by Tom Wolfe
One of the tests at Lovelace was an examination of the prostate gland. There was nothing exotic about this, of course; it was a standard part of the complete physical for men. The doctor puts a rubber sleeve on a finger and slips the finger up the subject’s rectum and presses the prostate, looking for signs of swelling, infection, and so on. But several men in Conrad’s group had come back from the prostate examination gasping with pain and calling the doctor a sadistic little pervert and worse. He had prodded the prostate with such force a couple of them had passed blood.
Conrad goes into the room, and sure enough, the man reams him so hard the pain brings him to his knees.
“What the hell!—”
Conrad comes up swinging, but an orderly, a huge monster, immediately grabs him, and Conrad can’t move. The doctor looks at him blankly, as if he’s a vet and Conrad’s a barking dog.
The probings of the bowels seemed to be endless, full proctosigmoidoscope examinations, the works. These things were never pleasant; in fact, they were a bit humiliating, involving, as they did, various things being shoved up your tail. The Lovelace Clinic specialty seemed to be the exacting of maximum indignity from each procedure. The pilots had never run into anything like this before. Not only that, before each ream-out you had to report to the clinic at seven o’clock in the morning and give yourself an enema. Up yours! seemed to be the motto of the Lovelace Clinic—and they even made you do it to yourself. So Conrad reports at seven one morning and gives himself the enema. He’s supposed to undergo a lower gastrointestinal tract examination that morning. In the so-called lower G.I. examination, barium is pumped into the subject’s bowels; then a little hose with a balloon on the end of it is inserted in the rectum, and the balloon is inflated, blocking the canal to keep the barium from forcing its way out before the radiologist can complete his examination. After the examination, like everyone who has ever been through the procedure, Conrad now feels as if there are eighty-five pounds of barium in his intestines and they are about to explode. The Smocks inform him that there is no john on this floor. He’s supposed to pick up the tube that is coming out of his rectum and follow an orderly, who will lead him to a john two floors below. On the tube there is a clamp, and he can release the clamp, deflating the balloon, at the proper time. It’s unbelievable! To try to walk, with this explosive load sloshing about in your pelvic saddle, is agony. Nevertheless, Conrad picks up the tube and follows the orderly. Conrad has on only the standard bed patient’s tunic, the angel robes, open up the back. The tube leading out of his tail to the balloon gizmo is so short that he has to hunch over to about two feet off the floor to carry it in front of him. His tail is now, as the saying goes, flapping in the breeze, with a tube coming out of it. The orderly has on red cowboy boots. Conrad is intensely aware of that fact, because he is now hunched over so far that his eyes hit the orderly at about calf level. He’s hunched over, with his tail in the breeze, scuttling like a crab after a pair of red cowboy boots. Out into a corridor they go, an ordinary public corridor, the full-moon hunchback and the red cowboy boots, amid men, women, children, nurses, nuns, the lot. The red cowboy boots are beginning to trot along like mad. The orderly is no fool. He’s been through this before. He’s been through the whole disaster. He’s seen the explosions. Time is of the essence. There’s a hunchback stick of dynamite behind him. To Conrad it becomes more incredible every step of the way. They actually have to go down an elevator—full of sane people—and do their crazy tango through another public hallway—agog with normal human beings—before finally reaching the goddamned john.
Later that day Conrad received, once more, instructions to report to the clinic at seven the next morning to give himself an enema. The next thing the people in the administrative office of the clinic knew, a small but enraged young man was storming into the office of General Schwichtenberg himself, waving a great flaccid flamingo-pink enema bag and hose like some sort of obese whip. As he waved it, it gurgled.
The enema bag came slamming down on the general’s desk. It landed with a tremendous plop and then began gurgling and sighing.
“General Schwichtenberg,” said Conrad, “you’re looking at a man who has given himself his last enema. If you want enemas from me, from now on you can come get ’em yourself. You can take this bag and give it to a nurse and send her over—”
Just you—
“—and let her do the honors. I’ve given myself my last enema. Either things shape up around here, or I ship out.”
The general stared at the great flamingo bag, which lay there heaving and wheezing on his desk, and then he stared at Conrad. The general seemed appalled … All the same it wouldn’t do anybody any good, least of all the Lovelace Clinic, if one of the candidates pulled out, firing broadsides at the operation. The general started trying to mollify this vision of enema rage.
“Now, Lieutenant,” he said, “I know this hasn’t been pleasant. This is probably the toughest examination you’ll ever have to go through in your life, but as you know, it’s for a project of utmost importance. The project needs men like yourself. You have a compact build, and every pound saved in Project Mercury can be critical.”
And so forth and so on. He kept spraying Conrad’s fire.
“All the same, General, I’ve given myself my last enema.”
Word of the Enema Bag Showdown spread rapidly among the other candidates, and they were delighted to hear about it. Practically all of them had wanted to do something of the sort. It wasn’t just that the testing procedures were unpleasant; the entire atmosphere of the testing constituted an affront. There was something … decidedly out of joint about it. Pilots and doctors were natural enemies, of course, at least as pilots saw it. The flight surgeon was pretty much kept in his place in the service. His only real purpose was to tend to pilots and keep ’em flying. He was an attendant to the pilots’ vital stuff. In fact, flight surgeons were encouraged to fly back-seat with fighter pilots from time to time, so as to understand what stresses and righteous stuff the job entailed. Regardless of how much he thought of himself, no flight surgeon dared position himself above the pilots in his squadron in the way he conducted himself before them: i.e., it was hard for him to be a consummate panjandrum, the way the typical civilian doctor was.
But at Lovelace, in the testing for Project Mercury, the natural order was turned upside down. These people not only did not treat them as righteous pilots, they did not treat them as pilots of any sort. They never even alluded to the fact that they were pilots. An irksome thought was beginning to intrude. In the competition for astronaut the kind of stuff you were made of as a pilot didn’t count for a goddamned thing. They were looking for a certain type of animal who registered bingo on the meter. You wouldn’t win this competition in the air. If you won it, it would be right here on the examination table in the land of the rubber tubes.
Yes, the boys were delighted when Conrad finally told off General Schwichtenberg. Attaboy, Pete! At the same time, they were quite content to let the credit for the Lab Rat Revolt fall to Conrad and to him alone.
At Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, where they went for the psychological and stress testing, the air of secrecy was even more pronounced than at Lovelace. At Wright-Patterson they went through the testing in groups of eight. They were billeted off to themselves at the BOQ, the Bachelor Officers Quarters. If they had to call for anything on the base, they were not to refer to themselves by name. Instead, each of them had a number. Conrad was “Number 7.” If he needed a car to take him from one place to another, to keep an appointment, he was supposed to ring up the car pool and say only: “This is Number Seven. I need a car …”
The testing, on the other hand, seemed—at first—more like what a self-respecting fighter jock might expect. They gave the candidate an oxygen mask and a partial-pressure suit and put him in an air-pressure chamber and reduced the pressure until an altitude of 65,000 feet was simulated. It made one feel as if his entire body were being squeezed by thongs, and he had
to force his breath out in order to bring new oxygen into his lungs. Part of the stress was in the fact that they didn’t tell him how long he had to stay there. They put each man in a small, pitch-black, windowless, soundproofed room—a “sensory deprivation chamber”—and locked the door, again without telling him how long he would have to stay there. It turned out to be three hours. They strapped each man into a huge human milkshake apparatus that vibrated the body at tremendous amplitudes and bombarded it with high-energy sound, some of it at excruciating frequencies. They put each man at the console of a machine called “the idiot box.” It was like a simulator or a trainer. There were fourteen different signals that the candidate was supposed to respond to in different ways by pressing buttons or throwing switches; but the lights began lighting up so fast no human being could possibly keep up with them. This appeared to be not only a test of reaction times but of perseverance or ability to cope with frustration.
No, there was nothing wrong with tests of this sort. Nevertheless, the atmosphere around them was a bit … off. Psychiatrists were running the show at Wright-Patterson. Every inch of the way there were psychiatrists and psychologists standing over you taking notes and giving you little jot’em’n’dot’em tests. Before they put you in the Human Milkshake, some functionary in a white smock would present you with a series of numbered dots on a piece of paper on a clipboard and you were supposed to take a pencil and connect the dots so that the numbers beside them added up to certain sums. Then when you got out of the machine, the White Smock character would give you the same test again, presumably to see if the physical experience had impaired your ability to calculate. And that was all right, too. But they also had people staring at the candidate the whole time and taking notes. They took notes in little spiral notebooks. Every gesture you made, every tic, twitch, smile, stare, frown, every time you rubbed your nose—there was some White Smock standing by jotting it down in a notebook.
One of the most assiduous of the monitors was a psychologist, a woman named Dr. Gladys J. Loring—as Conrad could tell from the nameplate on her smock. Gladys J. Loring was beginning to annoy him intensely. Every time he turned around she seemed to be standing there staring at him, without a word, staring at him with utter White Smock detachment, as if he were a frog, a rabbit, a rat, a gerbil, a guinea pig, or some other lab animal, scribbling furiously in her notebook. For days she had been watching him, and they had never even been introduced. One day Conrad suddenly looked her straight in the eye and said: “Gladys! What … are … you … writing … in … your … notebook!”
Dr. Gladys J. Loring looked at him as if he were a flatworm. All she did was make another notation of the specimen’s behavior in her notebook.
To fighter jocks it was bad enough to have doctors of any sort as your final judges. To find psychologists and psychiatrists positioned above you in this manner was irritating in the extreme. Military pilots, almost to a man, perceived psychiatry as a pseudo-science. They regarded the military psychiatrist as the modern and unusually bat-brained version of the chaplain. But the shrink could be dealt with. You just turned on the charm—lit up the halo of the right stuff—and did some prudent lying.
In the interviews for this job of “astronaut,” as in other situations, the psychiatrists would get on the subject of the hazards of the assignment, the unknowns, the potentially high risk, and then gauge the candidate’s reaction. As all heads-up pilots knew, this called for “second-convolution” thinking. It was a mistake to say anything along the lines of: Oh, I rather enjoy risks, I enjoy hanging my hide out over the edge, day in and day out, for that is what makes me superior to other men. The psychiatrists always interpreted that as a reckless love of danger, an irrational impulse associated with the late-Freudian concept of “the death wish.” The proper response—heard more than once during that week at Wright-Patterson—was to say: “Oh, I don’t regard Project Mercury as a particularly high-risk proposition, certainly not compared to the routine test work I’ve been doing for [the Air Force, the Navy, the Marines]. Since this project has a high national priority, I’m sure that the safety precautions will be far more thorough and reliable than they were on something like the [F–100F, F–102, F–104, F–4B], when I had that one in the test stage.” (Very slight smile and roll of the eyeballs.) Beautiful stuff! This showed that you were a rational test pilot, as concerned about safety as any sensible professional … while at the same time getting across the idea that you had been routinely risking your life and were so used to it, had such righteous stuff, that riding a rocket seemed like a vacation by comparison. That created the Halo Effect. Offhand allusions to derring-do would have the psychiatrists looking at you with big wide eyes, like little boys.
Conrad knew all this as well as the rest of them. He knew exactly how the prudent officer should deal with these people. It was hard not to know. Every night the boys got together in the BOQ and regaled each other with stories of how they had lied their heads off or otherwise diligently subverted the inquiries of the shrinks. Conrad’s problem was that somewhere along the way the Hickory Kid always took over and had to add a wink or two for good measure.
In one test the interviewer gave each candidate a blank sheet of paper and asked him to study it and describe what he saw in it. There was no one right response in this sort of test, because it was designed to force the candidate to free-associate in order to see where his mind wandered. The test-wise pilot knew that the main thing was to stay on dry land and not go swimming. As they described with some relish later on in the BOQ, quite a few studied the sheet of paper and then looked the interviewer in the eye and said, “All I see is a blank sheet of paper.” This was not a “correct” answer, since the shrinks probably made a note of “inhibited imaginative capacity” or some goddamned thing, but neither did it get you in trouble. One man said, “I see a field of snow.” Well, you might get away with that, as long as you didn’t go any further … as long as you did not thereupon start ruminating about freezing to death or getting lost in the snow and running into bears or something of that sort. But Conrad … well, the man is sitting across the table from Conrad and gives him the sheet of paper and asks him to study it and tell him what he sees. Conrad stares at the piece of paper and then looks up at the man and says in a wary tone, as if he fears a trick: “But it’s upside down.”
This so startles the man, he actually leans across the table and looks at this absolutely blank sheet of paper to see if it’s true—and only after he is draped across the table does he realize that he has been had. He looks at Conrad and smiles a smile of about 33 degrees Fahrenheit.
This was not the way to produce the Halo Effect.
In another test they showed the candidates pictures of people in various situations and asked them to make up stories about them. One of the pictures they showed Conrad was a piece of American Scene Okie Realism, apparently from the Depression years. You could see a poor sunken hookwormy sharecropper in bib overalls trying to push a rusty plow through some eroded ground that was more gully than topsoil, aided by a mule with all his ribs showing, while off to one side the man’s sallow hollow-socketed pellagra-ravaged wife with a swollen eight-month belly covered by a dress made from a fertilizer sack leans up against their shack to catch her breath or else to prop up the side wall. Conrad looks at the picture and says, “Well, you can tell that this man is a nature lover. He not only tills the soil, he appreciates the scenery, as you can tell by the way he is looking off toward the mountains, the better to observe the way the pale blue of the range in the distance harmonizes with the purple haze of the hills near his beloved homestead”—and on and on in this fashion until, at long last, it dawns on the interviewer that this wiry wiseacre who chatters away with a gap between his front teeth … is sending him up, him and his whole test.
This did not create the Halo Effect, either.
Oh, Conrad was rolling now. He was beginning to have a good time. But he had one piece of unfinished business. That night he called up th
e car pool.
“This is Number Seven,” he said. “Number Seven needs a car to go to the PX.”
The next day, after the heat-chamber test, in which he spent three hours shut up in a cubicle heated to 130 degrees, Conrad was rubbing the sweat off the end of his nose when he looked up—and sure enough, Dr. Gladys J. Loring was right there, making note of the event in her spiral notebook with a ballpoint pen. Conrad reached into the pocket of his pants … and came up with a spiral notebook and a ballpoint pen just like hers.
“Gladys!” he said. She looked up. She was startled. Conrad started scribbling in his notebook and then looked at her again. “Aha! You touched your ear, Gladys! We call that inhibition of the exhibitionism!” More scribbling in the notebook. “Oh-oh! Lowering of the eyes, Gladys! Repressed hypertrophy of the latency! I’m sorry, but it has to go in the report!”
Word of how the flatworm turned … how the lab rat had risen up … how Pavlov’s dog rang Pavlov’s bell and took notes on it … oh, word of all this circulated quickly, too, and everyone, from Number 1 to Number 8, was quite delighted. There was no indication, however, then or later, that Dr. Gladys Loring was amused in the slightest.
When Scott Carpenter called home to California from Wright-Patterson in the evenings—and he was always careful to take advantage of the lower evening rates—his wife, Rene, was usually in the living room. They had a house in Garden Grove, a town near Disneyland. The focal point of the living room was a three-piece sectional sofa that had a great teardrop-shaped monkeypod coffee table in front of it and a monkeypod end table at this end and another monkeypod end table at the other end. A great deal was summed up by those three great showy slabs of monkeypod wood with the yellow-brown grain streaks curling this way and that. Every officer and his wife in the U.S. Navy in the year 1959 understood the Monkeypod Life.