Those Fuzzy Years

It was a Wednesday afternoon, I believe, and Morgan and I were sitting at the bar. We had a couple in us when the conversation rolled around to the John Wayne Gacy case.

A few days earlier, I had lent her a copy of Tim Cahill's peculiar psychological portrait of Gacy, Buried Dreams, and she was already a ways into it. While we were talking, she mentioned in passing an interest in seeing footage of Gacy, if only to hear what he sounded like.

"Y'know," I said, a dim memory sparking, "I think I have that."

Back in the early 90s, in the midst of a long stretch of desperate unemployment that threatened to go on forever, I wrote a book called Nobody Laughs When They Leave. It was a social history of the freakshow from the 1940s to the present, focusing on the influence of freak culture on contemporary arts and entertainment. Being, as I have been on occasion, 10 minutes ahead of my time, the book never found a publisher. Two years later, the market was flooded with freak books, and the "brilliant" insights I'd laid out in Nobody Laughs were now considered little more than simple common sense?maybe even trite.

But all that's beside the point.

In researching the book, I spent far too many hours in front of the television, my thumb poised on the VCR's "record" button. Before long, I had dozens of hours of worthwhile material gathered?sleazy talk shows, trial footage, relevant news, shows that featured midgets. And among it all, I had also taped televised interviews with celebrity murderers?Manson (the one where he sings "I Walk the Line" to a very uncomfortable Diane Sawyer), Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer (with his dad!), David Berkowitz?and John Wayne Gacy. Still proclaiming his innocence, Gacy was, in an unbelievably boring fashion.

Boring as it was, though, I knew I had it someplace at home. Somewhere within those mountains of videotapes stacked around, behind and above my television set, I knew I still had those tapes. All I needed to do was find them, then scan through them quickly.

I told Morgan I'd find them for her. Besides, I thought, it would be fun to see some of that old stuff again. So that night when I got home?drunk, maybe, but not stupid-drunk?I put some dinner in the oven, grabbed a flashlight and began hunting through the video library. It didn't take me long at all to find three of the tapes I had labeled "Media Freaks (Ch. 4)." They were, mercifully, still all gathered together in the box in which I had stored all my research footage for the book. Figuring victory was mere moments away, I set the cassettes next to the television, got my dinner out of the oven, then popped the first tape in.

The first one started promisingly enough?an episode of the Maury Povich show that featured people who did stupid things with their bodies. I scanned forward to the closing credits.

After that, however, something went wrong.

Instead of interviews with killers and footage of Michael Jackson denying that he had molested a little boy and documentaries about Coney Island, I discovered...The X-Files. I've only seen that show once, and this wasn't even the episode I remember. After that came some random, uninteresting bits of local news. Then a weather report. Then a lot of commercials. Then a talk show that didn't seem to have much to do with anything. Then more commercials, another X-Files, and more weather.

I scanned to the end of the tape, yanked it out, then popped in the next one.

Sitcoms, car commercials, bits of sporting events and nature shows?nothing complete from beginning to end?all of them intercut in such a way that it was obvious that I was doing a lot of rewinding and retaping. It almost seemed like I knew what I was doing, like I was after something very specific in all these snippets, but I'll be damned if I could figure out what.

The only thing I knew for sure was that none of the things I remembered taping were anywhere to be found on these tapes.

"Jesus Christ," I muttered aloud at the screen, as I scanned past made-for-tv movies, hospital dramas and more weather reports. Dozens of weather reports.

When I had scanned through all the tapes I uncovered, finding nothing that even remotely resembled an interview with John Wayne Gacy, I picked them all up and dumped them in the trash can in the kitchen. Then I went back out to the television and sat back down on the linoleum.

What in the hell had I been thinking back then?

My memory clawed its way back toward those days, but things grew dimmer the closer I got.

Only then did I remember that I was getting into The Fuzzy Years. 1985-'94. The years in which I stayed dangerously drunk all the time, because there was little or no reason not to stay that way. Years full of blackouts and awful, inexplicable mistakes and worse public behavior. Years of knives and broken glass and vomit and hospitals.

Not that they didn't have their own unique charm?it's just that I have a hard time, now, remembering exactly what went on.

It was in the midst of those years that I had gathered all those tapes and wrote that damn, useless book.

Whatever I was after in culling together those tapes I'd just trashed, it was obviously the result of some drunken logic, which made perfect sense at the time, but whose meaning would be unclear at best the next morning, and absolutely opaque a few years down the line. Seeing them now was like having a friend (or ex-friend) describe in terrible detail your boorish behavior at the show that night a week after you'd started wondering why no one was talking to you anymore.

Then I began to wonder?did those things ever really exist? The things I was looking for? Did I really have a boring interview with Gacy somewhere? The letters and the painting I'm sure about?but what about that televised interview? I had to. Somewhere. But what if it was just a fever dream? Or what if I hadn't quite yet figured out how to record things off the television properly? But that couldn't be the case. I'd been doing that for too long.

Man, oh man, the things we lose.

Then my thoughts turned to the case of audiotapes I kept under the bed. Hundreds of them. And in and amongst those audiotapes, I knew, were a collection of tapes I made between the ages of nine and 12. Little shows I used to record in my room. Songs taped off the radio. Commercials I liked. All of them intercut the same way these videotapes had been, and not a single one of them labeled in any way.

I shuddered at the thought of ever hearing any of those again. My daily, public humiliation is great enough already, without inflicting it upon myself in private. There was no need to perform Knip's Last Tape.

I left the box of audiotapes where it was among all the dust and the cat hair and the old roach discs. My memories of those childhood recordings were bad enough. I thought it best to leave what would undoubtedly be a far worse reality where it lay, unheard and unspoken. Instead I showered and went to bed, defeated, once more, by my past.