Not his real name, of course. He picked it up back in college when he was still playing freshman football—or trying to—for the Whittier Poets. When he joined the Chicago Bears, sportswriters started calling him the Fighting Quaker and, for reasons never quite clear to me (maybe it had something to do with his battering-ram style of running), Iron Butt, but Gloomy Gus was the name that stuck to him. Not because he was actually a gloomy sort of character—I doubt he had any feelings at all, as we know them anyway, he wasn’t put together that way—but because it was a clown’s name, and a clown was what Gus was, even when he was a National Hero. He was the most famous guy I ever knew—a college All-American and an all-star football pro—and, as such, a kind of walking cautionary tale on the subject of fame and ambition.
He first turned up at a party we threw in my studio one Friday toward the end of March, and he came back every Friday night after. “A f’kucken schnorrer,” Harry called him, “f’kucken” being his own Yiddish-American neologism, made of kucken, fucking, and fehkuckteh, but Gus wasn’t there to sponge exactly. It was just his style: everything by the numbers, one to ten and start again. In fact, he was one of the hardest workers I ever knew. Maybe that was why they called him Iron Butt, I don’t know. Jesse speculated it had to do with his Bear teammates’ inability to crack his virginity in the lockerrooms; he made up a funny song about it, a parody of “John Henry” in which the steel-drivin’ man meets his match at last. Gus was a strange guest, my principal distraction through the hands-down melancholy of this past month, but maybe he contributed to it, too. He ate my food, drank the Baron’s milk, crapped in my toilet, washed in my basin, even used my bed, but never a word of thanks, not even the least sign that he understood these things were mine and not his. Simon joked he was just being a good comrade, true to the canons, but then Gus wasn’t mooching off Simon. In place of thanks, we got performances. Sometimes by request, sometimes spontaneous, but never entirely predictable. He’d laid on several skills in his lifetime, and he didn’t always come up with the right ones in the right order.
I hadn’t recognized him at first, which is not surprising, since not only had he been wearing a bushy black beard and been introduced as an actor living off the WPA like the rest of us, but I wouldn’t ordinarily recognize any professional football player, by face or name, nor would any of my friends. Of course I like the game—I like all games—but I don’t keep up with the overblown seasonal histories. Nevertheless, it happens that I did know who Gloomy Gus was, had even for a few weeks a couple of years back followed his then-fabulous career, and I eventually put two and two together (the answer in Gus’s case was not four, not even close), though I admit I got some help from visitors who came through asking about him.
That time when I was reading about him was the autumn of 1934. I’d come back to Chicago after a couple of years bumming around, following the harvests and the unionizing. I was tired of that life and wanted to get back to sculpting again. I’d learned a new skill on the road, welding, and I knew at last where I was going, if I could ever get the money together for a studio and equipment. I was staying at that time down on Kedzie with my aunt. I had no place to begin work, so I took a refresher course in plumbing and metalworking at the Jewish Training School and spent the rest of my time reading. Anything at hand, which at my aunt’s house was mostly mystical tracts and newspapers. And the papers that fall were full of the incredible exploits of Gloomy Gus of the Chicago Bears. It was his rookie season in the bigtime and he was breaking every record in the books, just as he had done in college ball. The reporters were so excited it was sometimes hard to tell the newspapers from the mystical tracts. I read that he’d played for a little Quaker school out in California, and had set phenomenal rushing, passing, pass-receiving, and scoring records—including seven touchdowns, almost single-handed (he was always a loner, and besides, nobody else was really good enough to keep up with him) against Pittsburgh in the Rose Bowl. There was even a popular song about him, “You Gotta Be a Football Hero.” He was everybody’s All-American, and all the big professional teams were after him. He wasn’t interested in the negotiations apparently, and would have played for nothing (though this may have been some publicity tararam handed out by the Bears’ front office), but he was very loyal to all his friends and relatives, his old coach, former teammates and girlfriends, and so the price was finally pretty high, especially considering the hard times. Since the Bears were the reigning league champions and had all the money, they were the ones who got him. And it was worth it, or so it seemed that fall: he led the Bears to a perfect season in the conference—thirteen wins, no ties, no losses—and again completely rewrote the record books. Only in the last game or two did the cracks begin to show, but before the playoff for the championship with the New York Giants had ended, his legendary career was over. Until then, he’d been living the dream of every little school kid in America: the quiet scholarly little boy, left out of all the neighborhood games and laughed at by all the girls, who suddenly finds the magic formula and becomes the most famous athlete and greatest lover in the world. “I believe in the American dream,” he once said, “because I have seen it come true in my own life.”
I’m just crossing Division Street when I run into my friend Jesse, coming out of a bar with Harry and Ilya. Ilya I haven’t seen in weeks. He’s very drunk and sullen—a pale wispy boy who never looks quite strong enough to stand, even when he’s sober. His brother Dave, we learned a couple of weeks ago, lost an arm and part of a leg at Ja-rama—like Ilya, he’s a musician: a violinist, was—and since then Ilya’s become secretive and ill-tempered, almost as though he somehow blamed the rest of us for what happened to his brother. He still looks that way, though that he’s out drinking with Jesse and Harry is a good sign. Leo had once, soberly, more or less soberly, lectured me on alcohol and revolution, the link being the romantic illusion. “And why not?” he’d grinned wearily (we were watching drunken Father Clanahan tip over, as I recall). “Reality’s such shit. You have to reinvent it just to live in it.” “Hey, Meyer!” Jesse calls now, flashing his lean, gap-toothed smile from under his rumpled cloth cap. “How’s ole Gus?”
“He died.”
Jesse and Harry somehow look downcast and amused at the same time. The momentary fade Jesse passes into suggests he’s already conjuring up a new song. Come all you good workers, a story I will tell, about a football hero who for our Union fell. Ilya, who introduced Gus to us in the first place, only grimaces irritably and looks down at his feet. “The silly potz,” Harry sighs, shaking his little round head. Harry was always baffled by Gus, and has never got over his rage at what Gus did to his sister. “Was he still taking curtain calls at the end?”
“No,” I say, “though he had an audience—the place was filled with celebrities and reporters. But he didn’t seem to recognize them. He just lay there, like he didn’t know what was happening. They’d shaved his beard off, and it made him look puffy and gray and vulnerable.”
“This is the city of the gray faces,” says Harry cryptically, squinting up at us through the rain streaking his thick smudged lenses. Harry is a poet and a Trotskyite, and he loves enigma.
Jesse glances at Ilya, then explains: “Harry ’n me been down to the Eagles on Houston where they got those fellas laid out. Huge crowds down there, Meyer, like you never seen, folks payin’ their respecks from all over the country.” He shakes his head, a flash of bitterness sobering the genial creases of his face. “At least seven a them boys, you know, got it in the back.”
“So I heard. Our brave boys in blue.”
“It was sad to see, Meyer. Them fellas is completely dead. And a lotta others are hurtin’, too. The hall down there had the ass-pick of a first-aid shelter in a fuckin’ war zone.” Jesse cups his big hands against the rain and lights a cigarette, watching Ilya, a sincere worry on his face. “Crushed skulls, broke ribs, ’n suchlike,” he says around the smoke. “Seen a pore woman who’s gone stone blind, her head fulla stitches like
the goddamn Bride a Frankenstein. An’ a guy with a bullet hole clean through his left flapper, talkin’ about how lucky he was.”
Ilya snorts, staring at the traffic in the street behind me. “Lucky!”
“They even wounded a little kid,” says Harry, his gray jowls puffy with indignation. “A little petseleh not more than nine, they were shooting at everybody. And an expectant mother. Just missed killing the bloody foetus—and they won’t even let her out of jail!”
“It’s true,” Jesse says. “A dude was locked up with me all night who’d been shot in the leg. His wounds was festerin’ up ’n he was gittin’ feverish, but they wouldn’t let him go. Hell, no. Far as I know, the pore sonuvabitch is dead by now. An’ the damn cops is talkin’ like they cain’t wait to shoot some more. But nobody’s scared, that’s the main thing you notice down there, they’re jist mad.” Jesse’s theme song: the universal war. Which side are you on. Injustice is as plain as the nose on your face, you can’t pretend you don’t see it. Jesse’s an old Wob, one of the few to stay with the union movement after the Wobblies fell apart, sweet but intransigent. He takes a deep drag on the cigarette, then hands it to Ilya. “Funny how the world works, you know. Seems like you always gotta go through flesh to git to the other side.”
“You…!” growls Ilya, looking away but taking the smoke. Cars pass us in the street, a wet hum and throb.
Where Ilya reacted against the privileged survivors, hurting Jesse just a bit, I might have snorted at “the other side.” Instead, I say: “Flesh isn’t just a passive medium, you know. It talks back. Only sometimes in the excitement we forget to listen.”
“Yeah, speakin’ a that, ole son, howza mouse?” Jesse grins, peering closer.
“It’s okay.” I should be grateful for it, it may have saved my life. Because of it, Leo told me to stay home Sunday: they expected action, and the black eye would be too tempting a target. Badge of a troublemaker. Jesse missed the Memorial Day confrontation, too, having been arrested in a sound-truck on Wednesday as the men were first downing tools and coming out, released only yesterday.
“Seen Leo?” he asks now.
“He’s left town.”
“That figures,” grumps Harry, who never went down to the strike at all. “He’s a mamzer, a shvitser, you can’t trust him.”
“He’s needed in Ohio,” I say, defending my friend. “There’s some kind of air war going on over there. Besides, he’s a good organizer—”
“That patscher? He couldn’t organize his rectum! He’s a joyboy, Meyer, he’s got no vision, no ideology, it’s just a big circus to him. Look at him taking that dumb klutz down there Sunday! He knew f’kucken Karl Marx couldn’t keep his signals straight, he knew what had to happen!”
“Turds like him are gonna get us all killed,” grumbles Ilya, passing the cigarette back to Jesse. A bit unfair maybe, but at least it’s a sign of health that he’s said “us” again. Jesse winks soberly at me over the dangling butt.
“Maybe that wasn’t a great idea,” I admit. “But a lot of steelworkers are football fans. Leo thought that an expression of solidarity from a famous star like Gus could make a strong impression on them—”
“Well, it sure did that,” agrees Harry. “It got ten of the poor shlimazels killed! It was that crazy charge on the police that set the whole meshugass off, I read it in the papers!”
“What paper wuzzat, comrade?” asks Jesse with a wry one-sided grin, and Harry grunts ambiguously.
“Leo told me Gus had nothing to do with it,” I say. “He said it all started when some cop got nervous and shot into the crowd of workers crossing the field—then everybody just started running. Which is why so many of them got it in the back.”
“If it was a cop,” Jesse puts in. “Mighta been one of Girdler’s comp’ny goons, tryin’ to whup up a little action—we heard somethin’ about that today down to the fun’ral.”
“Maybe,” I allow. “Wouldn’t be the first time.” Jesse nods. We’re remembering Kansas, Pennsylvania, Kentucky. Bloody Thursday in San Francisco, where years ago we met. The cynical perverting of men’s honest passions. “Anyway, Leo claims he tried to drag Gus away when the shooting broke out, but Gus seemed mesmerized by all the fireworks. You know what big crowds always did to him. Then some cop lobbed a gas grenade, Gus grabbed it in midair, and he was off and running. Jesse Owens couldn’t catch him, Leo said. War Admiral couldn’t. He said Gus sprinted the whole battle line between cops and workers, dodging clubs and stones and even bullets. A cop would be bashing a striker with a billy and Gus would time his run so as to go flashing between them on the backswing, without even seeming to change his pace. That’s real prairie out there, maybe the first time in years Gus had seen an open field, he was really moving.” (On the phone, Leo had said: “For the first time I have to appreciate those welded bozos of yours, Meyer—do me one of that batbrain hauling his ashes through all that rowdydowdy, and you got yourself a patron! Ha ha! Even if I have to hock old Mother Blooey!” Meaning his car—named after the Grande Dame of the Party—his one possession.) “You’re right about Leo never staying around when there’s shooting going on, Harry,” I add, “especially when it’s all coming from one side, he wouldn’t even argue with you about that, but he said he couldn’t resist watching old Gloomy Gus make his fabulous run, even if it did mean he nearly got caught standing there. And the amazing thing was, Gus made it, juggling that smoking gas grenade, all the way from one end to the other!”
“Whoopee! What a way to go!” hoots Jesse, slapping his leg. He takes a final pleasurable pull, his pale blue eyes fixed remotely on Gus’s run, and passes the butt between fingertips to Ilya. “Shit, boys, that musta been somethin’ to see!” Yes, it’s going to be a good song.
“Maybe those ten shmucks who got killed ran interference for him,” suggests Harry sarcastically. “That’s how many’s on a football team, isn’t it?”
Jesse laughs. “You think they were countin’, Harry?”
“I heard a rumor down at the theater he might’ve been a police informer,” Ilya says. We turn to watch him. He drops the butt, about the size of a used pencil eraser, onto the wet sidewalk and pointlessly steps on it, and as he does so seems to step into our circle. Or toward it anyway.
“What’s that—?” asks Harry.
“You know, maybe the cops recognized him as one of their own pals and held their fire.”
“No,” I say, “they shot at him all right. At least according to what Leo says. In fact, before he got to the end, everybody was trying to get him, throwing or shooting whatever they had at him. He’d become like some kind of terrifying symbol or something, but they couldn’t hit him. It was only when he’d finished his run and turned back to trot toward the cops with his arms stretched out in a V above his head that one of them shot him. This came as a complete surprise to him, of course. Leo says he just stood there, crumpling, that panicky twitching look in his face that always comes over him when he gets his signals crossed, and then the gas grenade blew up. That’s when Leo said he left.”
“A good story,” harrumphs Harry. “Leo’s still got his touch. But I don’t believe it. Like my old bobbeh used to say, nisht geshtoigen, nisht gefloigen—it don’t stand, it don’t fly. Except that part about Leo never staying around when the shooting starts. That had a ring of truth…”
“Whaddaya think about that rumor, Meyer?” Jesse asks. “What Ilya here was sayin’—you think ole Gus mighta been a Judas goat?”
“I don’t know. That one was going around the hospital today, too. The cops weren’t denying it, but maybe that’s because they don’t want to admit they’ve killed a famous middle-class hero. In fact, they were trying to suggest he might have been shot in the line of duty by one of the strikers, not by a cop at all, but not even the Trib seems to be buying that one.”
“Still, think about it—he had all the gear, didn’t he? Even a disguise! You always said he was like playactin’ alla time, but he didn’t seem to have no center.
Maybe that was jist on accounta he couldn’t show us the center…”
“Well…”
“Oi! it all fits!” cries Harry, slapping his round cheeks. “Why didn’t we see it before? A f’kucken mosser! We’re all geshtupped!”
“Maybe,” I laugh, “but I doubt it. I like Leo’s story better. Anyway, Leo’s pretty sure we cleaned most of them out Friday and Saturday.” I point to my eye and the others grin, all but Ilya, who seems unable to look at it.
“Hey, it’s fucking cold and wet out here,” he complains. “Let’s get something to drink, goddamn it!”
Jesse grins and wraps a bony arm around him. “Wiser words, Ilya ole buddy,” he says with a fake drunken slur, “was never spoke! C’mon, it’s dog-fuckin’ time, brothers!”
“Join us, Meyer,” says Harry, searching for me through his thick wet glasses. “I’ll buy you a glezel your Moldavskaya syrup.”
“No, thanks. I’m going home and get some work done.” They look surprised at this. I hope they’ll take the hint. I’ll start by repairing the cat, the one made of pennyworth nails. Find a place in it for one of these railroad spikes in my pocket. To prop up the fused belly, maybe. Scar tissue. “It’s been awhile, you know…”
“Well, so that’s good,” says Harry, slapping my shoulder. He seems genuinely pleased. “Maybe we’ll stop by later and see how it’s going.”
“Yeah, an’, hey, pick me up somethin’ cheap at Polly the Greek’s, will ya, Meyer?” says Jesse, fishing for change. He drops a quarter in my hand, tips his long-billed cap, and they drift off, through the drizzle, stubby half-blind Harry, pale Ilya, and Jesse with his long skinny arms around the pair of them, singing snatches from Casey Bill’s “WPA Blues”—