I wished

When I was 10 years old, some friends and I were playing in some bushes on an edge of my front yard that very roughly brought to mind a pint-sized forest. One of them was using an old rusted ax to chop depressions in the ground for some forgotten reason, and I was crawling wildly through the shrubbery below, I don’t know why. My friend chopped. The ax blade split my skull. If he hadn’t semi-seen me and let up slightly on the handle, I would be dead.

I was squashed onto the ground, out cold and with a volcanic vent-like wound erupting in my budding hippie hair. My friends freaked out and ran away, leaving me to die or live somehow or other. When I woke back up at some convenient point, my head was firing blood in all directions so I struggled to my feet and ran screaming up the driveway.

I was salvaged, then kept out of school for months, recovering in bed. For the first few weeks, the pain was unbelievable. They couldn’t anesthetize my head because my brain was trapped inside so there was nothing anyone could do. I kept wishing I was dead. I turned my thoughts into a beacon that sent a nonstop SOS, or the opposite, I guess, to God or whoever, and I absolutely meant it, but I also knew it wouldn’t happen.

When the pain eventually waned a bit, and I could think of things I would be doing were I not in bed or incapable of moving even an inch without a pounding headache, it began to interest me that I had wanted to die even though I knew I wouldn’t, no matter how passionately I’d wished to be dead and how much death was the only thing that could have helped me.

I felt as though my wish for death contained a kind of logic that I couldn’t access with my usual overly protective thoughts. That, prior to then, I’d been a kind of actor or self-hypnotist, not just when I socialized with other people but when I even thought of other people, which, put together, constituted almost always. That my wish had been completely understanding because it knew me, unlike my friends.

I felt that when I’d wished to die, I was being who I really was, sans interference from the world or from the priorities and hopes that had polluted me through other people’s minor needs for me or from the books I read incessantly. It was like I’d found myself, and I was someone who had never had the things I really wanted, plainly never would, and whom no one would fully comprehend. I think that saved me more than surgery.

After that, I began to make a wish when the impracticalities of life wronged me, but very cautiously. I did that to understand who I really was and what I actually wanted, regardless of whether my wish could possibly come true or was good or bad for me or for anyone else, because I didn’t know who I was most of the time.

I tried to see myself as consciousness that looked like me and whose speaking voice was based herein and censored by my crappy English but also out of my control like my ventriloquist. I used that voice to represent the public me. And then there was my secret self who took pity on how compromised I usually was and poached the wisest powers of my mind, then used a thought to say, in so many words, “I will grant you one wish, Dennis. What do you want?”

Then I would think about the question until it had infected me, revising and refining a related wish, first conceptually as a tryout to assess the consequence, were it to happen in the real world. If the wish involved sex, which it almost inevitably did, I would test myself by masturbating, cum, then reappraise the wish more puritanically and decide if my surpassing goal of cumming had overly influenced me or given me the equivalent of truth serum.

This process might go on and on for weeks, months, with one offhand in-process wish refining and dwindling until I’d built the single most intransigent, comprehensive thing I craved and that would never come to pass and that no one else could ever guess I wanted. And once I had decided on and made that perfect wish, didn’t get it, and accepted that my peace of mind was doomed, I thought I knew exactly who I was, and I stopped wishing for it.

I thought my wishing ritual would die away or be co-opted when I became a writer, or at least a writer good enough to do my thoughts some kind of justice and get them published and read. I assumed the writing thing was generated from the same impulse I’d had to pinpoint and set aside my deepest shit. I figured writing would just give that stuff a solid form and, if safely sealed into the envelopes of books, readers could solve me if they wanted. But that wasn’t true.

Instead, my writing merely subdivided me again. I became a semi-guy who dealt with other people nicely and another semi-guy who used the written word to challenge readers to accept the secret me selectively and still another semi-me who wanted something so abnormal that even the unrivaled distancing device of nuanced, airtight wordage couldn’t get it out to other people.

What the writing did was draw a stylized map to the general location where my wishes were impregnating. I tried to make the maps clever, funny, disturbing, and erotic so the things I wrote about would seem as scary or exciting to envision as they’d been to pen, sort of like the rosy illustrations with which rides are represented in the folded maps they hand you at the entrances of amusement parks.

I think the wishes always courted love. I think somewhere along the line I decided that I hadn’t actually wanted to be dead when I’d wished to die, and that I’d wanted death to love me enough to kill and take me. I don’t think I knew that for a long time, though. I think I thought the wishes I so time-consumingly constructed were about having raucous sex since that was the crux of what happened in them.

When I never thought I could be loved, or not realistically, or not by anyone real who had a choice, by which I mean people other than my family, which covers most of my life, I’d think up situations where the horror of not being loved, of being rejected by someone I could ostensibly pick out of the lineup of Los Angeles’s cutest boys, for instance, would feel the most intense.

And since cumming was the most intense outcome I knew, I made them hugely sexual, and, to try to make the blast as wild as I imagined being loved would feel, I made my fantasies as scary and chaotic to everyone involved in them as possible, but especially to me since I was real. I wanted the orgasms they produced to be like self-inflicted fatal wounds, or maybe more like being shocked back into real life by a defibrillator, I guess.

When I was really young, I wished quite warily, as if a wish was a new car and I its freshly licensed driver. I thought that if I wished to alter people in my real life, I would get too confused about them and myself and go crazy or something. So I would fixate on, say, cute young actors on TV shows or cute young pop singers because they were as blank and unrealistic as the secret me.

I thought those wishes would be safe to play within, and they could vanish from my memory like books of fairy tales from growing children’s bookshelves, which they did, apparently, because I don’t recall anything about the huge majority of them, apart from one wish that seems to have been so taxing to perfect that I tried to keep its doings straight in a diary that I found among my stuff some years ago.

That wish, which I revised sometimes hourly over several weeks when I was 13, involved identical twin brothers who were actors on a short-lived TV show I liked. The Monroes was the show, and it was set in the wilderness of Montana maybe, back when families pioneered out west by wagon train, then squatted plots of forest, built cabins, and tried to start new anarchistic lives of endless promise or whatever.

The twins, played by wan, long-haired, adolescent actors Keith and Kevin Schultz, were the youngest of some siblings whose parents had been killed by Native Americans or something, and who consequently had to organize themselves into a family unit, with the oldest brother-sister combo as the makeshift mom and dad and the twins reformulated as mock sons whom the others had no choice but to control.

They twins were very cute, presumably to get young girls to watch, but they couldn’t act at all. To make them function properly, the show’s director had them speak in almost monotones, and hold their faces very still, and even move their bodies stiffly. They seemed eternally bored, even when required to come off angry or frightened or hysterical, which made them boring to watch, I would imagine, unless you were attracted to their looks like I was, in which case they were addictively mysterious.

The twins were mostly there to illustrate the vexing obligations of their older siblings. Even so, they seemed more like family cats, free-floating tidbits who came and went a few times in every episode, and whose appearances were noticed by the others more than greeted with affection. My guess is that, had their older siblings shown the wooden duo too much interest, it might have made them seem obsessed like pedophiles.

So the twins were asked to be peripherally in trouble all the time, i.e., to get captured by outlaws, almost eaten by bears, fall in ravines, contract malaria, etc., and thereby advance the story lines at large and display their minor characters’ bravery and foolishness without sapping much attention from their older siblings’ weekly tested skills as decent parents.

They were like mistakes or weaknesses, and I seem to have decided that a well-appointed wish could be the perfect opportunity to enhance their roles and also figure out my fascination with them, and, by proxy, better come to grips with the unavailability of everyone I craved romantically or sexually but had no guts or looks to help bewitch.

According to my notes, my wish started its short, roiling life respectfully. I wished that I were living in the same fictional Old West component of the TV show, and that the twins weren’t bad actors but incredibly laconic historic figures, and that my parents also had been killed by Native Americans or something, whereupon the older siblings reluctantly adopted me.

My premise as the new son was to show Keith and Kevin Schultz the interest no prior cast member was scripted to—gambling that, deep inside, they were dying for attention, and that I could undermine their catatonic bents and get all three of us laid. But I quickly realized my mistake. Their relentless stoicism wasn’t rubbery. It had been set in stone by lack of acting talent, and my wish made no allowance for off-show groundwork.

So I couldn’t tell if being in cahoots with them and flirting merely added “dealing with the gay son” as a recurrent subplot of their general malaise. They seemed more hypnotized by me than really interested, and, given my neediness and wish to get my boner back to dangling unnoticed in my pants, where it belonged, that got frustrating fast.

So I revised the wish. I became a “bad kid” who’d been cast to use the duo’s diffidence to easily convince them that, say, smoking pot, then having sex with me was no more challenging than looking frightened by a man dressed as a bear. Getting naked with their cute but rigid bodies sated me in one sense, but, once I’d cum, I still felt hurt by how they’d just go back to staring blanks at me again.

Next I wished that one of them would fall in love with me, even if he couldn’t show it, and that the other twin would get so jealous underneath his placid surface that he’d kill his brother in a violent rage. I found that upgrade interesting, according to my notes, because, given that they looked and thought—or, rather, barely thought—alike, the murder felt less like tragedy than just subtraction or streamlining.

Excited, I spent several days’ entries wishing the fratricide was ever more appalling. As this wish predated my acquaintanceship with Sade, it wasn’t all that gory. Its violence merely showed me what his stolid face could not, that he felt violently in love. In short, he clobbered his dead ringer’s head with rocks while I smiled lovingly with horror at him. Oh, I should say I felt no guilt, because the killer twin had tied me to a chair, forcing me to watch.

But at some point, I realized there was something missing even so. I wanted Keith and Kevin Schultz to know that I was me and not another actor doing something in their scripts that occasioned them to wildly overact. So I further upped the ante and made my wish more God’s-eye-like. I turned the sets and premise of the show into the falsities they were, and I made the twins and me young actors who worked therein and lived in Hollywood or someplace.

I made the TV show’s director some super-evil guy who was so obsessed with Keith and Kevin Schultz that he’d concocted and bankrolled a fake TV show and “cast” them in it as a way to get them nude and raped and so on. I had him use the show’s cabin set like people who make snuff films use the basements where they drag their captives. And I was in the cast too, but tied to a chair again.

But in asking for the Schultzes to be real like me with lives and friends and shit I’d need to know about to represent them, I hit a wall. The only tip-offs were in magazines like Tiger Beat, whose mission was to edit every star they lionized into the perfect chick bait. Just like every other idol, Keith and Kevin were portrayed as nice, reserved young boys whose love for girls was as inclusive as the printed text inside a Valentine.

That limitation might have been no big deal were I a normal masturbating kid, but my wishing thing was much more serious, as I’ve explained. I saw my wishes as a kind of life or death decision, and I wanted what I wished for to defeat me when it couldn’t come to life. And no matter how I overhauled the Schultz twins, they were never worth it. The last sentence of my wish journal was “Fuck them.”

In my later teens, I discovered serial killers, as they were termed. I decided they were like primordial big brother figures of my wishing side. The dick without the brains, essentially. Haunting that resource solved my wishing’s problem for a while. Because the murdered boys were baffling and safe like TV characters, and almost real, or real enough since they originated in the news, but not dangerously real since, by the time I knew they’d even been alive, they were dead.

Suddenly the sex I wished on real boys seemed psychologically okay, like throwing lit firecrackers at somebody in a coffin. To read the news reports that summed the victims up as prostitutes or drug addicts or mentally unsound, the promises their lives had made to them and everyone were so slight that you could see why horny psychos could have rationalized their murders as simple edits.

I got particularly obsessed with Robert Piest, who was the last boy killed by John Wayne Gacy, and the crime that eventually led to his arrest. I liked the way Piest looked, which, at least in rugged newsprint, was eerily like George Miles, who, as you know by now, I wanted desperately to love me, but who was too erratic looking to objectify into a cute guy you could have by stripping naked, so I didn’t.

So Piest, with his frozen face and untold body language and physique finagled by high school gymnastics, as the news squibs always mentioned, presumably to add zeal to the nightmare he’d been through, became a kind of storage space and match for George, and in my secret world where I had never dared to bring him, he and Piest grew almost indistinguishable.

I liked that Piest was not a drug addict or prostitute or criminal like Gacy’s other casualties, and, thus, vaguely less doomed to die young anyway, which gave his death the air of devastation I would need to even start to try to think it could relate tangentially to George’s. At the same time, Piest was termed in every thumbnail obit as being, while brighter than Gacy’s other gambits, unmotivated. He wanted to grow up to work in a garage, if I remember right.

Gacy had always denied himself boys as relatively valuable and more than likely to be missed than Piest, but there was something to the boy that turned him, maybe even, I imagined, the same who-knows-what that made me target George’s love over that of people who could feel and show it. And there was something so momentous about killing Piest, compared with Gacy’s others, that what’s known about the death is legendary among serial killer buffs for its poetic.

What’s known for sure is Gacy spotted Piest somewhere, decided to kill him, and offered him some kind of easy-money short-term fix-up job at Gacy’s house, and that Piest accepted and showed up at Gacy’s to do said job at some appointed time. After that, no one really knows, but either Piest balked when he discovered the job was getting fucked, or Gacy was so intimidated by Piest’s quality he couldn’t get a hard-on. So, instead of raping Piest, he said something like, “Let me show you my rope trick, and I’ll let you go.”

Gacy put some kind of quirky noose thing made from rope tied onto sticks around Piest’s neck and turned the sticks, then watched the boy strangle to death. When Piest died, Gacy looked up at a light bulb that was hanging from the ceiling, and something apparently profound happened in Gacy’s head that no one will ever know and that even Gacy said was indescribable, and he looked with fascination at the light bulb, and said, “Light.”

I wanted to understand what “light” meant and why Gacy hadn’t raped Piest when he could have so handily, and I wanted not to be someone so covert and disconnected that I would let someone who could be George get killed. So, I set the time clock in a wish to just before Gacy had snuffed Piest and made myself his hopelessly crushed-out friend who always tagged along with him, and I let Gacy just be Gacy because I’d always had a hard time imagining the impetus of murderers from scratch.

I made dozens if not hundreds of wishes set in a slightly altered version of the real-life crime scene. I was there, trapped but not cute enough to be killed with any excitement or something, so I was cruelly forced to not just watch my hopeless crush get offed but to never even see him naked much less fuck him. That was where my wish was concentrated, trying with my magic powers to reorganize that horrible, depressing situation.

For a while, I tried to turn the murder’s buildup into a kind of courtroom scene with Gacy as the judge and me acting as my own attorney, sometimes under the guise of representing Piest’s best interests and sometimes using him as evidence against himself that I had brought before the court to serve my own. Since Gacy had the final word, and it was mine, the case seemed very open and shut to me.

For instance, I would say to Gacy: If you kill him, you’ll get caught. He’d say, “If I let him go, he’ll tell, and I’ll get caught anyway.” Then why not rape him first, I’d ask. “Because he’s too good for me.” All the more reason. “Tell that to my dick.” Then let me fuck him. “I thought he was your friend.” He is, but you’re going to kill him, so it’s my only chance. Plus, you could watch. “But if it turned me on, I’d kill you too.” Then don’t watch, just let me fuck him because . . . why not and what’s the difference?

When Piest was on the witness stand, I’d say, If I kill Gacy, which I can because this situation is my wish, will you love me? He’d say, “Well, maybe by default.” What if I said you’re going to kill yourself when you turn 30, and your life will get more hellish, and I’m the only one who’ll love you even when you’re insufferable. “If it’s hellish anyway why bother?” To not be so alone. “I’ve been alone and suicidal ever since we met.” Then if I kill Gacy, let me fuck you. “Why?”

Long story short, I tried every rationale that reality had stuck me with to coerce Gacy into either sparing Piest’s life or allowing me to fuck him first, and, in later, more developed versions, I even called a clinician to the witness stand and used what seemed like basic logic to convince him to sell Piest on why loving me was good for him, period, and clever too since maybe, just maybe, even a psychopath like Gacy might respect love’s stature and let us leave.

Things got grittier and juicy over time but I’ll spare you. No matter how I tweaked the wish, it never brainwashed Piest, someone with every reason in the fucking world to love me, or to lie convincingly at least. And what finally killed it off—and this sounds convenient, but it’s true—is I took acid, bought into its mind-trumps-body doctrine, and exposed my wishing’s fatal flaw. Sex, or rather lust: Gacy’s, Piest’s lack thereof, and mostly mine since it began that stupid swordfight.

That took me back to where my wishes started, the hankering to die, and how huge and pure and terrifying and extremely selfish and yet arguably selfless that had been. I realized my ambition had been hacked along the way, and I’d ended up like Orson Welles—I think was my comparison—except I was too horny to create another masterpiece rather than too broke. So I masturbated to the point where having sex seemed like a yawn, then made one last-ditch wish.

I showed up at Gacy’s, and what happened sounds so preordained now as I compromise my secret self enough to type it—I immediately fell out of what I’d thought was love with Piest, not that I had ever been, and the idea of having sex with him seemed weird and morbid. I weighed what options I had left, then let him die horribly and let Gacy spot a light bulb, say, “Light,” go to prison, and be executed in peace. In other words, I barely wished.

Then I finally turned my wishes loose on people in my life or on its periphery and went straight for love. Sex too, but that was only like a set of stairs I climbed to get where I was going. I picked on guys who were available to varying degrees, and wishing gradually became a kind of technical exercise that rendered every person doctoring within it so interchangeably ideal that no one recognized me anymore, or I them.

The problem, or perhaps the worst of many problems, was that the love my imagination had constructed as an endpoint wasn’t getable through simple back-and-forths, even with neurotics. My wish had started at the top by wanting death to love me. I’m talking totally absorb me, mysteriously and without rewards, ending every other thing besides itself, a love so violent that even John Wayne Gacy’s victims were like bricks laid out before a bricklayer.

Eventually, I stopped wishing altogether, except for normal shit like money. I never used George in a wish again, even though, in retrospect, he was so unknowable, such a blur, someone whose love was so difficult to imagine manifesting, that fantasizing love from him would decimate me might have worked, whatever I thought “worked” meant. We stayed real guys, dealing with the tumult of his mental illness, and waiting for it to go away or kill him.

I still dreamed of reinventing George but only in the safety of my writing, poems and terrible short stories at that point, and later novels, five of them, where I tried to recapitulate him, make him sexier, or semi-sane, or so cute his insides didn’t matter, sometimes by name, sometimes renamed and given similar but hotter bodies, other talents, different issues, and you can find out how terribly he fared in every variation if you want: George, David, Kevin, Ziggy, Robin, Chris, Drew, Sniffles, Egore, Dagger, George.

I wrote the books thinking George would read the Cycle and go, “Wow, you think I have so many possibilities, you find me so inspiring, you wanted me to die young so much more spectacularly than the boring way I wanted to, you must love me, I mean you’d have to, and I must love you too, how could I not after all the work you’ve done, and I do,” but he killed himself before the first of them was even published.

When George was 18, he found a useful medication. It merged the half of him who couldn’t stop fidgeting and saying everything that crossed his mind at frantic speed with the other half who lay in bed and stared. He became as close to a complete George as he would ever be, and it was sort of possible to think that very strange guy was George and not just an experimental composition caused when both conflicting measures were being played at once.

Even that shaky George seemed a kind of miracle to me, and to him too for as long as that medication worked and while he lasted. And what I mostly would have wished from him happened, like for real. Some defect of the medication spun his mania into a sex addiction, and we had sex like we were wrestling each other for a knife, and our exhausted cuddling afterward would feel like love, to me at least, sometimes for hours.

The pill worked until his middle-20s. Then he tore apart again. We tried to edit ourselves back into friends, which we’d never really been. Being “put up with” at that age was too dark for George. He stopped talking to me. I moved away, so far away that I didn’t have a phone in my apartment. My letters to him bounced. I thought or wished another pill had eventually unified him. It was only years after he was dead that I was wrong.

George worsened. After three involuntary psych holds, he quit pretending he was sane. He threatened to kill a girl he didn’t love but wanted to be loved by and was arrested. He had to move in with his parents, and I guess, or can only think, having known him as well as anybody had, that he knew by then or thought he knew that he would never stop exploding under wraps, and there was no wrap left anyway.

In January 1987, George took an overdose of pills that didn’t work. Two days after being checked out of the hospital he tried to kill himself by totaling his father’s car, but he survived. At that point, his family gave up on him. He bought a gun and hid it for a few days. On his 30th birthday, he blew his brains out in his bedroom while listening to Nick Drake singing sadly to him about what he thought he heard as death.

You can make a movie based on Peter Pan and cast a pretty boy who has the minimum amount of talent needed, but he can never be more than the buffer or the life raft of the famous illustrations that deformed the story and preconfigured the appearance of their actor. Drawings can only hope to nail a character’s resemblance, and they’re just distractions from whatever wish was dying in the writer when he typed it.