Magnificent Desolation (23 page)

How low does a person need to go before looking up? Where does an alcoholic need to be before hitting rock bottom? I don’t know. I’m sure it is different for every one of us, and the lines are often blurred. For me, I arrived at what I can now look back and see as a turning point, although at the time it was just another in a series of drunken disappointments.

Late one night during a relapse, I started drinking again. When I left the bar, I stopped by Kathy’s apartment, but she didn’t answer the door. I started pounding on the door in the middle of the night, completely
oblivious to the possibility that she might not be home. When nobody answered the door, I broke it down. Before long, two police cruisers pulled up outside the apartment. Kathy’s neighbors had called them. The officers subdued me, cuffed me, and led me to their car, “helping” me in a not-so-gentle fashion into the backseat of the police cruiser.

They took me downtown to the police station, and prepared to book me for disorderly conduct. As I looked around the police station, I attempted to do what I always did—play on my celebrity. The officers recognized me, and I could tell that they really didn’t want to book me, but they couldn’t let me back on the streets in my inebriated condition. “Do you have any friends you can call?” an officer suggested. “Someone who would be willing to take responsibility for you and get you home?”

I called Clancy to come and pick me up, but he refused. “If you want to drink, you are an adult. Go ahead and drink,” he said, “but don’t bother me.” He wasn’t angry at me for waking him in the middle of the night, or for stepping off the path he was helping me to follow. Clancy knew alcoholics, and he knew that most of us had a rather sporadic record when it came to establishing a new direction in life. I could hear the disappointment in his voice, but in my semi-inebriated state, I didn’t really care.

I hung up the phone and called another good friend I had come to know in AA, Dick Boolootian, asking him to come down to the jail and pick me up. Dick was a brilliant educator, a doctor of science, and a good man. When he walked in and saw me in jail, I thought he might weep. He didn’t rebuke me, scold me, or say anything all that profound, but the look in his eyes seared into my soul. He signed me out of the police station and took me home. Dick stayed for a while and tried to talk to me, but I was not conversant. “Go to bed, Buzz,” Dick said as he looked at me before going out the door. “Please.”

“I will, Dick. I will. I’m just going to sit up for a few more minutes and watch the news. I’ll call you later on.” Dick nodded and went out the door. After Dick went home, I couldn’t sleep, so I started looking around for a bottle. Before long, I found one and downed it. I had hit
bottom. Clancy and I stopped meeting regularly after that, and I began meeting with another Alcoholics Anonymous group in West LA.

I found that the shame of starting over again once I had been sober for a long stretch was a blow to my ego, a process that I did not care to repeat. It takes genuine humility to turn your life over to a higher power, and that may be why it is so difficult for some people to stop their destructive behaviors. Moreover, you can’t compromise. You can’t say, “Well, I’ve quit drinking hard liquor, but I’ll still have a few beers with the boys.” Half-measures are doomed to fail. I’ve heard of people who quit drinking liquor but literally drank Aqua Velva shaving lotion. Another lady chugged her perfume, all the while claiming that she hadn’t had a drink of alcohol.

Many people say, “I just can’t help it; I have to drink. I can’t get well.” I said that, too. The truth is, getting well is a choice. Yes, you can get well; it may take somebody bigger than you to help you, but people in far worse circumstances than yours have gotten well. You can, too.

It is not easy, especially when alcohol and depression are riding tandem on a person. According to the addiction expert Dr. Joe Takamine, the leading cause of suicide is depression; the second leading cause is alcohol. When those two cohorts gang up on the same person, the end result is often not pretty

During this time, I also met regularly with Dr. Pursch on an outpatient basis. By now Pursch’s reputation had grown even larger. Among his patients was Billy Carter, the brother of President Jimmy Carter, whom he had treated for alcoholism. Pursch affirmed that if I could stay sober, the rest of my life would come together. The doctor was right.

Finally, in October 1978, I laid down alcohol once and for all. My willingness to do so was not an act of willpower so much as a coming to the end of my own selfishness. I had always been self-centered, and because of my abilities or my intelligence or my fame, people had let me get away with it. When I began to see myself for what I really was, and had a group of fellow travelers who knew me for what I was—and were not impressed—I began to take baby steps toward getting well. Along
the way, I learned that to truly keep something and hold onto it, you have to give it away.

After I had been sober for about a year, Dr. Pursch asked me if I would visit with Betty Ford, the wife of President Gerald Ford. Mrs. Ford was going through the same Navy recovery program that I had gone through with Dr. Pursch, and I was glad to offer her some encouragement. After completing her program at the U.S. Naval Hospital in Long Beach, Mrs. Ford talked to her friends about the need for a treatment center that emphasized the special needs of women. Her good friend Leonard Firestone encouraged Mrs. Ford to pursue her dream, and in 1982 they cofounded the nonprofit Betty Ford Center in Rancho Mirage, California, where untold numbers of people have found help in overcoming alcoholism and chemical dependencies.

Dr. Pursch later asked me to visit with William Holden, which I was glad to do, but Bill didn’t respond well. The Oscar-winning actor who had appeared in such films as
The Bridge on the River Kwai, The Towering Inferno
, and
Network
was more concerned about getting back to the set of a movie he was making than he was about taking seriously his own recovery program. Stefanie Powers, his companion at the time, tried to help him, and she meant well, but even she couldn’t find a way to keep Bill from walking out on the opportunity to get help. Bill eventually left the program and went back to drinking. Sadly, on November 16, 1981, Bill fell down drunk in his own home, lacerating his head and bleeding to death. When his body was discovered more than four days later, doctors estimated that he had been conscious for more than thirty minutes after the fall, but didn’t recognize the seriousness of his injury due to the level of alcohol in his system. When I heard about Bill’s death, it saddened me deeply. I knew that could have easily been me had it not been for the turnaround I had experienced in my life.

And I was indeed a very,
very
grateful man.

   11

A
S THE TENTH ANNIVERSARY OF THE
A
POLLO
11
MOON LAND
ing approached, I was experiencing a reawakening in my own life. Following my personal epiphany in October 1978, the milestone from which I dated my sobriety, I was ready to plunge back into helping America’s space program be more farsighted and productive. I also felt compelled to help others fight their battles with depression and alcoholism. Perhaps they could learn from what I had experienced.

I had once been known as the “best scientific mind in space” according to
Life
magazine. I even carried a slide rule on the Gemini 12 flight in case I needed to correct the computer on the rendezvous maneuvers. That’s because I knew if the computer said we were twenty feet out of plane, I could count on ten of that, but not all twenty I could pretty much figure out rendezvous maneuvers in my head.

But the ten years since my moonwalk were not filled with achievements, bold accomplishments, and grand acclamations. It had been my decade of personal hell. By 1979, I felt that all that was changing for me. I still suffered occasional setbacks from depression, but overall my life was on an upswing. What helped me most was following the recommendations in the Alcoholics Anonymous “Big Book”—the book in which the twelve-step recovery program was originally outlined—to get my eyes off myself and start helping somebody else. I hoped to do
that by attending classes and seminars in which I could study to become a consultant on alcoholism. I was forty-nine years old when I started a one-week course in June 1979, at the University of Utah’s School on Alcoholism and Other Drug Dependencies. I went from there to Rutgers University in New Jersey for a three-week-long-summer-school course at the Center for Alcohol Studies. Both of these courses provided tremendous keys for understanding my own alcoholism and recognizing alcoholic tendencies in others.

As part of our class work at Rutgers, I was assigned to do a project report on some facet of alcoholism. I chose the delicate subject of alcohol’s effects on pilots, specifically commercial airline pilots; and the employee programs designed to combat alcoholism at Eastern Airlines. Flying and alcohol seemed to go together for many pilots. I knew that to be true. When I was flying combat missions in Korea and later practicing to deliver nuclear bombs from our bases in Germany and other parts of the world, my first stop after landing was the officers’ club. Of course, a smart pilot doesn’t dare be impaired when flying, but once out of the cockpit and away from the stress, it is time to relax and let your hair down. Even as an astronaut, I drank regularly and heavily right up to a few days before lifting off for the moon. So I was acutely aware of how pilots tended to relax with the help of alcohol, and I also knew how addictive misusing alcohol could become.

My choice to study the employee programs at Eastern Airlines had not been arbitrary or accidental. My aunt had been a flight attendant with Eastern, and had later married a vice president of the company. Additionally, Eastern’s CEO and chairman of the board was none other than former astronaut Frank Borman. I thought for sure I’d be welcomed to do my research with Eastern.

I wasn’t. When I went to Eastern’s headquarters in Miami to explore what the airline was doing to help pilots who might have alcohol problems, I was informed that Frank had just revised Eastern’s procedures. He was very standoffish about me sticking my nose in his programs. Frank and I had always been competitive during our stints at NASA, but I was still somewhat surprised at the lack of cooperation.
Unknown to me at the time, Frank was already experiencing difficulties with his unionized employees, troubles that would eventually lead to the airline being bought out by Texas Air. No wonder he didn’t appreciate my asking what treatment programs they offered to help the alcoholics in his planes!

S
HORTLY AFTER COMPLETING
my program at Rutgers, I returned to California to join Neil Armstrong and Mike Collins at a private Apollo 11 tenth anniversary celebration at the home of ex-President Richard Nixon in San Clemente. A few days later I headed back to Washington, D.C., to celebrate NASA’s version of the tenth anniversary of the initial Apollo moon landing. Other than the party at the Nixons’, the tenth anniversary celebration was the first time I had seen Neil or Mike since the fifth anniversary. By July 20, 1979, twenty-four Apollo astronauts had reached the moon, and twelve of us had actually walked on the surface. For the milestone anniversaries of the initial landing, NASA liked to pull all of us back together, and it was always good to see everyone.

Those who attended the anniversary celebration were surprised when I showed up with my former wife, Joan. We were living our separate lives by now, with the only contact between us regarding matters pertaining to our children. I had dated a few women since our divorce, and could no doubt have invited someone to come along to Washington, D.C., but when it came time for the Apollo 11 anniversary, I felt that Joan deserved to be there as much as anybody. For all the sacrifices she made and for the price she paid, she should be able to join in the celebration, too. Besides, she had remained friends with most of the astronauts’ wives, so it would be a special treat for her to be reunited with them.

I was pleased people recognized that Joan and I were still friendly toward one another, that we harbored no resentments or bitterness; several remarked that it was refreshing to see a divorced couple getting along so well. Nevertheless, when anyone noticed the two of us together,
I was quick to let them know that we had no intentions of reconciling and remarrying.

A lot had happened in our lives since that warm Florida morning on July 16, 1969, when Neil, Mike, and I had set out from Launch Pad 39-A. Our initial landing and the five additional lunar landings to follow ours—the more scientifically exciting trips in my estimation— yielded an enormous amount of information, but, more important, demonstrated to the world the power of American technology once we set our sights on a goal.

Neil was now an aerospace engineering professor at the University of Cincinnati, as well as a consultant to Chrysler. He still liked to dabble in test flights of business jets occasionally, too. Mike Collins had left NASA shortly after our mission to work for the U.S. State Department. He later moved to the Smithsonian Institution, where he directed the creation of the National Air and Space Museum, one of the most popular exhibits in Washington, D.C. By 1979, Mike was one of the top people at the Smithsonian.

And me? I didn’t know what I was doing, or where I was going. But I smiled nonetheless when someone at the anniversary would come up and say, “Gee, Buzz, you look great. What’s been going on in your life since walking on the moon and experiencing that magnificent desolation?” I had finally come to a great sense of peace in overcoming the struggles I had faced, and the changes I had experienced since Apollo 11.

The space program itself had changed tremendously in a decade. The genius Wernher von Braun, who developed the mighty Saturn V rocket that had lifted us toward the moon, had passed away. Americans had not flown in space for more than four years, and there was some question about when the space shuttle would actually be ready to fly, although NASA hoped that it could make its initial forays into space in 1980. At the time of the tenth anniversary, I knew that we had no plans to return to the moon for at least another decade, if then.

Nevertheless, the festivities in Washington, D.C., were upbeat, warm, and inspiring. President Jimmy Carter honored Neil, Mike, and
me at a White House ceremony, followed by a public ceremony on the Mall, where we received a standing ovation from the crowd. In the National Air and Space Museum, we answered the usual questions from the media, including the inevitable “Would you go again?” Neil said that he would take the flight again “in a minute.” Mike Collins said he would go again, too, but then quipped, “But it would take more than a minute to get ready.” When the spotlight fell on me, my mind quickly flashed back through the stress of the world tour, the subsequent mental depression, alcoholism, and the breakup of two marriages in the last decade, and I said, “I’m not sure I would go again.”

In truth, I was more passionate about getting other people into space than going back myself. That was one of the positive aspects I saw in the space shuttle. It held the potential for more than just a few highly trained specialists to travel into space. The shuttle was basically a space truck with a cab that could seat seven and a cargo hold large enough to carry a Greyhound bus and more. The plan was to fly to and from orbit every few weeks, hauling up satellites and other equipment, as well as men and women to a permanent space station. My hope was that not just pilots, scientists, and engineers would go into space, but that one day ordinary citizens—doctors, accountants, musicians, writers, and artists would experience space, too.

That’s why in 1979 I got excited about creating a program along with Dr. Dick Boolootian to help United Airlines 727 pilots learn how to fly the space shuttle. The shuttle system was little more than a huge rocket booster attached to a winged orbiter space vehicle that looked and operated much like an airplane once the initial fuel tanks and boosters were gone, so it was only logical that with a little training, most pilots could learn how to fly a shuttle. Although such an idea may seem absurd now, at that time it made sense, especially when the shuttle began to fly in April 1981. I spent hours on end in Dick Boolootian’s office bouncing ideas off him, wondering how we could develop space travel for ordinary folks. Others proposed that commercial entities and private enterprises might even want to purchase a space shuttle. Unfortunately, those kinds of creative ideas were quickly squelched
after the
Challenger
disaster in 1986. But from 1979 to 1981, my brain was firing on all pistons, and what fueled the engine was my passion to explore space.

I had been sober for several years now, and while I still struggled with brief periods of depression, I was inspired by the possibilities of how I might use my talents to help renew America’s passion for space exploration.

In February 1982, I became particularly enamored with the idea of Americans going back to the moon. I attended several conferences at the California Space Institute in San Diego, headed up by Jim Arnold, the same organization led today by America’s first woman astronaut, Sally Ride. I had some contacts with General Dynamics regarding the possibilities of establishing a more permanent lunar presence. At another conference in Houston, Dave Criswell made a powerful presentation on the possibility of beaming solar energy back from the moon. Dave got everyone excited about installing rows of solar panels on the moon’s surface that would be powerful enough to send power to satellite relays and back to Earth. I was thrilled that creative minds were finally thinking about sound economic and practical reasons for going to another celestial body to do more than simply stomp around, do a few experiments, plant some flags, and kick up some dust.

I knew I could apply my knowledge of orbital mechanics to develop techniques for a spacecraft to travel continually between Earth and the moon in continuous cycling orbits, almost as though it were a trolley on an invisible pulley system drawing the craft back and forth. Now, if we could just keep doing that, cycling back and forth, we could deliver people, products, food and supplies, more technology, and machinery using hardly any fuel for the translunar spacecraft. You just hop on. It’s only three and a half to four days away. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see how easily a system like that could work; well, maybe it does. I called my spacecraft transit concept a “cycler,” and I was excited about the possibilities.

On July 22, 1984, in conjunction with the fifteenth anniversary of Apollo 11, I penned an op-ed piece in the
Los Angeles Times
with the
title, “Let’s Return to the Moon for Good.” I felt the time was opportune to send explorers back to its dusty surface, but this time we would establish a lunar base and develop the moon’s natural resources in support of space operations. To establish an ongoing method of lunar sorties, I introduced my cycler concept of “coasting trajectories in a translunar rendezvous” space transport system. In one way of looking at it, I saw the moon as one big resource, a natural space station, the ultimate space station orbiting the Earth—and one that already had six American flags on it!