Close to madness...

Today was a weird one. I felt close to losing control a few times, over nothing. The only thing I could figure that might have triggered this mood was another of John Wayne Gacy's victims was identified by Chicago police...and it turned out he hadn't even been reported missing. His family cared so little about his disappearance, they hadn't even wondered where he was. But they had sent some DNA in to an Ancestry webiste to trace their own roots, and the cops were connecting with that as one way to track down the few unidentified remains.

The guy was 21 years old when he was raped and murdered. A nice open face. He was dumped in a grave with other unidentified victims of Gacy, and was only disinterred when the cops decided to go further with trying to ID them. Even now, there's some question as to whether or not he'll be returned to his home town to be buried, that's how little his blood relations cared.

I have something like that happen in my book Bobby Carapisi. One character is cut off from the family because he's gay, to the extent they wipe him out of their history, as if he weren't even born. It was a hard thing to write because I knew someone that had been done to...someone who killed themself because it finally became too much to bear.

At the time, people said his suicide was because he had AIDs...but he was handling that. It was knowing he'd die alone and buried alone that finally did him in. He arranged to have himself cremated and his ashes scattered in Lake Austin, so there would be no headstone. He joked that the lake's water was so damned cold, it might mitigate being in hell.

I wasn't part of that. I couldn't do it. I was weaker, then.

What being brought back to this did, however, was jolt me in the writing of APoS. The story is too goddamned polite. Brendan goes through hell, in it, and needs to better react to that. He laughed and brought me ideas on how to let him start breaking free of convention and gentleness. I need to find his music, and I'm thinking British Punk...but I'm not sure if that works for the late 70s. He's definitely not disco or pop or even acid rock. He wants his own sound, for the time. Something he brings with him from Houston back to Derry and becomes his armor...his protection as he regains his footing in the city.

Maybe I'll track down The Next, a punk band from San Antonio who played a lot at Raul's, in Austin.