By Popular Demand: Alex’s Dahmer Story

You asked for it.

Okay, so flashback to 1990. I’m living in Wisconsin, and not yet 21 years old. My friend Cindy tells me that the best clubs in Milwaukee are the Mad Planet, La Cage, and 219. The latter two were gay bars. No stranger to underage drinking at gay bars (I went to high school just outside of NYC and back then those were the best places to get in with questionable ID), I had no hang-ups about that sort of thing, and I’ve always enjoyed queer culture anyway.

She introduces me to her weird artist friend Brad, and one night we wind up going to 219 midweek. Brad’s a short, slender, and swarthy looking guy whose ethnicity you can’t really discern. He files under ‘exotic’, whereas I was merely a run of the mill white goth rock kid. He was always being hit on, and consequently had to buy a lot less drinks than me.

The tale picks up after the jump.

One time out, this dude comes up to us and starts making kind of weird small talk. He’s a little bit shifty looking, blond, has thick glasses that he keeps taking off and putting back on again. Crap Freddy Mercury moustache. While he’s been hitting on me too, he’s fairly persistent with Brad. Brad took two beers off of him and starts getting drunk fast. Too drunk, actually – he’s only had three or four by this point and he usually quaffs down a fair bit more than that before the end of the night. He’s getting sloppy and I decide to haul him out of there and drive him home. My friend passes out a little bit in the car, so I have to rouse him and help him up two flights of stairs. I crash on the couch. The next morning he’s got one hell of a hangover and neither of us understands why.

So naive, we never even suspected that he’d been dosed with anything. Now, we’re pretty sure he was.

Flash forward a few months. Dahmer’s arrest kind of made a hell of a lot of local news and his picture was everywhere. I’m sure I’ve seen that face before but I can’t place it. One day shortly after the buzz dies down, I’m over at Brad’s place and we’re talking about the murders and such. Almost at the same instant we both realize—holy shit—that was the guy!

I still like gay bars a lot, though I’ve been buying my own drinks for a long time now, ever since I’ve learned that all gay dudes are cannibals.