Riding Rockets

CHAPTER 9 Babes and Booze

Over the next several months we continued our agency indoctrination by visiting NASA “centers” around the country. Like all government agencies, NASA spreads its operations over multiple states to gain the largess of as many congressional delegations as possible. We flew in private NASA jets to Kennedy Space Center, to NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California, to Marshall Spaceflight Center (MSFC) in Huntsville, Alabama, and to several other NASA and contractor facilities scattered around the country. At each location we were introduced to the workers, took tours, and received briefings on the operations of each facility.

There was a social agenda as well. Many nights would find us at a cocktail reception or dinner hosted by a local community official. Some of these events were more work than fun. Attendees clamored for autographs and photos. Or the press would be invited and they would squeeze us for interviews. For the most part, though, we were good ambassadors for NASA and warmly welcomed the attention. The women probably welcomed it less so. With each passing day it was becoming more evident that the major focus was on them. Even the black TFNGs would become as invisible as us white guys whenever Judy or Rhea or Anna—the triumvirate of TFNG beauty—walked into the room. They were particularly dazzling when they were dressed in their dark blue patch-covered flight coveralls. There wasn’t a man or woman in any public setting who didn’t stare. I recall one local politician questioning several of us men at a party. He was totally focused on our comments until Judy walked by in her flight suit. Then he interrupted us, said, “Excuse me,” and hurried to catch up to Judy. We were abandoned like the out-of-state voters we were.

What was it about the women in their flight suits? It wasn’t like the clothing flattered their figures. NASA ordered them off the shelf. The nuns of my high school would have loved them. They were baggy in all the right places, effectively neutering the female form. But in them, Judy, Rhea, and Anna stole the audience. The flight suits seemed to transform them into fantasy creatures like Barbarella or Cat Woman or Bat Girl. If Madonna had walked into a room in a jewel-bedecked Prada special, dripping Tiffany diamonds, and stood next to a coverall-clad Judy, Rhea, or Anna, the Material Girl would have paled to “ordinary.” Everybody, men and women alike, wanted to be seen with the flight suit–dressed women and pose for photos with them. Occasionally they would be so bothered and exhausted by the attention, they would use us men as human shields. At one of the parties I was standing with Dale Gardner, Norm Thagard, and a few others when Judy Resnik ducked behind our backs and whispered, “Close it up. I don’t want that press guy to find me.” A moment later we saw the stalker, pen and pad in hand, searching the room for his quarry. He eventually camped out at the exit to the ladies’ room, expecting Judy had fled there.

Eating an uninterrupted meal in public in a flight suit quickly became impossible for the TFNG females. Patrons would approach them and ask for autographs, scrounging for any scrap of paper, including napkins, sugar packets, or bank deposit slips from the back of their checkbooks. At one meal the entire kitchen staff came out to meet Judy. The proud establishment owner, a large Italian woman, fawned over her as if she were royalty while ignoring me and the other men as if we were Judy’s foot servants. In jest I interrupted their love fest and said, “Hey, what am I…chopped liver?” Moments later the woman brought out a plate of exactly that, raw chopped liver, and dropped it in front of me. Judy laughed. So did I. I like a good joke even when it is on me.

Besides the open bars at our soirées, there were other attractions for the males…young, beautiful women. Lots of them. At a Florida event one of the coarser TFNGs observed, “Mullane, look at this party. It’s a potpourri of pussy.” I had been in enough officers’ clubs in my life to know that aviator wings had more babe-attracting power than Donald Trump’s twelve-inch wallet. The Navy SEAL insignia had the same effect. One SEAL told me that some of the young women who frequented their officers’ club were nicknamed Great White Sharks because they had swallowed so much SEAL meat. The male TFNGs were learning there was an even more powerful pheromone than jet-jockey wings and the SEAL insignia: the title astronaut. The fact that none of us had been any closer to space than an airline flight attendant didn’t seem to matter. To the space groupies the title was good enough. We males found ourselves surrounded by quivering cupcakes. Some were blatantly on the make, wearing spray-on clothes revealing high-beam nipples, and smiles that screamed, “Take me!” The few bachelor TFNGs must have experienced some Zen-like ecstasy. In fighter pilot talk, they operated in a “target-rich environment.” They should have just donned a full-body latex suit and gotten a “please take a number” dispenser.

Even the gold bands on the fingers of us married TFNGs were no deterrent to many of these women. They were equal opportunity groupies. Of course it was easy to see who was taking advantage of the situation. During the head count on the bus to return to a hotel, some MIAs would be noted. “He said not to wait for him. He got a ride.”

“Yeah, I’ll bet he got a ride” would be the rebuttal and a wave of snickers would follow.

It was also easy to see who was traumatized by the body swapping…the post-docs. I doubt any of them had ever met a married colleague with red-blasted “all-nighter” eyes, trailing the odor of alcohol and sex as he exited a motel room with a smiling young woman. Sensing their shock, Rick Hauck spoke to them on a bus returning from a meet-the-astronauts mingle. “Everybody needs to understand their moral standards aren’t necessarily shared by others in the group. If you see something on one of these trips that offends you, keep it to yourself. It’s none of your business. You could damage somebody’s marriage.”

How different was Rick’s speech from John Glenn’s “keep your peckers stowed” speech of twenty-five years earlier. As documented in The Right Stuff, Glenn cautioned his six peers against adulterous activity because of the scandal that would result if they were discovered. Now, a quarter century later, Rick’s comments were aimed at the spectators, not the perpetrators. Zip your mouth, not your pants. How the moral compass had swung. Adultery and divorce had lost their stigma. Neither was going to affect a TFNG’s career.

Philandering wasn’t the only thing shocking the post-docs on these trips. The art of alcohol abuse was another, and some military TFNGs were true Picassos.

“Who wants to try a flaming hooker?” was Hoot Gibson’s question at a Cape Canaveral bar one night. The recipe for the drink included a prodigious quantity of high-proof alcohol served in a brandy snifter. The drink was served on fire. I stuck around for this. Fire and intoxicated astronauts were material for David Letterman’s stupid human tricks.

As always, there had to be competition. Winners were those who could throw back the complete shot in one gulp without burning themselves, then slam down the glass with the residual alcohol still burning. Needless to say, it helped to be at the bulletproof level of intoxication before attempting this trick.

Like a circus barker, Hoot roped in a crowd of unsuspecting post-docs. None thought it was possible. Hoot smiled at the challenge, unstuck a cigar from his mouth, slicked his mustache into order, grabbed the flaming drink, and quaffed it back. He slammed down the glass. A blue flame hovered over it.

The gauntlet had been thrown down and several suckers readied themselves to duplicate the feat. The bartender served up more glasses and torched them. With fear-tightened faces the post-docs picked them up and hesitantly brought them to their lips. Soon a new smell mingled with the miasma of cigar smoke, perfume, and beer…burning facial hair. There were cries of pain as flaming alcohol scorched mustaches, lips, and chins. Through it all Hoot smiled and puffed his cigar with an expression saying, “Why do I do this?” Periodically he would down another drink to keep enticing the wounded scientists back to the flame. Each time he remained uninjured and the glass retained the blue flicker of success. Each time it emboldened another post-doc to attempt self-immolation. As the hour drew late, Hoot finally explained the trick. “You have to be fearless. Toss the entire glass. Don’t sip. There isn’t enough oxygen in your mouth to feed the flame so it’ll go out. If you do it fast enough, the flame will stay with the glass.”

The formula for success had come far too late. At breakfast the next morning a few embarrassed, miserably hungover post-docs sat at the table nursing multiple blisters on their faces. Some of those victims, no doubt, were dreading having to explain to their spouses the source of their injuries. “Honey…you’re not going to believe how this happened.” Indeed, they wouldn’t.

At every opportunity the military TFNGs also introduced the civilians to our lively, sometimes sick, sense of humor. During our tour of NASA’s California facilities, Steve Hawley made the mistake of asking Loren Shriver, Brewster Shaw, and me to dinner with a former colleague of his. In the course of the meal Steve’s friend, a male astrophysicist, became overawed with the Vietnam aspect of our past lives. Like me, Loren and Brewster were combat veterans of that conflict. The young scientist was relentless in probing for information on our experiences. “Mike, what did you do in Vietnam?”

I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to play with his head, so I seamlessly replied, “I flew a candy bomber.”

“A candy bomber? What was that?”

I had a fish on the line and began to reel it in. “In the villages the women and children would hide in their spider holes and trenches. You could never get them in the open. So I flew a plane loaded with canisters of candy and would swoop low over the villages and drop them nearby. This would bring the women and children out of their holes to scoop it up.” At this point in my story I pointed to Loren and Brewster. “And these guys would be thirty seconds behind me loaded wall to wall with napalm and would lay it down on those villagers. It got them every time.”

The scientist’s eyes widened in shock and outrage. I could just imagine the scene playing out in his brain: images of women and children dipped in jellied gasoline running around on fire. He snapped his head to Loren and Brewster, anticipating a denial. At this point I expected my twisted joke to come undone but Brewster and Loren picked up my lead. They assumed the steely eyes of professional killers and silently nodded in the affirmative. Every Vietnam atrocity this young scientist had ever heard of was now confirmed.

Hawley tried to calm him. “That’s bullshit. They make up these stories all the time. Don’t believe them. They didn’t kill any women and children.”

At that comment, Brewster shrugged. He didn’t say a word but his body language did: “You can believe what you want.” There was no doubt in any of our minds Steve’s friend walked away from dinner believing he had just socialized with war criminals.

On a trip to Los Angeles it was Jeff Hoffman who felt the sting. At breakfast he asked Brewster and me what we had done the night before. While we had actually been at a bar having a few beers, I immediately replied, “We visited that museum.”

“What museum?”

I made up an incredible story about a museum of “cultural art.” Loren Shriver picked up on my lead and added his own embellishments about famous paintings by Picasso and sculptures by Michelangelo. Dick Scobee joined in with more bullshit. Through it all Jeff expressed his disappointment at missing such a rare and wonderful opportunity. Finally he asked, “Where’s the museum?”

I replied, “It’s right next to the Christian Science Reading Room. We did some studying there before going to it.”

Even this over-the-top BS didn’t immediately register in Jeff’s brain. He continued to lament he had missed one of America’s greatest museums. A minute later he jerked up from his coffee. “You guys made all that up, didn’t you?” We laughed.

Jeff would prove to be the most enduring TFNG scientist. Over the years, many of the other civilians would become enamored with the military aviator mystique and would take on varying degrees of its form. But, to the very end, Jeff remained an unpolluted scientist—a fact that presented some great opportunities for us AD retards. I recall a Monday meeting in which he made an impassioned request for better attendance at an astronaut office science lecture series. Attendance was voluntary and few of the military TFNGs were showing up. Jeff begged, “Guys, we’re going to have coffee and doughnuts and the visiting professor really has some fascinating stuff to tell us. You really should be there.” He then expanded on the science that would be covered. I watched the pilots. Their faces were pictures of disinterest. The only thought running through their brains was I wonder where happy hour will be?

Jeff finally finished. “Do you have any questions?” He looked so hopefully at his tuned-out audience, it about broke my heart. He was desperate for any indication that we had paid the slightest attention to his pleas. “Any questions? Any questions at all?” But the room remained as silent as an OMS burn.

I slowly raised my hand and Jeff’s face lit up like a sunspot. “Yes, Mike.”

“I was just wondering…. What type of doughnuts are you going to have?” The walls of the room nearly blew apart with laughter. It was one of Jeff’s many lessons that the military aviator brain was a science wasteland.

Like Hoot with the flaming hookers, I wondered, Why do I do this? and smiled that I had. But I will ultimately pay the price. Besides Bible hell and feminist hell, I’ll also burn in post-doc hell.