The only remarkable thing about the first few games of that 1932 season was that nothing went radically wrong. Drills and exercises were one thing, real games were another, and Gus hadn’t put it all together yet, but he had set aside seventy-five minutes a day with three hours extra on weekends for what he called “meshing sessions,” and by the fourth or fifth game it was all beginning to fall into place. He wasn’t fast as a runner, but he was nimble, deceptive, and hard-hitting, a tricky man to bring down. His pass reception was surefingered, if a bit stiff in its orthodoxy, and his defensive play was sometimes crude but always effective. He could pass when he had to (though he didn’t seem to like releasing the ball once he had it in his hands—sometimes people even had to take it away from him to center it for the next play), and he was very impressive at reading offensive plays of the opponent, slapping butts in huddles, and coming on and off the field. Finally, after a lot of soul-searching, the coach decided to start him for the Homecoming Game.
It was a beautiful southern California day in mid-November, and the Whittier stands were filled with alumni, disgruntled by the recent elections and back on campus for what they assumed was to be another punishing humiliation for their alma mater. They wanted to fire the coach, but they doubted they could find anyone else who would take the job. Mrs. Herbert Hoover, wife of the defeated President and a former student of this Quaker college, was said to be present, but this did not appreciably raise any spirits. There was a parade on the field before the game, to be followed by the crowning of the Homecoming Queen, who would then preside over the game and other festivities of the day, if “festivities” was the word for such a dismal Quaker program. Since she had a little prayer to deliver during the ceremony, the Queen-elect slipped behind the bleachers at one of the endzones for a moment to practice, and there she bumped into Gloomy Gus. This was his first game as a starter, so he was back there squeezing in fifteen quick minutes of flag-saluting drill to prepare himself for the playing of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” He glanced up, smiling absently, then a flicker of recognition came to his eyes, his lips parted, he smiled gently, tilting his head just so, and said: “Priscilla! Priscilla, I’ve been looking for you!” Then he took her hand…
By the time the Homecoming Queen staggered out onto the field, starry-eyed, badly rumpled, and bloodstained in the rear, the ceremonies were over. The president of the college, in desperation, had named Mrs. Hoover the honorary Homecoming Queen, but then it had turned out she wasn’t in the stands after all. The alumni had taken it all in their stride, business as usual, and passed around their flasks of bathtub gin. In a couple of short seasons, they’d suffered a stock-market crash, the outbreak of war in Manchuria, the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby, a Bonus March by a lot of ex-enlisted riffraff on Washington, and the defeat of the Republican Party—what was a mere assault on their Homecoming Queen? They settled back to watch their football team get taken apart once again, hoping only that the gin held out.
The Poets always fumbled the opening kickoff, it was a Homecoming tradition. But in 1932 the tradition was broken. Gloomy Gus hauled the ball in and ran eighty-five yards through the entire opposition for a touchdown, the first of his career. So spectacular was it, the fans just sat there in stunned silence. Gus had this knack for leaving people with their jaws hanging open, I’ve witnessed it myself. This silence rattled him for a moment and he may have wondered if they’d noticed he had his pants on inside out. But then they erupted in wild cheering, screaming, foot-stamping. Old men rushed out onto the field to hug him, kiss him, lift him on their shoulders, even though there was still a whole game to play. And what a game. He scored seven touchdowns all by himself in the first half. The coach finally had to take him out of the game so the other team would go on playing. He let him back in for the last three minutes of the game because the alumni had been throatily demanding it, and he scored yet again on three straight power plays. It was a school record. The whole town went delirious with joy. Luckily, he’d practiced riding around on shoulders and receiving accolades, maybe in fact it was one of the first things he’d practiced, so he carried himself elegantly as long as it lasted. The Homecoming Queen lay in the supply room, taking on anyone who’d approach her in the plain speech. The coach put on Indian feathers and led a dance. Everybody told him he was a genius. The party went on for three days, though Gus, of course, had long since withdrawn—as soon as he’d come down off the shoulders, in fact—in order to stick to his timetable.
Now that he was playing first-team football and having it off with girls regularly, there were some adjustments in his practice schedules, but it did not get easier for him. He still had to preserve all the old drills, and now there were new subtleties to learn, new plays on the field, new challenges from girls. He had to learn to cope with various forms of intercourse hysteria, for example, and to talk with sports reporters, address student rallies without running for office, pose for photos. The coach, too, had things to learn, such as to leave well enough alone. In the very next game, for example, after Gus had scored four touchdowns in the first quarter, he instructed him to “take it easy, killer,” and nearly paralyzed him. Then the Chief tried to take over Gus’s entire practice schedule—partly, it should be said, because Gus’s mother and brother begged the coach to be relieved of this burden once and for all—and he made the mistake, in spite of the brother’s warnings, of canceling or just ignoring some of the fundamental drills, such as how to turn while running, how to fade back for a pass, how to hunker down, ball the fists, break from a huddle, and so on. The result of this was that Gus spun into illegal motion the first ten plays of the next game. The coach was wild with panic. He kept pinching himself in the face and shaking his head. Gus’s brother came to the rescue.
“I took Dick out behind the bleachers for fifteen minutes of offside drill. It was just luck I drilled him that long, any more I couldn’t have taken, but a minute less and it wouldn’t have been enough. We didn’t find this out right away, but it turned out if he missed any practice time, he had to make it up completely. He could cut fat from the schedule, but not any single increment of it. He’d gone a week, seven days, without his offside drill, and at two minutes a day that meant he was fourteen minutes behind. All I knew that day was that suddenly he seemed to get it and I was barely able to walk. I told the coach: ‘I think he’s all right.’
“We were losing 14—0 at this point—it would’ve been worse, but luckily we were up against one of the worst teams in the circuit—so the coach rushed him back into the game. He didn’t go offside, but that was the only thing he didn’t do wrong. He seemed to understand the plays, but his legs didn’t work. His mind seemed to be racing ahead and his body made motions they would have made forty yards downfield, but his feet were rooted to the spot. Sometimes he didn’t even get turned around and facing the right direction after a huddle. The coach was in a terrible funk. He’d begun to think he might get invited to coach at some school where they paid real money and had real football players, maybe even the Ivy League or the pros, and so he was frantic that Dick was blowing it for him. I tried to help, but the Chief was completely incoherent and kept making strange Indian noises, and I was afraid he was going to take out on me what he was feeling toward Dick.
“At halftime, though, I was able to get through to the Chief. We were behind by four or five touchdowns by then, and the coach couldn’t even talk. He kept his Indian feathers in the lockerrooms now for celebrations, and he just sat there eating them. We all thought he’d had a stroke. I asked to see Dick’s practice schedule for the past week. I studied it over and said: ‘I think he can still throw passes if somebody will tuck the ball in his hands.’ I’ll never forget the look on the Chief’s face, Meyers. It was one of those moments when you think either you or the rest of the world has to be crazy, and you’re no longer so sure you’re the one who’s all right. He swallowed the feathers he was eating and said in a throaty whisper: ‘Throw? Passes?’ ‘It’s not what he does best,’ I
said, ‘but you’ve ruined him for anything else.’ This hit the Chief very hard, I felt sorry for him, but he knew it was true.
“Well, he was grasping for straws at this point, so rather than quit or scalp us both, he took the chance. What did he have to lose? I took Dick out behind the stands again for fifteen minutes of practicing feints and breaking out of the huddle. I hoped this would loosen him up and that some of the other skills would come back to him in the course of the game. It didn’t matter, after all, where he did his practicing, on the field or off. Anyway, it worked. It wasn’t Dick’s most brilliant day maybe, passing was something he never completely perfected, and the Poets didn’t have anybody who could catch the ball, but he hit them squarely enough so that they managed to score a touchdown and only fumbled or got intercepted half a dozen times. More important, I told the coach to repeat plays over and over like a kind of drill. This was completely against the Chief’s instincts, of course, but he had no choice. This worked, too. It was the same as practice time for Dick, and his legs slowly came back to him. We lost the game, but the last eight minutes of it were so fantastic it felt like victory. Dick played both offense and defense and he scored three times in those eight minutes. They tried to stall, but Dick hit them so hard it was impossible for them to hang on to the ball. You know, Meyers, when my brother was good, there was nothing in the whole goddamn world he couldn’t fuck over!”
The last two games of the season were apparently real bloodlettings. The scrapbook showed he made the front page of nearly every newspaper in California. The coach probably should have taken Gus out after he got eight or nine touchdowns ahead, but he was too shaky to do anything by then but let things happen by themselves. They were such unsporting devastations that a number of teams canceled the next season’s games with Whittier. The coach was disconcerted by this boycott, but managed to turn it to his own advantage, filling the 1933 schedule with big-name teams. These teams had everything to lose and nothing to gain, so it wasn’t easy to draw them into a game, but he did get Notre Dame, which was also having trouble finding opponents in those days, and more important, though less of a team, Washington and Jefferson. Both wanted to use Whittier as a warm-up, early in the season, which spoiled the Chief’s sense of dramatic climax, but this, too, turned out well in the end. The stunning defeat of Notre Dame put Whittier in the national newspapers, and Gus’s massacre of Washington and Jefferson was so fearsome that the visitors not only refused to finish the game, leaving in utter self-disgust after the score reached 76-0, but they gave up football for the rest of the season, allowing Whittier to take over their program. By the time the Homecoming Game with Duke rolled around that year, Mrs. Herbert Hoover was in attendance, and the new Homecoming Queen was waiting tremulously outside the players’ lockerroom an hour before the opening ceremonies. Gloomy Gus broke almost every offensive record in the books that season, as did the Poets, though their record was more or less identical to his—the only important records left standing, in fact, were for punts and field goals, simply because the Poets never had to fall back on them.
Our paths might have crossed that fall and winter. Pursued by history, I was on the bum, drifting westward to California. Gus, making what I was running from, was being brought east to be wined and dined by the professionals. I was traveling on freights or hitchhiking (“goosing the ghost,” as Jesse calls it, a bit of slang left over from his days as a Bible salesman), he came first class by the Rocket. They took him to the National Football League championship between the Chicago Bears and the New York Giants, which the Bears won, 23-21, and to the Chicago Century of Progress Exposition. I sometimes felt that it was the insane preparations for that tinsely fair, in the middle of so much human misery, that had elbowed me out of Chicago, but I would have envied him his trip on the Skyride. He was already famous and became more a part of the fair than a visitor. He and Sally Rand and the Enchanted Island. While I, feeling exiled from myself and having had to sneak past border vigilantes and escape from detention camps, was out in southern California, partly because I’d hoped to reach Mexico, a private pilgrimage to the murals (didn’t make it), mainly just because it was warmer. You didn’t freeze sleeping in the street. I worked my way from town to town as an odd-jobs man, wearing cardboard in the soles of my shoes, and on my back whatever gratuities fell there. In the Los Angeles area, some stern old lady gave me a moth-eaten sweater with some kind of fraternity insignia on it, and for all I know she was Gus’s grandmother. In Chicago, Gus seduced an entire cross section of the city on a one-each-of-a-kind program, and as far as he knew one of them was my sister. If I’d had a sister. Each day he practiced religiously, protecting and honing his skills and adding new ones. I was adding new ones, too—plumbing, carpentry, gardening, bricklaying, automobile repair, electrical wiring, even begging and petty thievery—and though my hunger was more immediate and familiar, it could be said that hunger drove us both. Both of us were ranging far from home, fulfilling myths about ourselves, his the rags-to-riches drama of the industrious American boy, mine the curse of the Wandering Jew. And we were both—captives of alienating systems—divided within ourselves. “To subdivide a man,” Marx has said, “is to execute him if he deserves the sentence, to assassinate him if he does not.”
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-lik
e 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.
Whatever Happened to Gloomy Gus of the Chicago Bears? Page 8