Apparently, the critical turning point in Gloomy Gus’s life came during his freshman year at Whittier College out in southern California. At that moment, he did what sooner or later we all do: he began to simplify himself. I can understand this: my sculpting is not something that was added to an expanding life, but that which remains after all the other things have been peeled away, things that, who knows, I might have been better at. We all have too few lives to live. Later, in an unpublished interview, Gus was to say that all he ever wanted to do was play football and screw girls, but up till that autumn in 1930 he had been trying to score everywhere at once: as a scholar, a politician, an organist, pianist, and violinist, a carny barker, gas station attendant, Quaker Sunday School teacher, debater and actor, entrepreneur, journalist, songwriter and playwright. A familiar pattern: he seemed destined to become president of the local Chamber of Commerce, or maybe a judge. He’d won scholarships, elections, awards, leading roles, oratorical contests, and public praise. But he still hadn’t been able to make the football team or coax a girl’s underpants down.
Which was more important to him is not clear. In later years, Gus himself spoke mostly about football, but the Hearst guy insists that under the uniform he was “ninety-nine and forty-four one-hundredths percent pure hard-on.” Gus’s brother had no opinion, though when I asked he winked broadly. This wink was a peculiarity of Gus’s brother, however, and could have signified anything. Girls admired Gus apparently, but they didn’t have much fun with him. He developed a kind of paranoia, stimulated by some advertisement maybe, about having bad breath — each morning before leaving the house, he used to brush his teeth, gargle with special mouthwashes, and make his mother smell his breath — but at least part of the problem was that on dates he talked to the girls about such things as what might have happened to the world if Persia had conquered the Greeks, and then with no transition tried to wrestle them to the floor. This never worked. Likewise with the footbalclass="underline" it was all verbal. Maybe his early successes with debates and elections had twisted him a bit. One teammate who knew him that freshman year summed up his talents very simply: “Dick had two left feet. He couldn’t coordinate.” Then why was he allowed to go on working out with the team? “He was always talking it up. That’s why the Chief let him hang around. He was one of the inspirational guys.” Of course, even the talking had required practice and so, like his acting, was cued and predictable, though maybe people failed to notice this at the time. A kind of religious recitation. We tried him out on winter nights around my stove. If you said, “Keep it rolling,” he’d say, “Fuckin’ good game!” If you said, “That’s showing them,” he’d say, “Make ’em eat shit!” Et cet.
The Chief was not an ungenerous man; he might have let Gus play from time to time just to be fair about it. Shut him up maybe. Besides, the Whittier Poets were terrible teams, freshmen and varsity both, they were sure to lose, no matter who played. But Gus suffered from something worse than just the two left feet: uncontrollable overeagerness. Every time he went into the game, he immediately went offside. As he bounded forward, his team marched backward, five penalty yards per play. Even if he was centering the ball himself (the Chief was resourceful, he tried that one too). He just couldn’t hold himself back. Girls, too, who might have surrendered to him in a moment of whimsical magnanimity, were put off by the way he lurched out of control before the foreplay had even begun.
There seemed to be no motive behind this over-eagerness. It was just a part of him, like the two left feet — it was difficult, in fact, for him to recognize that the fault might be his: he thought the rest of the world had two right feet and tended to collapse into slow-motion sequences. This characteristic, which was less than zeal but more than a conditioned reflex, may have got a certain amount of encouragement in his early life, since in other activities less formal than football and courtship it had served him well — he was like a jack-in-the-box in classrooms and student assemblies, debates, and fraternity meetings, and he won everything simply by astonishing everybody else into silence — but it was not basically something learned. I don’t know much about his birth (except that the sportswriters always liked to claim there was an eclipse of the sun that day), but I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that he came tearing out of his mother’s womb well before she was ready. He had what I can only describe as a short-circuited stimulus — response system in which everything operated on the knee-jerk principle. He spent most of the last six or seven years of his life struggling against this flaw, but as with any fundamental characteristic, the more he fought it, the more it dominated his life. With me it’s passivity, the open door; with Gloomy Gus, it was the plunge offside.
What had always worked best for him in his other activities was his discipline (also innate maybe, a kind of corollary of the overeagerness, but probably not; maybe his mother stuffed it into him with her Bible readings) — his careful preparations, self-control, dogged practice — so that’s what he turned to now in the fall of 1930 in his effort to overcome his failure on the football field and in the back seats of cars. I say “turned to,” “effort to overcome,” but I don’t mean to suggest there was anything overtly conscious about it. I’ve tried to imagine what bent him that fall and started him down the path to the Memorial Day massacre at the Republic Steel plant. He seemed uninterested in rewards, popularity, even love or happiness, and he was impervious to ridicule or criticism. Yet, at the same time, he lived in almost freakish immediacy to the world around him, a helpless puppet on a string, elbows akimbo and left feet twitching at every social whim. I don’t think he even “wanted” to play football or have sex — it was the world that told him he wanted these things, just as it might have told him instead to work for the New Deal, market frozen orange juice, get rich in Cuba, or run for Congress. He was nothing but Self, yet so invaded, more selfless than any of us in a way; without the sense of Audience, he would have been a lifeless pile of sticks and rags. Such a system may be reinforced by rewards and applause, but by small increments only. Only one thing will turn it around: violent disapproval. Fury. Rage. A beating, even. Who tore into him finally? Was it the coach? His heavy-handed father? His girlfriend?
Whoever it was put the fatal twist in his mechanism, that autumn Gloomy Gus made one simple alteration in his daily pattern, and so commenced to reshape his destiny: he set aside thirty minutes every day to practice not going offside. This habit of scheduling his time was one he’d picked up early, a consequence of his music lessons maybe. I’ve tried it myself from time to time, but I always misplace the schedules. Besides, somebody can always come through the door and spoil it for me. Mainly I do it because I enjoy writing out the schedules, it’s a kind of daydreaming. Gus was more serious about it. At first it had merely been the way to make full (and as his Quaker grandmother would say, “proper”) use of his free time after school and on weekends, but by the time he was thirteen the idea of “free time” had faded from his memory and all twenty-four hours, seven days a week, were locked up in his timetable. This meant that when something new was phased in — the thirty minutes spent learning not to go offside, for example — something else had to get squeezed or cut altogether. It was at this time that he gave up writing songs for his fraternity (“All hail the mighty boar, / Our patron beast is he…,” this was one of his famous ones) and mashing potatoes for his mother. This potato-mashing, incidentally, was not as irrelevant as it might seem. His mother once said of his skills (this made all the newspapers): “He never left any lumps. He used the whipping motion to make them smooth instead of going up and down the way the other boys did.” But since nothing ever came naturally to him, it’s obvious he’d had to devote a good part of his childhood working up this talent, one of his first to be noticed. Again inspired by a burst of anger, no doubt — his father is a moody, hot-blooded Black Irishman, handy with the razor strop, and he’s never liked lumpy mashed potatoes. Thus, an early establishment of the pattern, and Gus had evidently clung to this potato-mashing exercise like a security blanket up to that autumn of his freshman year in college.