Goddamn, I hated the Army. Oh, I loved basic training, and I got into my job as a part-time database programmer, part-time videographer/trainer, and data processor, but the bullshit of playing soldier was alien to me. I wanted an experiential life, not a regimen dictated by blind obedience and pretending that we were doing something important. Important to me was art, literature, music, creativity, exploration, history, love, fucking, and generally peeling back the skin of the onion of culture.

I’d joined the military in 1985, and by the end of 1987, I was free of that psychodrama to begin my full-time journey into the natural world of deviancy outside the machine of conformity. For two years at Rhein-Main Airbase adjacent to the Frankfurt International Airport, I had plowed into every word of Friedrich Nietzsche I could put my eyeballs on. I had dined on the vulgar fruit of Charles Bukowski’s effluvium. To my surprise, I learned that fist-fucking was really a thing, as was shit-eating and piss-drinking. Bertrand Russel was playing a role in my life along with Wilhelm Reich and a host of other thinkers. Art had been a part of my everyday existence, as was the discovery of music I’d never heard of before. And then I left the military before my term was up in large part due to a photo I’d taken of the performance artist Johanna Went, but that’s another story. From Ft. Bliss in El Paso, Texas, I headed back to Germany, and if I could have parachuted right into the red light district, I would have landed on the first prostitute I saw.

I wanted visceral and raw life to counteract the attempted brainwashing I’d endured for more than two years, and the only way to get there was to further embrace the antipodal world from where Americana and the U.S. military stood. I didn’t know how to reach my counter-culture heroes, who were celebrities in their own right, so I turned the other way and tried writing someone who was still a captive of total control.

Prison is where I thought I was while acting like a soldier, so why not write a prisoner? But I didn’t want a pen pal; I wanted to write someone who was a kind of Socrates or Dr. Frankenstein in his own right, and so I took aim at a serial killer. Maybe the most famous person who met that criteria in the 1980s was the Killer Clown, a.k.a. John Wayne Gacy.

So I found his address at Menard Correctional Facility in Illinois and wrote him a letter; he wrote back. For a few months, we exchanged letters, culminating in Mr. Gacy sending me an oil painting of some Disney characters dedicated to my daughter Jessica. I’d imagine that would make some people groan, knowing an infamous serial killer was creating a painting for someone’s 2-year-old daughter. Such is the life of someone feeling outside the mainstream.

Regarding what’s in the book from me, well, that can mostly remain private into eternity as the book is largely unavailable unless one wants to part with nearly $1,000 to secure a copy, but nobody on earth could ever have that level of interest in what some idiot 24-year-old had to say to a monster. For years, I was embarrassed to be included in the book, and I do believe that was Gacy’s intent, but here I am among fellow weirdos, such as Lux Interior of The Cramps and a young Oprah Winfrey, exploring our curiosity.

Is this something that progressed or obsessed me as I grew older? Nope, after trying to establish contact with Charles Manson, which failed, I was already growing out of it. By the time Jeffrey Dahmer was apprehended I was tempted to write him but instead satisfied myself by picking up a t-shirt with his mugshot on it while on a trip from Germany to Los Angeles. Wearing that shirt in Germany went unnoticed by Europeans who had no idea who this cannibal was, but American tourists traveling through would raise their eyebrows at the rude hippy flaunting such ugliness. I was reveling in it because back then, I was loaded with a bunch of fuck you.