“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.”