The San Bernardino County Sun from San Bernardino, California • Page 77

G4 I BOOKS AND AUTHORS The Sun SUNDAY, April 17, 1994 Dahmer's dad subtly lets loose rage in book The Reading List The New York Times weekly best-seller lists are based on computer-processed sales figures from 3,000 bookstores and from representative wholesalers. Paperback perhaps borderline ic; at one point, shortly after her son was born, she and her husband had an argument and she stormed out of the house clad only in her nightgown. He found her five blocks away, lying in a field of grass. After their divorce, she drops out of the picture, as does their second son, and one would bet she is the missing chord that would make this strangled howl of numbed confusion a psychologically comprehensive composition. Lionel Dahmer gives himself a reasonably hard time, portraying himself as an emotional anchorite, more comfortable with the lab and theorems than with human beings.

He ends up confirming his self-portrait when he strenuously denies charges that; because most of the men his son killed and eviscerated were Black or Asian, he was a racist. Not so, says Dahmer. It was because of the neighborhood in which he lived that those were the people he killed, that, and because they were the people most likely to need the money Jeffrey offered them. Call his son a murderer, a ne-crophile, a ghoul, a cannibal? Well, OK. Everybody needs a hobby.

But call him a racist and his father gets huffy. Anyone this congenitally oblivious to reality should be a candidate for Congress. "A Father's Story" is written in calm, lucid, professorial prose that is surprisingly effective, if only because it underplays the howling winds of suppressed rage and grief that Lionel Dahmer' must feel, that have irrevocably altered the lives of he and his second wife. len it to prove he could do it. In 1988, just before Jeffrey is to be sentenced for child molestation, his father finds a small wooden box about one foot square.

He asks his son to open it. Jeff pleads for just one small square foot of privacy and promises to open it in the morning. His father backs down. The next morning, the box is opened and found to contain porn magazines. During his son's trial, Lionel Dahmer learned that, before his son had filled it with pornography that night, the box had held a human head.

Lionel Dahmer seems to have had the same formal, distanced, deeply uncomfortable relationship with fatherhood that George Bush had with the English language. It's as if his paternal moves were learned by reading a book. Instinct, emotional savvy, a sense of how to deal with a child, a sense of when to stay and when to walk away, are absent. At one point, Dahmer writes that "in the eyes of parents, I think, children always seem just a blink away from redemption. No matter to what depth we watch them sink, we believe we need only grasp the lifeline, and we can still pull them safely to shore." How touching.

How naive. Would anything have been different if Lionel Dahmer had been a more confrontational man and forced his son into some kind of therapy andor institutionalization? Would those 17 men still be alive today? Maybe. Maybe not. Children have a way of bringing their own destiny with them into the world. Lionel Dahmer is honest about himself, less so about others.

Certainly, he is overly circumspect about his first wife, Jeffrey's mother, who was almost certainly clinically neurotic and ft sj i Hp- i. A TrfritftiiajaiTH Jeffrey Dahmer His dad divulges thoughts Book report Title: "A Father's Story" Author Lionel Dahmer Publisher Morrow Paget); 255 Price: $20 and necrophilia. The vaguely risible thing is that his father never had a clue. He knew only that his son had a drinking problem and was homosexual. Lionel Dahmer castigates himself for his comical obliviousness to reality, as well he should; he's reminiscent of the old woman in the Lenny Bruce routine who feels sorry for her son.

He's a nice boy, and all the young men he brings home respond to his kindness by beating him up and taking his jewelry! At one point, Jeffrey's grandmother, with whom he's living, finds a fully clothed department-store mannequin in his closet. Jeffrey, calm and unemotional as always, explains that he had sto By Scott Eyman Cox News Service Inexplicable evil terrifies us, and so we compulsively seek answers. The devil; a bad childhood; mental illness. None of it quite washes; botched toilet training doesn't explain Mengele. Or Jeffrey Dahmer.

"A Father's Story" is Lionel Dahmer's sad, wounded circling around the monster he created, his eldest son who tortured, murdered and ate parts of at least 17 other men. By the time he was arrested, in July 1991, Dahmer had turned his low-rent Milwaukee apartment into a charnel house. His father, back home near Akron, Ohio, watched aghast on television as the police gingerly carted out the large freezer that he had been leaning against only a few months before. As Lionel Dahmer writes, the conventional Worst Parental Fear is that your child has died, but he found out that there are things much worse than that: "Not that my son was dead, but that something inside of him was dead Actually, as "A Father's Story" proves, whatever made his son's acts possible call it a lack of conscience or the absence of a moral sense never was alive in Jeffrey Dahmer. Although it is not an idea Lionel Dahmer ever articulates, his son was and is your basic Bad Seed, a strange child (by the time he entered first grade, as his father characterizes him, he was "deeply shy, distant, nearly a strange teenager (unbeknown to anyone else, he collected road kill and bleached the rotting flesh to keep the bones) and a strange adult, a failure at everything to which he turned his hand, except killing $16 Arizona Jute Runners come in solid, natural, and sage (not shown) and red stripe.

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