Whatever Happened to Gloomy Gus of the Chicago Bears? (2 page)

At the river, where it rolls under Ogden, I pause, watching the rain freckle the dirty brown water, sweeping back and forth with the wind like indefatigable and ever renewable armies. An illusion, of course. Armies can perish entirely, causes can be lost, nothing is inevitable. Just because people can control their thoughts, they suppose they can control the world of things. They project their convictions out on the world and are surprised when the world takes no notice. A kind of magical thinking: Freud called it “omnipotence of thoughts.” I've often been guilty of it myself in that space of time between thinking up a new idea for a sculpture and actually picking up the torch to begin. All the worse when it happens out in the world. Orthodox Marxists like my friend Simon tend to forget the old rabbi's warning—”History is
nothing but
the activity of man pursuing his aims”—and to look upon history not as the minute-by-minute invention it really is, but as a kind of discovery, something that unfolds inexorably before your eyes, in spite of all of man's willful and unwillful resistance. Which is, as Leo puts it, a lot of mystical borax. Nothing so infuriates Leo as Simon saying something like “You can't hurry history, comrade.” Usually, this is Simon's excuse for avoiding demonstrations and the like, and so that makes Leo all the madder. “Listen, Simon,” he'll yell, his mustaches bristling, “I don't believe in historical forces and I don't believe in moral positions. Nobody's got a right to anything, and nothing—
nothing
, goddamn it!—is inexorable. The struggle against oppression seems endless, but it can end, and the oppression is real but it is not immoral. I can understand these shits like Girdler. If I'd inherited a railroad or a steel plant, or had fought my way up the goddamn ladder like he did to get one, I'd be on the other side fighting to keep what I had, just as hard as I'm fighting now to take it away. Partly just because it's
fun
. And don't think any crazy historical spirit or supposedly superior morality would stop me! All that's just fiction, brother, and fiction is the worst enemy we got!”

Leo's right when he argues that actions are the only hard things in the world—I also believe in the essential softness of objects, the hardness of gesture, it's why I like to work in welded metal. But these actions have less certain meaning and more lives in the world than Leo likes to allow, and he's too much gripped by the image of life as a gutter fight. Of course, the Party's doing everything it can to make it seem like one since the Stalin-Trotsky split, turning old family friends like Simon and Harry into mortal enemies, and the kangaroo trials in Russia right now are making Leo's claim that “the only real joy in life is power, and there's just not enough of it to go around,” sound like a truism, but this is to ignore the effect a changed context can have and to underestimate the appetite for hope and brotherhood. Leo also finds my jugglers and athletes frivolous, but that's because he talks without listening to himself; he'd be much closer to the mark to say they were self-contradictory. Leo puts a lot of people off with his hardnosed bluster, but I've always felt close to him. He and Jesse befriended me during rough times on the road, and I followed them around in their efforts to organize coal miners, tenant farmers, ironworkers, housewreckers, Leo becoming a kind of father figure to me. Not having had one of my own. And from those times, I know that Leo's not the cynic he pretends to be. If anything, he's too ruled by his emotions. Injustice offends him at some level that seems almost organic, and he stakes out these skeptical positions to give himself more room to move and breathe.

I pick up a broken chip of concrete and toss it idly into the river, meaning nothing by it, except maybe as a kind of calendar notation. It occurs to me that Leo would have looked for a boulder, Jesse would have tried to skip the thing, Golda would have loved the chip and grieved when it was gone. Gus? Probably he'd have carried it into the river on an end run. Or delivered Hamlet's soliloquy to it as to Yorick's skull. Though on the night we showed his talents off to Leo, I should say, he gave no sign of knowing
Hamlet
—or even of its existence. By then I knew a lot of the plays he'd been in, and so got him to do Aeneas for us, the prosecuting attorney from
The Night of January 16th
and the greenhorn playwright from
The Dark Tower
. Leo was particularly impressed by a bit Gus did from an unknown one-acter called
The Price of Coal
, and the old innkeeper's weeping scene from
Bird-in-Hand
, which, in spite of its feudal sentiments (the thrust of the play is the old man's opposition to his daughter's marrying into the upper classes: “And we've always known 'oo was 'oo and which ‘at fitted which 'ead…”), was very moving. Tears actually welled up in his eyes and rolled down his cheeks into his black beard when he reached the lines: “H' I'm sorry about wot h' I've done tonight. H' I shall be sorry for h' it till the end of me life. H' I've be'ayved so as h' I ought to be h' ashamed, h' I know. But this business”—
sob!
—” ‘as pretty near broke me ‘eart…!”

“Jesus, that's terrific!” Leo laughed. We got Gus to repeat it a couple of times to show Leo how the tears fell right on cue each time through. “Hey, brother, I could use you down at the steel mill next week!” Leo said, half jokingly, yet clearly considering the possibilities at the same time. When I tried to caution him, he wouldn't listen, so I shouted out:
“29!”
Gus jumped to his feet, ducked his head down into his shoulders, and—
wham!
—piled into my potbellied stove. Luckily, there was no fire in it, or he'd have been badly burnt. As it was, there was a tremendous crash of stovepipe, grates, and dishes, cinders and coaldust flying everywhere, and a big hole in the partition between my room and the studio out front. “Holy shit!” Leo gasped. “This guy's a fucking tornado!” My intention had been to convince Leo not to take Gus down to the Memorial Day demonstration (“More like the
Hindenburg,”
I suggested), but I apparently accomplished just the opposite. It hasn't escaped me that I am, indirectly anyway, responsible for Gus's death.

Not his real name, of course. He picked it up back in college when he was still playing freshman football—or trying to—for the Whittier Poets. When he joined the Chicago Bears, sportswriters started calling him the Fighting Quaker and, for reasons never quite clear to me (maybe it had something to do with his battering-ram style of running), Iron Butt, but Gloomy Gus was the name that stuck to him. Not because he was actually a gloomy sort of character—I doubt he had any feelings at all, as we know them anyway, he wasn't put together that way—but because it was a clown's name, and a clown was what Gus was, even when he was a National Hero. He was the most famous guy I ever knew—a college All-American and an all-star football pro—and, as such, a kind of walking cautionary tale on the subject of fame and ambition.

He first turned up at a party we threw in my studio one Friday toward the end of March, and he came back every Friday night after. “A f'kucken schnorrer,” Harry called him, “f'kucken” being his own Yiddish-American neologism, made of
kucken
, fucking, and
fehkuckteh
, but Gus wasn't there to sponge exactly. It was just his style: everything by the numbers, one to ten and start again. In fact, he was one of the hardest workers I ever knew. Maybe that was why they called him Iron Butt, I don't know. Jesse speculated it had to do with his Bear teammates' inability to crack his virginity in the lockerrooms; he made up a funny song about it, a parody of “John Henry” in which the steel-drivin' man meets his match at last. Gus was a strange guest, my principal distraction through the hands-down melancholy of this past month, but maybe he contributed to it, too. He ate my food, drank the Baron's milk, crapped in my toilet, washed in my basin, even used my bed, but never a word of thanks, not even the least sign that he understood these things were mine and not his. Simon joked he was just being a good comrade, true to the canons, but then Gus wasn't mooching off Simon. In place of thanks, we got performances. Sometimes by request, sometimes spontaneous, but never entirely predictable. He'd laid on several skills in his lifetime, and he didn't always come up with the right ones in the right order.

I hadn't recognized him at first, which is not surprising, since not only had he been wearing a bushy black beard and been introduced as an actor living off the WPA like the rest of us, but I wouldn't ordinarily recognize any professional football player, by face or name, nor would any of my friends. Of course I like the game—I like all games—but I don't keep up with the overblown seasonal histories. Nevertheless, it happens that I did know who Gloomy Gus was, had even for a few weeks a couple of years back followed his then-fabulous career, and I eventually put two and two together (the answer in Gus's case was not four, not even close), though I admit I got some help from visitors who came through asking about him.

That time when I was reading about him was the autumn of 1934. I'd come back to Chicago after a couple of years bumming around, following the harvests and the unionizing. I was tired of that life and wanted to get back to sculpting again. I'd learned a new skill on the road, welding, and I knew at last where I was going, if I could ever get the money together for a studio and equipment. I was staying at that time down on Kedzie with my aunt. I had no place to begin work, so I took a refresher course in plumbing and metalworking at the Jewish Training School and spent the rest of my time reading. Anything at hand, which at my aunt's house was mostly mystical tracts and newspapers. And the papers that fall were full of the incredible exploits of Gloomy Gus of the Chicago Bears. It was his rookie season in the bigtime and he was breaking every record in the books, just as he had done in college ball. The reporters were so excited it was sometimes hard to tell the newspapers from the mystical tracts. I read that he'd played for a little Quaker school out in California, and had set phenomenal rushing, passing, pass-receiving, and scoring records—including seven touchdowns, almost single-handed (he was always a loner, and besides, nobody else was really good enough to keep up with him) against Pittsburgh in the Rose Bowl. There was even a popular song about him, “You Gotta Be a Football Hero.” He was everybody's All-American, and all the big professional teams were after him. He wasn't interested in the negotiations apparently, and would have played for nothing (though this may have been some publicity tararam handed out by the Bears' front office), but he was very loyal to all his friends and relatives, his old coach, former teammates and girlfriends, and so the price was finally pretty high, especially considering the hard times. Since the Bears were the reigning league champions and had all the money, they were the ones who got him. And it was worth it, or so it seemed that fall: he led the Bears to a perfect season in the conference—thirteen wins, no ties, no losses—and again completely rewrote the record books. Only in the last game or two did the cracks begin to show, but before the playoff for the championship with the New York Giants had ended, his legendary career was over. Until then, he'd been living the dream of every little school kid in America: the quiet scholarly little boy, left out of all the neighborhood games and laughed at by all the girls, who suddenly finds the magic formula and becomes the most famous athlete and greatest lover in the world. “I believe in the American dream,” he once said, “because I have seen it come true in my own life.”

I'm just crossing Division Street when I run into my friend Jesse, coming out of a bar with Harry and Ilya. Ilya I haven't seen in weeks. He's very drunk and sullen—a pale wispy boy who never looks quite strong enough to stand, even when he's sober. His brother Dave, we learned a couple of weeks ago, lost an arm and part of a leg at Ja-rama—like Ilya, he's a musician: a violinist, was—and since then Ilya's become secretive and ill-tempered, almost as though he somehow blamed the rest of us for what happened to his brother. He still looks that way, though that he's out drinking with Jesse and Harry is a good sign. Leo had once, soberly, more or less soberly, lectured me on alcohol and revolution, the link being the romantic illusion. “And why not?” he'd grinned wearily (we were watching drunken Father Clanahan tip over, as I recall). “Reality's such shit. You have to reinvent it just to live in it.” “Hey, Meyer!” Jesse calls now, flashing his lean, gap-toothed smile from under his rumpled cloth cap. “How's ole Gus?”

“He died.”

Jesse and Harry somehow look downcast and amused at the same time. The momentary fade Jesse passes into suggests he's already conjuring up a new song. Come all you good workers, a story I will tell, about a football hero who for our Union fell. Ilya, who introduced Gus to us in the first place, only grimaces irritably and looks down at his feet. “The silly potz,” Harry sighs, shaking his little round head. Harry was always baffled by Gus, and has never got over his rage at what Gus did to his sister. “Was he still taking curtain calls at the end?”

“No,” I say, “though he had an audience—the place was filled with celebrities and reporters. But he didn't seem to recognize them. He just lay there, like he didn't know what was happening. They'd shaved his beard off, and it made him look puffy and gray and vulnerable.”

“This is the city of the gray faces,” says Harry cryptically, squinting up at us through the rain streaking his thick smudged lenses. Harry is a poet and a Trotskyite, and he loves enigma.

Jesse glances at Ilya, then explains: “Harry 'n me been down to the Eagles on Houston where they got those fellas laid out. Huge crowds down there, Meyer, like you never seen, folks payin' their respecks from all over the country.” He shakes his head, a flash of bitterness sobering the genial creases of his face. “At least seven a them boys, you know, got it in the back.”