I pick up a broken chip of concrete and toss it idly into the river, meaning nothing by it, except maybe as a kind of calendar notation. It occurs to me that Leo would have looked for a boulder, Jesse would have tried to skip the thing, Golda would have loved the chip and grieved when it was gone. Gus? Probably he’d have carried it into the river on an end run. Or delivered Hamlet’s soliloquy to it as to Yorick’s skull. Though on the night we showed his talents off to Leo, I should say, he gave no sign of knowing Hamlet—or even of its existence. By then I knew a lot of the plays he’d been in, and so got him to do Aeneas for us, the prosecuting attorney from The Night of January 16th and the greenhorn playwright from The Dark Tower. Leo was particularly impressed by a bit Gus did from an unknown one-acter called The Price of Coal, and the old innkeeper’s weeping scene from Bird-in-Hand, which, in spite of its feudal sentiments (the thrust of the play is the old man’s opposition to his daughter’s marrying into the upper classes: “And we’ve always known ’oo was ’oo and which ‘at fitted which ’ead…”), was very moving. Tears actually welled up in his eyes and rolled down his cheeks into his black beard when he reached the lines: “H’ I’m sorry about wot h’ I’ve done tonight. H’ I shall be sorry for h’ it till the end of me life. H’ I’ve be’ayved so as h’ I ought to be h’ ashamed, h’ I know. But this business”—sob! — ” ‘as pretty near broke me ‘eart…!”
“Jesus, that’s terrific!” Leo laughed. We got Gus to repeat it a couple of times to show Leo how the tears fell right on cue each time through. “Hey, brother, I could use you down at the steel mill next week!” Leo said, half jokingly, yet clearly considering the possibilities at the same time. When I tried to caution him, he wouldn’t listen, so I shouted out: “29!” Gus jumped to his feet, ducked his head down into his shoulders, and—wham! — piled into my potbellied stove. Luckily, there was no fire in it, or he’d have been badly burnt. As it was, there was a tremendous crash of stovepipe, grates, and dishes, cinders and coaldust flying everywhere, and a big hole in the partition between my room and the studio out front. “Holy shit!” Leo gasped. “This guy’s a fucking tornado!” My intention had been to convince Leo not to take Gus down to the Memorial Day demonstration (“More like the Hindenburg,” I suggested), but I apparently accomplished just the opposite. It hasn’t escaped me that I am, indirectly anyway, responsible for Gus’s death.
Not his real name, of course. He picked it up back in college when he was still playing freshman football — or trying to — for the Whittier Poets. When he joined the Chicago Bears, sportswriters started calling him the Fighting Quaker and, for reasons never quite clear to me (maybe it had something to do with his battering-ram style of running), Iron Butt, but Gloomy Gus was the name that stuck to him. Not because he was actually a gloomy sort of character — I doubt he had any feelings at all, as we know them anyway, he wasn’t put together that way — but because it was a clown’s name, and a clown was what Gus was, even when he was a National Hero. He was the most famous guy I ever knew — a college All-American and an all-star football pro — and, as such, a kind of walking cautionary tale on the subject of fame and ambition.
He first turned up at a party we threw in my studio one Friday toward the end of March, and he came back every Friday night after. “A f’kucken schnorrer,” Harry called him, “f’kucken” being his own Yiddish-American neologism, made of kucken, fucking, and fehkuckteh, but Gus wasn’t there to sponge exactly. It was just his style: everything by the numbers, one to ten and start again. In fact, he was one of the hardest workers I ever knew. Maybe that was why they called him Iron Butt, I don’t know. Jesse speculated it had to do with his Bear teammates’ inability to crack his virginity in the lockerrooms; he made up a funny song about it, a parody of “John Henry” in which the steel-drivin’ man meets his match at last. Gus was a strange guest, my principal distraction through the hands-down melancholy of this past month, but maybe he contributed to it, too. He ate my food, drank the Baron’s milk, crapped in my toilet, washed in my basin, even used my bed, but never a word of thanks, not even the least sign that he understood these things were mine and not his. Simon joked he was just being a good comrade, true to the canons, but then Gus wasn’t mooching off Simon. In place of thanks, we got performances. Sometimes by request, sometimes spontaneous, but never entirely predictable. He’d laid on several skills in his lifetime, and he didn’t always come up with the right ones in the right order.
I hadn’t recognized him at first, which is not surprising, since not only had he been wearing a bushy black beard and been introduced as an actor living off the WPA like the rest of us, but I wouldn’t ordinarily recognize any professional football player, by face or name, nor would any of my friends. Of course I like the game — I like all games — but I don’t keep up with the overblown seasonal histories. Nevertheless, it happens that I did know who Gloomy Gus was, had even for a few weeks a couple of years back followed his then-fabulous career, and I eventually put two and two together (the answer in Gus’s case was not four, not even close), though I admit I got some help from visitors who came through asking about him.
That time when I was reading about him was the autumn of 1934. I’d come back to Chicago after a couple of years bumming around, following the harvests and the unionizing. I was tired of that life and wanted to get back to sculpting again. I’d learned a new skill on the road, welding, and I knew at last where I was going, if I could ever get the money together for a studio and equipment. I was staying at that time down on Kedzie with my aunt. I had no place to begin work, so I took a refresher course in plumbing and metalworking at the Jewish Training School and spent the rest of my time reading. Anything at hand, which at my aunt’s house was mostly mystical tracts and newspapers. And the papers that fall were full of the incredible exploits of Gloomy Gus of the Chicago Bears. It was his rookie season in the bigtime and he was breaking every record in the books, just as he had done in college ball. The reporters were so excited it was sometimes hard to tell the newspapers from the mystical tracts. I read that he’d played for a little Quaker school out in California, and had set phenomenal rushing, passing, pass-receiving, and scoring records — including seven touchdowns, almost single-handed (he was always a loner, and besides, nobody else was really good enough to keep up with him) against Pittsburgh in the Rose Bowl. There was even a popular song about him, “You Gotta Be a Football Hero.” He was everybody’s All-American, and all the big professional teams were after him. He wasn’t interested in the negotiations apparently, and would have played for nothing (though this may have been some publicity tararam handed out by the Bears’ front office), but he was very loyal to all his friends and relatives, his old coach, former teammates and girlfriends, and so the price was finally pretty high, especially considering the hard times. Since the Bears were the reigning league champions and had all the money, they were the ones who got him. And it was worth it, or so it seemed that falclass="underline" he led the Bears to a perfect season in the conference — thirteen wins, no ties, no losses — and again completely rewrote the record books. Only in the last game or two did the cracks begin to show, but before the playoff for the championship with the New York Giants had ended, his legendary career was over. Until then, he’d been living the dream of every little school kid in America: the quiet scholarly little boy, left out of all the neighborhood games and laughed at by all the girls, who suddenly finds the magic formula and becomes the most famous athlete and greatest lover in the world. “I believe in the American dream,” he once said, “because I have seen it come true in my own life.”