His brother described Gus’s freshman year as one of the worst of his — the brother’s — life. Gus’s other pursuits had been essentially private ones, but now with this offside problem he needed others to help, and his younger brother got the brunt of it. At first Gus did try to go it alone, using an alarm clock, but the ring was too much like the school bell, and it made him very jumpy in classrooms: he sometimes found himself out of his seat five minutes before the bell and down in a crouch in the front of the room, tense with expectation. So he got his brother to call numbers. Arbitrarily, they chose “29” as the signal to go. I asked the brother why and he said: “I don’t know. The year maybe.”
“You mean, because of the crash?”
“No, it was 1930, remember, and I think we thought that ‘29’ would cause just that split second of delay that Dick needed. It was a mistake, though.”
“A mistake?”
“Using just one number like that. We realized too late we should have mixed them up. He never quite got over it. You know what they say, the things you learn first stick with you the longest. Every time somebody shouted ‘29’ after that, he was off and running. Had to leave it out of the signals, and even the Bears, you know, had to be sure not to call an accidental ‘29.’ It was supposed to be kept secret, but somehow it leaked out, and that leak was part of what got him in trouble finally.”
The half-hour-a-day practice paid off. A couple of weeks after he’d begun the exercise, the Chief gave him another chance. It was late in the game and the freshman Poets were trailing by five touchdowns. The Poets’ left tackle got hit hard and the Chief sent Gus in for one play, sacrificing the expected five-yard offside penalty loss, while the other guy got his wind back. The play was called and for the first time in his football career Gus managed to stay down until the ball was snapped. But he got smeared. They had to carry him off the field on a stretcher. As they passed the Chief with him, he looked up with a hopeful smile and asked: “How’d I do, Coach?”
The Chief looked down at this eager, curlyheaded kid, whose face was presently all chopped up with cleat marks, and said grimly: “Well, at least you didn’t go offside.”
“Gosh… thanks, Chief!”
“Thanks—! Thanks for what? You were terrible! You let that worthless sonofabitch walk right over you! Instead of five yards, we lost fifteen!”
Gus looked rattled. “But… what… what did I do wrong?”
The coach stared down at him in disbelief, shook his head. “Well, for one thing, son,” he sighed (on the field a pass had been intercepted, the Poets were now six touchdowns behind), “keep your butt down. You’re not up there to blow farts, you’re part of a wall and your ass is the weight that’s holding it up. And when I say you gotta be on your toes, I don’t mean like a goddamn ballet dancer—dig in! Become part of that turf you’re holding! And your fingers — look at ’em! They’re all bloodied up! Three of ’em look broken! Don’t spread ’em out like that! Knuckle under, make ’em into fists, flexible but hard! And keep your goddamn stupid head down, for Chrissake! It don’t matter to you what’s behind the guy in front of you, you just hunch your shoulders down and keep an eye on him! Watch all of him, but don’t let his face take your mind off the important parts: his hands and his knees. That first guy who hit you came in awful high, right at the belly, a very bad habit — lift your knees up when he does that and cure him of it! Now, didja ever think what a shoulder was for? When you — My God, now what’s the matter? What’re you makin’ all them damn twitches for?”
“That’s… that’s a lot to remember, Chief…”
But Gloomy Gus was nothing if not thorough. He added an hour and forty minutes to his daily schedule, giving up the playwriting, glee club, the violin, and pumping gas at his dad’s filling station, and set about learning all the things the Chief had told him. Now he needed an opponent as well as someone to call the signals. His brother balked, but got dragged into it just the same. So did his fraternity brothers, neighbors, teammates, even his mother and his girlfriend. His mother showed that Quaker forbearance she was famous for, even when flat out on the field and run over, but his girlfriend quit him, bawling all the way home that she was afraid she was never going to have a baby all her life. His father loved physical contact, but not when it was two-sided, so he steered clear. When Gus couldn’t find willing opponents, he used the school tackling dummies, but it was hard to watch the hands and knees. Everything went well enough and he even got into another game before his freshman season ended, performing well on the line. But the coach made the mistake of using him at fullback for one play, and when the quarterback turned around to hand off the ball, Gus creamed him. His own quarterback. “He came in high, Chief — and like you said…” The coach hoped the silly bastard would flunk out or get pregnant or something before the next season rolled around.
Speaking of which, he was at this same time working on his problem with girls. Well, not precisely at the same time, since the practice times were in different parts of his daily schedule. Which accounted for his picking up girlfriends in one season and losing them in the next. His technique was precisely the same: learn one thing at a time, starting with the simplest, and practice it over and over and over until it was second nature (there being no first with Gus, of course). Then add the next element. As with football, he began by learning how not to go offside, though the problem here was slightly different. In effect, he had to unlearn what he knew or thought he knew about sex and start over with holding hands. For thirty minutes every day, he practiced going through the Persians-and-Greeks thing, then reaching for the girl’s hand. It was not always easy to find girls to practice this with. His brother said he hated this part even more than being a tackling dummy. Especially since Gus was a slow learner and kept making appalling mistakes. But then it occurred to him one day that he didn’t need the Persians and Greeks anymore, and with that it became easier to find willing girls again, though they never understood the constant repeats and the abrupt dismissals when the thirty minutes were up.
Over the months that followed, he continued his exercises, expanding them to include new techniques picked up from coaches, friends, movies, books, teammates, barbershops, parents, and burlesque shows in Los Angeles. He learned how — each in separate drills — to tackle and block, swear vehemently, break out of a huddle, cradle a ball, throw it and catch it and inflate it, how to squeeze hands, caress them, gaze deeply, joke casually, wink, blow loose wisps of hair back, ask for a phone number, stand tall, and even foxtrot a bit. Not without paying a price, of course. Something had to go to make room for all of this. He was able to compress some practice times, once he’d mastered a given skill, but he discovered he could not omit any drill altogether or the skills slipped away from him again. Even the offside practice: he got it down to about two minutes a day, but he couldn’t get rid of it. And one skill did not simply lead to another — more often it led to a dozen, and each of these dozen to a dozen each, multiplying like leaves on a fast-branching tree. I could understand his dilemma. I have the same problem with my sculpting: I can never hope to catch up. I’m afraid we had a lot in common, Gloomy Gus and I, more than I’ve sometimes wished to admit. I’ve said we simplified ourselves — but didn’t we merely substitute a vertical madness for a horizontal one?