Society
Jeffrey Dahmer’s Dad Lives Around The Corner From Me
I wish he’d mow his lawn more often.
I’ve never had kids, but I know you can’t control how they turn out. Nobody has children and thinks, “Boy, I hope my kids become drug addicts one day.”
You try to raise your kids to be good, law-abiding citizens. Some parents are better at that than others.
But in the end, you can’t control whether your kids start using drugs, or whether they’re rude to strangers, or whether, over a span of many years, they horrifically murder 17 people.
These things just happen.
The paramedics spend a lot of time at Mr. Dahmer’s house. But in between visits from the fire department, he appears to be a tough old coot who still mows his own yard (just not to my exacting standards).
I wouldn’t mind owning Mr. Dahmer’s house if it were to come on the market — I already have some major renovations in mind.
I don’t like yellow, so it’s getting a paint job. I think a fence out front would be cute. Get rid of the trees. Maybe buy some goats. Goats make everything better.
Sorry, Zillow, but no way is that place worth $380,000. It doesn’t even have goats.
Trained as a chemist, Mr. Dahmer has actually spent most of his life as a writer. In his book, A Father’s Story, he worries that something he might have done or not done, some failure of his as a parent, caused Jeffrey to turn into the more-than-usually-gruesome serial killer who became a household name.
Of course, serial killers are born, not made. I hope Mr. Dahmer knows that. Something was wrong with Jeff deep down in his mitochondria. Some gene was sleeping on the job and eventually, things went horribly wrong.
I can only watch snippets of Jeffrey Dahmer: Mind of A Monster (2020). The Dahmer saga is too close and too big a part of my mental landscape to explore in detail all over again.
It started one county over, and I guess it’s going to end three houses behind me.
I’m sorry anybody has to go through something like that — I’m sorry for Jeffrey’s parents and family, his victims, his victims’ families. I’m even sorry for Jeffrey. No one asks to be born, and certainly, no one asks to be born a serial killer.
I wasn’t going to write about Jeffrey Dahmer’s dad. I was going to write about the pair of lunatic brothers who were behind the iconic Farrah Fawcett poster — you know the one. I think about them every time I drive past the vacant lot where the Trikilis house used to stand in all its weird, leaning glory.
But I got distracted when I stumbled across Lionel Dahmer’s IMDb page because (A) he has an IMDb page, and (B) his credits include playing the role of … Jeffrey Dahmer’s dad.
It just struck me as the ultimate melding of real life and entertainment, where we all play the role of ourselves.
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