“Like I’m telling you, Meyer, he was a kuntzen macher, like Harry says — you know, a real tricks-maker — I’m gonna miss him so…”
“Well, finally it was the Giants who broke him, in the championship game. They’d purchased a reserve Bear lineman surreptitiously by way of the Green Bay Packers in order to obtain firsthand intelligence about Gus’s practice routines. At first this guy’s information seemed useless: short on specifics about tactics and play patterns, long on apparent irrelevancies about spitting water and handholding and suchlike. They began to think the lineman himself was maybe a sleeper, a plant.”
“Like those chazzers down at the steel plant who gave you all those bumps,” she says, kissing the bruise on my shoulder, her hand stroking my thigh.
“Exactly, Golda. Some of the heavies on the Giants line even roughed the guy up a bit, but he stuck to his story. It was only about twenty-four hours before the playoff began that it suddenly occurred to them what it was all about. Their strategy the next day was to hit him at the fundamentals. They bribed the band to play “Roll Me Over in the Clover” instead of “The Star-Spangled Banner” during the opening ceremonies, so he didn’t know whether to salute or sing along. When his linemen were bent over in front of him, they tossed him a wet towel.”
“Ah…!” She touches her breast and, sighing, nods.
“They shouted out numbers when plays were being called, and by halftime had hit on ‘29’ to make him go offside. They rushed offside themselves and hit him coming out of huddles just to confuse him. In pileups, they passed him condoms and blew in his ear, and once, when he succeeded in breaking free on a long run, they all stopped and applauded him. He pulled up, smiled, tossed the ball in the air, and jogged off the field toward the sidelines. The Bears recovered the ball that time, but the coach was in a state of absolute panic.”
“What naughty tricks, Meyer!”
“Football’s a rough game, Golda, especially when you’re playing for money.”
“It oughta be socialized…”
“There was worse to come. The Bears’ coach had pulled Gus out of the game in the second quarter, but he couldn’t win without him. So he drilled him intensely during the halftime break, a kind of shorthand run-through of the entire system, and sent him out for the second half, hoping for the best. For a few plays, he was okay. He went offside a couple of times on shouts of ‘29,’ but he scored another touchdown on the old Statue of Liberty play, after making sixty-eight yards on two passes, one of them from behind his back, and a brilliant end run, and the Bears moved out in front by ten points. That was when the Giants played their sneaky ace in the hole. They had got ahold of one of the professionals Gus slept with for his nighttime sex drills and had suited her up. When the Bears got the ball again, the Giants brought her on. The Bear quarterback called a long downfield pass to Gus. Gus broke out of the huddle to see the girl standing behind the Giant line. He walked forward, going offside as the ball was snapped, and the Giants opened up to let him through. He was tilting his head just so — you can imagine…”
“Yes…”
“There was a flag down, but play continued as the Giants rushed the Bear quarterback. In desperation, he flung the ball at Gus’s back: it struck him on the helmet just as he was snuggling in the girl’s shoulderpads and she was unlacing his britches, caromed off into the arms of a waiting Giant, who lugged it all the way on a zigzag time-killing course to the Bears’ seventeen-yard line before being brought down. Back in Giant territory, meanwhile, Gus was giving the packed stadium a show of his own. This was the girl he’d been using to practice the ‘wheelbarrow,’ ‘windmill,’ and ‘buzzsaw’ positions with, so the fans were treated to a lot of strenuous action, especially since they were both still tangled up somewhat in shoulderpads, cleats, and tattered jerseys.”
“I think we done the wheelbarrow…”
“The referee was frantically signaling everything from illegal position and unsportsmanlike conduct to unnecessary roughness and intentional grounding, but Gus, deep into one of his fixed drills, was oblivious to everything but the sequence of procedures, and the girl — well, you know how the girls always got. The other players were too awestruck to interfere; it finally took the cops to break it up. And these guys were so agitated by what they saw — Gus’s orgasm, when he got it off at last, sent the girl skidding on the icy field all the way into the endzone — that they went wild and clubbed the poor guy unmercifully. To make it worse, the band now struck up the National Anthem, and Gus stood up, saluted, and peed all over the cops just as they charged him. It was the worst beating since his father had whipped him with a razor strop for swimming in the railroad ditch in Yorba Linda. It was that and not the girl that broke him. Four years of tireless self-discipline, Golda, had come to this: the worst beating in his life. To a man like Gus, with no past and no future, such a beating is a kind of death: an unbearable, omnipresent moment. The intricate mechanism comes unglued — instead of a machine, all that’s left is a bag of busted-up junk — and like with Humpty-Dumpty, there’s no way to put it back together again.”
“It’s sad, Meyer, his getting the business like that. Maybe that’s what made him do what he did at the steel mill last Sunday. Because of the police, I mean…”
“Maybe. But I don’t think so. He had no coherent memory of it that he could reflect upon, and he never would have understood why everybody was so mad that day, even if you had explained it to him. Nor could he think ahead to some kind of redress. The greatest lover and halfback in recent history — maybe of all time — was suddenly nothing, less than human, a kind of unwired puppet, unable even to recall his toilet training or his native language. The coach had a lot invested in him and tried to get him back on the old schedules, but there was nothing holding them together anymore. Some skills dwindled and disappeared, others became bizarrely exaggerated. He could still throw a football a country mile, but he couldn’t receive, couldn’t even catch a centered ball or take a hand-off. He had an erection night and day, but he couldn’t find the place — any place — to stick it. He could still pinch bottoms on a crowded streetcar or feint through an entire enemy lineup, with or without the ball, but he was as likely to do both at the same time as to do neither. He could no longer tell the difference between a football field, a crowded sidewalk, a bedroom, and a madhouse.
“Which of course was where they finally sent him — to a madhouse, I mean. They tried different ways to rehabilitate him. Psychoanalysis didn’t work at all — it was like he didn’t have any ‘normalcy’ to work back to. They experimented with courses he’d had in college, and he took a passing interest in history and government, but he could no longer get the hang of reading the pages consecutively, so he developed a lot of weird and destabilizing ideas. They read in his file that he’d once played the piano, they tried that. He set about learning pieces one note at a time, but he was much slower now, it took him an entire day to learn a single bar, another day to learn a second, a whole week to put the two together. Still, it was better than nothing, and they kept at it, managing to get him all the way through ‘The Curse of an Aching Heart’ and halfway into ‘Happy Days Are Here Again,’ before he broke down again and started hauling the scores toward some imaginary endzone, trying to hump the grand piano, whispering sweet nothings into its soundbox. His mother, trying to help, reminded them about his old potato-mashing skills, but this got him even more mixed up. After the first night, the janitorial staff of the institution threatened to walk out if they ever had to clean up that kind of a mess again. At last somebody thought to try acting, he’d done a lot of that before, and this turned out to be the answer. Or anyway a kind of answer. They didn’t cure him, but as an actor, his peculiar behavior seemed more acceptable, and some of his old routines could now be relearned as parts in a play. Once he had a repertoire established, they let him go, and not long after that he turned up here, that night you met him.”