Though the Chicago weather was typically bitter, the studio was warm with the close press of friends, hot food and drink, music, good feelings. People wore ribbons and badges or pieces of clothing they associated with their Spanish brothers and sisters, and one of the women brought a big cake decorated with La Pasionaria’s NO PASARÁN! The best was Thérèse, a wet nurse who’d helped lead a sit-down strike down at the Board of Health to get the price of her milk raised (they’d tried for ten cents an ounce, got four), who came dressed in a Flamenco dancer’s costume fashioned entirely out of tissue paper, ribbons, and shredded Sears, Roebuck catalogues. “Whoo, it’s really blowin’ out there, honey!” she exclaimed breathlessly, fluttering in through the front door like a huge ruffled bird, snow capping her black brows, “I was dam’ near gone with the wind!” I’d found a picture of Abraham Lincoln and had pasted up a large poster with a balloon coming out of Abe’s mouth that read: VIVA LA QUINCE BRIGADA! Later, Leo laughed and called it jingoism, but we all laughed with him. The party was also for him and Jesse, as it turned out, and for the union victories in Michigan, a surprise homecoming — the sit-down strikes had done it. After a million dollars in private detectives and that much again in armaments, thugs, and counterpropaganda, General Motors and Chrysler had finally caved in and recognized the United Auto Workers. Leo and Jesse had come dashing straight back to the party from the mass rally in Detroit’s Cadillac Square, skidding up to the curb outside in Mother Blooey, Leo’s old beat-up Terra-plane, and had rushed in to a burst of applause with three bottles of Old Quaker whiskey, a bucket of beans, and big placards that read SPIRIT OF 1937 and FORD TOMORROW!
It was Ilya who brought Gus along, introducing him as an actor in a WPA project that Ilya was composing a score for. It was a couple of weeks before we found out who he really was, and then thanks mainly to a reporter for the Hearst chain assigned to do a “Whatever Happened to—?” story on him. I know people in the Theater Project — before I got reclassified as a sculptor last fall, I did set designs for the FTP — but when I asked Gus if he knew them, he only stared at me blankly. Well, it was a stupid question, one of those clinging rituals. I regretted it as soon as I’d asked it, and, smiling apologetically, led Gus over to the trestle table of food and drinks.
He was a bulky man — too bulky for an actor, I thought then, but later: rather small for a pro halfback — with a wide sloping nose, an intense but unfocused gaze, and a bushy black beard. “Hey, comrades! It’s f’kucken Karl Marx!” Harry hollered drunkenly. Everybody laughed, but Harry couldn’t have been further off the mark: Gus not only lacked political awareness, he lacked awareness of any kind. He had no core at all. Unless pure willpower has some kind of substance, amounts to some kind of character. We didn’t discover this that night, of course, it took us awhile to catch on to Gloomy Gus. But as we got to know him and something about his past — which was pretty remarkable in its way — it was this nothingness at the center that we all settled on as the essential Gloomy Gus. Ilya argued that it made him a good actor: the empty vessel. I disagreed. I don’t believe in philosopher-actors any more than Ilya does, but skills alone aren’t enough: good actors cannot merely be empty, they have to know how to empty themselves.
He was badly coordinated, too. The first two drinks we gave him slipped right through his hand and smashed on the floor. He didn’t apologize, didn’t pick up the broken glass, he just smiled vacantly at us, waiting for another drink to be lodged in his still-cupped and outstretched hand. The third time, I propped an empty glass in his hands and made sure he had a grip on it before pouring — we’d had to scrape to get together what food and drink we had, and it hurt to waste any of it. “Tell me when,” I said.
He stared at me searchingly, and after a moment replied with boyish earnestness: “Honey, don’t be impatient. The delay’s been useful, hasn’t it?”
“What—?!” I cried.
He became very jittery then, his eyes flicking from side to side as though deeply perplexed, hunting for something — then suddenly he seemed to find it (I could almost hear the whirr-click!): he smiled benignly, lovingly, and said in a deep resonant voice: “Fannie, I ask you to marry me.”
At first I though Ilya had put him up to it. But I saw that Ilya was as amazed as I was. This guy must be stewed, I thought. Or more likely: on some kind of drugs. As it turned out, however, these had been lines from two plays he’d been in—The Dark Tower and The Trysting Place (I was to get to know these plays all too well in the weeks to follow) — and unwittingly I’d been throwing him cues. He wasn’t always like that, I should say. Sometimes he was worse.
Sixty or seventy people turned up finally, filling the place up. I was kept busy as the de facto host and — purposely maybe (I was convinced by now it was all a put-on, and felt I’d had my turn at being the butt) — took little further notice of this oddball actor, except to join him in the laughter as he attempted clumsily, laboriously, mechanically, but with farcical vehemence, to learn the words to “The Internationale.” It had started as a mild taunt—“What kinda comrade actor are you, Karl Marx,” Harry had shouted good-naturedly, “if you don’t know ‘The f’kucken Internationale’?”—but it was like Harry had flicked a switch: Gus looked up in alarm, blinked (we all laughed: he was good at this, we felt), and commenced to struggle fiercely with the words of the song: “Arise ye, uh, prisoners of starvation…” He became obsessed by it, in fact — I caught glimpses of him from time to time the rest of the night, off in some corner of the studio, huddled among half-finished creatures of mine (a lonely man at heart, I thought), going over and over the lines: “Tis the final, uh, conflict, Let each rise — no, stand…”