Whatever Happened to Gloomy Gus of the Chicago Bears?

by Robert Coover

  I’m just finishing the last panel when Harry’s sister Golda arrives with a paring knife in her hand. “I seen it when I went by earlier, Meyer. I come back to scrape it off.” She seems pretty shaken. Of course, she’s been through a lot of late. “It’s terrible, Meyer. What’s happening to our people?”

  “Don’t let it upset you, Golda. Just kids, probably.”

  “I’ll be honest, when I first seen it there I looked the other way and run off. Then I got mad at myself and so I come back.”

  “I know. I nearly couldn’t open the door at first. But it’s okay now,” I say, smiling up at her. She looks older than she has recently, worn down, vulnerable. “Golda, listen, I’m sorry. I just came from the hospital. Gus is dead.”

  “I know. Harry called me after he seen you.” She sighs heavily, holding one breast. “People are wonderful, Meyer, they can get used to everything in this world.” The very words no doubt of our brethren in the German ghettos, streets of Guernica, hills of Ethiopia. It’s a sentiment neither Gorky nor I much admire, but have learned to live with, even in ourselves, as though to acknowledge its universality. “I like the flowers,” she says. “But… still it’s scary. You can’t forget what’s underneath.”

  “That’s sort of the idea, Golda.” I tell her about the fresh strawberries and she goes back to my room to wash them while I clean out my brush. She notices my wet clothes and makes me take them all off. She hangs them outside, while I change into dry underwear, thick socks, and a sweater. I don’t have a second pair of pants.

  What with all this domesticity, the fruity perfume of the strawberries (she’s put them in a little vinegar and sugar to bring the juices out), the day’s stresses, the memories the room holds for Golda, and the essential loneliness we both share, we soon find ourselves tumbling about on the ceremonial cot together. I apologize that I don’t have Gus’s technique and can’t do what he did for her, but she laughs sadly and says it’s all illusion anyhow, just a trick of the imagination. She coaches me in a few gimmicks she’s picked up from Gloomy Gus and seems to have a good time. Afterwards, having kissed all my bruises, even the ones on my behind (“battle wounds,” she calls them, licking at them tenderly, respectfully), she hugs me close and says she was very satisfied, and I can’t complain. My Homecoming Queen. I’m afraid she’s going to ask me why I don’t have a girlfriend, and that’s exactly what she does. “A healthy boy like you, Meyer…”

  “I like to be alone, Golda.”

  She’s quiet for a moment. “Do you want to be alone now?”

  “No,” I lie. “No, this is great.” How did Gloomy Gus do it, I wonder. Just in and out and never look back: that’s the coaching I really need. “But I do have to be alone a lot, and it’s hard for girls to understand that.”

  “You’ve had girls living with you, Meyer?”

  “Sometimes. I’ve always liked having them around, but it’s never worked out. They sit in the studio reading a book, insisting they won’t bother me, but of course they already are. They try painting while I sculpt—I’m very weak, it’s their paintings I spend the day with. I build up to my best work all day, but just then I hear them frying something on the stove. I can’t let it get cold, can I? The minute the thought crosses my mind, I’ve lost my momentum. On the very best days, I rarely get more than twenty or thirty perfect minutes, the rest all preparations and reflections, and with all the best intentions, they’ve taken these moments away from me. It’s always hard to tell them to go away and leave me alone for a while—and sometimes I mean for several days, even weeks—in fact, it’s the hardest thing of all. Almost I can’t do it. So finally I’ve found it best to avoid the problem. For now, anyway.”

  “The trouble is, Meyer,” she says softly, “you’ve never been in love.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because it’s always ‘they,’ not ‘she.’ “

  “That’s just my shyness, Golda, in talking about it.”

  “But don’t you get lonely sometimes?”

  “Sure.”

  “Meyer, I won’t bother you, I promise. But when you get lonely, call me up, okay?”

  “Okay, Golda. But—”

  She presses her finger on my lips. “I know, I know,” she says. “Let’s have some strawberries.”

  She seems calmer now, almost happy. We sit on the edge of the cot in our underwear, munching the bright-red strawberries and talking cheerfully about Gloomy Gus. I describe the scene down at the hospital, she tells me about the last time he made love to her. It was just like all the other times until she asked him if it was the only way he knew, and—whirr-click!—he switched tracks and treated her to a feast of oral sex unlike anything she’d ever known before.

  “You mean sixty-nine?”

  “Yeah, well,” she grins, strawberry juice trickling out the corners of her mouth, “I didn’t take no more chances with numbers…”

  The one thing she couldn’t get used to, she says, was how inconsistent he was: desperately in love with her one moment, utterly indifferent the next. “He was just a gay deceiver, Meyer,” she sighs.

  “Well,” I smile, “more like a coldhearted craftsman, I’m afraid. One thing he always said in interviews: ‘What determines success or failure is the ability to keep coldly objective when emotions are running high.’ He isolated himself from his feelings through discipline. He lived life in a kind of time-tunnel. Every minute of every day he lived was completely used up in working on his skills, even when he seemed to be simply enjoying them.”

  “He did seem very serious…”

  “I work pretty hard, Golda, but next to him I’m a complete amateur. I wouldn’t be surprised if even his dreams were training programs. Maybe that was where he kept up the old skills he’d learned before giving them up for football and girls.”

  “He always told me he dreamed of me, Meyer,” she whispers, gazing lovingly upon a plump red strawberry, the best of the box. “Probably it was just sweet nothings, hunh? Salting me up…”

  “You know, I don’t think he knew what love was all about—or football either. He’d taught himself how to score, but after he’d scored he didn’t know what to do but score again.”

  “I know. A girl just didn’t know where she was with him…”

  “He was very skillful, Golda, but he was a man without an overview. He lived this rigid, segmented, repetitive life, and he couldn’t step back. His inability to discriminate was phenomenal. He was a freak, all willpower, no judgment—”

  “You mean,” she muses, strawberry juice dribbling down her soft chin, “he was a eager beaver who couldn’t see past the end of his own shnozzle…”

  “You could say so,” I smile. “You know, people complain we don’t live enough in the here and now. Either we’re absorbed in the past or daydreaming about the future, which is presumably a very crazy way to behave, because we’re missing the real thing and taking the imaginary thing as real. ‘Live like each moment is your last,’ they say.”

  “They’re right, Meyer. It’s the truth.”

  “But that was just how Gus lived, though without the morbid touch: moment by moment, each out cut off from the next, fulfilling his timetable. We talk about living in the present because we can’t imagine actually doing it. He did it. He was in that sense the perfect realist, the absolute materialist.”

  “He was a lot smarter than me, I know that.”

  “We think of the past and the future as part of a kind of river, a time-stream, but this is just a poetic metaphor. Gus had no perception of this or any other metaphor. He was completely metaphor-free. He had no imagination at all!”

  “Well, I don’t know about that,” she replies. “Did I ever tell you about his little tricks with the ketchup and cottage cheese?”

  “Oh, he was inventive. He had to be. Everything was a crisis for him. Whenever he encountered something new, he tested out responses to it. When something worked, he moved it into his practice schedule and turned it into a habit.�
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  “He had a cute thing with a bicycle pump, too. You should have such habits, Meyer,” she teases, popping a strawberry into my mouth. “Sometimes, though, he got very dirty talking, you wouldn’t do that…”

  “Probably he was just getting his line for making out muddled up with his lockerroom banter. Tell me, did he ever hit you with a wet towel?”

  “How—how did you know?”

  “Just a guess…”

  “I turn my back once to get undressed, that’s all, and I’m just pushing down my, my under-things, thinking how excited he must be to see, you know… when—oh! What a spank! I thought I would die!”

  “It was one of his football exercises, Golda.”

  “You mean, he wasn’t mad—?”

  “Not like you mean. He just couldn’t keep things straight finally. That was how he cracked up.”

  “He was a little peculiar, Meyer, I know what you’re talking about. Once we were hugging and I just squatted down a little so to sit on the bed, when he claps me hard on the tushie and says: ‘Let’s go git them fuckin’ assholes!’—pardon the French, Meyer. And then he turns and runs—patsch!— right into the wall!”

  “He was breaking out of a huddle…”

  “He sure was! I thought he was killing himself! I didn’t think it was for love, but I couldn’t be sure. I run over to help him. I says: ‘Dick! Dick! What have you done?’ And you know what he says?”

  “‘Golda! Golda! I’ve been looking for you!’ “

  “You’re right, Meyer! That’s it! The whole shtick, right from the start, like nothing has happened!”

  “It was that routine that ended his career, Golda.”

  “You mean—? I thought there was a woman behind it!” she exclaims, setting her jaw. Then she sighs. “Tell me the truth, Meyer, there were other women, weren’t there? I mean… more than one…”

  “Yes, yes, there were, Golda,” I say, not wanting to hurt her, but wishing her to be free of this freak once and for all. “Hundreds, in fact. Every year.”

  She takes it better than I expected. Or worse: it seems to please her. “Was he really so famous, then?”

  “For one season he was the greatest halfback in football,” I say. “He had a secret. But it was the wrong kind of secret. When he finally went, it was a terrible thing to watch.” So I told her about all the practice sessions, how he developed his fabulous techniques, demanding ever more and more of himself, and how these techniques helped him to score on and off the field like nobody had ever scored before. “There was no stopping him. It looked easy, nobody guessed how hard he worked. In fact, it was fairly easy as long as he was in college. But the big leagues were something else—just not the same thing as college Homecoming Queens and Whittier Poets. What he’d learned so far was just baby stuff. He had to double up on everything. Getting rid of the classwork was a help—in fact, he quit right after the football season was over. He still graduated, but it was mostly on reputation and his personal correspondence with Mrs. Hoover. And in the pros he had a whole team to work with and no longer had to play defense as well as offense. But there were scores of new plays to learn on the field, scores of new positions off. Even the football that season had a new shape, and women in Chicago wore more clothes. Nothing was easy. And of course he couldn’t leave out anything he’d learned so far without blowing the works. He even turned his meals into practice sessions for testimonial dinners, pickups, biting in pileups, and muff-diving, so as not to lose time. He—”

  “What diving?”

  “You know, with the mouth—”

  “Oh! I thought you said muff-diving…”

  “I did, Golda. A muff’s, you know, for keeping your hands warm—”

  “Ah!” she says, blushing, and puts my hand between her legs.

  “The point is, in order to keep up with these new demands, even his eating, sleeping, and toilet time had to be used for practice somehow. He hired professionals to sleep with him at night, for example, waking him for five-minute practice sessions at one, three, and five A.M. Even his urination doubled as a drill for flag-saluting during the playing of the National Anthem. It sounds a bit crazy, but the results were good. By the middle of that autumn he was scoring approximately once every eleven minutes on the field and had progressed in his seductions beyond mere movie stars and teammates’ wives, into Congress, convents, industrial baronies, and the American Bible Society. On the gridiron, the Bears were unbeatable as long as he was in the lineup, though as the season wore on it got more difficult for him. Now and then he missed a day of practice—once with hay fever, a second time with a wrenched knee, another when he got drugged by a lady psychiatrist who couldn’t bear to let him go.”

  “Oi, I know just how she felt, Meyer…!”

  “Well, his timetable had been reduced by then to the bare-bone essentials, so to catch up he had to cut more and more into his sleeping time. He was spending as much as eighteen to twenty hours a day at what he called in an interview that ‘tough, grinding discipline that is absolutely necessary for superior performance.’ Actually, he didn’t mind the sleepless nights and even began to believe in them. But then the other teams started filming his play and soon discovered a number of seemingly fixed patterns. They began to predict and intercept his moves. The Bears’ coach, seeing Gus was getting outguessed, told him he was too mechanical, he had to think faster on his feet. So he set aside time each day to practice thinking, which meant he had to give up everything subsequent to scoring: no more acknowledgments of applause, no more gratitude to girls. His thinking sessions were essentially efforts to crossbreed all the things he already knew, creating a greatly augmented number of variations on a theme, so to speak. There were still patterns, he couldn’t help that, but they were much harder to detect and predict. It was enough to get the Bears through a perfect season in the Western Division, the only one in NFL history, but already by the last game or two the other teams were getting to him again. Of course, he was still setting astounding records in all departments, but at the end of the season they were holding him to only three or four touchdowns a game, cutting his rushing average by some twenty-five percent, and intercepting a number of his passes, especially on the right flank, where he always thought he was strongest. He pushed deeper into the night with his thinking practice and risked cutting some of the foreplay and huddle techniques, but as a result he began showing other signs of strain. He lurched into a few wild plays in the last games and went offside a couple of times, knocked a Congresswoman’s teeth out in a surprise body-block in her bathtub (she bit the cold-water tap as she came down), had an orgasm in a pileup on the field at which time some strange murmurings were also reported but not believed, and broke into a stream of abusive showerroom obscenities during a Quaker service in his honor at the Friends Meeting House on the South Side, which nevertheless did not prevent him from seducing two of the ladies present and tackling a third.”

  “Like I’m telling you, Meyer, he was a kuntzen macher, like Harry says—you know, a real tricks-maker—I’m gonna miss him so…”

  “Well, finally it was the Giants who broke him, in the championship game. They’d purchased a reserve Bear lineman surreptitiously by way of the Green Bay Packers in order to obtain firsthand intelligence about Gus’s practice routines. At first this guy’s information seemed useless: short on specifics about tactics and play patterns, long on apparent irrelevancies about spitting water and handholding and suchlike. They began to think the lineman himself was maybe a sleeper, a plant.”

  “Like those chazzers down at the steel plant who gave you all those bumps,” she says, kissing the bruise on my shoulder, her hand stroking my thigh.

  “Exactly, Golda. Some of the heavies on the Giants line even roughed the guy up a bit, but he stuck to his story. It was only about twenty-four hours before the playoff began that it suddenly occurred to them what it was all about. Their strategy the next day was to hit him at the fundamentals. They bribed the band to play “Roll Me Over
in the Clover” instead of “The Star-Spangled Banner” during the opening ceremonies, so he didn’t know whether to salute or sing along. When his linemen were bent over in front of him, they tossed him a wet towel.”

  “Ah…!” She touches her breast and, sighing, nods.

  “They shouted out numbers when plays were being called, and by halftime had hit on ‘29’ to make him go offside. They rushed offside themselves and hit him coming out of huddles just to confuse him. In pileups, they passed him condoms and blew in his ear, and once, when he succeeded in breaking free on a long run, they all stopped and applauded him. He pulled up, smiled, tossed the ball in the air, and jogged off the field toward the sidelines. The Bears recovered the ball that time, but the coach was in a state of absolute panic.”

  “What naughty tricks, Meyer!”

  “Football’s a rough game, Golda, especially when you’re playing for money.”

  “It oughta be socialized…”

  “There was worse to come. The Bears’ coach had pulled Gus out of the game in the second quarter, but he couldn’t win without him. So he drilled him intensely during the halftime break, a kind of shorthand run-through of the entire system, and sent him out for the second half, hoping for the best. For a few plays, he was okay. He went offside a couple of times on shouts of ‘29,’ but he scored another touchdown on the old Statue of Liberty play, after making sixty-eight yards on two passes, one of them from behind his back, and a brilliant end run, and the Bears moved out in front by ten points. That was when the Giants played their sneaky ace in the hole. They had got ahold of one of the professionals Gus slept with for his nighttime sex drills and had suited her up. When the Bears got the ball again, the Giants brought her on. The Bear quarterback called a long downfield pass to Gus. Gus broke out of the huddle to see the girl standing behind the Giant line. He walked forward, going offside as the ball was snapped, and the Giants opened up to let him through. He was tilting his head just so—you can imagine…”