Tom Wolfe - The Right Stuff

It began to dawn on the boys and their wives that these people, the businessmen and the politicians, looked upon the opening of the Manned Spacecraft Center and the arrival of the astronauts as about the biggest thing in Houston history. Neiman-Marcus and all the other high-tone stores, the great banks and museums and other grand institutions, all the class, all the Culture, were in Dallas. By Houston lights Dallas was Paris, once you set your watch to Central Standard, and Houston was nothing but oil and hard grabbers. The space program and the seven Mercury astronauts were going to make Boom Town respectable, legitimate, a part of America's soul. So the big parade began with Representative Albert Thomas's waving ten-gallon hat signaling the start of the redemption of Houston.

The seven pilots and their wives thought they had seen every sort of parade there was, but this one was sui generis . There were thousands of people lining the streets. They did not make a sound, however. They stood there four and five deep at the curbs, sweating and staring. They sweated a river and they stared ropes. They just stared and sweated. The seven lads, each in his emblazoned convertible, were standing up grinning and waving, and the wives were smiling and waving, and the children were smiling and looking around—everyone was doing the usual—and the crowds just stared back. They didn't even smile. They looked at them with a morose curiosity, as if they were prisoners of war or had come from Alpha Centauri and no one was sure whether or not they comprehended the local lingo. Every now and then some very old person would wave and yell something hearty and encouraging, but the rest were just planted there in the sun like tarbabies. Of course, anyone fool enough to stand around in the asphalt mush of Downtown at noon watching a parade was obviously defective to begin with. The parade plowed on, however, through wave after wave of catatonia and rippling lassitude.

After about an hour of this, the fellows and their families noticed with considerable misgiving that the parade was heading back into that hole in the ground underneath the Coliseum. The air conditioning hit them like a wall. Everybody's bone marrow congealed. It made you feel like your teeth were loose. It turned out that this was where the little cocktail party was going to take place: in the Houston Coliseum. They led them up to the floor of the Coliseum, which was like a great indoor bowl. There were thousands of people milling around and some sort of incredible smell and a storm of voices and the occasional insane cackle. There were five thousand extremely loud people on the floor eager to tear into roast cow with both hands and wash it down with bourbon whiskey. The air was filled with the stench of burning cattle. They had set up about ten barbecue pits in there, and they were roasting thirty animals. Five thousand businessmen and politicians and their better halves, fresh from the 100-degree horrors of Downtown in July, couldn't wait to sink their faces in it. It was a Texas barbecue, Houston-style.

First they took the seven brave lads and their wives and children up onto a stage that had been set up at one end of the arena, and there was a little welcoming ceremony in which they introduced them one by one, and a great many politicians and businessmen made speeches. All the while the great cow carcasses sizzled and popped and the smoke of the burning meat was wafted here and there in the chilly currents of the air conditioning. Only the extreme cold kept you from throwing up. The ganglia of the solar plexus were frozen. The wives tried to be polite, but it was a losing game. The children were squirming up on the stage and the wives were getting up and whispering to any locals they could get close to. The children were in extremis . They hadn't been near a bathroom for hours. The wives were frantically trying to find out where the Johns were in this place.

Unfortunately, now came the part where they were just supposed to relax, eat a side of beef and a peck of kidney beans sinking in gravy, drink a little whiskey, and shake hands with the good folks and make themselves at home. So they led them back out onto the floor of the arena, cleared out a space, got some folding chairs for them and some paper plates loaded with huge joints of Texas steer, and then put a lineup of folding chairs around the whole group of them, in a circle, on the order of a stockade, and around the stockade they put a ring of Texas Rangers, facing outward, toward the crowd. The crowd was now lining up, by the hundreds, at the barbecue pits, getting great lubricated hunks of beef on paper plates… and more whiskey. Then they took seats in the stands, thousands of them, and looked down at the stockade floor. This was the main event, the reception, the Big Howdy: five thousand people, VIPs one and all, sitting up in the stands of the Houston Coliseum amid the burning cattle… watching the astronauts eat .

Certain VIPs with clout, however, were allowed to enter the stockade through the ring of Rangers and greet the lads and their wives personally as they juggled the great maroon hunks of meat. It was always someone such as Herb Snout from Kar Kastle, and he would come up and say: "Hi, there! Herb Snout! Kar Kastle! Listen! We're damned glad to have you folks here, just damned glad, goddamn it!" And then he would turn to one of the wives, whose hands were so full of cow meat she couldn't budge, and he would bend down and turn on a huge Karo-syrup grin, to show his deference to the ladies, and say in a suddenly huge voice that would make the poor startled woman drop the reeking maroon all over her lap: "Hi, there, little lady! Just damned glad to see you , too!" And then he'd give a huge horrible wink that would practically implode his eye, and he'd say, "We've heard a lot of good things about you gals, a lot of good things"—all with this eye-wrenching wink.

After a while, there were Herb Snouts and Gurney Frinks all over the place and the huge Hereford joints were sliding down every leg and splashing in the puddles of whiskey on the floor, and five thousand spectators watched their struggling jaws, and the smoke and the babble filled the air and the children screamed for mercy and relief. Just then, when the madness seemed to have outdone itself once and for all, a band struck up and the houselights dimmed and a spotlight searched out the stage and a show began and a mighty hearty voice boomed out over the p.a. system: "Ladies and gentlemen… in honor of our mighty special guests and mighty fine new neighbors, we are proud to present… Miss Sally Rand!"

The band struck up "Sugar Blues"… much raunchy high-hatting of the trumpets… Oh, owwwwwwwwwwahwahwah … and out into the spotlight pranced an ancient woman with yellow hair and a white mask of a face… Her flesh looked like the meat of a casaba melon in the winter… She carried some enormous plumed fans… She began her famous striptease act… Sally Rand!… who had been an aging but still famous stripper when the seven brave lads were in their teens, during the Depression… Oh-owwwwwwwww wahwahwah … and she winked and minced about and took off a little here and covered up a little there and shook her ancient haunches at the seven single-combat warriors. It was electrifying. It was quite beyond sex, show business, and either the sins or rigors of the flesh. It was two o'clock in the afternoon on the Fourth of July, and the cows burned on, and the whiskey roared goddamned glad to see you and the Venus de Houston shook her fanny in an utterly baffling blessing over it all.

Just three years ago Rene had still been in that dogged military wife's frame of mind in which you gladly spent three days sanding a slab of monkeypod, until your hands were raw, to save the fabulous sum of ninety-five dollars. When Scott had run up a fifty-dollar telephone bill calling her from Washington, Albuquerque, and Dayton during the testing back in 1959, it had seemed like the end of the world. Fifty dollars! That was the food budget for a month ! That was three years ago. Now she was in the living room of her own house—custom-made, not a tract home—on a lake, underneath the live oak and the pines. She and Annie Glenn had flown down to Houston one weekend from Washington and picked out lots, just like that, but they turned out to be in the best spot in the vicinity of the Space Center, a development called Timber Cove. The Schirras and Grissoms had moved into the same neighborhood. With admirable foresight, as it turned out, they had built their houses so that they opened up in the back to look out on the water and the trees, while on the side facing the street they were practically blank walls of brick. They had barely moved the first stick of furniture in when the tour buses started arriving, plus the freelance tourists in cars. They were extraordinary, these people. Sometimes you could hear the loudspeaker inside the bus. You could hear the tour guide saving, "This is the home of Scott Carpenter, the second Mercury astronaut to fly in earth orbit in outer space." Sometimes people would get out and grab handfuls of grass from your lawn. They'd get back on the bus with the miserable little green sprouts sticking out of their fingers. They believed in magic. Sometimes people would drive up, get out, stare at the house as if waiting for something to happen, and then walk up to the door and ring the bell and say: "We hate to bother you, but do you suppose you could send one of your children out so we could have our pictures taken with him?" And yet they weren't like the fans of movie stars. There was no frenzy. They thought they were really being considerate by not asking you to come out for the snapshot session yourself. They really meant it. They had more of the attitude of being at a living shrine.