“You mean,” she muses, strawberry juice dribbling down her soft chin, “he was a eager beaver who couldn’t see past the end of his own shnozzle…”
“You could say so,” I smile. “You know, people complain we don’t live enough in the here and now. Either we’re absorbed in the past or daydreaming about the future, which is presumably a very crazy way to behave, because we’re missing the real thing and taking the imaginary thing as real. ‘Live like each moment is your last,’ they say.”
“They’re right, Meyer. It’s the truth.”
“But that was just how Gus lived, though without the morbid touch: moment by moment, each out cut off from the next, fulfilling his timetable. We talk about living in the present because we can’t imagine actually doing it. He did it. He was in that sense the perfect realist, the absolute materialist.”
“He was a lot smarter than me, I know that.”
“We think of the past and the future as part of a kind of river, a time-stream, but this is just a poetic metaphor. Gus had no perception of this or any other metaphor. He was completely metaphor-free. He had no imagination at all!”
“Well, I don’t know about that,” she replies. “Did I ever tell you about his little tricks with the ketchup and cottage cheese?”
“Oh, he was inventive. He had to be. Everything was a crisis for him. Whenever he encountered something new, he tested out responses to it. When something worked, he moved it into his practice schedule and turned it into a habit.”
“He had a cute thing with a bicycle pump, too. You should have such habits, Meyer,” she teases, popping a strawberry into my mouth. “Sometimes, though, he got very dirty talking, you wouldn’t do that…”
“Probably he was just getting his line for making out muddled up with his lockerroom banter. Tell me, did he ever hit you with a wet towel?”
“How — how did you know?”
“Just a guess…”
“I turn my back once to get undressed, that’s all, and I’m just pushing down my, my under-things, thinking how excited he must be to see, you know… when — oh! What a spank! I thought I would die!”
“It was one of his football exercises, Golda.”
“You mean, he wasn’t mad—?”
“Not like you mean. He just couldn’t keep things straight finally. That was how he cracked up.”
“He was a little peculiar, Meyer, I know what you’re talking about. Once we were hugging and I just squatted down a little so to sit on the bed, when he claps me hard on the tushie and says: ‘Let’s go git them fuckin’ assholes!’—pardon the French, Meyer. And then he turns and runs—patsch! — right into the wall!”
“He was breaking out of a huddle…”
“He sure was! I thought he was killing himself! I didn’t think it was for love, but I couldn’t be sure. I run over to help him. I says: ‘Dick! Dick! What have you done?’ And you know what he says?”
“‘Golda! Golda! I’ve been looking for you!’ “
“You’re right, Meyer! That’s it! The whole shtick, right from the start, like nothing has happened!”
“It was that routine that ended his career, Golda.”
“You mean—? I thought there was a woman behind it!” she exclaims, setting her jaw. Then she sighs. “Tell me the truth, Meyer, there were other women, weren’t there? I mean… more than one…”
“Yes, yes, there were, Golda,” I say, not wanting to hurt her, but wishing her to be free of this freak once and for all. “Hundreds, in fact. Every year.”
She takes it better than I expected. Or worse: it seems to please her. “Was he really so famous, then?”
“For one season he was the greatest halfback in football,” I say. “He had a secret. But it was the wrong kind of secret. When he finally went, it was a terrible thing to watch.” So I told her about all the practice sessions, how he developed his fabulous techniques, demanding ever more and more of himself, and how these techniques helped him to score on and off the field like nobody had ever scored before. “There was no stopping him. It looked easy, nobody guessed how hard he worked. In fact, it was fairly easy as long as he was in college. But the big leagues were something else — just not the same thing as college Homecoming Queens and Whittier Poets. What he’d learned so far was just baby stuff. He had to double up on everything. Getting rid of the classwork was a help — in fact, he quit right after the football season was over. He still graduated, but it was mostly on reputation and his personal correspondence with Mrs. Hoover. And in the pros he had a whole team to work with and no longer had to play defense as well as offense. But there were scores of new plays to learn on the field, scores of new positions off. Even the football that season had a new shape, and women in Chicago wore more clothes. Nothing was easy. And of course he couldn’t leave out anything he’d learned so far without blowing the works. He even turned his meals into practice sessions for testimonial dinners, pickups, biting in pileups, and muff-diving, so as not to lose time. He—”
“What diving?”
“You know, with the mouth—”
“Oh! I thought you said muff-diving…”
“I did, Golda. A muff’s, you know, for keeping your hands warm—”
“Ah!” she says, blushing, and puts my hand between her legs.
“The point is, in order to keep up with these new demands, even his eating, sleeping, and toilet time had to be used for practice somehow. He hired professionals to sleep with him at night, for example, waking him for five-minute practice sessions at one, three, and five A.M. Even his urination doubled as a drill for flag-saluting during the playing of the National Anthem. It sounds a bit crazy, but the results were good. By the middle of that autumn he was scoring approximately once every eleven minutes on the field and had progressed in his seductions beyond mere movie stars and teammates’ wives, into Congress, convents, industrial baronies, and the American Bible Society. On the gridiron, the Bears were unbeatable as long as he was in the lineup, though as the season wore on it got more difficult for him. Now and then he missed a day of practice — once with hay fever, a second time with a wrenched knee, another when he got drugged by a lady psychiatrist who couldn’t bear to let him go.”
“Oi, I know just how she felt, Meyer…!”
“Well, his timetable had been reduced by then to the bare-bone essentials, so to catch up he had to cut more and more into his sleeping time. He was spending as much as eighteen to twenty hours a day at what he called in an interview that ‘tough, grinding discipline that is absolutely necessary for superior performance.’ Actually, he didn’t mind the sleepless nights and even began to believe in them. But then the other teams started filming his play and soon discovered a number of seemingly fixed patterns. They began to predict and intercept his moves. The Bears’ coach, seeing Gus was getting outguessed, told him he was too mechanical, he had to think faster on his feet. So he set aside time each day to practice thinking, which meant he had to give up everything subsequent to scoring: no more acknowledgments of applause, no more gratitude to girls. His thinking sessions were essentially efforts to crossbreed all the things he already knew, creating a greatly augmented number of variations on a theme, so to speak. There were still patterns, he couldn’t help that, but they were much harder to detect and predict. It was enough to get the Bears through a perfect season in the Western Division, the only one in NFL history, but already by the last game or two the other teams were getting to him again. Of course, he was still setting astounding records in all departments, but at the end of the season they were holding him to only three or four touchdowns a game, cutting his rushing average by some twenty-five percent, and intercepting a number of his passes, especially on the right flank, where he always thought he was strongest. He pushed deeper into the night with his thinking practice and risked cutting some of the foreplay and huddle techniques, but as a result he began showing other signs of strain. He lurched into a few wild plays in the last games and went offside a couple of times, knocked a Congresswoman’s teeth out in a surprise body-block in her bathtub (she bit the cold-water tap as she came down), had an orgasm in a pileup on the field at which time some strange murmurings were also reported but not believed, and broke into a stream of abusive showerroom obscenities during a Quaker service in his honor at the Friends Meeting House on the South Side, which nevertheless did not prevent him from seducing two of the ladies present and tackling a third.”