Robert Coover - Whatever Happened to Gloomy Gus of the Chicago Bears?

I’m beginning to feel ill at ease sitting around in that crowd in my underwear, so I go outside for my pants. They’re still damp, but I pull them on anyway — like Gus said: “One has to be uncomfortable to do one’s best thinking.” What I’m thinking about is how to cut a swath through all these friends, the impinging news mosaic, swastikas and wedding feasts, all my new ideas for projects, and the “cold oily bubble” of life itself, in order to get back to Maxim Gorky’s eyes. No way, probably. The invitation is out as it has always been. Friends will come. The Condor Legion will come. Ideas, too, like dust motes in the afternoon. It’s a kind of cranial erosion, a Dust Bowl of the mind. I’m excited by that notion of multifaceted pieces, it’s even better than the one I had earlier about polarities and confrontations, and I’m eager to light the torch before it all gets away from me, but… not quite eager enough.

I stand outside for a few minutes (can’t stay as long as I might like: it’s starting to sprinkle again), feeling the iron railroad spikes in my pocket, lying heavily, wet and cold, against my leg, and gazing in on my friends through the back door. Jesse is tuning up his guitar, his long bony knees stuck out in the small room like angle irons. Harry is peeling potatoes for his sister Golda at the sink, squinting closely at them through his thick lenses. O.B. and Billy Dean are trading down-home stories, and the Baron is in O.B.’s lap getting his ears scrubbed. O.B. never liked cats until he started hanging around this place and took to the Baron. In fact he helped name him, as we went from Charlie the Tramp (his peculiar walk after being hit by a car) to radio’s Baron (“Wass you dere, Sharlie?”) Munchausen to simply the Baron (“That cat ain’t no tramp!” O.B. declared with a brotherly grin) and finally the Black Baron, referring more to his banner than to his color (“What I don’t like about cats,” Leo had said, “is you can’t organize them!”). Ilya is awake and throwing up in the bucket I keep my metal scraps for Maxim Gorky in, but that’s all right, it’ll wash out. And Gorky won’t care, being accustomed to our self-destructions and — who knows — maybe even in the end admiring them.

Gloomy Gus, before he died, became a little delirious and mistook me for his coach back at Whittier College. He apparently understood that the trouble was he’d gone offside again, and he was apologizing for letting the team down. “Try to forget about it, Gus,” I said. “The game’s not over yet.”

“Chief,” he whispered, tears forming in the corners of his eyes (was this another act, I wondered, had I thrown him another cue?), “why is it we go on forever, making the first mistake we ever made… over and over again?”

I knew the answer, but I didn’t think he really-wanted to know. He looked genuinely anguished, but with Gloomy Gus this didn’t mean a thing. “Well, it’s probably not a mistake, Gus,” I said finally. “Probably it’s only—”

But by then he was dead.