Whatever Happened to Gloomy Gus of the Chicago Bears?
Robert Coover
For Pili:
May there always be
one more anniversary…
It’s the Duke of Windsor’s wedding day. $1300 worth of flowers have arrived at their French château to “festoon the nuptials,” while back home in Baltimore, we’re told, Mrs. Simpson’s house is being reopened as a shrine and museum. EDWARD BOSSES WALLY AROUND AND SHE LIKES IT. She’s in fluted blue today with a bonnet of feathers and tulle. Elsewhere, another Soviet marshal is being shot, a young American is being guillotined in Fascist Germany for plotting against anti-Semites, a supposed has-been named Bill Dietrich pitched a no-hitter for the White Sox, and up in Wisconsin some guy dynamited his whole family just “because they wouldn’t help around the farm.” And here in Chicago Gloomy Gus is dead. I walk home from the county hospital, through the cool rain, up Ogden, thinking: Only for the egoist and the dogmatist (and maybe they’re one and the same, although I’m thinking of two different friends of mine) is there one “history” only. The rest of us live with the suspicion that there are as many histories as there are people and maybe a few more—out here in the flood, after all (I chuck the day-old Trib in a bin as I pass), what arrangements can we not imagine? Of course, we share some of the same information, call it that—Gus, for example, is dead in all our histories—but it’s never enough to call “History.” What do we have? Births, debts, deaths, and the weather.
Which as usual in Chicago is pretty grim. I’m getting soaked through, but to tell the truth, I don’t mind the rain—it’s been too hot, we all need the cooling off. It’s about the best news we’ve got, in fact, possibly excepting that of Mrs. Simpson’s festooned nuptials. I’m grateful just for the physical contact. Watching life vanish, even from a punch-drunk loony like Gloomy Gus, has a way of disconnecting me from things, and the cold wet wind blowing in off Lake Michigan, down Ogden’s diagonal swath and into my face, helps put my feet back on the streets again. I might even be able to go home and weld another piece on Maxim Gorky’s nose, I think. His nose is broad and generous: yes, maybe I can work again, why not? Gus is dead, Leo’s left town, Maxie is on his way to Spain, O.B. to New York, maybe I can clear the rest of those bums out of my studio and get some work done. I need to be cut off for a while, need to think out my half-formed plan to follow Maxie to Spain. If I could only finish the Gorky. Then I could go and die and feel less guilty about it.
Poor old Gus was the eleventh fatality from Sunday’s confrontation down at Republic Steel, most of them shot in the back; hundreds more were wounded and bashed, and now Kelly’s cops, not merely exonerated but eulogized for their wholesale shooting and clubbing of unarmed workers (okay, they weren’t all workers), have been given open license to hunt down all “agitators.” Which can mean just about anyone they and the strikebreaker gangs choose it to mean: RIOTS BLAMED ON RED CHIEFS. I suppose, in the general—and willful—confusion, that might even, ironically, include me. It’s Haymarket Square all over again, Chicago’s old conspiracy called law and order. Hystereotypical, man, as O.B. would say. Still, it’s not the ’20s, I shouldn’t let myself sink into Leo’s cynicism. Things are changing. It’s no longer a capital crime to belong to a union, and there’ve been real victories, most recently General Motors and Chrysler and U.S. Steel, Leo’s been part of them. The Wagner Act got past the Supreme Court just this past month, union organizers are guests of Congress, even the chaingangs have been put on forty-four-hour weeks, it’s a new world. Sure it is, I can hear him laugh sourly, but nudge the establishment, Meyer, and you can still get killed in it.
It was Leo who took Gus down to the Memorial Day demonstration Sunday. What had he intended? With Leo you could never be sure. Much less Gus, the poor freak. Whether he was trying to put on an entertainment for that cop, tackle him, or hump him, we’ll never know. Whichever, or all three, or something else, there’s no doubt he was caught offside once again and for the last time, his original sin. But he went down with real style and a complete disregard for his own skin, exemplifying a remark he once made to a sports reporter after a tough game: “A man is not afraid at a time like this because he blocks out any thought of fear by a conscious act of will. He concentrates entirely on the problem which faces him and forgets about himself.” Inarticulate as he was, where did Gus find these words? In books? From other interviews? Was he coached? Or maybe he didn’t say it, maybe some reporter made it up. As for the cop, when they told him it was the famous Chicago Bears halfback he’d shot, all he could do was stammer lamely that he was a Cubs fan.
There’s a line in Gorky’s My Universities: “I noticed—how many times?—that everything unusual and phantastical, however far from the truth it might be—appeals to people much more than serious stories of actual life.” Maybe this is because, in the end, the “phantastical” stories are easier to believe. Leo told me recently that one of the Syndicate’s booming operations these days is the supplying of weapons to both sides in industrial disputes: blackjacks, billyclubs, firearms, steel bars, baseball bats, charged wires, and steam lines, even ax handles never made for axes. He said that Republic Steel has bought ten times as many gas guns and twenty-five times as many gas shells and projectiles over the past three or four years as the whole city of Chicago, and claimed they recruit their scabs direct from the underworld. He was telling me this to explain why the union needed its own arsenal, whatever the source, its own army of volunteers. “Workers aren’t warriors,” he’s often said. “In armed conflict, you need some pros.” Not that the unions do much recruiting from the underworld, of course. “Those guys are instinctively reactionary, the boss-pool you might call them, you can’t trust them.” I’m sure the regret in his voice was sincere. And then that mustachioed grin: “Now, psychos, on the other hand…” I find it hard to cope with this realism. “As a socialist, Meyer,” Simon likes to say, “you’d make a good gardener.” This is true. I think of myself as a lyrical socialist, which makes about as much sense, given the world we live in, as being an anal-retentive anarchist with a bomb in his hand. Leo, it goes without saying, disappeared right after the riot. “If they ask where I am,” he told me on the phone, “tell them I’ve gone to Spain to get killed.” Which was not so much information as a dig at me. I supposed he was actually across the line somewhere on his way to one of Girdler’s other steel mills in Ohio or Michigan—Canton maybe, he might have been trying to give me a hint: mostly immigrant Spaniards there, after all, an unstable mix of anarchists and socialists with ties still to their suicidally warring movements back home in the Republic.
Spain’s a good place to go to get killed, all right, Leo’s right about that. Or mutilated: they say that three quarters of all the volunteers who’ve gone over there are already dead or wounded. Fascist propaganda maybe—but what would I do without my arms? or my eyes? Crossing the railroad line, I find myself for the first time in over a month crawling down by the tracks in what was once an old habit, scratching about in the light rain for iron spikes and nails lying loose. It wouldn’t be a surprise, I think, feeling the tenderness in my blackened eye like a word of advice, to find out that the Abraham Lincoln Battalion is being financed by rightwing industrialists in this country like Tom Girdler, happy to rid themselves once and for all of indigenous romantics. Spain: the new Hog Butcher of the World. Am I really going to follow Maxie over there? Since the bombing of Guernica a little over a month ago, I’ve felt I had to go, that I’d never work again until I did, but now, hunkered down beside these gleaming wet rails stretching off subversively into the tunneled distance and feeling no pull
on me, no pull at all, I’m not so sure. Behind me, back down Ogden, is the old neighborhood with its street garbage and hangouts, the Russishe shul, Central Hebrew High, the gangfights outside Davy Miller’s, the horseradish grinders and umbrella men with their crude jokes, my uncle’s humid laundry business, the old people’s home where he died complaining about the bills, “Oi, vai! A sof! A sof!” I’ve been running from that all these years. Out of the neighborhood, out of the city, away from the state, across the country, headed for Mexico at one time, dreaming even of Palestine, Maxie’s big goal. Now here I am, still on its short leash. It has taken me a long time to come home: am I going to leave it again? Yet can I do otherwise? If my country would say yes, if it would ask me to go, it would be so much easier. Maybe then I’d even feel less like an exile. The spikes are beautiful: hand-hammered, square, little sculptures on their own. I pocket a handful of them (“Can we just sit here in Chicago,” Maxie demanded—and he wasn’t declaiming, it was an expression from the heart—“and let such things happen? Will we do nothing to stop this evil?”), as well as some small gears, some brass moldings, and what looks like a distributor baseplate. There’s also an apple lying there, partly eaten (“It is like a sickness spreading into the world—and where, if not there, will the line be drawn?”); I was glad I didn’t have to pick it up.
I’ve not worked since the bombing of Guernica five weeks ago, haven’t even been contributing my share to the WPA project. Which I like: a park sculpture meant as a clambering device for little kids. But there was a park in Guernica too, kids playing. The German Condor Legion hit the town on market day, nowhere to hide, thousands of people killed and torn apart, cremated in the fires that followed. It was a completely inhuman thing, and it made me a little crazy. Of course, the world is full of sadness—all the massacres in Spain, in Ethiopia, in China, here in this country for that matter: men tortured with blowtorches, then hung from trees and set alight—but this was something new. Others could put a good face on it, talk about its arousing world opinion finally against the Fascist terror—how could Roosevelt ignore this?— but I felt like those people out on the Caspian steppes must have felt all those centuries ago, ancestors of mine maybe, when they first saw those strange monsters thundering down on them from the morning sun, awesome, dismaying (the rumble of it, the precision, the terror)—no, not the Mongols, hordes like any hordes, but the horses. Now I look up in the sky, where life comes from, and see it dark, yet garish, ablaze with metallic death.
I destroyed half a year’s labors that afternoon in a fit of—what? despair? guilt? outrage? revelation? childish nihilism? I don’t know. All I remember is I picked up the oxyacetylene torch as the news came through on the radio, in between soap commercials, thinking to fight back with art, to forge some affirmation in the face of so much annihilation, something like that, and instead I went berserk, fusing everything within the blowpipe’s reach, including a stack of metal folding chairs, the pipe on my old stove, and the bars at the foot of my iron bed. In fact, it was the alarming stench of burning blankets and mattress straw that finally brought me back to my senses—I twisted the valves shut, threw a pot of cold coffee at the smoldering bedding, wrenched the sagging bars at the foot upright and held them till they cooled, and then fell down on the bed, still in my gloves and goggles, to lie in all that stink and wreckage, thinking: This is probably more or less what the survivors of Guernica are doing, because: what else can they do? I stared at the melted cityscapes, the mowed Jarama flowers, the broken-backed jugglers. A cat made of little pennyworth nails I’d been working on for nearly a year had collapsed on its own fused belly like an old drunk. Nearly a year! What have I been doing all this time? I must be mad!
The Black Baron wandered in then, looking faintly offended, circled the bed once, then jumped up beside me. “Baron,” I said, “Leo’s right. Art’s just another form of hysteria. If you’re not on the front lines, you’re dead.” The Baron purred. “We’ve got to grow up, Baron. We’ve got to learn how to kill.” Instead, though, I dropped off into a deep thick begoggled sleep… from which—only today, it might be said—I’m at last stirring.…
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.