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

Gloomy Gus of the Chicago Bears. It was his rookie season in the bigtime and he was breaking every record in the books, just as he had done in college ball. The reporters were so excited it was sometimes hard to tell the newspapers from the mystical tracts. I read that he’d played for a little Quaker school out in California, and had set phenomenal rushing, passing, pass-receiving, and scoring records—including seven touchdowns, almost single-handed (he was always a loner, and besides, nobody else was really good enough to keep up with him) against Pittsburgh in the Rose Bowl. There was even a popular song about him, “You Gotta Be a Football Hero.” He was everybody’s All-American, and all the big professional teams were after him. He wasn’t interested in the negotiations apparently, and would have played for nothing (though this may have been some publicity tararam handed out by the Bears’ front office), but he was very loyal to all his friends and relatives, his old coach, former teammates and girlfriends, and so the price was finally pretty high, especially considering the hard times. Since the Bears were the reigning league champions and had all the money, they were the ones who got him. And it was worth it, or so it seemed that fall: he led the Bears to a perfect season in the conference—thirteen wins, no ties, no losses—and again completely rewrote the record books. Only in the last game or two did the cracks begin to show, but before the playoff for the championship with the New York Giants had ended, his legendary career was over. Until then, he’d been living the dream of every little school kid in America: the quiet scholarly little boy, left out of all the neighborhood games and laughed at by all the girls, who suddenly finds the magic formula and becomes the most famous athlete and greatest lover in the world. “I believe in the American dream,” he once said, “because I have seen it come true in my own life.”

I’m just crossing Division Street when I run into my friend Jesse, coming out of a bar with Harry and Ilya. Ilya I haven’t seen in weeks. He’s very drunk and sullen—a pale wispy boy who never looks quite strong enough to stand, even when he’s sober. His brother Dave, we learned a couple of weeks ago, lost an arm and part of a leg at Ja-rama—like Ilya, he’s a musician: a violinist, was—and since then Ilya’s become secretive and ill-tempered, almost as though he somehow blamed the rest of us for what happened to his brother. He still looks that way, though that he’s out drinking with Jesse and Harry is a good sign. Leo had once, soberly, more or less soberly, lectured me on alcohol and revolution, the link being the romantic illusion. “And why not?” he’d grinned wearily (we were watching drunken Father Clanahan tip over, as I recall). “Reality’s such shit. You have to reinvent it just to live in it.” “Hey, Meyer!” Jesse calls now, flashing his lean, gap-toothed smile from under his rumpled cloth cap. “How’s ole Gus?”
    â€œHe died.”
    Jesse and Harry somehow look downcast and amused at the same time. The momentary fade Jesse passes into suggests he’s already conjuring up a new song. Come all you good workers, a story I will tell, about a football hero who for our Union fell. Ilya, who introduced Gus to us in the first place, only grimaces irritably and looks down at his feet. “The silly potz,” Harry sighs, shaking his little round head. Harry was always baffled by Gus, and has never got over his rage at what Gus did to his sister. “Was he still taking curtain calls at the end?”
    â€œNo,” I say, “though he had an audience—the place was filled with celebrities and reporters. But he didn’t seem to recognize them. He just lay there, like he didn’t know what was happening. They’d shaved