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

just the opposite. It hasn’t escaped me that I am, indirectly anyway, responsible for Gus’s death.
    Not his real name, of course. He picked it up back in college when he was still playing freshman football—or trying to—for the Whittier Poets. When he joined the Chicago Bears, sportswriters started calling him the Fighting Quaker and, for reasons never quite clear to me (maybe it had something to do with his battering-ram style of running), Iron Butt, but Gloomy Gus was the name that stuck to him. Not because he was actually a gloomy sort of character—I doubt he had any feelings at all, as we know them anyway, he wasn’t put together that way—but because it was a clown’s name, and a clown was what Gus was, even when he was a National Hero. He was the most famous guy I ever knew—a college All-American and an all-star football pro—and, as such, a kind of walking cautionary tale on the subject of fame and ambition.
    He first turned up at a party we threw in my studio one Friday toward the end of March, and he came back every Friday night after. “A f’kucken schnorrer,” Harry called him, “f’kucken” being his own Yiddish-American neologism, made of kucken , fucking, and fehkuckteh , but Gus wasn’t there to sponge exactly. It was just his style: everything by the numbers, one to ten and start again. In fact, he was one of the hardest workers I ever knew. Maybe that was why they called him Iron Butt, I don’t know. Jesse speculated it had to do with his Bear teammates’ inability to crack his virginity in the lockerrooms; he made up a funny song about it, a parody of “John Henry” in which the steel-drivin’ man meets his match at last. Gus was a strange guest, my principal distraction through the hands-down melancholy of this past month, but maybe he contributed to it, too. He ate my food, drank the Baron’s milk, crapped in my toilet, washed in my basin, even used my bed, but never a word of thanks, not even the least sign that he understood these things were mine and not his. Simon joked he was just being a good comrade, true to the canons, but then Gus wasn’t mooching off Simon. In place of thanks, we got performances. Sometimes by request, sometimes spontaneous, but never entirely predictable. He’d laid on several skills in his lifetime, and he didn’t always come up with the right ones in the right order.
    I hadn’t recognized him at first, which is not surprising, since not only had he been wearing a bushy black beard and been introduced as an actor living off the WPA like the rest of us, but I wouldn’t ordinarily recognize any professional football player, by face or name, nor would any of my friends. Of course I like the game—I like all games—but I don’t keep up with the overblown seasonal histories. Nevertheless, it happens that I did know who Gloomy Gus was, had even for a few weeks a couple of years back followed his then-fabulous career, and I eventually put two and two together (the answer in Gus’s case was not four, not even close), though I admit I got some help from visitors who came through asking about him.
    That time when I was reading about him was the autumn of 1934. I’d come back to Chicago after a couple of years bumming around, following the harvests and the unionizing. I was tired of that life and wanted to get back to sculpting again. I’d learned a new skill on the road, welding, and I knew at last where I was going, if I could ever get the money together for a studio and equipment. I was staying at that time down on Kedzie with my aunt. I had no place to begin work, so I took a refresher course in plumbing and metalworking at the Jewish Training School and spent the rest of my time reading. Anything at hand, which at my aunt’s house was mostly mystical tracts and newspapers. And the papers that fall were full of the incredible exploits of