Whatever Happened to Gloomy Gus of the Chicago Bears? (11 page)

At home, I find that somebody's painted a swastika on my door with black paint. Some childish prank probably, but that doesn't stop my heart from leaping to my throat. I try to stare as coldly as I can at the thing, since maybe they're watching me to see what I'll do, but inside I feel like I'm coming apart at all the joints. I'm an atheist, my first struggle against ideology was against Judaism, Freud freed me from my family, what was left of it, and socialism from my parochialism, but it's all been an illusion, I can see that now. Meyer, I say to myself, feeling again that jerk on the leash, be a Jew. Stop kidding yourself, and be a Jew.

I step firmly toward the door (have I been thinking about walking away, pretending I don't live here?) and force the key in. Then suddenly I get panicky about the Baron. Of course, the Baron isn't Jewish. But kids in the neighborhood have tried to get him before. I burst into my studio, arms full of fish and fruit, calling for him. He comes in from the back, stretching sleepily, rubs up against my leg to be stroked. “Hey, Baron,” I cry, setting the packages down. “That's all right, boy, it ain't the last consumption!” Something Jesse used to say after a bad day on the road. The Baron sniffs the groceries. I'm calming down at last. I give the Baron the fishheads and other scraps. I'd meant to parcel them out over two or three meals, but I'm so grateful he's alive, I give it all up at once like some kind of propitiating sacrifice. Be a Jew.

“There was much that was interesting and much that was amusing in our house,” Gorky wrote, “but sometimes I was overwhelmed by a vast longing. It was as though a great burden were weighing me down, and I went on living at the bottom of an inky pit, bereft of sight and hearing and feeling—blind and only half alive.” For over a month, that's how I've felt. “Confined in a cold oily bubble… stuck into it like a midge.” But no longer. Now, with that swastika on the door, the Baron rumbling softly over the stringy translucent bits, blind Gorky looking down on me, Gus dead and the streets drying up, my clothes wet on me and abrasive, dust motes floating in the soft ivory glow this side of the front window, I know that dead time is over. I'm frightened, but I'm alive again. And I know something else: I'm not going to Spain. Or to Palestine either. No more abdications. On some open shelving just past Gorky's square chin lies some of my early work, bits and pieces of unfinished ideas, a few blasted victims from the Guernica blitz, odd scraps of collected junk, all heaped up on each other. There is no harmony in this random pile, but there is life. I don't like Jane Addams' carved wooden head lying there on that scarred steel clutch plate, but in its harsh dissonance the juxtaposition seems to say more about life than her head alone—romanticized, yes, I know that, but sometimes you can't help it—ever did. Somebody has draped upon a Medusa-like crown of welded hair—but faceless—an old cap I used to wear on the road, and in the empty space where the face should be, like a kind of nose, leans the upraised leg of a baseball pitcher. I sit back against a bucket of scrap metal, thinking: In a class-ridden society, although itineraries may pass by and over each other, there is no real intersection—it's like separate planes sliding by each other. Now I want to make them collide. It will be uncomfortable, but I want to do this. Why am I trying to express harmony and simplicity when that isn't what I feel?

The swastika is still on the door and on my mind. The door I've left open, folded back against the inner wall, not wanting to put the sign out, so to speak, but I can't leave it that way. I could scrape it off, but they'd probably just paint it on again. Paint over it, same thing. Besides, whatever the intentions of those who put it there, it has come to me as a kind of sign, and I feel like it's important to leave it there. Transfigured maybe, but not dismissed. Never throw nothin' away. I go get some black paint and turn the swastika into three little squares, leaving the fourth, the upper left one, open. The two squares adjacent to the open one I fill with sprays of colored flowers cut from a little book of them I have, and the other square I paint red. The irony of the flowers is submerged maybe in the implied cowardice in failing to declare myself (where are the Star of David, working-class symbols, or laments for bloodied Spain?), but in the land of the wolves things are bad enough without putting out bait. Especially when you're the little pig who lives in the straw house. Or so I explain to the Baron, while varnishing the flowers.

I'm just finishing the last panel when Harry's sister Golda arrives with a paring knife in her hand. “I seen it when I went by earlier, Meyer. I come back to scrape it off.” She seems pretty shaken. Of course, she's been through a lot of late. “It's terrible, Meyer. What's happening to our people?”

“Don't let it upset you, Golda. Just kids, probably.”

“I'll be honest, when I first seen it there I looked the other way and run off. Then I got mad at myself and so I come back.”

“I know. I nearly couldn't open the door at first. But it's okay now,” I say, smiling up at her. She looks older than she has recently, worn down, vulnerable. “Golda, listen, I'm sorry. I just came from the hospital. Gus is dead.”

“I know. Harry called me after he seen you.” She sighs heavily, holding one breast. “People are wonderful, Meyer, they can get used to everything in this world.” The very words no doubt of our brethren in the German ghettos, streets of Guernica, hills of Ethiopia. It's a sentiment neither Gorky nor I much admire, but have learned to live with, even in ourselves, as though to acknowledge its universality. “I like the flowers,” she says. “But… still it's scary. You can't forget what's underneath.”

“That's sort of the idea, Golda.” I tell her about the fresh strawberries and she goes back to my room to wash them while I clean out my brush. She notices my wet clothes and makes me take them all off. She hangs them outside, while I change into dry underwear, thick socks, and a sweater. I don't have a second pair of pants.

What with all this domesticity, the fruity perfume of the strawberries (she's put them in a little vinegar and sugar to bring the juices out), the day's stresses, the memories the room holds for Golda, and the essential loneliness we both share, we soon find ourselves tumbling about on the ceremonial cot together. I apologize that I don't have Gus's technique and can't do what he did for her, but she laughs sadly and says it's all illusion anyhow, just a trick of the imagination. She coaches me in a few gimmicks she's picked up from Gloomy Gus and seems to have a good time. Afterwards, having kissed all my bruises, even the ones on my behind (“battle wounds,” she calls them, licking at them tenderly, respectfully), she hugs me close and says she was very satisfied, and I can't complain. My Homecoming Queen. I'm afraid she's going to ask me why I don't have a girlfriend, and that's exactly what she does. “A healthy boy like you, Meyer…”

“I like to be alone, Golda.”

She's quiet for a moment. “Do you want to be alone now?”

“No,” I lie. “No, this is great.” How did Gloomy Gus do it, I wonder. Just in and out and never look back: that's the coaching I really need. “But I do have to be alone a lot, and it's hard for girls to understand that.”

“You've had girls living with you, Meyer?”

“Sometimes. I've always liked having them around, but it's never worked out. They sit in the studio reading a book, insisting they won't bother me, but of course they already are. They try painting while I sculpt
—
I'm very weak, it's their paintings I spend the day with. I build up to my best work all day, but just then I hear them frying something on the stove. I can't let it get cold, can I? The minute the thought crosses my mind, I've lost my momentum. On the very best days, I rarely get more than twenty or thirty perfect minutes, the rest all preparations and reflections, and with all the best intentions, they've taken these moments away from me. It's always hard to tell them to go away and leave me alone for a while—and sometimes I mean for several days, even weeks—in fact, it's the hardest thing of all. Almost I can't do it. So finally I've found it best to avoid the problem. For now, anyway.”

“The trouble is, Meyer,” she says softly, “you've never been in love.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because it's always ‘they,' not ‘she.' “

“That's just my shyness, Golda, in talking about it.”

“But don't you get lonely sometimes?”

“Sure.”

“Meyer, I won't bother you, I promise. But when you get lonely, call me up, okay?”

“Okay, Golda. But—”

She presses her finger on my lips. “I know, I know,” she says. “Let's have some strawberries.”

She seems calmer now, almost happy. We sit on the edge of the cot in our underwear, munching the bright-red strawberries and talking cheerfully about Gloomy Gus. I describe the scene down at the hospital, she tells me about the last time he made love to her. It was just like all the other times until she asked him if it was the only way he knew, and—whirr-
click!
—he switched tracks and treated her to a feast of oral sex unlike anything she'd ever known before.

“You mean sixty-nine?”

“Yeah, well,” she grins, strawberry juice trickling out the corners of her mouth, “I didn't take no more chances with numbers…”

The one thing she couldn't get used to, she says, was how inconsistent he was: desperately in love with her one moment, utterly indifferent the next. “He was just a gay deceiver, Meyer,” she sighs.

“Well,” I smile, “more like a coldhearted craftsman, I'm afraid. One thing he always said in interviews: ‘What determines success or failure is the ability to keep coldly objective when emotions are running high.' He isolated himself from his feelings through discipline. He lived life in a kind of time-tunnel. Every minute of every day he lived was completely used up in working on his skills, even when he seemed to be simply enjoying them.”

“He did seem very serious…”

“I work pretty hard, Golda, but next to him I'm a complete amateur. I wouldn't be surprised if even his dreams were training programs. Maybe that was where he kept up the old skills he'd learned before giving them up for football and girls.”

“He always told me he dreamed of me, Meyer,” she whispers, gazing lovingly upon a plump red strawberry, the best of the box. “Probably it was just sweet nothings, hunh? Salting me up…”

“You know, I don't think he knew what love was all about—or football either. He'd taught himself how to score, but after he'd scored he didn't know what to do but score again.”

“I know. A girl just didn't know where she was with him…”

“He was very skillful, Golda, but he was a man without an overview. He lived this rigid, segmented, repetitive life, and he couldn't step back. His inability to discriminate was phenomenal. He was a freak, all willpower, no judgment—”

“You mean,” she muses, strawberry juice dribbling down her soft chin, “he was a eager beaver who couldn't see past the end of his own shnozzle…”

“You could say so,” I smile. “You know, people complain we don't live enough in the here and now. Either we're absorbed in the past or daydreaming about the future, which is presumably a very crazy way to behave, because we're missing the real thing and taking the imaginary thing as real. ‘Live like each moment is your last,' they say.”

“They're right, Meyer. It's the truth.”

“But that was just how Gus lived, though without the morbid touch: moment by moment, each out cut off from the next, fulfilling his timetable. We talk about living in the present because we can't imagine actually doing it. He did it. He was in that sense the perfect realist, the absolute materialist.”

“He was a lot smarter than me, I know that.”

“We think of the past and the future as part of a kind of river, a time-stream, but this is just a poetic metaphor. Gus had no perception of this or any other metaphor. He was completely metaphor-free. He had no imagination at all!”

“Well, I don't know about that,” she replies. “Did I ever tell you about his little tricks with the ketchup and cottage cheese?”

“Oh, he was inventive. He had to be. Everything was a crisis for him. Whenever he encountered something new, he tested out responses to it. When something worked, he moved it into his practice schedule and turned it into a habit.”

“He had a cute thing with a bicycle pump, too. You should have such habits, Meyer,” she teases, popping a strawberry into my mouth. “Sometimes, though, he got very dirty talking, you wouldn't do that…”

“Probably he was just getting his line for making out muddled up with his lockerroom banter. Tell me, did he ever hit you with a wet towel?”

“How—how did you know?”

“Just a guess…”

“I turn my back once to get undressed, that's all, and I'm just pushing down my, my under-things, thinking how excited he must be to see, you know… when—oh! What a spank! I thought I would die!”

“It was one of his football exercises, Golda.”

“You mean, he wasn't mad—?”

“Not like you mean. He just couldn't keep things straight finally. That was how he cracked up.”

“He
was
a little peculiar, Meyer, I know what you're talking about. Once we were hugging and I just squatted down a little so to sit on the bed, when he claps me hard on the tushie and says: ‘Let's go git them fuckin' assholes!'—pardon the French, Meyer. And then he turns and runs—
patsch!—
right into the wall!”

“He was breaking out of a huddle…”

“He sure was! I thought he was killing himself! I didn't think it was for love, but I couldn't be sure. I run over to help him. I says: ‘Dick! Dick! What have you done?' And you know what he says?”