And it did. And I watched as he burned himself down with acid and grass and speed and then cocaine and heroin, riding that string right out to its end until he was pale as ashes in the glowing ember of himself. About that time, he was visiting Houston and stopped by to see my brother Gregory, who had played tenor saxophone with him. We had both payed with Johnny. It was at a little basement club on Fannin in Houston called the Act III. The stage was about the size of a double bed, and there were maybe a dozen tables. It was black-box-theater decor, and the cockroaches were the size of Cuban cigars. One of the musicians brought Wite-Out from an office supply store and painted “Eat At The Act Three” on the backs of a number of cockroaches.
That night, we went to a little apartment Johnny was keeping in Houston, and he laid open a medicine chest he carried with him. Inside were a paper of heroin, one of coke, some PCP, MDA, THC, LSD, weed, hash, ups, reds, and a few assorted devices for the administration of those potions.
“Welp,” he said, “we can shoot some of this here smack, or we can snort some of this coke. But you can’t have any of the MDA,” he added with a big grin. “That’s all mine.” A bigger grin—he could hardly stand it. “I use that to fuck on!” And he grabbed himself and hugged himself as if he might bodily disintegrate just from the thought of how good it was going to be.
That was fairly near the end, we thought, we who played backup for Johnny. We who worshipped him. Johnny went off to a hospital, and we never expected to hear from him again. And the strange thing this night in the dressing room at the Garden is that he actually made it all the way back. He went to the edge and looked over, and where Hendrix and Joplin and countless others (Jim Morrison, Keith Moon . . .) fell right in and drowned, Johnny somehow managed to come back from the dead. The way he looks, all white and pink and stripped bare like a wax statue, you might think he was never really here to begin with, just a spirit passing through. Good-bye, porkpie hat. But here he is among us once again, ghost or saint, striking quiet lightning out of his soundless guitar and sipping bourbon and ginger ale, waiting to go on stage.
The Garden is an appropriate place for a man of his tastes and proclivities. The original Garden was designed by Stanford White, an architect who built homes for the rich of New York and the East Coast during the Gilded Age, a complex, brilliant, wild, driven, and desperately sexual man, who at the pinnacle of his career would design the Washington Square Arch at the bottom of Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, the Judson Memorial Church, New York University in the Bronx, and Madison Square Garden itself. Along with a sculptor, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, designer of the twenty-dollar gold “double eagle” for the United States Mint, he and several other men of the arts, founded the Sewer Club. The club occupied a rented room in a building on Washington Square Park. One member, the artist Thomas Dewing, described “scenes of mirth and physiological examination.” The men could have sex or watch people having sex. It seems that there was scant distinction made, at least among some of them, as to which gender they chose for their partner or partners. White and Saint-Gaudens, who were very possibly lovers, later formed another sex club called the Morgue on West Fifty-Fifth Street. Like Johnny Winter’s nights, theirs in the Gilded Age were long and excessively wild, with drinking, feasting, and shows or prizefights, all punctuated by interludes of sex in rooms and apartments they kept scattered all over town, including in the highest tower of Madison Square Garden, which Stanford and Gus had topped, much to the chagrin of New York society, with a giant statue of a naked teenage girl. Both Stanford and Gus were lovers of the teenage girls whose bodies were combined to create the statue. Johnny likes teenage girls. And they like him.
I leave the dressing room and go out to look at the audience. The Garden is filled to capacity. I want to look at people’s faces, into their eyes, and all that comes into my mind is quaalude, Tuinal, Seconal, downers. It appears that you could go up and steal someone’s appendix, and he wouldn’t notice. And they are kids, fourteen, eighteen, twenty, reeling around the theater with their heart rates down to about forty. A real demented crowd. I can’t figure out what draws that kind of people to Johnny, brilliant, white Johnny with that unearthly way of moving his fingers. I supposed deep down they can tell a kindred spirit when they see one. The difference is that the drugs never slow down Johnny’s fingers the way they seem to slow down these kids.
I go back to the dressing room, contemplating the fact that the only thing between those kids and Johnny is a hollow metal door and a skinny guy who claims to have a third-degree black belt in karate. He wears a black kid glove on his right hand “for the psychological effect,” he says with a soft Cajun accent. It reminds me of a man I know who is a slumlord. He carries a carpenter’s claw hammer around with him all the time. When I asked why, he said, “I could carry a gun, but everybody down in the hood has a gun. They’re not afraid of guns. They’re afraid of crazy. And when I walk down the street at night talking to myself with this hammer in my hand, they cross the street to get away from me.” This kid—except for the glove, you wouldn’t even notice him until he walks Johnny to the stage. I go back out to watch.
Because he’s albino, Johnny can’t see very well to begin with. There’s almost no pigment in the irises of his eyes. That pigment keeps you from being blinded just from opening your eyes in normal daylight. Going on stage is a psychedelic experience even without the drugs. Johnny’s not blind. But what he sees is unlike anything you and I would ever see. What he experiences is like a hit of dimethyltryptamine. He lives in the center of one great white-hot, glittering rainbow flash. His world is on fire with light. People glow and shimmer in it like lens flares on a photograph. So when he steps out on stage under half a million candlepower of stage lights, he just gives up any attempt to see what’s happening, and he plays, wailing into the void where other sounds, other musicians playing, are his only points of reference.
The downed-out kids haul up close to the stage and scream at him with love, with demented, slow-motion hysteria. From the upper balconies, bottles and cherry bombs and strings of Chinese firecrackers float down, some landing on the stage and detonating there. Johnny cranks up the volume and tries to outdo those sounds. He’s unimpressed. They used to do a lot worse to us in Beaumont and Lafayette. I can see the crowd surging just as a very drunken man’s body will do before he gets sick. Johnny’s heat-death delirium screens it all out, and he keeps on playing. And maybe that’s it. Maybe these embalmed kids come to hear and see Johnny because anything less intense would never penetrate their soporific haze. In a sleep that deep, it takes some heavy dreams to make contact. Maybe it takes a saint to get through to the dead.
11
Space Station
I AM FLOATING down the length of the International Space Station somewhere 250 miles above the North Atlantic, going about seventeen thousand miles an hour. If I tilt my head down as far as my space suit will allow, I can see the edge of my helmet and even my boots. As I jet around the exterior of the station, the misty earth below seems like a blue and living cell. Now Africa heaves into view toward the east. The Niger, like a great snake, undulates down its belly.
This is my first EVA, or extravehicular activity. The exterior of the space station, almost blinding in the airless sunlight, has golden handholds bolted all over it, each a glittering treasure of safety, labeled with numbers and letters to tell me where I am in the confusion of this mammoth structure. I can see the labels vividly in the blazing sunlight as I drift down toward the open cargo bay of the space shuttle. It’s still docked there from our arrival on station, and the fifty-foot Canadarm (used for grappling satellites and pieces of the station) is folded up now, at rest.
Soon the space shuttle will close its doors, back away from us, and blast home in a fiery deorbit. We’ll watch it burn in the night sky as it disappears into the blue. Night and day alternate every forty-five minutes here—a sunrise and sunset sixteen times during every normal Earth day.
Off to my right, I see another astrona
ut in his brilliant white space suit, working on something, perhaps a communications antenna. As he works, twisting a torque tool, he suddenly loses his grip, his tether fails him, and he is kicked off the station. I watch in horror as he goes tumbling head over heels toward a half-moon, which hangs in the black sky like a child’s paper boat.
He’s moving away fast. I see him reach for the controller of his SAFER (Simplified Aid for EVA Rescue) unit, which we all wear when working outside the station. It’s a small tank of nitrogen to be used for jet propulsion. We have a minute’s worth of fuel. By carefully controlling the jet, we’re supposed to be able to maneuver back to the station. That’s the theory. Now he punches a button with his big white-gloved finger, and the device automatically fires, calculating the force required to stop his rotation.
Gradually, his tumbling stops, but he’s still drifting away. I breathe a sigh of relief, which I can hear in the headphones of my helmet. “Is he all right?” I ask.
“So far so good,” the controller says. “Let’s see if he can get back.”
I see the astronaut searching, trying to find us. I could yell and scream, but my disembodied voice over the voice link would do him no good—and he’d never hear me without it in this deadly vacuum of space.
He’s still drifting farther and farther away from the safety of these golden handholds. He’s completely disoriented, but he must act fast. There’s no way to retrieve him. The shuttle is docked. Otherwise it might try a risky maneuver to pick him up. And the station can’t move, not that fast, not that precisely. His only hope is his SAFER unit.
I see him turning this way and that, trying to find us in the sea of blackness. The black sky is all around him, sprent with stars, and the space station must appear like all the other tiny white dots. At last, I see his head jerk as he catches the lights of the station. Facing home now, he begins firing the nitrogen jets. I can hear the controller reading out the lost astronaut’s speed, angle, and closure rate, as well as the amount of fuel he has left.
As the lost man makes his one and only attempt to get back safely, I drift around the station, mesmerized by the surreal and blinding light, the whiteness of the floating city, and the confounding complexity of all its details, from the giant solar arrays—gleaming articulated fields of onyx more than half an acre in size—to the high-frequency antennas, which rotate to track communication relay satellites far above our orbit. A robot arm moves along the main truss like an inchworm, clutching beams with a titanium grip. I’ve learned every system, yet even so, the whole remains incomprehensible, just as the whole experience of being up here does.
In my headset I listen to the controller talking to the lost astronaut. Each of us knows this might happen. Each of us accepts the risk. I hear the hiss of jets in the headphones as he maneuvers back toward us, and I watch the sun wink off his black face shield as he turns his head left and right to gauge his trajectory—no ILS, no GPS, this is a nonprecision maneuver—by guess and by god.
First he gets going too fast. He’ll crash into the space station like a bug hitting a windshield. He has to slow himself down. But he overdoes it, stops altogether, and has to start again—all of this wasting precious fuel. He’s down to 5 percent of the tank’s supply when the controller directs him to make one last try. But the jets propel him off at the wrong angle, and he runs out of fuel. Now he’ll drift along, and soon he’ll run out of oxygen, too. And then he’ll die. His batteries will probably last longer than his air, so we’ll be able to converse with him the whole time. Maybe they’ll get his wife and kids on the communications pass so that they can say good-bye.
I remove the virtual-reality headset that encloses my head and take off the white pack I’m wearing. Suddenly—shockingly—I find myself in a cluttered laboratory. Bundles of wires go everywhere across beat-up industrial carpeting beneath an old acoustic tile ceiling stained by leaking water. Boxes piled everywhere and bins of candy and pretzels, a wooden ladder against the wall, an orange traffic cone. A youthful trainer wearing a goatee plugged into a virtual-reality headset with a large white pack on his chest. That’s the controller I was talking to. A metal cage with cables going out of a six-axis robot. Cabinets full of wire, a whole room full of Silicon Graphics computer bays, all off-the-shelf equipment put to new purpose. “Paint don’t make it go,” David Homan said of the cosmetic catastrophe around him. He is manager for virtual reality applications at Johnson Space Center. He studies me with a faint smile. “Pretty realistic,” he says with evident pride. It was. My heart is in my throat. I’m sweating.
Homan is a thin, rumpled man in his forties, whose decades of work in computer graphics have culminated in this, one of the world’s most sophisticated virtual reality labs. His main task now: to train astronauts for the dangerous task of assembling the International Space Station, which after countless delays and tens of billions of dollars spent, has finally begun to take shape in orbit. When completed (target date: 2004), the station will weigh 470 Earth tons and, at various times, house astronauts from sixteen nations, including Japan, Russia, France, and Brazil. It will span 356 feet, making it the largest man-made structure ever to orbit Earth, longer than Saturn V, which sent men to the moon. More than one hundred thousand people worldwide are now involved in building, designing, or supporting something having to do with the station. Assembling it in space will require more EVAs—spacewalks—than have ever been performed before in the history of space exploration.
The “astronaut” I was watching during my EVA was actually a technician who was testing the equipment. He now takes off his headset and pack, and the trainer—the controller who was trying to talk him back home, the young man with a goatee—smiles at him and says, “Well, you’re dead. You want to try again?”
As they reset the computers, Homan shows me around the back lot of NASA where the gritty garage tinkerers make their magic. Each NASA center has a place where the dirty work is done. Earlier, I toured the NASA center at Huntsville, Alabama, a kind of hillbilly heaven, where they build and test various components of the space station. It is a vast tract of empty land, the site of a former army munitions plant and gunnery range, scattered with burned-out and used-up gizmos—rocket engines, actual rockets, tossed out whole in fields and rusting away among the weeds—and gigantic steel-and-concrete test stands with sluice canals for carrying millions of gallons of water to mitigate the enormous howling sheets of flame thrown off during a burn. From such humble beginnings come the showpieces that NASA shoots into space. They paint the things gleaming white, slap a big American flag on their sides, and roll them out for everyone to admire. Then they leap from the earth on tails of fire.
Going bald, Homan wears khakis and Top-Siders, steel spectacles, and a threadbare shirt with a fistful of pens stressing the pocket. He is fond of hitting subjects at an oblique angle. He explains to me that with all the in-space construction required to build the station, there’s a real possibility of losing an astronaut and not being able to get him back. “My EVA experience is fairly limited, though,” he adds. “But that was in college, and I didn’t inhale.”
When I met with Bob Cabana in November of last year, he was just about to take off to assemble the first pieces of the International Space Station in orbit around Earth. A marine colonel, Cabana would command the shuttle mission that would mark either the beginning of a glorious, cooperative new era in space or the greatest boondoggle in NASA history, depending on the person you questioned about it.
Small and boyish-looking, with salt-and-pepper hair, Cabana is a member of the elite group of the nation’s top astronauts. I caught him on a break from training at Johnson, and we talked in a small conference room. He said that he had dreamed of space since childhood. He told me about the time after he returned from his first flight. In the middle of the night, he woke up and had to use the bathroom. It was dark, and he was disoriented. His first thought was simply to float off the bed and fly over to the bathroom. He had forgotten that he was no longer in zero
g. His body told him it would work, but each time he pushed off, he just lay there like one of those practice dummies they use to teach medics CPR. He was pinned to the mattress, helpless.
After his second trip to space, the same thing happened. This time he intended to walk across the wall to the bathroom. Again, his muscles wouldn’t work. Some ugly force was holding him down.
“The third time I came back from space,” he said, “I woke up and thought, Shoot. I’m back on Earth again.” For an astronaut, Earth is the penalty box.
Ordinarily very controlled, astronauts such as Cabana and Jerry Ross, Cabana’s chief spacewalker for the first ISS mission, become animated when they talk about space. On Cabana’s first flight, the training had been so deeply ingrained that he didn’t look out the window until he was in orbit.
“I was just fixed on the instruments and on the tasks of monitoring that I had to perform,” he said. The rocket sways up there before it lifts from the pad. The engines are thundering as liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen run through the pumps at a rate fast enough to empty an average-size swimming pool in twenty seconds.
“You can feel it almost more than you can hear it,” Ross said. The whole cockpit vibrates and shudders, and at first it is difficult to tell that you’re moving. Then steadily the g-forces begin to build, until it feels like an elephant is sitting on your chest, and it’s all you can do to take a breath. “It’s only eight minutes, but it can seem like the longest eight minutes of your life.”
Chemistry of Fire Page 21