He came up with a much more interesting remark, quite spontaneously, that night Gus tackled my stove. While cleaning up the debris and putting the stove back together again (we’d got Gus back to playacting again, easing him gradually away from the heat and excitement of football by having him perform from a play he’d apparently written himself called The Little Accident, in which he’d played the part of a football player at Whittier College), I related what I knew by then about his past, the football, the girls, his timetables, the early decisions, and I tossed out a thought that had come to me earlier: “What if that’s what we mean by ‘growing up’? I mean, coming to a decision, suddenly or slowly, consciously or unconsciously, to step out of the explosion at large and accept some kind of structure you can work in, some arbitrary configuration — your own invention or borrowed from others — that allows you to reduce time to something merely functionaclass="underline" a material you can cut up and construct memories with…”
“You mean, what if ‘growing up’ and ‘going nuts’ are the same thing?” Leo asked.
“Well, if they are,” Simon said, “then — as of right now — they aren’t anymore.”
This, coming from Simon, so surprised us that we all applauded. Gus assumed, of course, that we were clapping for him — didn’t all the world? — and he lifted both fists above his head and flashed a frozen smile. We got into a heated argument after that about Leo’s desire to use Gus in the coming confrontation in South Chicago, Jesse and I arguing against the cynical manipulation of idiots as a form of exploitation and ultimately dangerous to the cause (what if one of them took over?), Leo, O.B., and Simon arguing variously for the impossibility of any action without “manipulation,” the sheer entertainment value of the thing (this was O.B., who has walked so long at the edge of some brink or other that he’s forgotten to care anymore whether he drops off or not — though reviewed as “cries of protest,” his novels are really about suicide and how to enjoy it), and the paradox that in any revolution those rebelling against the society have been warped by it.
“And anyway,” Leo said, “I don’t think anybody’s going to get hurt. Now that U.S. Steel has seen the light, these little assholes like Girdler will have to cave in, too. But we’ve got to stand firm, and we can use Gus here as a kind of symbol. You know, HOLD THAT LINE!”
Gus, startled, leaped to his feet, dropped into a crouch, commenced to growl. “Whoa, boy!” Jesse cried. “Time out!”
“Man, I’m all for you takin’ this geek down there with you,” O.B. laughed, “but if you do, I’m gonna come and holler ‘29!’”
“Hey, Meyer!” It’s one of the boys. “I was safe, wasn’t I?”
I‘ve been watching their game in the schoolyard without thinking about it. Now I let what I’ve just seen pass again in slow motion before my inner eye (the one I do all my sculpting with — everything goes in there, but not everything stays, and reason has nothing to do with it; it’s a lot like Gus’s gearbox, now that I think about it): Bernie, the boy who asked me the question, has tried to stretch a single to a double. The kid on second was thrown the ball in plenty of time and was standing well in front of the detached chunk of sidewalk they’re using for the base, but he was scared and had his eyes shut. Bernie, eyes all lit up with the joy of it (memory is the greatest illusionist of them all, I think, giving us time with one hand and taking it away with the other), bashed into him, sending the kid sprawling. Right now, he’s trying very hard not to cry. “You were out, Bernie.”
“See? See?” cries the other kid loudly, too loudly, the tears springing to the corners of his eyes, reinforcing his indignation and self-righteousness. “You’re out, I told ya!”
“Aw, Meyer, you’re blind! He wasn’t even looking what he was doing!”
“I know. He didn’t tag you, you tagged the ball. If you’d been smart, instead of trying to knock him down like that, you would’ve just tiptoed around behind him.”
Everybody laughs at that, even the kid who’s been hit. “Hey, Meyer,” says another, the fat boy who’s playing Big Zeke Bonura over on first, “come and umpire, will ya?”
“Yeah, Meyer!”
“Can’t, fellas. I’ve got to get on home, get some work done. Besides, I’m soaking wet, and I’ve got some raw fish here I have to put in the icebox.”
“Aw, Meyer, just half a hour!” pleads the bespectacled White Sox pitcher.
“No, you see, a friend of mine died today, I couldn’t really keep my mind on the ballgame. But, hey, that was some game you pitched Monday! You made the Hall of Fame!” The boys laugh at that, a little self-consciously maybe, but they know I’m good at pretending with them. I see Old Man Donaldson coming around the corner with his fruit cart. “I tell you what I will do, though — I’ll buy you all an apple!”
They cheer at that and swarm around Donald-son’s wagon to pick out the ones with the least bruises. Bernie, to get even, takes a banana, which is expensive. Donaldson is a surly old wretch and might have taken a cut at them with his horsewhip, but just then his old nag drops a load of manure, and he gets distracted picking it up, shoveling it into a bucket he keeps hanging from the side of the cart for the purpose. “Never throw nothin’ away,” he always says, and does so now. Bernie’s slide into second base with all its inner contradictions is still playing before my inner eye, and an idea comes to me suddenly for a little football piece, something to mark Gus’s performance down at Republic Steel. Not exactly what Leo had in mind maybe (I’m thinking of the lurch into freedom through all those grabbing and flailing restraints of the line, form emerging from chaotic matter), but it’s the first idea of any kind I’ve had in a month, I have to get home and sketch it out. I pay for the apples and the banana and buy myself a box of strawberries, thinking: I’m a rich man, I can eat like the Duke of Windsor and spend all my days modeling little football and baseball players out of mud and nails — and if Leo and the others cannot see what I’m doing, then that just shows that, as with Gloomy Gus, their lives are too narrow and segmented.
“How, after all you’ve been through, Meyer,” Leo once asked me, “can you fuck around making these goddamn emptyheaded palookas?”
“It’s social realism,” Simon said, defending me, and Leo laughed, thinking Simon was making a joke. But Simon’s too dense for humor; I supposed he was thinking of all those muscular Soviet posters (though in that respect, the Fascists are even better social realists than the Soviets). Either way, he was wrong about it. True, I believe in social realism, after a fashion, but I don’t think you can know it before you start. True dialectic means letting your own work teach you as you go along. Art as process, as Dewey says, as interaction, shared celebration. You have to expose yourself before the world will show itself to you: a truth from the Torah.
I often get criticized by my friends for the athletes I make (and Leo’s right in a way: my welding techniques often use suggestion more than solid matter, so the heads are often, quite literally, empty). They argue that professional American sports reflect the sickness of American society: the exploitation of players, manipulation of followers, the brutality and competitiveness of the game, the record-keeping mania and personality cults, even the hokum reenactment and reinforcement of the rags-to-riches mythology. Bigtime football especially enrages them. They hate the raw, naked aggression, the implicit imperialism in the battle for yardage, the dehumanizing uniforms and training schedules, the lionization of the bully, and the celebration of violence as a way of discovering the self.