The Chief was not an ungenerous man; he might have let Gus play from time to time just to be fair about it. Shut him up maybe. Besides, the Whittier Poets were terrible teams, freshmen and varsity both, they were sure to lose, no matter who played. But Gus suffered from something worse than just the two left feet: uncontrollable overeagerness. Every time he went into the game, he immediately went offside. As he bounded forward, his team marched backward, five penalty yards per play. Even if he was centering the ball himself (the Chief was resourceful, he tried that one too). He just couldn’t hold himself back. Girls, too, who might have surrendered to him in a moment of whimsical magnanimity, were put off by the way he lurched out of control before the foreplay had even begun.
There seemed to be no motive behind this over-eagerness. It was just a part of him, like the two left feet—it was difficult, in fact, for him to recognize that the fault might be his: he thought the rest of the world had two right feet and tended to collapse into slow-motion sequences. This characteristic, which was less than zeal but more than a conditioned reflex, may have got a certain amount of encouragement in his early life, since in other activities less formal than football and courtship it had served him well—he was like a jack-in-the-box in classrooms and student assemblies, debates, and fraternity meetings, and he won everything simply by astonishing everybody else into silence—but it was not basically something learned. I don’t know much about his birth (except that the sportswriters always liked to claim there was an eclipse of the sun that day), but I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that he came tearing out of his mother’s womb well before she was ready. He had what I can only describe as a short-circuited stimulus–response system in which everything operated on the knee-jerk principle. He spent most of the last six or seven years of his life struggling against this flaw, but as with any fundamental characteristic, the more he fought it, the more it dominated his life. With me it’s passivity, the open door; with Gloomy Gus, it was the plunge offside.
What had always worked best for him in his other activities was his discipline (also innate maybe, a kind of corollary of the overeagerness, but probably not; maybe his mother stuffed it into him with her Bible readings)—his careful preparations, self-control, dogged practice—so that’s what he turned to now in the fall of 1930 in his effort to overcome his failure on the football field and in the back seats of cars. I say “turned to,” “effort to overcome,” but I don’t mean to suggest there was anything overtly conscious about it. I’ve tried to imagine what bent him that fall and started him down the path to the Memorial Day massacre at the Republic Steel plant. He seemed uninterested in rewards, popularity, even love or happiness, and he was impervious to ridicule or criticism. Yet, at the same time, he lived in almost freakish immediacy to the world around him, a helpless puppet on a string, elbows akimbo and left feet twitching at every social whim. I don’t think he even “wanted” to play football or have sex—it was the world that told him he wanted these things, just as it might have told him instead to work for the New Deal, market frozen orange juice, get rich in Cuba, or run for Congress. He was nothing but Self, yet so invaded, more selfless than any of us in a way; without the sense of Audience, he would have been a lifeless pile of sticks and rags. Such a system may be reinforced by rewards and applause, but by small increments only. Only one thing will turn it around: violent disapproval. Fury. Rage. A beating, even. Who tore into him finally? Was it the coach? His heavy-handed father? His girlfriend?
Whoever it was put the fatal twist in his mechanism, that autumn Gloomy Gus made one simple alteration in his daily pattern, and so commenced to reshape his destiny: he set aside thirty minutes every day to practice not going offside. This habit of scheduling his time was one he’d picked up early, a consequence of his music lessons maybe. I’ve tried it myself from time to time, but I always misplace the schedules. Besides, somebody can always come through the door and spoil it for me. Mainly I do it because I enjoy writing out the schedules, it’s a kind of daydreaming. Gus was more serious about it. At first it had merely been the way to make full (and as his Quaker grandmother would say, “proper”) use of his free time after school and on weekends, but by the time he was thirteen the idea of “free time” had faded from his memory and all twenty-four hours, seven days a week, were locked up in his timetable. This meant that when something new was phased in—the thirty minutes spent learning not to go offside, for example—something else had to get squeezed or cut altogether. It was at this time that he gave up writing songs for his fraternity (“All hail the mighty boar, / Our patron beast is he…,” this was one of his famous ones) and mashing potatoes for his mother. This potato-mashing, incidentally, was not as irrelevant as it might seem. His mother once said of his skills (this made all the newspapers): “He never left any lumps. He used the whipping motion to make them smooth instead of going up and down the way the other boys did.” But since nothing ever came naturally to him, it’s obvious he’d had to devote a good part of his childhood working up this talent, one of his first to be noticed. Again inspired by a burst of anger, no doubt—his father is a moody, hot-blooded Black Irishman, handy with the razor strop, and he’s never liked lumpy mashed potatoes. Thus, an early establishment of the pattern, and Gus had evidently clung to this potato-mashing exercise like a security blanket up to that autumn of his freshman year in college.
His brother described Gus’s freshman year as one of the worst of his—the brother’s—life. Gus’s other pursuits had been essentially private ones, but now with this offside problem he needed others to help, and his younger brother got the brunt of it. At first Gus did try to go it alone, using an alarm clock, but the ring was too much like the school bell, and it made him very jumpy in classrooms: he sometimes found himself out of his seat five minutes before the bell and down in a crouch in the front of the room, tense with expectation. So he got his brother to call numbers. Arbitrarily, they chose “29” as the signal to go. I asked the brother why and he said: “I don’t know. The year maybe.”
“You mean, because of the crash?”
“No, it was 1930, remember, and I think we thought that ‘29’ would cause just that split second of delay that Dick needed. It was a mistake, though.”
“A mistake?”
“Using just one number like that. We realized too late we should have mixed them up. He never quite got over it. You know what they say, the things you learn first stick with you the longest. Every time somebody shouted ‘29’ after that, he was off and running. Had to leave it out of the signals, and even the Bears, you know, had to be sure not to call an accidental ‘29.’ It was supposed to be kept secret, but somehow it leaked out, and that leak was part of what got him in trouble finally.”
The half-hour-a-day practice paid off. A couple of weeks after he’d begun the exercise, the Chief gave him another chance. It was late in the game and the freshman Poets were trailing by five touchdowns. The Poets’ left tackle got hit hard and the Chief sent Gus in for one play, sacrificing the expected five-yard offside penalty loss, while the other guy got his wind back. The play was called and for the first time in his football career Gus managed to stay down until the ball was snapped. But he got smeared. They had to carry him off the field on a stretcher. As they passed the Chief with him, he looked up with a hopeful smile and asked: “How’d I do, Coach?”
The Chief looked down at this eager, curlyheaded kid, whose face was presently all chopped up with cleat marks, and said grimly: “Well, at least you didn’t go offside.”
“Gosh… thanks, Chief!”
“Thanks—! Thanks for what? You were terrible! You let that worthless sonofabitch walk right over you! Instead of five yards, we lost fifteen!”
Gus looked rattled. “But… what… what did I do wrong?”
The coach stared down at him in disbelief, shook his head. “Well, for one thing, son,” he sighed (on the field a pass had been intercepted, the Poets were now six touchdowns behind), “keep your butt down. You’re
not up there to blow farts, you’re part of a wall and your ass is the weight that’s holding it up. And when I say you gotta be on your toes, I don’t mean like a goddamn ballet dancer—dig in! Become part of that turf you’re holding! And your fingers—look at ’em! They’re all bloodied up! Three of ’em look broken! Don’t spread ’em out like that! Knuckle under, make ’em into fists, flexible but hard! And keep your goddamn stupid head down, for Chrissake! It don’t matter to you what’s behind the guy in front of you, you just hunch your shoulders down and keep an eye on him! Watch all of him, but don’t let his face take your mind off the important parts: his hands and his knees. That first guy who hit you came in awful high, right at the belly, a very bad habit—lift your knees up when he does that and cure him of it! Now, didja ever think what a shoulder was for? When you—My God, now what’s the matter? What’re you makin’ all them damn twitches for?”
“That’s… that’s a lot to remember, Chief…”
But Gloomy Gus was nothing if not thorough. He added an hour and forty minutes to his daily schedule, giving up the playwriting, glee club, the violin, and pumping gas at his dad’s filling station, and set about learning all the things the Chief had told him. Now he needed an opponent as well as someone to call the signals. His brother balked, but got dragged into it just the same. So did his fraternity brothers, neighbors, teammates, even his mother and his girlfriend. His mother showed that Quaker forbearance she was famous for, even when flat out on the field and run over, but his girlfriend quit him, bawling all the way home that she was afraid she was never going to have a baby all her life. His father loved physical contact, but not when it was two-sided, so he steered clear. When Gus couldn’t find willing opponents, he used the school tackling dummies, but it was hard to watch the hands and knees. Everything went well enough and he even got into another game before his freshman season ended, performing well on the line. But the coach made the mistake of using him at fullback for one play, and when the quarterback turned around to hand off the ball, Gus creamed him. His own quarterback. “He came in high, Chief—and like you said…” The coach hoped the silly bastard would flunk out or get pregnant or something before the next season rolled around.
Speaking of which, he was at this same time working on his problem with girls. Well, not precisely at the same time, since the practice times were in different parts of his daily schedule. Which accounted for his picking up girlfriends in one season and losing them in the next. His technique was precisely the same: learn one thing at a time, starting with the simplest, and practice it over and over and over until it was second nature (there being no first with Gus, of course). Then add the next element. As with football, he began by learning how not to go offside, though the problem here was slightly different. In effect, he had to unlearn what he knew or thought he knew about sex and start over with holding hands. For thirty minutes every day, he practiced going through the Persians-and-Greeks thing, then reaching for the girl’s hand. It was not always easy to find girls to practice this with. His brother said he hated this part even more than being a tackling dummy. Especially since Gus was a slow learner and kept making appalling mistakes. But then it occurred to him one day that he didn’t need the Persians and Greeks anymore, and with that it became easier to find willing girls again, though they never understood the constant repeats and the abrupt dismissals when the thirty minutes were up.
Over the months that followed, he continued his exercises, expanding them to include new techniques picked up from coaches, friends, movies, books, teammates, barbershops, parents, and burlesque shows in Los Angeles. He learned how—each in separate drills—to tackle and block, swear vehemently, break out of a huddle, cradle a ball, throw it and catch it and inflate it, how to squeeze hands, caress them, gaze deeply, joke casually, wink, blow loose wisps of hair back, ask for a phone number, stand tall, and even foxtrot a bit. Not without paying a price, of course. Something had to go to make room for all of this. He was able to compress some practice times, once he’d mastered a given skill, but he discovered he could not omit any drill altogether or the skills slipped away from him again. Even the offside practice: he got it down to about two minutes a day, but he couldn’t get rid of it. And one skill did not simply lead to another—more often it led to a dozen, and each of these dozen to a dozen each, multiplying like leaves on a fast-branching tree. I could understand his dilemma. I have the same problem with my sculpting: I can never hope to catch up. I’m afraid we had a lot in common, Gloomy Gus and I, more than I’ve sometimes wished to admit. I’ve said we simplified ourselves—but didn’t we merely substitute a vertical madness for a horizontal one?
Moreover, in Gus’s case, the various responses with which opposing teams and girls might confront him were virtually infinite—relatively, with my inert bits of metal, I have it easy—and, lacking any instinct for either discipline, he had to learn them all, one by one, and then memorize counter-moves, a stupendous task that only one as disciplined as Gloomy Gus could ever have undertaken. It was made all the more complex by his belief (or maybe it was instinct, same source as the offside lurch) in the surprise counterattack as the only possible reply: “You cannot win a battle in any arena of life merely by defending yourself.” He felt that, since girls and football teams are “not intelligent, but stupid, it is important whenever possible to confront them with an unexpected maneuver.” There’s a famous maxim, attributed to him, on the subject: “Take the offensive, show no fear, do the unexpected, but do nothing rash!” But since all his moves were studied out and practiced, how could they be surprises? This became his master task: to make the response mechanism so intricate that the patterns were invisible. A million new drills, then, and to make room for them, he had to abandon his music, fraternity, edifying outside reading, hamburger-grinding, presidency of Christian Endeavor, baseball and tennis, oratory, school newspaper editorship, friendly conversations, and Latin club. Though he cut back sharply on the time spent on acting and debate, he clung to them, as well as to his campus politics and studies, the latter because he had to pass his courses to stay in school and play football, the others because they doubled as verbal calisthenics for lockerroom banter and picking up new girls.
While to the casual observer the results of all this rigor and sacrifice may not have been spectacular, they were nevertheless impressive enough. Before classes had begun next fall, to the surprise of the coach he had made the varsity football squad, and to the surprise of the head cheerleader had gently sucked her left pap. In fact, he had sucked it three times in succession, starting from scratch with the wink, pickup, and handholding each time through, and all she could think of to say was: “Don’t you like the other one?” “He looked so surprised,” she said after, “that I don’t think he knew there was another one.” On the football field he was neither brilliant nor imaginative, but he was consistent. The coach still didn’t trust him in the backfield, but he did let him play right end in the second half of the fourth game of the season. He did well, staying onside until the ball was centered, taking out his man, throwing textbook blocks, and running convincing decoys, until on about the seventh or eighth play he was thrown a pass. He floated far out on the right flank, shook off his opponent, sprinted downfield, turned at just the right moment, leaped gracefully, and made a phenomenal catch of a wobbling, overthrown pass—the students and fans in the stands went wild. But when he came down, he just stood there, smiling blankly. For a moment, everybody on the field was like that, stopped dead, staring at him, dumbfounded. Then they hit him. So hard in fact that he fumbled the ball, the opponents recovering. Once again, they had to carry him off.
“What the hell happened?” cried the coach as they carried him by, in pain but still smiling.
“I couldn’t remember what came next, Chief,” he said.
The coach was nearly crying, but what he said was: “Y’know, if they’d had more guys like you in the cavalry, maybe we wouldn’ta been the ones to end up on the goddamn reservations!”
“Gosh… thanks, Coach…”
Gus, when he was able, went back to the practice field. Fields. He no longer had time for campus politics, little theater, or debate society. Every minute in his daily timetable not used for eating, sleeping, toilet, and classwork went into learning everything there was to know about girls and football. He’d had an experience with a girl from his chemistry class much like the one he’d had on the football field: he’d got her skirts up all right and knew what the equivalent of a touchdown was, but he’d forgotten to practice getting an erection. He’d expanded his practice schedule, apparently determined never to let these things happen again, although his brother said he didn’t think it was determination. He thought it was more like grabbing a tiger’s tail: no conscious decisions, just one desperate thing after another. “One fact you oughta understand,” he told me as we sat in my back room looking through the scrapbook (he’d turned down a cup of coffee after seeing the condition of my pot), “when Dick was three years old he fell out of a buggy and the iron wheel ran over his head—he’s got a scar from the top of his forehead to the back of his neck from it.” The brother’s suspicion that Gus wasn’t all there I shared, but I didn’t think the bump had anything to do with it.
Whatever moved him—his own inspiration or mere mechanics—he set about to master the two arts once and for all. He not only drilled himself on all aspects of offense and defense, of foreplay and conquest, but he also had practice sessions on how to jog out onto the field, spit water during time-outs, laugh at the coach’s jokes, and crack bare butts with wet towels in the showerroom (his brother balked at practicing this one with him, and even his mother’s Christian forbearance failed her before he’d got the knack), how to compliment girls’ private parts politely in public, avoid entangling alliances, take a slap, test condoms, dance the Charleston, and recognize jazz-babies, red-hot mamas, and virgins by the way they walked. By the time the football season rolled around his junior year, he’d been named the second-string right halfback by the coach of the Whittier Poets and jerked off by the captain of the women’s volleyball team, both of whom admitted later to a lot of preliminary soul-searching.
Whatever Happened to Gloomy Gus of the Chicago Bears? Page 7
