Was there a fricasseed street hooker in my future?
So I was three out of four on the Gein-Gacy-Bundy Scale.
Lonely, brooding and poly-addicted substance abuser? Double Check! Tortured animals as a youth? Negative, thank Christ. Watching these TV shows, the killers’ life stories kind of had the same arc, some of which I identified with. So the American culture, from high, middle, to low, was seemingly obsessed with these maniacs. “I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice Chianti.” “It puts the lotion on its skin, or else it gets the hose again.” The Silence of the Lambs had been released the year earlier and people quoted that movie like it was Blazing Saddles: Even the band I had formed/quit a year earlier (the aptly ’90s-named, Gloryhole…ROAR!) issued a 45 with cover art using a now-famous image of Ted Bundy laughingly washing dishes with some unsuspecting blonde-haired woman. People visited, even owned paintings by, John Wayne Gacy and many a fanzine (to wit: ANSWER ME!) celebrated these sickos. Some in the “punk rock” and underground scene were surely obsessed with these people. No one really goes “retro” on this ‘90s fad, but there was some kind of growing excitement about, or at least fascination with, these biologically (or was it demonically?! Yank! Yank! Yank!) mutated souls who wandered the land, strangling, fucking, roasting, and devouring as they had seen fit. TV shows and non-fiction books analyzed, vilified and, arguably glorified, these people (invariably white men, incidentally). A year earlier, Jeffrey Dahmer had been arrested after his bloody “boy buffet” terrorized Wisconsin.
I had never killed or cannibalized a woman but I did fear that I might be turning into a serial killer.This was 1992, a few years after Ted Bundy met his maker courtesy of the state of Florida. “Yet man is born unto trouble, as the sparks fly upward.”