselves Mundle Bundles. My Phoenix pal, Mary Jane, her husband and I laughed at the cool coincidence. It was one of those nights where all felt right in the world.

Librarians get the job done

     The Richelieu Reading Room at the National Library of France in Paris is beautiful. No, you can’t get in, unless you are a registered researcher or skilled at talking your way past librarians.

     Don’t fuck with librarians.
     In the newspaper, I’m using a weaker word than “fuck,” the watered-down euphemism required by the kabuki of daily newspapering. Which in the freer online world I can ignore. Why not? The nation is in continual crisis, if not circling the drain. Norms are trashed left and right. Newspapers are wan imitations of themselves as it is. Time to unleash all the words.
     Librarians are badass. At least I can say that in print.
     Yes, the National Archives is not, technically, a library so much as a repository of public documents. But it has its own library and a chief librarian, and is in charge of all presidential libraries. We’re on safe ground considering it a library.
     And yes, those busting into Mar-a-Lago on Monday were not librarians, per se, but FBI agents acting as their proxy. Still, going down to Florida to collect their overdue materials was certainly a boss librarian move. The sort of hardball I’ve come to associate with librarians.
     Librarians can’t be milquetoasts. They must deal with the public. Frequently wrangle other people’s children for hours. Librarians can’t suffer fools. Busting in, guns drawn, blowing the safe, is very on-brand for librarians. “I believe you have something that belongs to us!”

Mrs. Rachel Beers, circa 1978,

     Experience has given me special respect for librarians. Not to be confused with affection. Closer to the survivor nostalgia that Marines feel for abusive boot camp instructors at Parris Island. There was Mrs. Rachel Beers — I remember her name — fixing me with her deadly laser stare from behind the circulation desk at the Berea High School Library. She once printed up school library rules on a special handout, personalized for me, and hand-delivered them, since I obviously didn’t seem to understand that the library rules applied to me, too. Especially to me.

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Flashback 2011: Spiders can bite you in many ways

   
      Monday I finally did something I've been meaning to do for months — walk through the Chicago Botanic Garden with its president, talking about the artwork installed for the 50th anniversary. That'll run Monday in the Sun-Times.

     During our walk, I mentioned this column, about hanging out with spider expert Jim Steffen, and thought I'd share it here. That word in the third paragraph, "epigyne," means exactly what it seems to: the female sex organ of an arachnid.  A reminder that the language, like nature itself, can be wonderfully specific. Steffen was an emeritus senior ecologist at the garden until his retirement last year.

     Determining the sex of a spider is not so very much different than determining the sex of a human baby: You flip it over and check out the equipment.
     Unlike with the baby however, with a spider, you need a microscope to get a good look at its sex organs, which are both very small and very complicated and — also unlike the baby — you really want the spider to be dead.
     “You can imagine, if you had a live spider and you flipped it over, it’s not going to sit there,” said Jim Steffen, an ecologist at the Chicago Botanic Garden in Glencoe, as I peered into a microscope and admired the dainty epigyne of a crab spider collected in the Mary Mix McDonald Woods, a 100-acre oak forest within the Botanic Garden, which for the past 23 years Steffen has been nudging back toward its pristine state.
     Nature is interconnected, so caring about trees — the oaks have been here 10,000 years while the ash, the Norway maples and the other riff-raff less than 200 — led Steffen to focus on leaf litter, the fallen leaves and debris on the ground under the trees.
     “I was interested in what was happening with the leaf litter,” he said, “because what we have discovered with woodland restoration, as invasive species invade the woodland the litter layer degrades.”
     And by figuring out what’s happening with the spiders in the leaf litter, Steffen gets insight into the ecosystem as a whole.
     Invasive species, both plants and animals, are hardy imports from around the globe that have a tendency to crowd out local flora and fauna. Some have suitably awful names — leafy spurge, poison hemlock, goutweed, hairy fireweed — others do not: baby’s breath, Queen Anne’s lace, wild strawberry.
     And buckthorn. Longtime readers will recall my endless War Against Buckthorn. I smiled, encountering my old nemesis in the Botanic Garden, like Sherlock Holmes detecting the hand of Professor Moriarty in a particularly sticky business.
     Somewhat like a character out of Conan Doyle himself, Steffen is trim, 60, with a neat white mustache. He lives in Winthrop Harbor. Perhaps all you need to know about his personal life is that when I asked him what he does as a hobby, he answered, “I collect seeds on the weekend.” He also gardens.
     Learning that the spiders are killed in order to study them gave me pause. I feel bad when called upon to kill a spider. Didn’t Steffen, as a man devoted to nature, also feel bad?
     “No,” he said. “If I took you for a walk through this part of the woods here, you would probably kill several hundred thousand insects — springtails and spiders — walking. Every time you put your foot down you’re stepping on something.”
     Somehow I reached the age of 50 without ever hearing the word “springtail” — it’s a tiny (¼-inch long or less) primitive insect-like thing with a curled tail used to hop away from danger. We looked at a few under the microscope — a springtail looks like a brown crumb with personality.
     “It’s a group of organisms not looked at too closely,” Steffen said, noting that a volunteer, studying creatures that showed up in the spider traps, found about half a dozen new springtails that science had yet to give names.
     We ended up at the Botanic Garden’s ecology lab, and I was struck by the contrast between the wild disorder of the green, sun-dappled woods, with hardy oaks and nefarious buckthorn, and this cool, pristine white room with its gray counters, sleek microscopes, rack of Kimax lab glassware, orderly rows of metal boxes of slides and spider-filled little vials. On the bookshelf, apropos titles: Mushrooms Demystified by David Arora, All About Weeds by Edward Rollin Spencer and How to Know the Grasshoppers, Crickets, Cockroaches and Their Allies by Jacques Hefler.
     After two hours I was just getting started, but Steffen began sorting slides, and I realized I was keeping him from important work. Besides, I’d already collected enough information for three columns (I haven’t even talked about the sex lives of spiders. Male spiders engage in foreplay and treat their beloved to dinner — a male will wrap a fly in silk and present it to the female, though, unlike men, or at least unlike most men, he will then do the deed while she’s still eating).
     Nor have I touched on spiders’ solitary quality, nor their venom — almost all spiders are poisonous, though only a few have poison in enough quantity or strength that can harm humans. Nor have I mentioned our outsize fear of spiders, which are everywhere.
     “You’re never more than a meter away from a spider, wherever you are,” said Steffen.
     Whether that’s good or not is up to you.
            —Originally published in the Sun-Times, May 13, 2011.