“Yes…”
“There was a flag down, but play continued as the Giants rushed the Bear quarterback. In desperation, he flung the ball at Gus’s back: it struck him on the helmet just as he was snuggling in the girl’s shoulderpads and she was unlacing his britches, caromed off into the arms of a waiting Giant, who lugged it all the way on a zigzag time-killing course to the Bears’ seventeen-yard line before being brought down. Back in Giant territory, meanwhile, Gus was giving the packed stadium a show of his own. This was the girl he’d been using to practice the ‘wheelbarrow,’ ‘windmill,’ and ‘buzzsaw’ positions with, so the fans were treated to a lot of strenuous action, especially since they were both still tangled up somewhat in shoulderpads, cleats, and tattered jerseys.”
“I think we done the wheelbarrow…”
“The referee was frantically signaling everything from illegal position and unsportsmanlike conduct to unnecessary roughness and intentional grounding, but Gus, deep into one of his fixed drills, was oblivious to everything but the sequence of procedures, and the girl—well, you know how the girls always got. The other players were too awestruck to interfere; it finally took the cops to break it up. And these guys were so agitated by what they saw—Gus’s orgasm, when he got it off at last, sent the girl skidding on the icy field all the way into the endzone—that they went wild and clubbed the poor guy unmercifully. To make it worse, the band now struck up the National Anthem, and Gus stood up, saluted, and peed all over the cops just as they charged him. It was the worst beating since his father had whipped him with a razor strop for swimming in the railroad ditch in Yorba Linda. It was that and not the girl that broke him. Four years of tireless self-discipline, Golda, had come to this: the worst beating in his life. To a man like Gus, with no past and no future, such a beating is a kind of death: an unbearable, omnipresent moment. The intricate mechanism comes unglued—instead of a machine, all that’s left is a bag of busted-up junk—and like with Humpty-Dumpty, there’s no way to put it back together again.”
“It’s sad, Meyer, his getting the business like that. Maybe that’s what made him do what he did at the steel mill last Sunday. Because of the police, I mean…”
“Maybe. But I don’t think so. He had no coherent memory of it that he could reflect upon, and he never would have understood why everybody was so mad that day, even if you had explained it to him. Nor could he think ahead to some kind of redress. The greatest lover and halfback in recent history—maybe of all time—was suddenly nothing, less than human, a kind of unwired puppet, unable even to recall his toilet training or his native language. The coach had a lot invested in him and tried to get him back on the old schedules, but there was nothing holding them together anymore. Some skills dwindled and disappeared, others became bizarrely exaggerated. He could still throw a football a country mile, but he couldn’t receive, couldn’t even catch a centered ball or take a hand-off. He had an erection night and day, but he couldn’t find the place—any place—to stick it. He could still pinch bottoms on a crowded streetcar or feint through an entire enemy lineup, with or without the ball, but he was as likely to do both at the same time as to do neither. He could no longer tell the difference between a football field, a crowded sidewalk, a bedroom, and a madhouse.
“Which of course was where they finally sent him—to a madhouse, I mean. They tried different ways to rehabilitate him. Psychoanalysis didn’t work at all—it was like he didn’t have any ‘normalcy’ to work back to. They experimented with courses he’d had in college, and he took a passing interest in history and government, but he could no longer get the hang of reading the pages consecutively, so he developed a lot of weird and destabilizing ideas. They read in his file that he’d once played the piano, they tried that. He set about learning pieces one note at a time, but he was much slower now, it took him an entire day to learn a single bar, another day to learn a second, a whole week to put the two together. Still, it was better than nothing, and they kept at it, managing to get him all the way through ‘The Curse of an Aching Heart’ and halfway into ‘Happy Days Are Here Again,’ before he broke down again and started hauling the scores toward some imaginary endzone, trying to hump the grand piano, whispering sweet nothings into its soundbox. His mother, trying to help, reminded them about his old potato-mashing skills, but this got him even more mixed up. After the first night, the janitorial staff of the institution threatened to walk out if they ever had to clean up that kind of a mess again. At last somebody thought to try acting, he’d done a lot of that before, and this turned out to be the answer. Or anyway a kind of answer. They didn’t cure him, but as an actor, his peculiar behavior seemed more acceptable, and some of his old routines could now be relearned as parts in a play. Once he had a repertoire established, they let him go, and not long after that he turned up here, that night you met him.”
Golda sits thinking about this for a while, holding the bowl—now with just one strawberry left in it—pressed against her soft tummy and fleshy thighs. Finally, she sighs and says: “What if, Meyer… what if he was really, you know, a man ahead of his time?” Maybe, I think, staring out the hole Gus made in my partition into my silent dusty studio, I’ve been worrying too much about Maxim Gorky’s eyes. Maybe I should have one of them wink, or cross them, or paint eyeballs on cardboard that can be moved from side to side and up and down behind the cavities. “Like, maybe, if we had only given him more love and understanding, this woulda never happened…”
“Maybe that’s what we’re all dying of, Golda. Love and understanding…”
“Not me,” she replies brightly and claps a hand on my leg. “Here, Meyer,” she grins, plucking the last strawberry from the bowl with her free hand, and pinching my own hand, still between her legs, “this’ll cure the alienation what ails you!” I lean forward to suck it from her fingers, but she drops it down her cleft, poking it deep inside the brassiere. “Communism don’t deprive any man of the power to appropriate the products of society,” she lectures huskily, sliding her hand up my thigh, “but you got to show you got a appetite…”
And that’s how it happens that I’ve got my nose deep in Golda’s brassiere, her hand yanking on my stiffened organ, when her brother Harry comes in with Jesse, carrying Ilya between them, out cold, along with some other guys I never saw before, all boisterously singing “Raggedy, Raggedy Are We.” When they see us like that, they switch to “Nekkid, nekkid are we…!” Left it open again… yet again. Well…as long as I’ve got my nose in there, I figure I might as well get what I came for.
“Say, we seen all them pretty flowers on the door,” Jesse declares, as they dump Ilya on some tarps in a corner. They’ve got some bottles as well, a sack of potatoes, and a peeled bird. “You guys celebratin’ the Duke losin’ his cherry or some-thin’?”
I come up with the strawberry between my teeth, and one of the newcomers says: “Naw, he’s jist bobbin’ fer apples!”
“Who said they was no free lunch?”
They all roar with drunken laughter and Jesse says: “Hey, let’s sing ’em your weddin’ song, Harry! C’mon, Billy Dean!”
Golda flushes politely and pulls on her clothes, muttering something about going out to see if my pants are dry (“I was afraid he’d catch his death of cold, Harry!”), while the others spread their feet apart to keep from tipping over, wrap their arms around each other’s shoulders, and bellow forth (the tune might be “Yankee Doodle,” but probably isn’t):
“Jolly old Wally
Said to Eddie
In their wedding bed:
‘Where’ve you kept
That great big scepter
You had before we wed?’
“Said Ed to Wally:
‘I’m so solly,
If you are frustrated,
But this thing,’ he said,
‘Between us is dead,
I’ve been expropriated!’ ”
“They’re still wet,” says my Homecoming Queen when she comes back in. The others are all
hoo-haing, snorting, slapping their knees, genuinely pleased with themselves. In the midst of it all, Golda and I are introduced to Billy Dean and his friends Gordon and Elroy, Jesse explaining in a loud voice that they all need a place to bunk down for a couple of nights and that Gordon, who’s said to be a painter and hopeful of getting on some WPA arts project now that he’s heard about them, is staying with me.
“And lookie here,” says Jesse, holding up the scraggly bird, “we found this here kosher chicken on the way up, jist layin’ there—musta got hit by a damn car!”
“Probably it committed suicide,” booms Harry, “caught out there in that kuckamaimie without its feathers on!”
“Now howzabout conjurin’ up somethin’ clever with the remains, Goldie, so’s the pore cock won’ta died in vain?”
“Well,” she says, glancing at me, “if it’s all right with Meyer…”
“Sure, it’s all right with Meyer,” snorts Harry. “If he don’t eat nothing but strawberries, he’ll get the f’kucken scurvy!”
“I thought berries was supposed to be good for scurvy,” says Golda.
“Well, scabies, then. Or diabetes. Whatever it is, it is sure to be the end of the little petseleh, if not worse!”
“There’s some fish, too,” I say, tired of my own silence. “A red mullet.”
“I knowed I smelt somethin’ dreadful,” says one of the newcomers.
“Now, that’s a very poetical and appetizin’ com-bynation!” exclaims Jesse, slapping the lump of yellowish chicken flesh down on the table. “Mullet ’n pullet!”
“Don’t talk dirty, Jesse,” Golda scolds, poking through my toolbox for a usable knife.
“Hey, did you hear, Meyer?” Harry says. “General Mola is dead! The old shitser crashed in a airplane today!”
“Man, that nigger cat sure got a style for disassemblin’ a fishhead!” groans the one called Billy Dean, watching the Baron at work. “Kinda takes your appetite away…”
“If something happens to f’kucken Franco now, chavairim, the whole shitpot could break down!” says Harry cheerfully, his fat cheeks piled back toward his ears in a mirthless grin. “Things could be maybe better in Spain after all this than they ever were!”
Hasn’t he seen what’s happening, I wonder. (“Dam’ right, Harry!” says Jesse, uncapping a bottle of Silver Dollar whiskey.) Maybe not. Some things we just don’t want to know. Elroy switches the radio on and tunes in The Lone Ranger.
“Man, lookit this thang! Somebody been usin’ this raddio for target practice!”
“Billy Dean here knows a guy who was down at Republic Sunday,” Jesse says, throwing a wink my way. “He says the first shots probably come from inside…”
Billy Dean stammers something defensive about this unnamed friend being on the wrong side, not knowing what was really going on, but that he learned his lesson watching how the police worked that day. His version of Gloomy Gus’s charge: “He seemed to be blowin’ smoke outa his butt, like somebody dropped somethin’ in his pants!” Harry by now is completely convinced that Gus was a police informer and that the story of his rehabilitation after he crashed out of professional football was just an elaborate fabrication to cover the time of his police training. Golda says she doesn’t think any of the political theories are correct, nor does she buy the idea that he was just a freakish psychopath that Leo manipulated or was manipulated by. She thinks he was an ordinary man of ordinary abilities possessed by an heroic vision of life. He’d sacrificed a lot of things most people take as normal—including normal social behavior—in his effort to realize that vision, with the consequences that, like many geniuses (here she glances my way winsomely), when he achieved his goal the ordinary people he’d once been a part of couldn’t understand him anymore. He knew this, and so when his moment came he gave, not explanations or advice, but himself. “Like a poet…”
I smile. One of my figures of a dancer has fallen—maybe it fell a month ago when I got hit by Guernica—and I see that it looks interesting on its side like that. Like somebody twisting to be free of chains. I realize suddenly that what I want to do is make sculptures that reveal different things at the same time, have profiles substantially different and a number of uniquely meaningful positions. O.B. arrives while I’m thinking about this (what does it have to do with my idea about dissonance, I wonder), and says he heard that Gus had captured the Republic Steel plant single-handed Sunday and had got shot singing “Happy Days Are Here Again” from the plant roof. There are some awkward moments as the Southern boys shy from this hardy black man, but they’re soon got over through O.B.’s own good nature and Jesse’s embracing sympathies, Jesse informing them all that he’s got a new song called “Whatever Happened to Gloomy Gus?” O.B. is more or less on his way to Mad-hatten, as he calls it, but says he needs a corner to sack out in for a couple of nights while he winds down his local love life, and can he stay here? He seems unusually gregarious and self-confident, but I can see that underneath the heartiness he’s frightened, so I can’t say no.
I’m beginning to feel ill at ease sitting around in that crowd in my underwear, so I go outside for my pants. They’re still damp, but I pull them on anyway—like Gus said: “One has to be uncomfortable to do one’s best thinking.” What I’m thinking about is how to cut a swath through all these friends, the impinging news mosaic, swastikas and wedding feasts, all my new ideas for projects, and the “cold oily bubble” of life itself, in order to get back to Maxim Gorky’s eyes. No way, probably. The invitation is out as it has always been. Friends will come. The Condor Legion will come. Ideas, too, like dust motes in the afternoon. It’s a kind of cranial erosion, a Dust Bowl of the mind. I’m excited by that notion of multifaceted pieces, it’s even better than the one I had earlier about polarities and confrontations, and I’m eager to light the torch before it all gets away from me, but… not quite eager enough.
I stand outside for a few minutes (can’t stay as long as I might like: it’s starting to sprinkle again), feeling the iron railroad spikes in my pocket, lying heavily, wet and cold, against my leg, and gazing in on my friends through the back door. Jesse is tuning up his guitar, his long bony knees stuck out in the small room like angle irons. Harry is peeling potatoes for his sister Golda at the sink, squinting closely at them through his thick lenses. O.B. and Billy Dean are trading down-home stories, and the Baron is in O.B.’s lap getting his ears scrubbed. O.B. never liked cats until he started hanging around this place and took to the Baron. In fact he helped name him, as we went from Charlie the Tramp (his peculiar walk after being hit by a car) to radio’s Baron (“Wass you dere, Sharlie?”) Munchausen to simply the Baron (“That cat ain’t no tramp!” O.B. declared with a brotherly grin) and finally the Black Baron, referring more to his banner than to his color (“What I don’t like about cats,” Leo had said, “is you can’t organize them!”). Ilya is awake and throwing up in the bucket I keep my metal scraps for Maxim Gorky in, but that’s all right, it’ll wash out. And Gorky won’t care, being accustomed to our self-destructions and—who knows—maybe even in the end admiring them.
Gloomy Gus, before he died, became a little delirious and mistook me for his coach back at Whittier College. He apparently understood that the trouble was he’d gone offside again, and he was apologizing for letting the team down. “Try to forget about it, Gus,” I said. “The game’s not over yet.”
“Chief,” he whispered, tears forming in the corners of his eyes (was this another act, I wondered, had I thrown him another cue?), “why is it we go on forever, making the first mistake we ever made… over and over again?”
I knew the answer, but I didn’t think he really-wanted to know. He looked genuinely anguished, but with Gloomy Gus this didn’t mean a thing. “Well, it’s probably not a mistake, Gus,” I said finally. “Probably it’s only—”
But by then he was dead.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by an
y means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
A shorter version of this appeared earlier in American Review 22
Copyright © 1987 by Robert Coover
ISBN: 978-1-4532-7932-8
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Whatever Happened to Gloomy Gus of the Chicago Bears? Page 10