Whatever Happened to Gloomy Gus of the Chicago Bears? Read Free

Party’s doing everything it can to make it seem like one since the Stalin-Trotsky split, turning old family friends like Simon and Harry into mortal enemies, and the kangaroo trials in Russia right now are making Leo’s claim that “the only real joy in life is power, and there’s just not enough of it to go around,” sound like a truism, but this is to ignore the effect a changed context can have and to underestimate the appetite for hope and brotherhood. Leo also finds my jugglers and athletes frivolous, but that’s because he talks without listening to himself; he’d be much closer to the mark to say they were self-contradictory. Leo puts a lot of people off with his hardnosed bluster, but I’ve always felt close to him. He and Jesse befriended me during rough times on the road, and I followed them around in their efforts to organize coal miners, tenant farmers, ironworkers, housewreckers, Leo becoming a kind of father figure to me. Not having had one of my own. And from those times, I know that Leo’s not the cynic he pretends to be. If anything, he’s too ruled by his emotions. Injustice offends him at some level that seems almost organic, and he stakes out these skeptical positions to give himself more room to move and breathe.
    I pick up a broken chip of concrete and toss it idly into the river, meaning nothing by it, except maybe as a kind of calendar notation. It occurs to me that Leo would have looked for a boulder, Jesse would have tried to skip the thing, Golda would have loved the chip and grieved when it was gone. Gus? Probably he’d have carried it into the river on an end run. Or delivered Hamlet’s soliloquy to it as to Yorick’s skull. Though on the night we showed his talents off to Leo, I should say, he gave no sign of knowing Hamlet —or even of its existence. By then I knew a lot of the plays he’d been in, and so got him to do Aeneas for us, the prosecuting attorney from The Night of January 16th and the greenhorn playwright from The Dark Tower . Leo was particularly impressed by a bit Gus did from an unknown one-acter called The Price of Coal , and the old innkeeper’s weeping scene from Bird-in-Hand , which, in spite of its feudal sentiments (the thrust of the play is the old man’s opposition to his daughter’s marrying into the upper classes: “And we’ve always known ’oo was ’oo and which ‘at fitted which ’ead…”), was very moving. Tears actually welled up in his eyes and rolled down his cheeks into his black beard when he reached the lines: “H’ I’m sorry about wot h’ I’ve done tonight. H’ I shall be sorry for h’ it till the end of me life. H’ I’ve be’ayved so as h’ I ought to be h’ ashamed, h’ I know. But this business”— sob! —” ‘as pretty near broke me ‘eart…!”
    â€œJesus, that’s terrific!” Leo laughed. We got Gus to repeat it a couple of times to show Leo how the tears fell right on cue each time through. “Hey, brother, I could use you down at the steel mill next week!” Leo said, half jokingly, yet clearly considering the possibilities at the same time. When I tried to caution him, he wouldn’t listen, so I shouted out: “29!” Gus jumped to his feet, ducked his head down into his shoulders, and— wham! —piled into my potbellied stove. Luckily, there was no fire in it, or he’d have been badly burnt. As it was, there was a tremendous crash of stovepipe, grates, and dishes, cinders and coaldust flying everywhere, and a big hole in the partition between my room and the studio out front. “Holy shit!” Leo gasped. “This guy’s a fucking tornado!” My intention had been to convince Leo not to take Gus down to the Memorial Day demonstration (“More like the Hindenburg,” I suggested), but I apparently accomplished