Whatever Happened to Gloomy Gus of the Chicago Bears? (7 page)

Toward sundown, the sky behind the plant reddening like a taunt, Leo got a report from a guy named Bill, who'd also been helping him (“He's okay, he's got good calluses,” Leo explained), that there was a group planning to march on the plant as soon as it got dark. Bill estimated there were about a hundred of them, but that they'd take others with them. He said he'd tried to talk them out of it, as Leo had asked, but they'd got pretty hostile toward him, accusing him of being a lackey and a company fink. A lot of the local workers had drifted away around suppertime, the women and children as well, the crowd was becoming increasingly hard-core, many of them from out of town, and, as Bill pointed out, there was now a lot more drinking going on. This was true, I'd noticed it myself. Several members of the organizing committee had left by now as well, and I could see that Leo was seriously considering joining the exodus. He argued with individuals that a march on the plant now would serve no purpose at all, that it would only give the police an opportunity to beat up and arrest a lot of men we would need on Sunday, and that it might even give the authorities an excuse to bring in enough force to make the Memorial Day demonstration impossible. As individuals, they all tended to agree with him, but as a group they still seemed determined to march. They wanted something to happen, they didn't care what. “Ah well, it'll give us something to talk about on Sunday, I guess,” he said finally, turning to a guy with a bottle. “Lemme have a swig of the people's cornjuice, Smitty.” He took a deep suck on the bottle, handed it to me with an airy wheeze. “Have a bracer, Meyer,” he said with a crooked smile, barely visible now in the deepening dusk, “and get ready for history.”

By the time we'd formed up outside Sam's Place, there were nearly a thousand of us, and Leo, ever the pragmatist, had not only by now accepted the inevitable, he was even helping to organize it. Instead of marching straight across the rough field where we might stumble and fall in the dark, we headed south down Green Bay Avenue, keeping the field on our right. There was still a faint glow on it, as if the bright day had left a residue, as in phosphorescent rock. It looked mysterious, almost otherworldly. Leo had put me on the right flank, near the guy named Smitty, whom we'd both come to suspect of being a police plant and agitator (maybe it was the lethal quality of his booze that had given him away), and told me to keep an eye on him while he took the other flank. At 117th Street, we turned west toward the main gate, but we didn't get far: the police were waiting for us there. It was as though they'd known all along we were coming. Of course we'd been shouting a lot in the dark echoey night, and a couple of cops had got pushed aside further up the street, it was hardly a secret. But even before we'd reached them, they seemed to be in our midst. That was when I got my black eye, and a bruise or two elsewhere besides. It was pitch-dark and there was a lot of confusion, fists and clubs flying, bricks as well, but I had no doubt who it was who hit me. I'm used to looking at the world through dark goggles, after all, and seeing more than most. I'd been knocked to the ground and was having a hard time getting up. I heard shots being fired, people screaming. It was Bill and Smitty who rescued me, dragging me away from the melee, upfield toward Sam's Place. The strikers were quickly routed by their own confusion, but a lot of heads got broken first. Some would need a hospital. The vanguard especially took a beating, but Leo, as I knew he'd be, was all right. “Sorry, Meyer,” he said when he saw me, and as far as I could tell, he truly was.

“Bill,” I said.

“That sonuvabitch…”

“Bill and Smitty.” They'd disappeared, of course, ostensibly to hurl themselves back into the fight, but it was clear they'd used me as the means to their own withdrawal. I'd seen them push the men in front off balance and into the police, then, yelling curses all the while at the cops (these were ritual phrases, repeated woodenly like recognition signals), start laying about wildly, as though fighting off unseen monsters. And it was Bill who, glancing over his shoulder to take aim, had laid me out with his elbow. If it was his elbow. Felt harder than one. It might have been about then, sprawling in the dirt and getting kicked and stepped upon in the night-dark turmoil, that I began to feel I might be able to live with myself if I didn't after all make it to Spain. Amazingly, some of these guys do this sort of thing every Saturday night just for fun; I prefer a little music on the radio and a handful of soft clay.

The next day Leo let a rumor start circulating that the committee had identified at least five company spies in their midst, and that they would be “dealt with” by all the comrades after sundown. “Bill” and “Smitty” (we no longer supposed those were their real names) were occasionally mentioned. They kept up a good front through the afternoon, but by sundown they had cleared out. Along with seventeen others. “Thanks, Meyer,” Leo said, and sent me home.

It's still chilly and overcast, but the rain's stopped by the time I reach my street in Old Town. In the school playground a block or so before my studio, boys are playing a ballgame. Other times of the year, it would be football or basketball, today it's baseball: the Cubs versus the White Sox, about five to a side, they're taking names like Billy Herman and Luke Appling, Dixie Walker, Jimmy Collins. Both teams—the real ones—are having good seasons, fighting right now for second place in their respective leagues, so the boys have a lot of pride in being who they are. The kid pitching for the White Sox five is, not surprisingly, calling himself Bill Dietrich, that down-and-outer the Sox picked up earlier this year on waivers who astonished everyone this week with his unlikely no-hitter. The kid even wears glasses like Dietrich, maybe that's why they've let him pitch.

I remember those games. I was never good enough to be Cobb or Wagner, I was always content to be somebody like Frank Schulte or Three-Finger Brown. For me, it wasn't whether you won or lost, but it wasn't exactly how you played the game either. The other boys used to complain I wasn't trying my best—I was, but what was best for me wasn't the same thing as it was for them. Participation was what I loved about ballgames, still do. Participation in the movement. It's what I love about socialism, theater, life itself. Even sculpture in a slightly different way: all the movement then is between me and my figures, but it's a real involvement just the same, a real dialectic. Probably I have Levite blood in me from somewhere, more in love with the choreography of gesture than with its aims. Sometimes this was useful in a ballgame, often it was not. As in life. Gliding toward a fly-ball, I often arrived too late for the catch; swinging easily around the bases, I'd run into easy putouts. This didn't bother me, but it bothered the others. They said I didn't have enough “hustle.”

Just the opposite from Gloomy Gus. Winning was everything for him. Or at least scoring. In a magazine interview, he once said: “I have never had much sympathy for the point of view ‘It isn't whether you win or lose, but how you play the game.' One must put top consideration on the will, the desire, and the determination to win!” Ghostwriters maybe, but the sentiment—or something very close to it—was his: “I never in my life wanted to be left behind.” He once had a football coach back at Whittier College, a fierce half-breed Indian ironically confined to a Quaker college and a team called the Poets, who drilled it into him every day: “You must never be satisfied with losing. You must get angry, terribly angry, about losing.” Such maxims either blew right by him or else they shot straight to his center, riveting in, becoming part of the very nuts and bolts of his oddly indurate and at the same time transparent mechanism. He was a walking parody of Marx's definition of consciousness, a cartoon image of the Social Product, probably the only man in recent history with what could be called a naked superego.

“If he's a bit demented,” Simon liked to say in his uninspired way, “well, he's only a mirror image of the insane nation that created him,” but though there was a germ of truth in that, it was a simpleminded truth. Just like Marx's famous dictum: an overstatement in the heat of historical debate against ossified orthodoxies. Sure, we're all crazy, and society often as not—as the lowest common denominator of our collective craziness—reinforces our silliest quirks, but between our cells and the informing universe (the dimensions are awesome, and not only in space) there's a lot of action. Words, like pebbles in a brook, create eddies and murmurings, but they're not the stream itself. Dogmatic epigrams like Simon's just dam up the brook and send it flowing elsewhere.

He came up with a much more interesting remark, quite spontaneously, that night Gus tackled my stove. While cleaning up the debris and putting the stove back together again (we'd got Gus back to playacting again, easing him gradually away from the heat and excitement of football by having him perform from a play he'd apparently written himself called
The Little Accident
, in which he'd played the part of a football player at Whittier College), I related what I knew by then about his past, the football, the girls, his timetables, the early decisions, and I tossed out a thought that had come to me earlier: “What if that's what we mean by ‘growing up'? I mean, coming to a decision, suddenly or slowly, consciously or unconsciously, to step out of the explosion at large and accept some kind of structure you can work in, some arbitrary configuration—your own invention or borrowed from others—that allows you to reduce time to something merely functional: a material you can cut up and construct memories with…”

“You mean, what if ‘growing up' and ‘going nuts' are the same thing?” Leo asked.

“Well, if they are,” Simon said, “then—as of right now—they aren't anymore.”

This, coming from Simon, so surprised us that we all applauded. Gus assumed, of course, that we were clapping for him—didn't all the world?—and he lifted both fists above his head and flashed a frozen smile. We got into a heated argument after that about Leo's desire to use Gus in the coming confrontation in South Chicago, Jesse and I arguing against the cynical manipulation of idiots as a form of exploitation and ultimately dangerous to the cause (what if one of them took over?), Leo, O.B., and Simon arguing variously for the impossibility of any action without “manipulation,” the sheer entertainment value of the thing (this was O.B., who has walked so long at the edge of some brink or other that he's forgotten to care anymore whether he drops off or not—though reviewed as “cries of protest,” his novels are really about suicide and how to enjoy it), and the paradox that in any revolution those rebelling against the society have been warped by it.

“And anyway,” Leo said, “I don't think anybody's going to get hurt. Now that U.S. Steel has seen the light, these little assholes like Girdler will have to cave in, too. But we've got to stand firm, and we can use Gus here as a kind of symbol. You know, HOLD THAT LINE!”

Gus, startled, leaped to his feet, dropped into a crouch, commenced to growl. “Whoa, boy!” Jesse cried.
“Time out!”

“Man, I'm all for you takin' this geek down there with you,” O.B. laughed, “but if you do, I'm gonna come and holler ‘29!'”

“Hey, Meyer!” It's one of the boys. “I was safe, wasn't I?”

I
‘
ve been watching their game in the schoolyard without thinking about it. Now I let what I've just seen pass again in slow motion before my inner eye (the one I do all my sculpting with—everything goes in there, but not everything stays, and reason has nothing to do with it; it's a lot like Gus's gearbox, now that I think about it): Bernie, the boy who asked me the question, has tried to stretch a single to a double. The kid on second was thrown the ball in plenty of time and was standing well in front of the detached chunk of sidewalk they're using for the base, but he was scared and had his eyes shut. Bernie, eyes all lit up with the joy of it (memory is the greatest illusionist of them all, I think, giving us time with one hand and taking it away with the other), bashed into him, sending the kid sprawling. Right now, he's trying very hard not to cry. “You were out, Bernie.”

“See? See?” cries the other kid loudly, too loudly, the tears springing to the corners of his eyes, reinforcing his indignation and self-righteousness. “You're out, I told ya!”

“Aw, Meyer, you're blind! He wasn't even looking what he was doing!”

“I know. He didn't tag you, you tagged the ball. If you'd been smart, instead of trying to knock him down like that, you would've just tiptoed around behind him.”

Everybody laughs at that, even the kid who's been hit. “Hey, Meyer,” says another, the fat boy who's playing Big Zeke Bonura over on first, “come and umpire, will ya?”

“Yeah, Meyer!”

“Can't, fellas. I've got to get on home, get some work done. Besides, I'm soaking wet, and I've got some raw fish here I have to put in the icebox.”

“Aw, Meyer, just half a hour!” pleads the bespectacled White Sox pitcher.

“No, you see, a friend of mine died today, I couldn't really keep my mind on the ballgame. But, hey, that was some game you pitched Monday! You made the Hall of Fame!” The boys laugh at that, a little self-consciously maybe, but they know I'm good at pretending with them. I see Old Man Donaldson coming around the corner with his fruit cart. “I tell you what I will do, though—I'll buy you all an apple!”

They cheer at that and swarm around Donald-son's wagon to pick out the ones with the least bruises. Bernie, to get even, takes a banana, which is expensive. Donaldson is a surly old wretch and might have taken a cut at them with his horsewhip, but just then his old nag drops a load of manure, and he gets distracted picking it up, shoveling it into a bucket he keeps hanging from the side of the cart for the purpose. “Never throw nothin' away,” he always says, and does so now. Bernie's slide into second base with all its inner contradictions is still playing before my inner eye, and an idea comes to me suddenly for a little football piece, something to mark Gus's performance down at Republic Steel. Not exactly what Leo had in mind maybe (I'm thinking of the lurch into freedom through all those grabbing and flailing restraints of the line, form emerging from chaotic matter), but it's the first idea of any kind I've had in a month, I have to get home and sketch it out. I pay for the apples and the banana and buy myself a box of strawberries, thinking: I'm a rich man, I can eat like the Duke of Windsor and spend all my days modeling little football and baseball players out of mud and nails—and if Leo and the others cannot see what I'm doing, then that just shows that, as with Gloomy Gus, their lives are too narrow and segmented.