Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs

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 clown[64] 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 uber-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.

“Believe it not, I consider Dahmer something of a tragic figure,” Derf once told me while munching on a bowl of Honey Nut Cheerios. “My relationship with him ended just before he killed that first guy, but I honestly believe he could have been stopped. Some adult could have stepped in when he was younger, I think, and changed the path he was on. But the moment he actually killed someone, any sympathy I might have had for him disappeared. When he crossed over to the other side, he became a monster to me, and he deserved a bullet in the back of the head.”

Certainly, there is something paradoxical about Derf’s assessment of Dahmer. His portrait of J.D. in My Friend Dahmer aggressively humanizes the killer, often to the point where he becomes almost likable. However, the moment Dahmer took someone’s life, Derf says his perception suddenly mirrored that of the rest of America. And as our conversation continued, I started to suspect Derf’s relationship with this guy was a little more complicated than even Derf was aware of. This was particularly clear when I asked him if he was glad that Dahmer went to Revere High. My specific question was this: If we concede that Dahmer was destined to commit these crimes regardless of where he grew up, would Derf have