#johnnygosch

Where Are All the Missing People?

Scrolling through my Netflix feed I am amazed at the number of true crime tv shows that have emerged over the past year; a newly found obsession of the public that needs to be fed. I realized that this fascination for true crime that I’ve had for several years now, is seeming to slowly creep into the mainstream media. A middle-aged man waiting for a table at my favourite breakfast restaurant a…

I had recurring nightmares when I was a child that I was being hunted on a dark country road by possessed deer with glowing eyes. I was afraid of the dark. I believed in monsters. I hated to be alone in the house, at any age. I heard noises—footsteps, the front screen door opening. I couldn't watch the TV show Fantasy Island for pretty much its entire eight-year run, and I definitely could not watch scary movies. 

I'd wake from my nightmares, cry and scream, and it all became kind of de rigueur in our house. Or at least, that's how I remember it. I could ask my family, but even if they don't remember my having nightmares, and that I often cried and screamed at night, it doesn't mean that I didn't. It means they remember things differently. They had their own problems to deal with, and they did.

Most times, I'd eventually tire myself out and fall back to sleep, but other times my older sister would crawl into bed with me and hold my hand and say, "I'm going to hold your hand so that when you have a bad dream again, you'll know I'm here." And of course I wouldn't have a bad dream on those nights after she did that.

My mother killed herself in our house in 1978. So that, well, that cast a certain pall. Four years later, a 12-year-old paperboy named Johnny Gosch was kidnapped about two miles from our house. And two years after that, another paperboy, 13-year-old Eugene Martin, was kidnapped about 11 miles from our house, in 1984. My family and I lived in a ranch-style house; my bedroom was on the ground floor, at the corner of the house. And if you are anything like me, then you know that this is another way of saying that I slept in a room with two waist-high windows on either side that anybody could break into. 

Now that I am writing this down, it is disturbing to realize how much I have lived my life in fear. 

My oldest sister delivered newspapers, too, several years before Johnny and Eugene were kidnapped. She woke before dawn, loaded up newspapers in the red wagon, and went out into the early morning darkness alone. Once, when I was about 4 years old, she bribed me into going with her by giving me a bag of giant marshmallows to eat along the route. It was wintertime, and though she remembered to put a coat on me, she forgot about shoes. I ate the entire bag of marshmallows from the comfort of the wagon while she tossed newspapers and my feet froze. When we got home, I barfed up the marshmallows while my sister got yelled at for taking me out at all, and especially without shoes. And then she cried while I barfed.

My sister is tired of hearing this story retold, and why wouldn't she be. It doesn't put her in the best light, though now I see that she was only 11 years old at the time and in need of company, probably feeling the pressure of getting those papers delivered on time, too. I see now that she might have felt lonely in those early mornings, or scared, and that these are important parts of the story that should have been seen all along. 

When I moved to New York when I was 28 years old, I'd sit on the subway and study the women who were in their 40s. They wore decorative eyeglasses and their heads were in books, and I'd feel sorry for them, how alone they looked. Of course, I'm one of them now. I didn't see that coming—though I did, in a way.

There is not a writer who won't tell you that writing can be a lonely endeavor, and that it is often scary. It's not just the time it takes to write, which in my case is extreme because I am so god-forsaken slow, but also because there are hours and days and months and years that pass where the writing takes priority. These decisions, sometimes unconscious, stack up until the next thing you know, you're a person who's still single, whose most intimate relationship is with the voices in your head. The danger here is the power your thoughts assume. You are at risk of becoming a child again, afraid of those who might break in, afraid of the power of disappearance.

And though there are sometimes triumphs, the rejections keep coming. And poverty casts its cold, long shadow. And if there are times when you manage to elevate above the dirge of these demons, even for a moment, the apparent reality that you must be insane to have chosen this life glares back at you in scorching light. 

But even so, none of these things are as scary as this very moment—the fact that I am writing them down for you to see. The scariest thing is to try to be seen, especially when fear and loneliness were not accepted parts of your childhood script.