Whatever Happened to Gloomy Gus of the Chicago Bears?

by Robert Coover

  “… Early next mornin’ while I was layin’ in my bed,

  I heerd a mighty rumble of bricks comin’ down on my head,

  So I had to start duckin’ and dodgin’ and be on my way,

  They was tearin’ my house down on me—

  That housewreckin’ crew from the WPA!”

  Jesse first sang us that song at the famous farewell party for Maxie in my studio back in March. It’s strange to think how much everything’s changed since then. That party was maybe the best one we’ve ever had. Sometimes I find it hard to believe in my own reality—the very idea of a conscious passage into and out of time seems like some kind of terrifying fairytale—but that night I felt very much at one with my own life and the lives of those around me. I even got a little drunk, unusual for me. My drinking habits are a kind of standing joke on Chicago’s North Side, especially since my studio is an old plumbing supplies warehouse once used during Prohibition, according to local legend, as a clandestine liquor depot by Bugs Moran’s gang. All I ever have is the occasional glass of sweet wine, the last vestige (I’ve thought until recently) of my rejected West Side childhood. That night I had several and soon became giddy and noisy in spite of myself, and I even danced a kazatzke. Or what I hoped passed for one, never having actually danced one before. Squatting and kicking the prisiadka, while the others clapped and chanted, I’d thought: This is what I’ve always wanted to do! Terrible sick hangover the next day—maybe we sweet-wine drinkers are the hardest and most self-punishing of all—but it was a small price to pay.

  The party had been called with hardly any planning to celebrate the victory at Guadalajara and to say goodbye to Maxie. Maxie was on his way to join the Lincoln Battalion in Spain: he thought of it as a rite of passage on his route to Palestine. We all love and admire Maxie very much and were afraid for him, and hopeful. Ilya’s brother David was already over there, crossing in the Christmas season with the first Americans to go, and our old West Coast CIO friends Eskill and Nicco and Richie as well. Many of us thought we’d be following. There was a real chance now. The Fascist advance had been stopped at last at the very edge of Madrid. We hadn’t heard the worst about Jarama yet, didn’t know that night that the untrained Lincolns had been almost wiped out in the mad attempt on Suicide Hill and were badly demoralized, didn’t know that David had lost two of his limbs and that Nicco was dead, we only knew that the Americans had heroically held the line there against immeasurable odds: the Fascists did not pass. And now the greatest victory of the war: Mussolini’s Blackshirt “volunteers”—there are said to be eighty thousand of them fighting for Franco in Spain, in spite of the so-called “Nonintervention Pact”—had been routed at Guadalajara, and in large part by their own countrymen, the famous Garibaldis of the International Brigade. The government counteroffensive, it was said, had begun. Newly trained Spanish divisions were being rushed to the front to replace the Italian Internationals. Russian tanks and guns had arrived, in fact they’d already helped win the battle at Guadalajara, and support from other countries like America, England, and France must not be far behind. It was in their own self-interest, after all. Roosevelt seemed to be hinting as much, and his new election mandate had freed him—indeed, obliged him—to act. Or anyway that’s what we chose to believe that night. Many, unable to hear the awful afterclap of silence following Guernica, choose to believe it still. In the end it is, as it has no doubt always been, a naked contest between heart and steel. Must heart always win? Or rather: can it ever win? Leo laughs and says no, but that night he was a minority of one.

  Though the Chicago weather was typically bitter, the studio was warm with the close press of friends, hot food and drink, music, good feelings. People wore ribbons and badges or pieces of clothing they associated with their Spanish brothers and sisters, and one of the women brought a big cake decorated with La Pasionaria’s NO PASARÁN! The best was Thérèse, a wet nurse who’d helped lead a sit-down strike down at the Board of Health to get the price of her milk raised (they’d tried for ten cents an ounce, got four), who came dressed in a Flamenco dancer’s costume fashioned entirely out of tissue paper, ribbons, and shredded Sears, Roebuck catalogues. “Whoo, it’s really blowin’ out there, honey!” she exclaimed breathlessly, fluttering in through the front door like a huge ruffled bird, snow capping her black brows, “I was dam’ near gone with the wind!” I’d found a picture of Abraham Lincoln and had pasted up a large poster with a balloon coming out of Abe’s mouth that read: VIVA LA QUINCE BRIGADA! Later, Leo laughed and called it jingoism, but we all laughed with him. The party was also for him and Jesse, as it turned out, and for the union victories in Michigan, a surprise homecoming—the sit-down strikes had done it. After a million dollars in private detectives and that much again in armaments, thugs, and counterpropaganda, General Motors and Chrysler had finally caved in and recognized the United Auto Workers. Leo and Jesse had come dashing straight back to the party from the mass rally in Detroit’s Cadillac Square, skidding up to the curb outside in Mother Blooey, Leo’s old beat-up Terra-plane, and had rushed in to a burst of applause with three bottles of Old Quaker whiskey, a bucket of beans, and big placards that read SPIRIT OF 1937 and FORD TOMORROW!

  It was Ilya who brought Gus along, introducing him as an actor in a WPA project that Ilya was composing a score for. It was a couple of weeks before we found out who he really was, and then thanks mainly to a reporter for the Hearst chain assigned to do a “Whatever Happened to—?” story on him. I know people in the Theater Project—before I got reclassified as a sculptor last fall, I did set designs for the FTP—but when I asked Gus if he knew them, he only stared at me blankly. Well, it was a stupid question, one of those clinging rituals. I regretted it as soon as I’d asked it, and, smiling apologetically, led Gus over to the trestle table of food and drinks.

  He was a bulky man—too bulky for an actor, I thought then, but later: rather small for a pro halfback—with a wide sloping nose, an intense but unfocused gaze, and a bushy black beard. “Hey, comrades! It’s f’kucken Karl Marx!” Harry hollered drunkenly. Everybody laughed, but Harry couldn’t have been further off the mark: Gus not only lacked political awareness, he lacked awareness of any kind. He had no core at all. Unless pure willpower has some kind of substance, amounts to some kind of character. We didn’t discover this that night, of course, it took us awhile to catch on to Gloomy Gus. But as we got to know him and something about his past—which was pretty remarkable in its way—it was this nothingness at the center that we all settled on as the essential Gloomy Gus. Ilya argued that it made him a good actor: the empty vessel. I disagreed. I don’t believe in philosopher-actors any more than Ilya does, but skills alone aren’t enough: good actors cannot merely be empty, they have to know how to empty themselves.

  He was badly coordinated, too. The first two drinks we gave him slipped right through his hand and smashed on the floor. He didn’t apologize, didn’t pick up the broken glass, he just smiled vacantly at us, waiting for another drink to be lodged in his still-cupped and outstretched hand. The third time, I propped an empty glass in his hands and made sure he had a grip on it before pouring—we’d had to scrape to get together what food and drink we had, and it hurt to waste any of it. “Tell me when,” I said.

  He stared at me searchingly, and after a moment replied with boyish earnestness: “Honey, don’t be impatient. The delay’s been useful, hasn’t it?”

  “What—?!” I cried.

  He became very jittery then, his eyes flicking from side to side as though deeply perplexed, hunting for something—then suddenly he seemed to find it (I could almost hear the whirr-click!): he smiled benignly, lovingly, and said in a deep resonant voice: “Fannie, I ask you to marry me.”

  At first I though Ilya had put him up to it. But I saw that Ilya was as amazed as I was. This guy must be stewed, I thought. Or more likely: on some kind of drugs. As it turned out, however, these had been lines from two plays he’d been in—The Dark Tower and The Trysting Place (I was t
o get to know these plays all too well in the weeks to follow)—and unwittingly I’d been throwing him cues. He wasn’t always like that, I should say. Sometimes he was worse.

  Sixty or seventy people turned up finally, filling the place up. I was kept busy as the de facto host and—purposely maybe (I was convinced by now it was all a put-on, and felt I’d had my turn at being the butt)—took little further notice of this oddball actor, except to join him in the laughter as he attempted clumsily, laboriously, mechanically, but with farcical vehemence, to learn the words to “The Internationale.” It had started as a mild taunt—“What kinda comrade actor are you, Karl Marx,” Harry had shouted good-naturedly, “if you don’t know ‘The f’kucken Internationale’?”—but it was like Harry had flicked a switch: Gus looked up in alarm, blinked (we all laughed: he was good at this, we felt), and commenced to struggle fiercely with the words of the song: “Arise ye, uh, prisoners of starvation…” He became obsessed by it, in fact—I caught glimpses of him from time to time the rest of the night, off in some corner of the studio, huddled among half-finished creatures of mine (a lonely man at heart, I thought), going over and over the lines: “Tis the final, uh, conflict, Let each rise—no, stand…”

  Though we didn’t fully appreciate it at the time (we still had a lot to learn about Gloomy Gus of the Chicago Bears), Harry had done us all a favor, keeping him at the edge of the party like that. And I was granted my bountiful night, from which sculptures have already flowed and can flow again, if I can find my way back to the torch. People came with food, drink, musical instruments, even gifts for me: wood for the stove in the back, scrap metal for my Gorky, drawing paper stolen from the WPA Poster Workshop. There was a miraculous lot of food, mostly cold things like sausages, cheeses, gehockteh leber, potato salads, breads, bowls of depression Jell-O, and suchlike, but Harry’s sister Golda, always one for dramatic entrances and exits, came sweeping in out of the snowy night bearing a huge pot of steaming hot kasha with noodles and chicken gizzards, and O.B. and his girl brought backbone and dumplings and a kettle of hambone soup we warmed up on my hot plate with Leo’s beans. Oh boy, I can taste it still! Feel it, hear it still!

  “I met a man the other day I never met before,

  He asked me if I wanted a job ashovelin’ iron ore.

  And I asked him what the wages was, and he said ten cents a ton,

  And I said, Aw fella, go scratch your neck I’d rather be on the bum!

  I am a bum, a jolly old bum,

  And I live like a royal Turk…”

  Even Simon turned up, unable to stay away, since it was he after all who’d arranged Maxie’s trip to Spain through his Party contacts. He and Harry managed to keep most of the crowd between them for the half hour that Simon stayed around, but it was good just to see them both in the same room again. Golda thought so, too, and gave Simon a big conspiratorial hug, though she carefully chose a moment when her brother was distracted, pushing Gus through another verse. Golda’s only heresy was her big heart, and no doubt they both forgave her. As they might, in the end, forgive each other. For all the horror of the Spanish Civil War, it was at least doing this, reconciling decent people like Simon and Harry. The Popular Front. I believe in the Popular Front—not in the military sense of a force allied by fear to confront a common enemy, but in the positive sense of an avant-garde of humankind drawn together by love and reason (even now I can hear Leo snorting at this, though it is he who lives by it) to create a better world. Like the hora they used to dance down near Herzl Junior College in Independence Square. At the time, watching them in their bouncy rounds, I thought they were silly. Grown-ups acting like kindergartners—like stupid little pishers, as my late uncle would say. I was twelve years old then and going senile. Now I only regret my two left feet. In Barcelona, they say, they have a dance much like it. That night I supposed I would soon be learning it. I told Maxie so: “I’m coming, too,” I said, lifting my glass, “as soon as I can.” He met my foolish grin with a solemn gaze. “You’re a good friend, Meyer,” he said. “You’re the best friend I have.” I was deeply moved by this, and thought: He’s saying goodbye. Suddenly I wished he wasn’t going. Farewells have always been easy for me, but this one wasn’t. I met Maxie a few years ago at the Jewish Training School and we became close friends as though in spite of our differences. I told him that day we met that I was making welded sculptures. He looked solemnly at his hands and said: “Well, I am making a nation.” He did not speak Yiddish, but pure Hebrew, though otherwise he was impatient with books and thought the fine arts a waste of practical skills. He seemed to think a nation was something you built entirely with your hands, and if he’s alive I’m sure he still does. But that night, at the party, he walked over and stood in front of my mask of Gorky. He stared up at it for a long time and then he said: “I don’t understand it, Meyer. I don’t know why anyone would do such a thing. But when I am away from here, I know it will be the most important memory I have of you. It will come to my mind and I will think about it then.” At that moment I felt certain he knew more about my work than anyone alive, but I didn’t know how to put this in words, so I said nothing. I regret that, of course, and have worried since that he might have thought he’d hurt my feelings.

  Around us meanwhile the party was in full swing, and I was soon swept into it again, heating up food, rinsing forks and glasses, bringing in the ice I’d been making in buckets in the backyard and chopping it up with one of my sculpting chisels, joining in the songs (“Solidarity forever! Solidarity forever…”) and hugs and conversations, the laughter and shouting. “Salud, Meyer!” “Salud, Ilya!” I felt an unbelievable intensity welling up about me, even when the chatter was about nothing more serious than chainletters and chicken factories, Charlie McCarthy or Chick Webb…

  “… In our hands is placed a power greater than their hoarded gold;

  Greater than the might of armies, magnified a thousand-fold.

  We can bring to birth a new world from the ashes of the old.

  For the union makes us strong!

  Solidarity forever!

  Solidarity forever…!”

  There was a lot of talk about Spain, of course, about art and theater and music, writing, film, swing bands, politics, all the things these friends of mine were not only interested in, but working and living with every day. I thought: These are the most beautiful people in the world, I’m lucky just to be able to have them around me! “You will eat, by and by!” they sang, crowding up around the overloaded trestle table.

  “The change from a handicraft mode of production to the machine age has alienated and isolated the artist,” Simon was saying over the noise, holding up the unfinished torso of a quarterback throwing a forward pass, “Meyer is fighting this alienation with his welding, don’t you see, humanizing, as it were, the industrial product…”

  “No shit…”

  “… Work and pray, live on hay,

  You’ll get pie in the sky when you die!”

  Simon took up a collection for the Brigade before he left, and Golda promised Maxie to keep a steady flow of cigarettes and warm socks coming to him in Spain, as she was already doing for Dave and the others. We drank to that. We were drinking to everything. And eating. And talking. “Hell, that guy’s got the imagination of a goddamn mirror,” someone said and winked at me. “Where’s the mustard?”

  “Hold, Madrid, for we are coming,

  I.B. men be strong…!”

  Father Divine was mentioned, Mother Bloor, test-tube babies and Baby Snooks. “What I’m sick of is art as a kinda jazzy framed wallpaper for rich cats!”—this was O.B., his voice intense but his soft brown face smiling serenely: “Art’s gotta go public, baby!” I think we were talking about a New Masses article on the Ash Can School of American art, but at the same time all around us people were joking about O’Neill’s Nobel and Paul Muni’s Oscar (“Imagine! Our own little Muni Weisenfreund!”), endorsing Sal Hepatica (“One dose, honey, and I was relaxed as twilight!”) or argu
ing about John L. Lewis as Working-Class Hero or capitalist lackey or next President of the United States or the driver of a Cadillac V-12, and it was all getting mixed up, deliciously mixed up. “Sure, times are better,” Leo was saying, tugging on his long mustaches. “Sure, there’s more money around. You used to only get forty dollars to beat up a worker a couple of years ago. Now it’s sixty, and for breaking his legs a bonus and a paid vacation!”

  “Come, Workers, sing a rebel song,

  A song of love and hate;

  Of love unto the lowly and of hatred to the great…”

  By now, the wine was beginning to taste very smooth, in fact it had no taste at all, and when O.B. offered me his reefer, I took a deep puff without even coughing. “Wow, it’s like A Night at the Opera in here!” O.B.’s girlfriend laughed, as someone bumped her up against him, and I laughed with her. Then it seemed I couldn’t stop laughing. When the Black Baron wandered in and Harry asked him in a corny Baron Munchausen accent, “Vot you tink, Sharlie, all dis pipple?”, I couldn’t even keep my feet, but fell giggling to my knees. Thérèse, infected by my giddiness, bugged her eyes at me, gapped her mouth, and sang out: “Aw, I once was as pure as a lily, an’ nobody called me no cow…

  “Mah booty was sweet as a rosebud,

  But lookit the dam’ thing now—!”

  And—“Woops!”—she tossed her paper skirts over her head. We were all laughing by then. “Hey! Ain’t dot luffly?” “Hee hee!” I was rolling around, unable to stand, feeling wildly silly but wonderful. “Meyer, you goofy ass,” Jesse laughed, baptizing me with a spray of whiskey, “you oughta git drunk more often!” It was around then, or maybe a little after, it’s all a bit confused, that I danced my kazatzke. And it was some time after this, hours maybe, long after midnight certainly, when most of the people had left, that I found myself sitting on the concrete floor of my barnlike studio with those close friends remaining (I’d spread some dusty old canvas for everybody to sit on, or seemed to have, maybe someone else did this), huddled in our overcoats, listening to Jesse sing old folk songs, new union songs, joining in when we knew the words or thought we did: