Tom Wolfe - The Right Stuff

And Glenn could see that after eight, ten, twelve hours of lying cooped up in the procedures trainer out in Hangar S, most of his brethren were ready to provide the magic. No matter what time it was, it was beer-call time, as they said in the Air Force, and they would get in their cars and go barreling into Cocoa Beach for the endless, seamless party. And what lively cries and laughter would be rising up on all sides as the silvery moon reflected drunkenly on the chlorine blue of the motel pools! And what animated revelers were to be found! There were NASA people and the contractors and their people, and there were the Germans. Although they scrupulously avoided publicity, many of Wernher von Braun's team of V-2 experts had important jobs at the Cape and were happy to find a fraternal atmosphere in which they could take off their official long faces and let the funny bone out for a tap dance or two. And many were the midsummer nights in Cocoa Beach, nights so hot and salty that the No See'um bugs were sluggish, when sizzling gluhwein materialized as if from out of a time warp and drunken Germans could be heard pummeling the piano in the cocktail lounge and singing the "Horst Wessel Song"! It was like some improbable echo of Pancho's along the hardtack Florida littoral. Oh, yes, it was! As at Pancho's, the most marvelous lively young cookies were materializing also, and they were just there , waiting beside the motel pools, when one arrived, young juicy girls with stand-up jugs and full-sprung thighs and conformations so taut and silky that the very sight of them practically pulled a man into the delta of priapic delirium. Some of them had come to work for the contractors, some to work for NASA, some to work for this or that business that was starting up in the little boom town—and some simply got there, materialized . And when an astronaut arrived, it was as if they dropped out of the sky or rose up from out of the Bermuda grass. In any event, they were always there and ready.

As even Glenn could tell, it was enough just to be an astronaut, whether a handsome devil like Scott Carpenter or a gruff little fellow like Gus Grissom. As soon as Gus arrived at the Cape, he would put on clothes that were Low Rent even by Cocoa Beach standards. Gus and Deke both wore these outfits. You could see them tooling around the Strip in Cocoa Beach in their Ban-Lon shirts and baggy pants. The atmosphere was casual at Cocoa Beach, but Gus and Deke knew how to squeeze casual until it screamed for mercy. They reminded you, in a way, of those fellows whom everyone growing up in America had seen at one time or another, those fellows from the neighborhood who wear sport shirts designed in weird blooms and streaks of tubercular blue and runny-egg yellow hanging out over pants the color of a fifteen-cent cigar, with balloon seats and pleats and narrow cuffs that stop three or four inches above the ground, the better to reveal their olive-green GI socks and black bulb-toed bluchers, as they head off to the Republic Auto Parts store for a set of shock-absorber pads so they can prop up the 1953 Hudson Hornet on some cinderblocks and spend Saturday and Sunday underneath it beefing up the suspension. Gus and Deke made a perfect pair, even down to their names. Not even the sight of the boys in their Mechanics & Tradesmen's Ban-Lon could turn off the girls to the presence of the astronauts.

There were juicy little girls going around saying, "Well, four down, three to go!" or whatever—the figures varied—and laughing like mad. Everybody knew what they meant but only halfway believed them. There was no question but that the temptations for the Fighter Jock Away from Home were enormous. It was all so easy and casual on these midsummer nights. Before the missiles came to the Cape, Cocoa Beach was a hard-shelled Baptist stronghold with more churches than gasoline stations, and practically all of them were of the pietistic or Dissenting Protestant variety. But the new Cocoa Beach, the Project Mercury boom town, was part of the new face of the 1960's: the little town whose life was completely keyed to the automobile. Naturally, nobody built hotels in Cocoa Beach, only motels; and when they built apartment houses, they built them like motels, so that you could drive up to your own door. At neither the motels nor the apartment houses did you have to go through a public lobby to get to your room. A minor architectural note, one might say—and yet in Cocoa Beach, like so many towns of the new era, this one fact did more than the pill to encourage what would later be rather primly named "the sexual revolution."

There had always been a part of the Military Wife's Compact that tacitly granted an officer a little latitude in this area. Naturally, there would be times when a military man would be sent far from home, perhaps for extended periods, and he might find it necessary to satisfy his healthy manly urges on these far-off terrains. There was even the implication that such urges were a good sign of a fighting man's virility. So the wife and the military itself would avert their eyes and stand mute—so long as the officer caused no scandal and did nothing to shake the solidity of his marriage and his family. This tradition had originated, of course, long before the airplane made it possible for an officer to reach the distant terrain in two or three hours for a long weekend or an overnight stand. Traditions often began on a moment's notice in the military; but they took a long time to die, and this one was in no danger of dying at Cocoa Beach.

That much John Glenn could discern also… and such was the background of the Konakai Seance.

Every now and then the seven pilots would shut the door of their office at Langley, and not even the secretary could come in. If anybody wanted to know what was going on in there, they were told that the astronauts were having a seance. A seance ? Oh, it's just a name they thought up for a meeting in which they try to come up with a common position, a consensus, concerning certain problems. The implication was that the problems were mostly technical in nature. Wally Schirra would mention that they had had a seance before going to the engineers and insisting on changes in the design of the instrument panel of the Mercury capsule. The idea was to give the corps of astronauts some of the solidity of a squadron. The seven of them might have their rivalries, their differences in backgrounds and temperaments and approaches to the job at hand, but they should be able to arrive at firm decisions as a group, no matter how acrimonious the debate might be, and then close ranks and pull together, one for all, all for one. Whether or not the session at the Konakai qualified as a seance by the usual standards was hard to say. But God knows it dealt with a recurrent problem… and the debate was acrimonious…

One day all seven of them were out in San Diego for a tour of the Convair plant and a look at the latest progress on the Atlas rocket. Convair wanted to do it up right and had treated them all to their own rooms at the Konakai, a rather high-toned hotel built in a Polynesian motif on Shelter Island, overlooking the Pacific. It so happened that Scott Carpenter had drawn a room with a double bed. That evening one of the boys approached him in a comradely fashion and said that his room had two twin beds, whereas in fact he was going to require a double bed for the evening. Would Scott mind switching rooms? It was all the same to Scott, and so they switched rooms. Scott mentioned it to his buddy John Glenn with a smile, as an amusing local note, and thought no more about it.

The next day the seven of them were in the living room of a suite that had been set aside for their use, when Glenn launched into a lecture, along the following lines: the playing around with the girls, the cookies, had gotten out of hand. He knew, and they knew, that it could blow up into something very unfortunate. They were all squarely in the public eye. They had the opportunity of a lifetime, and he was sorry but he just wasn't going to stand by and let other people compromise the whole thing because they couldn't keep their pants sapped.