Apollo

         In 1967 I was working on the Apollo project at the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston. I was a computer programmer working on the spacecraft simulator the astronauts used to train for the flight to the moon. We all had our own rental cars and I, in this, my first real job, was enthralled to be able to pay a little more than the rate we were reimbursed in order to drive the Shelby 350GTs and Corvettes that Hertz rented at the Houston airport. I finally settled on a nice blue Corvette that cost me $15 a week and happily bombed around in it. Our team worked second shift and what with the vagaries of computer and other problems I frequently got off at 9 or 10 PM at which time I would head off to my favorite watering holes which increasingly became the infamous Gaiety Supper Club in Galveston, about an hour’s drive south.

I totally adored the once elegant nightclub that was now nothing more than a whorehouse and bar. The sinister seamyness and rawness of life at the club enticed me night after night. I drank and became friendly with pimps with real six-shooters on their hips, met wild, outrageous customers, listened to story after story of the ‘working girls’, and in the wee hours of the morning after closing the club would frequently go out with Joyce, the owner, and her assistant Bobbie drinking until 8 or 9 AM. I mean I’m talking drinking 40 or 50 or 60 drinks sometimes! I could tell because my drinks were $1 a piece and I would only put $1 or $2 in the jukebox and I always started out with $50 or $60. I began drinking Hennessey brandy and soda at the club because I read in the New York Times Book Review that’s what Winston Churchill’s father drank. I thought buying the Sunday New York Times while in Houston would anchor my life in some way. Bobbie, Joyce and I once went down to Harold’s on the beach to drink beer at about 6 AM. Harold was an ex-Marine who loved us all and he didn’t close his place until God knows when. Joyce gave me directions and I just kept going and drove my Corvette right down on to the beach and starting driving doughnuts around Harold’s grass beer shack spraying sand all over and honking the horn until Harold woke up and woozily came out to greet us, all of us laughing like crazed hyenas which, of course, we were.

         Joyce was beautiful and truly wild. Half Cherokee Indian and half Mexican, she once got a load on at the club before it closed and Bobbie took a long scarf and tied her in her barstool so she wouldn’t fall off. One time I was just warming up, drinking my usual quick 4 or 5 drinks so I could begin to talk to everyone and Joyce looked at me across the bar and asked me how old I was. When I told her 24 her eyes welled up with tears and she blurted out, “Oh, you are just a baby. You look much older than that.” It was true and it was to be 15 long years before I entered my early adulthood and now in later years my childhood. About 4 years ago I was working as a baker in a girlfriend’s coffee shop and was talking in sketches about my life to one of the college students working there while we were on a break. He quickly grasped the drift and said, “You are living your life backwards.”

         I would drive, completely drunk, from Galveston back up to Webster, the Houston suburb where the Spacecraft Center is located. I always thought it humorous when I would get caught in traffic jams of those going to work when I would just be coming back ‘home’ to my hotel. Frequently, I would go into the coffee shop of the hotel and eat breakfast and ask the busboy to pour me what I thought was a hangover cure, ½ orange juice and ½ seltzer water. They hated to do this as it always fizzed all over the place and made a mess. After eating I would go up to my room, ask to be called at 3 PM, and totally crash, only to do the same thing over again the next night. And this was my week day schedule. On the weekends I would look for excitement. I’m sure I found it but I had begun to experience alcoholic blackouts and so I couldn’t remember. Saturday afternoons I’d frequent the boat drag races and drink beer with Red Adair’s guys who put out all those oil well fires. They all drove red Cadillac Eldorados.

I once came out of a blackout driving my Corvette on a desolate flat back country road in the early morning hours. It was like a surreal movie about someone else as I saw myself driving with one hand with a drink in the other. I looked down at the speedometer to see how fast I was going but couldn’t see the needle. I glanced again and finally saw that I had nearly pegged the needle near 120 or so and hadn’t noticed it. It took all my willpower to mentally force myself to slow down as I had no concept of danger or excess. When I finally got back to the hotel I turned the ignition off and passed out, frozen, with a drink in one hand and the keys in the other and stayed there for about 5 hours despite all the attempts of my co-workers to awaken me and get me out of the locked car. Although the hotel staff became increasingly used to my ‘schedule’, shall we say, I totally shocked the desk clerk one day when I called up and asked him what day it was. He told me and then I asked what time it was. He handled it all real well until I asked whether it was morning or evening.

         I also hung out in George’s, a small bar in a little town about 20 minutes south. I frequently ate dinner here and would go off to Galveston if there didn’t seem to be anything exciting about to happen at George’s. On night I struck up a conversation with the guy next to me at the bar and he began to tell me about his skydiving. Then he told me about his used airplane parts business. In south Texas this is a euphemism for smuggling in and out of Mexico. I became increasingly skeptical as we drank and drank. We began to speak of guns, which I love, especially machine guns. He knew as many technical details as I and told me he had an extensive machine gun collection. The last straw was when he told me of the large female black African lion he had at his house. I got angry and called him on it.

“Oh come on!”

“Yeah. You just come with me and I’ll show you.”

“Okay.”

Off we went in his Pontiac Safari station wagon. His wife icily greeted us and my friend escorted me into his den to wait while he and his wife went off to argue about where he had been all night. Every wall of the den was covered with machine guns and automatic weapons of all kinds, maybe forty or more. My friend returned and we went out back to a large cage where the lion was. I quietly got into the station wagon, the only safe place I could think of. The lion leapt up into the back of the wagon from the tailgate and we headed back to George’s. I wasn’t saying a word, obviously my bluff had been totally called. A few minutes down the road the lion was breathing heavily over my shoulder and was about to put her paw on me. I slunk down in my seat as much as possible and mumbled unintelligibly. My friend stopped, yelled at the lion and then went to the back of the wagon and tied her chain to the tailgate somehow so she stayed in back. We reentered George’s, lion first, my friend holding the chain second, and me a distant third. The three black girls who worked as barmaids and waitresses took one look at this procession and split out through the kitchen. Two of them never returned to work at all, ever. The last I saw, a drunk at the bar went to pet the lion on the head and the lion bit his hand. I slunk out the door and went ‘home’. It wasn’t until months later I ever recalled the incident as being unusual or out of the ordinary. What the hell, I was literally flying to the moon at work every day so my nocturnal activities didn’t seem at all out of the ordinary and I never spoke of my work when I was out carousing or of my carousing at work.