Whatever Happened to Gloomy Gus of the Chicago Bears?

by Robert Coover

  “My God, Golda!”

  “My purse flies outa my hands. He grabs it in midair, hides it in his elbow, hunches his head down and shlepps it right outa the theater! Oh, Meyer! I just wanna die!”

  I looked into her eyes. The flesh around them was puffy and discolored, but that would go away. She’s seen a lot, I thought. Maybe almost enough. “Golda, would you model for me?”

  She pulled back in surprise, as though to ask: You, too, Meyer? I realized it wasn’t the right time to have asked her. “Meyer, you know I can’t… I don’t do that sort of thing…”

  “No, I mean just your eyes, I want to try to do your eyes.”

  She stared at me a moment, her face still taut and damp with tears. Then she relaxed, took a sip of the coffee, wincing a bit, and smiled gently with cracked, swollen lips. “You’re a funny boy, Meyer,” she said.

  On my way to Polly’s Fishmarket on North Avenue, I pass a movie theater with a poster advertising a Coming Attraction: The Last Train from Madrid, starring Dorothy Lamour. “A hair-raising experience,” it says. “The first motion picture based on the Spanish War… Takes no sides.” Instant entertainment from the world’s atrocities, “WAR IS SWELL… when a hero can succeed in winning the love of a lady like Dorothy Lamour, says Gilbert Roland.” So much for heroism, for the struggle against oppression and injustice, laying down one’s life for his fellow men. Of course, not so instant: given the lag time in motion-picture production, “quick-thinking, fast-acting Paramount Pictures” must have started shooting before Franco did. And as for entertainment, who am I to cast stones? My Jarama flowers, fallen warriors, poised athletes, even my Gorky mask: how much is really a gift to the world, how much a premeditated theft of its substance?

  “Hey, whadda udder fella look like, Mayor?” Polly asks with an appreciative whistle.

  “I hit a door, Polly.”

  “Sure, sure, lucky da door don’ shoot you! I hope she wort’ it! Hey, you should see da mullets, Mayor, you wooden believe!”

  “Not today, Polly. Just a bit of mackerel, please. And a couple fishheads for my cat, if you have any.”

  “Sure, I got fishhead,” he says, dipping into the sink. He slaps one on the drainboard, flops a red mullet out between us. “Jus’ looka dat, Mayor! Ain’ he gorgiss?”

  “It looks delicious, Polly. Maybe tomorrow.”

  “Tomorra Friday, wop fishday, all gone. Nowza time, Mayor! Firs’ udda munt’, you got money inna pocket! Enjoy!”

  The fishhead has somehow slithered back into the sink. “Well, okay. But a smaller one.” He doesn’t hear my qualification, starts wrapping up the mullet he’s shown me. “For you, chip,” he assures me. Oh well. For the Baron’s sake, I rationalize, reaching for the bill crumpled up under the railroad spikes in my pocket. Polly dips for another generous handful of heads and other slippery debris. Jesse won’t mind. We’ll share it with Harry and Ilya if they come along. My friends often let me do their fish-buying for them so I can establish credit for the Baron. For all of us actually: the Baron’s often had to share his windfalls with the rest of us during hard times in the form of stew or, when Golda lends a hand, fishcakes.

  “You wan’ some ice crim, Mayor? My sister make.”

  “Next time, Polly,” I say firmly, snatching up the parcels before the fish can slip into the sink again.

  He shrugs, surrenders the change. “Take care da eye, Mayor—an’ stay way marrit leddies! Drive you wreck an’ ruin!”

  This was more or less that Hearst reporter’s theory about “whatever happened” to Gloomy Gus: a great athlete unmanned by a fatal weakness for women. The Samson syndrome. “That sumbitch couldn’t get enough, M’ar,” he told me, sitting back against my cold stove, his voice soft with awe and envy. He was staring at my iron bed (we’d just exchanged a few anecdotes, mentioning no names), shaking his head. “He was a goddamn legend. His dingdong was like the community relay baton, he poked it in every pussy in this fuckin’ country, from kid movie stars to the President’s grandmaw, he hardly had time for anything else. Finally, the way I figure it, all that humpin’ just shook his marbles loose.” There was a grain of truth in this. Or perhaps I should say, a seed of truth. The full title of that song about him was “You Gotta Be a Football Hero, To Get Along with the Beautiful Girls,” and sometimes that did seem to be the point of it. His sexual exploits were truly notorious, as famous as his touchdowns, really, and he’s still the subject of a lot of jokes—only Friday I heard one down at Sam’s Place near the Republic Steel mills, the one about Gloomy Gus losing a bet that he could screw all forty-six of the Radio City Rockettes in one night, giving up in defeat finally at forty-three (“Twenty-nine, more like,” Leo interrupted with a wink at me) with the apology that he couldn’t understand what was wrong, the rehearsal that afternoon had gone just fine. But that joke had more truth in it than the Hearst reporter’s theory, even down to the sterile mechanized sex of the Rockettes. For it wasn’t really dissipation that brought down Gloomy Gus. Simon maybe was closer to it with what he calls “the inherent contradictions of the American dream,” though it seems likely to me any dream of order would do.

  Telling jokes in Sam’s Place was the quiet part about Friday. Mostly it was hard work and finally not a little dangerous, my own most obvious souvenir of the day being my tenderized eye. I’d like to say the eye was a consequence of the sterile mechanized anality of the Chicago police force, their familiar and libidinous choreography of swinging saps and truncheons, but it wasn’t as simple as that. Leo had personally asked me to come down: the place was full of strangers, one of the drawbacks of the movement’s new fluidity and national solidarity, and Leo was sure several of them were company spies. “Now that I’ve lost Jesse, Meyer, I need someone near me I can trust.” It was Friday, the day I always relinquished my studio to Golda and Gus, so I needed some place to go anyway. I’ve never been that far south in Chicago before—nearly 120 blocks below the Loop—and I was surprised at how much open space there was. Even the steel plant is built low to the ground down there, sprawling about loosely to the south over some three hundred gritty acres between the Calumet River and the Pennsy Railroad tracks. The CIO organizers had set up their headquarters in a friendly working-class tavern called Sam’s Place, situated at the northeast edge of a grassy field looking across at the front gates of the Republic mill. In fact there’s a well-worn beeline path diagonally across the field from the gates to Sam’s Place, no doubt laid there by Sam’s regulars. No beer at Sam’s Friday, though, only water. There were a few ice-cream and soft-drink vendors around, a lot of picnic food, and some did have their own bottles, but there wasn’t all that much drinking going on. A policy of the union organizers, of course, but it was anyway too hot for alcohol. Hot and sunny. The field between us and the plant seemed almost to glow in the blazing light, and I thought at the time: It’s a stage, waiting there for us, almost magical in its alluring power. For the present we are all hovering in the wings, but who on either side will be able to resist its shimmering pull?

  There were many that seemed unable to resist it that afternoon, and Leo was worried about them. He and the rest of the organizers tried to distract them with softball games, pamphleteering, speeches, safety and marching drills, first-aid training, idle legwork, but it was very hot and people were impatient. A lot of them distrusted the organizers, resented being manipulated in any way. Others thought the organizers were moving too slowly for reasons they couldn’t understand. They wanted to get this over with and get back to work. Why wait for Girdler to bring in reinforcements? This waiting was no good. Only action would change anything. Why not at least march across to the plant, get close enough to reach the men still inside with loudspeakers, shame the honest ones into coming out? Not even the organizing committee was in complete agreement about strategy, torn between the reluctant voices and the rash. But a Memorial Day picnic had been called for Sunday when other workers and their families could turn up, a wooden stage was being built, folksingers
and speakers had been scheduled, Gloomy Gus included, there was a newsreel guy expected from Paramount Pictures; it made no sense to rush things, not to Leo anyway, so he used me most of the day scouting out hotheads and helping him cool them down.

  It was a long day. The heat and the glare didn’t help, the sweat, the short tempers. It was like those long July days out in San Francisco three years ago during the dock strike, only grittier. Leo noticed it, too. They’d brought out the National Guard in San Francisco with machineguns and rifles, and Leo worried about it happening here. It made him feel tempted to side with the hotheads, go now and get the jump on them. He hated all those scabs in there, knew a lot of them were ruthless armed hoods, could even see the propaganda value in provoking them. And he was upset about his UAW friends Frankensteen and Reuther, who’d been badly beaten Wednesday up in Dearborn by a goon squad hired by Ford. Plainclothes cops, it was rumored: someone saw a badge, or handcuffs. “Where is Richie,” Leo had remarked wryly, “now that we need him?” He was referring to San Francisco again, 1934. After a dozen good men had been shot out there on Bloody Thursday, Blaine had caught a scab trying to sneak off the company ship for a rendezvous with his girlfriend, had made some buddies hold the scab’s legs across a curb, and had jumped up and down on them. Richie is now a commissar with the Lincolns in Spain, we’ve heard. And that was another thing. The dusty field between us and the mills with its scraggly marsh grass and stunted shrubs looked too much like the pictures we’d seen of the country around Madrid. It looked like a place where people went to die. About a week after the bombing of Guernica, I’d got it in my head that Maxie had been killed. It was stupid, I had no reason for it, he probably wasn’t even in Spain yet. And I distrust all premonitions, hate such rubbish as precognition and mental telepathy (one of my aunt’s more appalling quirks: needless to say, she went running to the old folks’ home screaming that my uncle was dead about ten times before he finally kicked off—and that day she was happily playing bridge with her North Lawndale cronies). In my case (as in hers), a projection of guilt, I supposed. But still I couldn’t shake off the feeling that Maxie was dead. And it was with me like some kind of morbid affliction all day Friday.

  Toward sundown, the sky behind the plant reddening like a taunt, Leo got a report from a guy named Bill, who’d also been helping him (“He’s okay, he’s got good calluses,” Leo explained), that there was a group planning to march on the plant as soon as it got dark. Bill estimated there were about a hundred of them, but that they’d take others with them. He said he’d tried to talk them out of it, as Leo had asked, but they’d got pretty hostile toward him, accusing him of being a lackey and a company fink. A lot of the local workers had drifted away around suppertime, the women and children as well, the crowd was becoming increasingly hard-core, many of them from out of town, and, as Bill pointed out, there was now a lot more drinking going on. This was true, I’d noticed it myself. Several members of the organizing committee had left by now as well, and I could see that Leo was seriously considering joining the exodus. He argued with individuals that a march on the plant now would serve no purpose at all, that it would only give the police an opportunity to beat up and arrest a lot of men we would need on Sunday, and that it might even give the authorities an excuse to bring in enough force to make the Memorial Day demonstration impossible. As individuals, they all tended to agree with him, but as a group they still seemed determined to march. They wanted something to happen, they didn’t care what. “Ah well, it’ll give us something to talk about on Sunday, I guess,” he said finally, turning to a guy with a bottle. “Lemme have a swig of the people’s cornjuice, Smitty.” He took a deep suck on the bottle, handed it to me with an airy wheeze. “Have a bracer, Meyer,” he said with a crooked smile, barely visible now in the deepening dusk, “and get ready for history.”

  By the time we’d formed up outside Sam’s Place, there were nearly a thousand of us, and Leo, ever the pragmatist, had not only by now accepted the inevitable, he was even helping to organize it. Instead of marching straight across the rough field where we might stumble and fall in the dark, we headed south down Green Bay Avenue, keeping the field on our right. There was still a faint glow on it, as if the bright day had left a residue, as in phosphorescent rock. It looked mysterious, almost otherworldly. Leo had put me on the right flank, near the guy named Smitty, whom we’d both come to suspect of being a police plant and agitator (maybe it was the lethal quality of his booze that had given him away), and told me to keep an eye on him while he took the other flank. At 117th Street, we turned west toward the main gate, but we didn’t get far: the police were waiting for us there. It was as though they’d known all along we were coming. Of course we’d been shouting a lot in the dark echoey night, and a couple of cops had got pushed aside further up the street, it was hardly a secret. But even before we’d reached them, they seemed to be in our midst. That was when I got my black eye, and a bruise or two elsewhere besides. It was pitch-dark and there was a lot of confusion, fists and clubs flying, bricks as well, but I had no doubt who it was who hit me. I’m used to looking at the world through dark goggles, after all, and seeing more than most. I’d been knocked to the ground and was having a hard time getting up. I heard shots being fired, people screaming. It was Bill and Smitty who rescued me, dragging me away from the melee, upfield toward Sam’s Place. The strikers were quickly routed by their own confusion, but a lot of heads got broken first. Some would need a hospital. The vanguard especially took a beating, but Leo, as I knew he’d be, was all right. “Sorry, Meyer,” he said when he saw me, and as far as I could tell, he truly was.

  “Bill,” I said.

  “That sonuvabitch…”

  “Bill and Smitty.” They’d disappeared, of course, ostensibly to hurl themselves back into the fight, but it was clear they’d used me as the means to their own withdrawal. I’d seen them push the men in front off balance and into the police, then, yelling curses all the while at the cops (these were ritual phrases, repeated woodenly like recognition signals), start laying about wildly, as though fighting off unseen monsters. And it was Bill who, glancing over his shoulder to take aim, had laid me out with his elbow. If it was his elbow. Felt harder than one. It might have been about then, sprawling in the dirt and getting kicked and stepped upon in the night-dark turmoil, that I began to feel I might be able to live with myself if I didn’t after all make it to Spain. Amazingly, some of these guys do this sort of thing every Saturday night just for fun; I prefer a little music on the radio and a handful of soft clay.

  The next day Leo let a rumor start circulating that the committee had identified at least five company spies in their midst, and that they would be “dealt with” by all the comrades after sundown. “Bill” and “Smitty” (we no longer supposed those were their real names) were occasionally mentioned. They kept up a good front through the afternoon, but by sundown they had cleared out. Along with seventeen others. “Thanks, Meyer,” Leo said, and sent me home.

  It’s still chilly and overcast, but the rain’s stopped by the time I reach my street in Old Town. In the school playground a block or so before my studio, boys are playing a ballgame. Other times of the year, it would be football or basketball, today it’s baseball: the Cubs versus the White Sox, about five to a side, they’re taking names like Billy Herman and Luke Appling, Dixie Walker, Jimmy Collins. Both teams—the real ones—are having good seasons, fighting right now for second place in their respective leagues, so the boys have a lot of pride in being who they are. The kid pitching for the White Sox five is, not surprisingly, calling himself Bill Dietrich, that down-and-outer the Sox picked up earlier this year on waivers who astonished everyone this week with his unlikely no-hitter. The kid even wears glasses like Dietrich, maybe that’s why they’ve let him pitch.

  I remember those games. I was never good enough to be Cobb or Wagner, I was always content to be somebody like Frank Schulte or Three-Finger Brown. For me, it wasn’t whether you won or lost, but it wasn
’t exactly how you played the game either. The other boys used to complain I wasn’t trying my best—I was, but what was best for me wasn’t the same thing as it was for them. Participation was what I loved about ballgames, still do. Participation in the movement. It’s what I love about socialism, theater, life itself. Even sculpture in a slightly different way: all the movement then is between me and my figures, but it’s a real involvement just the same, a real dialectic. Probably I have Levite blood in me from somewhere, more in love with the choreography of gesture than with its aims. Sometimes this was useful in a ballgame, often it was not. As in life. Gliding toward a fly-ball, I often arrived too late for the catch; swinging easily around the bases, I’d run into easy putouts. This didn’t bother me, but it bothered the others. They said I didn’t have enough “hustle.”

  Just the opposite from Gloomy Gus. Winning was everything for him. Or at least scoring. In a magazine interview, he once said: “I have never had much sympathy for the point of view ‘It isn’t whether you win or lose, but how you play the game.’ One must put top consideration on the will, the desire, and the determination to win!” Ghostwriters maybe, but the sentiment—or something very close to it—was his: “I never in my life wanted to be left behind.” He once had a football coach back at Whittier College, a fierce half-breed Indian ironically confined to a Quaker college and a team called the Poets, who drilled it into him every day: “You must never be satisfied with losing. You must get angry, terribly angry, about losing.” Such maxims either blew right by him or else they shot straight to his center, riveting in, becoming part of the very nuts and bolts of his oddly indurate and at the same time transparent mechanism. He was a walking parody of Marx’s definition of consciousness, a cartoon image of the Social Product, probably the only man in recent history with what could be called a naked superego.