Whatever Happened to Gloomy Gus of the Chicago Bears? by Robert Coover
“A redheaded woman took me out to dine,
Says “Love me, baby, leave your union behind.”
Get thee behind me, Satan, travel on down the line.
I am a union man, gonna leave you behind.”
Harry knew some old Yiddish songs from Poland and O.B. some country blues—I especially remember one called “The Broke and Hongry Blues”—which he claimed to have learned from some blind guy with a peg leg. I’d found a tattered stocking cap for my head, had stuffed some newspapers—Hoover blankets, we used to call them on the road—inside my shirt, I was feeling very warm and happy. The bottles had been emptied, though I still clutched my wine bottle in one hand, licking at the neck from time to time as though to hold back sweet time. I really didn’t want it to end. In my other hand, I held a little Hasidic dancer, whittled from wood, the first piece of sculpture I ever did—someone had asked to see it earlier in the evening (maybe it was this that had led to the dance, or else followed it), and I hadn’t let go of it after. It was, I suddenly understood, huddled there on the floor, an image of my father, though I have no memory of him, and as far as I know he never danced, nor followed Hasidim.
Past Jesse’s head on the broad south wall, my mask of Maxim Gorky, made of welded bits of scrap metal and nearly ten feet tall (all that my warehouse ceiling permitted and more than the door allows), was taking shape. The wide forehead with its peasant hairline and deep worry lines, the high cheekbones, drooping mustache: these parts, though still incomplete, could be made out now and understood. By coincidence, I’d been reading—and been much moved by—My Universities when Gorky died last year, and I had thrown myself impulsively into the project, thinking: This is worth a lifetime. I’d thought I was ready for it, felt sure I had the skills now, the insight, the right relationship. I hadn’t reckoned, however, with the eyes. Hundreds of sketches were stuck up on the wall around the face, hundreds more had been destroyed, and I hadn’t got the eyes right yet on one of them. Those wise, piercing, compassionate eyes of Maxim Gorky, who cannot see enough of life. The old wounded eyes of Alexei Maximovitch Peshkov who has seen too much. In my imaginings, I could picture the entire face down to its least detail, but could only see deep empty spaces where the eyes should be. But tonight, I thought, tonight, if I weren’t so drunk, I might almost be able—
“Hey, Meyer,” Leo was saying, “let’s fix some coffee and build a fire in your stove.”
He was right. The studio was very cold. You could see your breath. Outside, snow was tumbling past my front shop window, vertical one moment, then suddenly horizontal the next as wind gusts whipped it. We struggled to our feet, the ten or eleven of us still there, and went back to my little room behind the studio, where I ate, slept, washed, and even, especially in the winter, did most of my work. There, on my old iron bed, we found Gloomy Gus screwing Harry’s sister Golda.
Golda stared up at us in terror and confusion—she’s no virgin, Golda, she’s been married once and has lived with a boyfriend or two since, but she is, as they say, a good Jewish girl, and this was not her style at all—but she held on to Gus all the same. Gus hadn’t seemed to notice we’d come in, he just kept thumping away: white-cheeked, very hairy, and professional. His lips moved faintly as though he were timing himself.
“Vos… you sh—vos tut zich—!?” Harry choked, his voice cracking with embarrassment and rage, but too stunned for the moment to leap on Gus and drag him off. I braced myself for the worst, glanced around for things that might break.
“Don’t do anything, Harry!” Golda pleaded throatily, wrapping her big soft thighs all the tighter around Gus’s bucking arse. Her eyes reminded me of some of my rejected sketches for Gorky’s eyes: desperate, aggrieved, soulful, but reflecting something more like irrational panic than wisdom. Over their heads was a quote I’d pinned up from Gorky’s Childhood: “Our life is amazing not only for the vigorous scum of bestiality with which it is overgrown, but also for the bright and wholesome creative forces gleaming beneath.” “I’m in love!” she cried.
Harry’s mouth opened and shut three or four times, gasping for air like a beached fish. Harry in his poems celebrated free love and he never interfered with his sister’s affairs, but he was clearly unprepared for this. He seemed to be trying to say something like “Get off!” or “Give up!,” but before he could get it out, Gus suddenly arched his back, slammed powerfully into Golda, and unleashed an orgasm that made her yelp and cross her eyes.
“Hey! Hey—shit shtik!” Harry croaked, finding his wind at last, grabbing Gus roughly by the shoulder. “I’m telling you—!”
Gus turned slowly, imperturbably, to gaze up at Harry from Golda’s flushed and ample bosom where he’d fallen, and after a moment a flicker of recognition crossed his bearded face. He lifted himself with brisk expertise out of Golda, stood with a jerky little hop, pulled on his shorts and trousers, tucked in his shirt, buckled his belt, cleared his throat and, standing there more or less at attention, sang “The Internationale” straight through, not missing a word: “Arise, ye prisoners of starvation! Arise, ye wretched of the earth…!”
We all dropped back in amazement, foolish grins twitching at the corners of our mouths (O.B. was laughing openly, his white teeth gleaming against his black face, and his girl was giggling helplessly, her face ducked against O.B.’s chest; later, I accomplished a wire-and-plaster study for a sculpture of the two of them like that, calling it, and meaning no irony at all, “After Guadalajara”), all except Harry and Golda—Golda lay tearful and naked on my bed like a pinned moth, breaking out all over her body in a pink mottled rash (“How many on our flesh have fattened…?” Gus was singing), while Harry stood rooted to the floor and white with shock. He didn’t even move when Gus finished his recital (“The Internationale shall be the human race!”), raised two clenched fists in a V, smiled as though accepting applause, and strode out. We had to shake poor Harry and smack his cheeks before he snapped out of it. Golda had by then roused herself, grabbed up her clothes and, rolling her eyes toward the ceiling, fled the room, possibly to chase after Gus, maybe just to escape her brother’s wrath. Harry wasn’t angry, though. He just shook his head stupidly like an old man and muttered: “That f’kucken Karl Marx! That f’kucken Karl Marx…”
Just how Gus managed that seduction, I eventually witnessed for myself and at Golda’s request. Poor Golda. Ordinarily buoyant, chatterboxy, rather plain and unmade-up and simple as water, a happy, open woman with a good heart and a fair amount of worldly wisdom, she suddenly became estranged and melancholic, more beautiful in a soft and vulnerable way, but more ludicrous too, puppy-eyed and dolled up like a schoolgirl: a poor hapless maiden, we all supposed, suffering from unrequited love. Except when he was copulating with her, which was about once a week, off and on—or I should say, on and off—Gus didn’t know she existed. The old story, you might say—but no, he really didn’t know she existed. She had to throw herself in his path. If on these rare occasions he had rejected her, even insulted or abused her, she might in time have got over him—she’s no child, after all, and ordinarily has a good sense of humor. But each time it was apparently exactly the same thing all over again—a textbook seduction, stunning orgasm, then briskly out and gone without so much as a wink or a fare-thee-well, leaving Golda spread out, flushed, gasping, and ever deeper and deeper in love. I’d see her often, lurking about my studio, a forlorn and dark-eyed creature utterly unlike the Golda I once knew, hoping only to catch a glimpse of her lover, but disappearing the moment Harry or one of the others turned up. She did catch him there a time or two, and discreetly I left them to it.
But one day she came up to me and, tears running down her soft cheeks, she said: “Meyer, you got to help me! Am I crazy or what?”
“Sure, Golda, you’re crazy,” I said. I was up on a ladder, working on Gorky’s forehead. It occurred to me that Gorky had not said much that was useful on the subject of sexual love, but in this I felt yet another bond with him. I did not know or care much
She didn’t seem to hear me. She was staring at, or rather through, a little row of flowers made out of brass hinges, screws, and the like, one of a group of things I’d been working on since Maxie’s party. My Jarama flowers, I called them. “Meyer, listen, it’s always the same, exactly the same…”
I thought at first she meant that all her affairs had come to nothing in the end, which was mostly true, and I started to make something up about the flowers she was staring past (maybe, also, I wanted her to notice them), but then it came to me that she might be trying to say something else. “What’s exactly the same, Golda?”
“What he says. What he does. The whole shmeer. Every word, every look, every touch, just the same. It’s like going to a movie you seen before. Except you end up getting… having…” She sighed, looked up at me. Yes, she’s in trouble, I thought, I could see it. “Is that you up there, Meyer? Maybe this is all just a bad dream, hunh?”
“No, it’s me, Golda,” I said, crawling down off the ladder, pulling off my welding goggles: “See?” I shut down the acetylene and oxygen, released the screw on the pressure regulators, drained the lines. In my mind’s eye I still saw that deep furrow over Gorky’s eye I was working on. The truth is beyond all commiseration… “C’mon, let’s have some coffee, you can tell me about it.”
She seemed to calm down and become the old Golda once more, but when we reached the back and she saw my cot, she got all shaky and tearful again. I kept quiet, letting her find her own time and way to get it off her chest. I didn’t exactly want to know about it, but I knew she’d tell me regardless. Gorky has a line in his Childhood: “I might liken myself as a child to a beehive to which various common ordinary people brought the honey of their knowledge and views of life.… Often the honey was dirty and bitter, but being knowledge, it was honey, nonetheless.” People have always come to me like that, too. I rarely ask any questions, but they tell me things anyway. “It starts,” she said, “with the way he looks up at me, how he suddenly recognizes me, the way the lid on one eye droops a bit and his lips come apart, how he tilts his head like he’s thinking about something very serious, and then how he smiles, so warm, so good, a little movement he makes with his hand, like a touch across the space between us, and I feel a tingle. ‘Golda!’ he says. Such a nice deep voice he has, Meyer, throaty and solemn like a rabbi. ‘Golda, I been looking for you!’ And then he takes my hand…”
She described it all, phrase by phrase, gesture by gesture, touch by touch—I found myself getting excited in spite of myself—and exactly what happened to her each step of the way. “There’s no grabbing, no fumbling, his hands slide from my face to inside my underwear like magic, Meyer, like water running over pebbles in a brook, you know? Gemitlech-like, going from some place to another place, sure, but remembered like being everywhere at once, and he is whispering in my ear and kissing the insides of my legs and smiling down at me from above, and I don’t know where I am anymore! ‘Surrender to the ancient force inside you, Golda,’ he says, ‘struggle against death!’ Is he kidding? The surrender is over, he’s—zetz!—inside me already, he’s—ah!—my clothes are gone but—oi!—filling me…!” The last part got rather blurred, but by then the words weren’t very important anyway.
She lay on my cot after, her clothes sweaty and rumpled, her hand between her thighs, her face suddenly aged and filled with so much sorrow I lost all my own excitement and wished only to hold her like a child and give her comfort. “Meyer,” she whispered, “would you do me a favor?”
“Sure, Golda…”
“Watch him, Meyer. Watch what he does to me.”
“You mean while he—? Well, I don’t know, Golda, I don’t much like—”
“Please, Meyer. For me. He’ll come here tomorrow. Keep the others away and watch. Tell me what happens, the whole megillah, tell me if I’m crazy or what.”
As usual, spineless as ever, I could not say no. The next day was Friday and Gus turned up as expected. I’d chased the others off, telling them my aunt was coming to visit. (And what would have happened, I was to wonder later on, when it was all clear to me, if Gus had taken my crazy aunt on?) I didn’t even have time to hide, but Gus didn’t seem to register my presence, and Golda after the first minute or two was conscious of nothing except Gus. And it was all true, the whole transaction, word for word, move by move. Gus entered the studio, walked to the back to get fed, noticing nothing en route, and there she was. She looked frightened and painfully self-conscious, yet approachable as a park bench; he seemed as insentient as ever, staring at her like she was the horizon. But then suddenly there was that flicker of recognition, the little gestures, and Golda, like Pavlov’s dog, began to respond. “Golda!” he said gently. “Golda, I’ve been looking for you!” He took her hand.
It was very smooth, very professional, yet sincere and intense at the same time. He went through the entire routine, just as Golda had recounted it, but though I’d heard it all before and stood objectively apart, trying vainly to apply Freud to what I saw, it was such an absorbing spectacle it all seemed like new. I tried to watch his hands, but I, too, got caught up in the timelessness of his performance and could not remember afterwards exactly how he undressed her. “Oh, Dick!” she groaned (she was the only one of us who ever used his real name). “Take me! Love me! Save me!” I left before the climax (he was technologically up-to-date, I’d noticed, using one of those slide fasteners on his fly instead of buttons), having seen that part before, went outside and planted some flowers in the vacant lot next to my studio, thinking: It is true that love is a momentary denial of reality and death—but then, is that its true and secret function: to serve as a defense mechanism against other forms of madness? I realized I was very agitated and falling back on defense mechanisms of my own.
After Gus had fed himself on my food and left, I went back in and found Golda sitting on my cot, dazed, a bit desolate, but not unhappy. She was dressed but not tucked in, and held in her hands, which were shaking slightly, what I thought at first was a handkerchief, but what I then recognized as her underpants. She looked soft, fat, somnolent, but, as always after one of these episodes, years younger than her age. “Well, Meyer?” she whispered. “Am I crazy? Did you see?”
“I saw, Golda. It’s like you said. The whole thing. It’s very strange… every time, just like that?”
She smiled wearily, stood and pulled her underwear on. “Sometimes he doesn’t call me Golda,” she said sadly, gazing off through the walls of my studio. She smoothed her skirt down, tucked her blouse in; it was the kind of costume little girls wore to the country on weekend outings, though it was still winter in Chicago.
But then a few days later she staggered into my studio all bruised up, her eyes blackened, a tooth missing in front and her jaw swollen. As soon as she saw me, she started to cry. I scrambled down the ladder. I thought she might have been hit by a car.
“It was Dick,” she wailed stiffly through her swollen jaw. “He hit me…!”
“My God, Golda!”
She fell forward on my shoulder and I started to embrace her, but she winced and pulled back: “Oh! I hurt all over!” she bawled.
I led her gently to the back, turned on the hot plate to heat up coffee. “How… how did it happen, Golda?” I asked. I was very upset and nearly tipped over the coffeepot, while setting it on the burner.
“He tried to kill me! He stole my purse!”
“Why? Why did he do such a thing?”
“I don’t know, I don’t know what’s happened!” she sobbed. “Oh, God help me, Meyer, I think he’s ruptured something inside me!”
“But did you say something? Did you do anything to make him—?”
She wiped her eyes on her sleeve and looked up at me. There was such a depth of sadness in her eyes, such a terrible mix of despair and longing, that I thought I was going to cry myself to see them. I’d put a box of cookies on the table, and
“And just for that he—?”
“I went to see him at the theater. He starts up when he sees me, just like always. I stop him. I says, ‘Tell me what you really think of me, Dick. I’m not a child,’ I says, ‘you don’t have to lie to me, I’m nearly twenty-nine’—forgive me, Meyer, I just couldn’t…”
“But you think that’s why he hit you? Just because you lied about your age—?”
“I don’t know, I don’t know. All I’m sure is the minute I said ‘twenty-nine,’ something very peculiar come over him. Suddenly, he stops staring at me like he’s Valentino and starts looking more like Wolfman—Meyer, I can’t tell you, it was awful! Geferlech! He ducks his head between his shoulders and he squats down like he’s got cramps or something, holding himself up with one hand, but balling the other one up like he’s gonna hit somebody.…”
“Oh no!” I remembered that night I’d met him, the whirr-click! as I’d switched cues on him; we’d tested him a few times since and it was always the same. “So that’s what…!”
“Yes, he’s snarling and grunting and showing his teeth like some kinda mad dog or something, quivering all over. I was scared. He rears his tokus up. I says, ‘Wait a minute, Dick, we can talk about this—’ And—plats!—he hits me! He just bucks forward, smacks into my belly and klops me clean through a wall in the set, off the stage, and into the orchestra!”