I’m just crossing Division Street when I run into my friend Jesse, coming out of a bar with Harry and Ilya. Ilya I haven’t seen in weeks. He’s very drunk and sullen — a pale wispy boy who never looks quite strong enough to stand, even when he’s sober. His brother Dave, we learned a couple of weeks ago, lost an arm and part of a leg at Ja-rama — like Ilya, he’s a musician: a violinist, was — and since then Ilya’s become secretive and ill-tempered, almost as though he somehow blamed the rest of us for what happened to his brother. He still looks that way, though that he’s out drinking with Jesse and Harry is a good sign. Leo had once, soberly, more or less soberly, lectured me on alcohol and revolution, the link being the romantic illusion. “And why not?” he’d grinned wearily (we were watching drunken Father Clanahan tip over, as I recall). “Reality’s such shit. You have to reinvent it just to live in it.” “Hey, Meyer!” Jesse calls now, flashing his lean, gap-toothed smile from under his rumpled cloth cap. “How’s ole Gus?”
“He died.”
Jesse and Harry somehow look downcast and amused at the same time. The momentary fade Jesse passes into suggests he’s already conjuring up a new song. Come all you good workers, a story I will tell, about a football hero who for our Union fell. Ilya, who introduced Gus to us in the first place, only grimaces irritably and looks down at his feet. “The silly potz,” Harry sighs, shaking his little round head. Harry was always baffled by Gus, and has never got over his rage at what Gus did to his sister. “Was he still taking curtain calls at the end?”
“No,” I say, “though he had an audience — the place was filled with celebrities and reporters. But he didn’t seem to recognize them. He just lay there, like he didn’t know what was happening. They’d shaved his beard off, and it made him look puffy and gray and vulnerable.”
“This is the city of the gray faces,” says Harry cryptically, squinting up at us through the rain streaking his thick smudged lenses. Harry is a poet and a Trotskyite, and he loves enigma.
Jesse glances at Ilya, then explains: “Harry ’n me been down to the Eagles on Houston where they got those fellas laid out. Huge crowds down there, Meyer, like you never seen, folks payin’ their respecks from all over the country.” He shakes his head, a flash of bitterness sobering the genial creases of his face. “At least seven a them boys, you know, got it in the back.”
“So I heard. Our brave boys in blue.”
“It was sad to see, Meyer. Them fellas is completely dead. And a lotta others are hurtin’, too. The hall down there had the ass-pick of a first-aid shelter in a fuckin’ war zone.” Jesse cups his big hands against the rain and lights a cigarette, watching Ilya, a sincere worry on his face. “Crushed skulls, broke ribs, ’n suchlike,” he says around the smoke. “Seen a pore woman who’s gone stone blind, her head fulla stitches like the goddamn Bride a Frankenstein. An’ a guy with a bullet hole clean through his left flapper, talkin’ about how lucky he was.”
Ilya snorts, staring at the traffic in the street behind me. “Lucky!”
“They even wounded a little kid,” says Harry, his gray jowls puffy with indignation. “A little petseleh not more than nine, they were shooting at everybody. And an expectant mother. Just missed killing the bloody foetus — and they won’t even let her out of jail!”
“It’s true,” Jesse says. “A dude was locked up with me all night who’d been shot in the leg. His wounds was festerin’ up ’n he was gittin’ feverish, but they wouldn’t let him go. Hell, no. Far as I know, the pore sonuvabitch is dead by now. An’ the damn cops is talkin’ like they cain’t wait to shoot some more. But nobody’s scared, that’s the main thing you notice down there, they’re jist mad.” Jesse’s theme song: the universal war. Which side are you on. Injustice is as plain as the nose on your face, you can’t pretend you don’t see it. Jesse’s an old Wob, one of the few to stay with the union movement after the Wobblies fell apart, sweet but intransigent. He takes a deep drag on the cigarette, then hands it to Ilya. “Funny how the world works, you know. Seems like you always gotta go through flesh to git to the other side.”
“You…!” growls Ilya, looking away but taking the smoke. Cars pass us in the street, a wet hum and throb.
Where Ilya reacted against the privileged survivors, hurting Jesse just a bit, I might have snorted at “the other side.” Instead, I say: “Flesh isn’t just a passive medium, you know. It talks back. Only sometimes in the excitement we forget to listen.”
“Yeah, speakin’ a that, ole son, howza mouse?” Jesse grins, peering closer.
“It’s okay.” I should be grateful for it, it may have saved my life. Because of it, Leo told me to stay home Sunday: they expected action, and the black eye would be too tempting a target. Badge of a troublemaker. Jesse missed the Memorial Day confrontation, too, having been arrested in a sound-truck on Wednesday as the men were first downing tools and coming out, released only yesterday.
“Seen Leo?” he asks now.
“He’s left town.”
“That figures,” grumps Harry, who never went down to the strike at all. “He’s a mamzer, a shvitser, you can’t trust him.”
“He’s needed in Ohio,” I say, defending my friend. “There’s some kind of air war going on over there. Besides, he’s a good organizer—”
“That patscher? He couldn’t organize his rectum! He’s a joyboy, Meyer, he’s got no vision, no ideology, it’s just a big circus to him. Look at him taking that dumb klutz down there Sunday! He knew f’kucken Karl Marx couldn’t keep his signals straight, he knew what had to happen!”
“Turds like him are gonna get us all killed,” grumbles Ilya, passing the cigarette back to Jesse. A bit unfair maybe, but at least it’s a sign of health that he’s said “us” again. Jesse winks soberly at me over the dangling butt.
“Maybe that wasn’t a great idea,” I admit. “But a lot of steelworkers are football fans. Leo thought that an expression of solidarity from a famous star like Gus could make a strong impression on them—”
“Well, it sure did that,” agrees Harry. “It got ten of the poor shlimazels killed! It was that crazy charge on the police that set the whole meshugass off, I read it in the papers!”
“What paper wuzzat, comrade?” asks Jesse with a wry one-sided grin, and Harry grunts ambiguously.
“Leo told me Gus had nothing to do with it,” I say. “He said it all started when some cop got nervous and shot into the crowd of workers crossing the field — then everybody just started running. Which is why so many of them got it in the back.”
“If it was a cop,” Jesse puts in. “Mighta been one of Girdler’s comp’ny goons, tryin’ to whup up a little action — we heard somethin’ about that today down to the fun’ral.”
“Maybe,” I allow. “Wouldn’t be the first time.” Jesse nods. We’re remembering Kansas, Pennsylvania, Kentucky. Bloody Thursday in San Francisco, where years ago we met. The cynical perverting of men’s honest passions. “Anyway, Leo claims he tried to drag Gus away when the shooting broke out, but Gus seemed mesmerized by all the fireworks. You know what big crowds always did to him. Then some cop lobbed a gas grenade, Gus grabbed it in midair, and he was off and running. Jesse Owens couldn’t catch him, Leo said. War Admiral couldn’t. He said Gus sprinted the whole battle line between cops and workers, dodging clubs and stones and even bullets. A cop would be bashing a striker with a billy and Gus would time his run so as to go flashing between them on the backswing, without even seeming to change his pace. That’s real prairie out there, maybe the first time in years Gus had seen an open field, he was really moving.” (On the phone, Leo had said: “For the first time I have to appreciate those welded bozos of yours, Meyer — do me one of that batbrain hauling his ashes through all that rowdydowdy, and you got yourself a patron! Ha ha! Even if I have to hock old Mother Blooey!” Meaning his car — named after the Grande Dame of the Party — his one possession.) “You’re right about Leo never staying around when there’s shooting going on, Harry,” I add, “especially when it’s all coming from one side, he wouldn’t even argue with you about that, but he said he couldn’t resist watching old Gloomy Gus make his fabulous run, even if it did mean he nearly got caught standing there. And the amazing thing was, Gus made it, juggling that smoking gas grenade, all the way from one end to the other!”