Magnificent Desolation (22 page)

I responded well to the AA programs, but I still struggled in my attempts to achieve and maintain sobriety Since my mentor Bud Scoles was a Navy guy, he also frequented the Navy facility in Long Beach, where Captain Joseph Pursch, the psychiatrist, served as director of the Naval Regional Medical Center. The Navy was quite involved in alcoholic recovery programs at that time, and Dr. Pursch was widely regarded as the foremost authority in the field of alcoholism who had never been an alcoholic himself. Admiral Scoles encouraged me to attend some of
the Navy recovery programs, and I took his advice, sometimes attending three or four meetings on the same day, when I felt more desperate.

In September 1976, Beverly and I set up an appointment to see Dr. Pursch ostensibly for possible treatment as a couple, but Beverly doubtless went along only to get me into treatment. That quickly became evident when the doctor questioned Beverly and me about our drinking. “I suppose I could eventually become an alcoholic,” she said, “but we’re not here for me. We’re here for Buzz.”

Dr. Pursch nodded in understanding and let the matter drop. He agreed to evaluate and work with us on an outpatient basis. I wanted medication for depression, but the doctor wanted me to get sober. I didn’t see how that was going to work, and I let the doctor know it. “Thanks, but no thanks,” I said.

On Monday evening, September 20, 1976, I spoke to a full house at the Lompoc, California, Civic Auditorium, sponsored by the Mental Health Association. In the course of my speech I described how I had overcome depression and had been treated for alcoholism. “I’ve been involved in all kinds of races,” I told the audience, “but running for happiness is the most important one I’ve been in.” I admitted to the crowd that although I had served as chairman of the National Association of Mental Health, my problems were not solved, and when depression returned, to escape, I turned to alcohol. “I could accept mental health as an illness,” I said, “but not alcoholism as an illness.”

My speech inspired the audience, and my words must have inspired me, too, because two days later I went back to Pursch, this time practically begging him to take me on as a patient.

On September 22, 1976, Dr. Pursch admitted me to the Navy Regional Medical Center for a full six weeks so he could work more closely with me. While at the Naval hospital, as part of their alcohol treatment program, we boarded Navy vans and drove to attend local Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, such as the one in Bellflower. Attendance was not optional.

In counseling, Dr. Pursch began by trying to build a relationship with me. He spoke with a distinct Hungarian accent. “Tell me why you
are here,” he began, as if he didn’t know, “and by the way, whatever you tell me, I will never tell anyone else without your permission.” The doctor stopped and, in an almost whimsical manner, added, “Unless you put me on the spot. If you tell me that you’re going to shoot someone, I’ll have you arrested.”

Pursch and I both smiled. “So tell me,” he continued, “what is it that brings you to me? I have to be here, but why
are you
here?”

I relaxed and tried to answer the doctor’s questions as best I could. As we talked, I felt confident that I could trust him.
Maybe this can help
, I thought. I began to spill my insides to him. I told him about the discipline and rigidity I had lived with all my life, reinforced by my attending West Point, Air Force flight training, becoming a combat fighter pilot, earning my doctorate at MIT, and culminating in the NASA program, and then back to the Air Force. All along the way, the expected levels of performance grew higher and higher. Then, upon coming back from the moon, I was a news item, going from city to city, riding in parades all around the world, receiving the keys to the city— and anything else I wanted. When I went back to the Air Force, life didn’t turn out the way I thought it should. I was passed over for promotion to brigadier general and an assignment that I truly wanted, to be commandant to the cadets at the Air Force Academy. Instead, I was given command of the test pilot program at Edwards Air Force base in California. That sounds like a plum position, but not for me. I was one of the few astronauts in the program at that time who had never been a test pilot. Neil was a former test pilot. So was Mike, but not me. And now, after nearly twenty years in the Air Force, including three and a half at MIT, and seven and a half at NASA, they wanted me to command the test pilot school instead of the Academy.

I explained to Dr. Pursch that since I returned from the moon, I had felt taken advantage of, exploited as people wanted to use my fame for their own purposes.

From then on, any time that I felt the “system” was taking unfair advantage of me and my fame–whether by individuals, companies, organizations, or the military—to deal with those growing resentments, I
turned increasingly to alcohol. The demons in my mind tossed up questions such as,
What did I get for serving my country all these years? I’m being relegated to playing the hero, and everyone wants a piece of me. But will they listen to my ideas? Will they value what I can offer for the future?
Then, to keep my life afloat, I would often speak at their conventions and sign autographs, for very little if any honorarium. I felt totally degraded as a person.

I recognized the inherent inconsistency; I didn’t want to feel that way, yet in all honesty I did. I knew that such thoughts were “unacceptable” to the public, to my family, and to myself, and I had a sensitive conscience, so there was no better remedy for putting my conscience to sleep for a while than with alcohol.

I confessed to the psychiatrist that since I had retired, I sensed no purpose and no structure to my life. I wasn’t sure what to do next. Pursch listened intently, but he continued to emphasize that my top priority was to get sober and stay that way.

One day early on in our treatment program, I asked the psychiatrist straight out, “Can alcoholics ever drink again?” I was hoping that he would respond positively, that yes, once a person went through treatment, he or she could handle alcohol. Pursch didn’t bite, but he did surprise me.

“Of course an alcoholic can drink again. They do it all the time.”

“What do you mean?”

“Some alcoholics can drink again, but you, Buzz Aldrin, cannot drink again without getting into problems.”

“Well, I don’t lose control of my ability to function every time I drink.”

“Maybe not, but you have become an unpredictable drinker, Buzz. Some people may have a drink and walk away from the bar. You have a hard time taking one drink without taking four or five more.”

I met with Dr. Pursch for about an hour every week, then eventually once every couple of months. We talked about everything from my strict upbringing, always trying to please my father, to being the second man out of the lunar module after Neil Armstrong, and always being
known as the
second
man to walk on the moon, and continually being reminded of that fact. At the conclusion of each meeting, Dr. Pursch asked, “Now, how would you summarize what we have talked about and what you need to do? Once you are out the door, you’re on your own.”

At one point I had a bit of a falling-out with him. I wanted him to meet more frequently with me, to treat me in a psychoanalytic way, and to prescribe some medication for me. Pursch refused. “You will not get well that way,” he said bluntly.

I could feel my hackles rising. “May I remind you, Captain, that I am a retired Air Force colonel, and that I am entitled to this care?”

“Yes, I understand that you are retired military, and you are indeed entitled to treatment. And that means you receive the treatment I am prescribing for you, and my prescription for you right now is not pills or psychoanalysis. Right now you need to get sober.”

I rose to leave, and walked briskly toward the door, but before I reached it, I stopped and snapped at him, “I won’t be coming back. Furthermore, I assure you that I will have no trouble finding another psychiatrist in Los Angeles to treat me.”

Dr. Pursch held his ground. “I don’t think you’ll have any trouble at all finding someone who will give you what you want. All you have to do is tell them who you are.”

I left Dr. Pursch and found Dr. Sturdevant, and began going to him for treatment. Pursch was right; I could find treatment with pills and psychoanalysis, but that did not help me. I could handle the depression, but I needed someone to confront me and to help keep me accountable about the drinking. I did nothing but prolong the nightmare.

Eventually I returned to Dr. Pursch again, seeking his help. This time the doctor surprised me. Rather than admitting me again to the naval hospital, he said, “I think you should meet Clancy Imislund. Clancy is a former alcoholic who has been sober for a long time. I think he can help you.”

I was insulted and shocked. “You would rather send me to a recovering drunk than to a man of Dr. Sturdevant’s caliber?”

“You don’t need academics, medication, or psychoanalysis. You are too bright, Buzz, too strong. Granted, your genetic disposition may tend to cause you to be depressed, and that same genetic makeup allows you to drink more than most people without always feeling its ill effects, but if you want to get well, you must seek help in getting sober and staying sober. Clancy can help you do that.”

After a while, I met with Dr. Pursch only to maintain my pilot’s medical evaluation for the FAA. An Air Force dictum of some sort basically said, “If Buzz Aldrin applies for a medical certificate to fly an airplane again, he must have a psychiatric exam every year.” That irritated me because I was doing my best to remain sober, and the psychiatrists still had to verify my ability to fly an airplane. Although I thought it unfair at the time, I now see it as a wise rule, but I sure didn’t feel that way then.

By the end of the year I had tired of Beverly telling me what to do—although, in her defense, she was probably simply trying to save my life—and after a loud disagreement, I told her I wanted a divorce. I was on a roll—two divorces in less than two years. In the process, the divorce with Beverly managed to clean out my bank accounts, or what was left of them. But it was worth it to be back on my own again. In retrospect, Beverly loved me as best she could until she could love me no longer. In many ways, however, I will always be grateful to her for encouraging me to seek help for alcoholism, not simply depression. That was worth far more than mere money.

I moved out of Beverly’s place to a newly-built duplex on Barry Avenue. While living there, I got a job with the Hillcrest Cadillac dealership, which is a story in itself.

   10

I
’
VE ALWAYS LIKED CARS, THE FASTER THE BETTER.
B
UT
I never dreamed of selling cars, not until I got to the point of needing some form of gainful employment. I was ready to take almost any honest job. I’m not sure what prompted me to try it, other than sheer desperation, especially since I had never sold anything in my life.

While attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings with Admiral Bud Scoles, I got to know some of the people who were regulars. A guy named Lynch showed up every week and was well thought of because he had a good job as a Cadillac salesman. I talked to him and asked him, “How did you get that job?”

He said that he would recommend me to the owner and maybe I could get a job there, too. Selling cars is a noble profession for many people; for me it was a desperate step. I was trying to save my life, and I needed to be doing something besides sulking alone in my apartment. I had an interview with Mike Brown, the son of the owner, and the next thing I knew, in July 1977, I was going to work at the Hillcrest Cadillac dealership in Beverly Hills every day. I was a terrible salesman, though. People came onto the lot in search of a car, and as soon as I struck up a conversation with them, the subject immediately turned from the comfort and convenience of a new or used luxury automobile to space travel. I spent more time signing autographs than anything
else. Worse yet, I was too honest. I was not a backslapping closer. I could inform the customer, but I could not glibly tell a prospective customer that our cars were his or her best choice, when I knew the weaknesses of our vehicles as well as the advantages. Nor could I sell an expensive Cadillac to somebody who I knew could not afford it, or sell the person a bunch of options that he didn’t need. When I told the truth, customers sometimes smiled broadly, shook my hand, and walked away. “Great to meet you, Buzz!” they’d say as they headed out of our lot, smiling, but without buying anything. Mike Brown just shook his head.

H. R. (“Bob”) Haldeman, President Nixon’s White House Chief of Staff, and a key figure in the Nixon Watergate scandal, came in to the dealership one day. Bob had been born and raised in California, so no doubt he was glad to be out of the Washington, D.C., fishbowl for a few days. I could relate to enduring a media frenzy, and we chatted idly for a few minutes about his ordeal. I showed him some cars while we talked about President Nixon and his Watergate troubles, but do you think that I could sell him a Cadillac? No way. I couldn’t sell a car to save my life. In fact, I didn’t sell a single car the entire time I worked at Hillcrest. But at least I drove a nice blue-and-white Cadillac for a while.

L
ATER THAT SAME
month, I ventured out to Edwards Air Force Base to view the first atmospheric “free” flight of the
Enterprise
, NASA’s new space shuttle test vehicle, as it landed on its own after being hitched to the back of a 747 jumbo jet. The shuttle was originally intended to be named
Constitution
, but
Star Trek
fans led a write-in campaign urging that it be christened
Enterprise.
It was my first time back at Edwards since my ignominious departure five years earlier. It felt a bit odd to be standing in street clothes among the spectators for the test event, but I also felt relieved on a personal level, and hopeful about the new direction in which NASA was headed.

The space shuttle captured the public’s attention with its dazzling display of a different kind of flying spacecraft as it landed on a dry lake-bed runway seven and a half miles long. The winged seventy-five-ton
spaceship had already flown piggyback-style, locked to the big jet in a “captive” flight a few weeks earlier. Now, for its first free flight, cars and campers crowded the desert highway that led to the base. Thousands of spectators made the predawn drive over the mountains from Los Angeles to the Mojave plateau to watch the test landing. Already, NASA was planning to send the shuttle on its first flight into space in 1979 from Cape Canaveral, and that mission and the next three to follow were scheduled to end with airplane-like landings at Edwards on the special clay, silt, and sand lake-bed runway.

T
HE DAY AT
Edwards, exhilarating as it was to watch the landing of the shuttle, was also a bitter reminder that I had been trying to exist on my Air Force retirement pay, half of which went to Joan and the kids, and the new job I was trying out at the Cadillac dealership. Added to that, I was still dealing with periodic bouts of depression. My life seemed a perennial struggle, in which I often wondered,
Where do I fit in after being an astronaut on the moon?
The Technicolor had drained from my life, and I felt discouraged. I couldn’t see how anything could change in the near future. The orderly progressive structure of my early years in which I had achieved so much had stalled. Inevitably, it seemed, I would spiral downward when the people at NASA or the aerospace companies for whom I served as a consultant refused to consider my ideas, ideas that I knew beyond a doubt could help forward our space program. When I was “up,” I charged ahead, believing that change was possible, and that I could make a difference. But when I was “down,” numbness overcame me and after a while I soothed my uneasiness by turning to alcohol.

About that time, Dr. Joseph Pursch reminded me to seek out Clancy Imislund. I had met Clancy while I was still married to Beverly, when I attended one of the meetings recommended by Dr. Don Flinn, but I really didn’t become part of his group until Dr. Pursch recommended him as well. Clancy was known as a more rigid recovery group leader. He could be a little rough around the edges, and he shot straight
with the people who came to his meetings, sometimes too straight. “Half of you attending this meeting are going to die drunk,” he said, partially for effect, and partially as a serious warning. Nevertheless, men and women came to his meetings from far and wide, and from every stratum of society; they knew that he loved them enough to tell them the truth.

Once I got to know Clancy, I understood why the psychiatrists held this nonmedical recovery leader in such high regard. Clancy knew what it was like to be an alcoholic. In our conversations, I discovered that he genuinely empathized with what I had experienced; he understood how I felt. As he described his own inability to cope with alcohol, I thought I was listening to my own inner story. Certainly the details of Clancy’s story were different, but his frustration and exasperation at not being able to control his own desires resonated with me. Several decades earlier, he’d drunk so much that he was thrown out of the Los Angeles Midnight Mission, the city’s downtown shelter for homeless people, alcoholics, and drug addicts. He had lost his job, his home, and his family, and he had gotten his two front teeth kicked out in an altercation. He almost died, but he walked seven miles in the rain to Wilshire and Fairfax, where there was an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, and the people there saved his life. Years later, after remaining sober, Clancy left a secure job and took a position running that same Midnight Mission from which he had been ejected years earlier. Since then he had worked with all sorts of people, from multimillionaire business tycoons to Hollywood stars to street people. By the time I met him, he’d been sober for nearly twenty years.

One of the things I liked about Clancy was that he treated me just like anyone else. I was not Buzz Aldrin, astronaut; I was just Buzz, an alcoholic.

Clancy was able to get me to do things that I wouldn’t ordinarily do, especially since they were not intellectually defensible. For example, early on he invited a bunch of other alcoholics and me to come to his home on the outskirts of Venice for a cookout and an afternoon of volleyball in his backyard. Before we could play, however, Clancy passed
out some shovels. He stabled a pony in his backyard, so we had to clean up the pony excrement first. The reason was not necessarily to make us nicer or better people, but to gradually change our relationships with the world around us, and our psychological perspectives on our inner worlds. Clancy was also big on humility as an important part of recovery, and few things were more humbling than Hollywood celebrity types—and former astronauts—shoveling pony poop.

I had sworn off drinking several times before meeting Clancy, and had stretched my abstinence to thirty days on at least ten separate occasions. But I’d always found my way back to another bar or another bottle of Scotch. I’d feel almost as though someone had inserted a wind-up spring in my mind while I was sleeping, and that each day the spring was getting tighter and tighter. Before long, I started thinking that a drink might make me feel better. After a while, another drink followed the first, then a second and a third.

With Clancy, I found an “outside” guy who was willing to shoot straight with me. He could see both the problem and me, and he offered advice based on a more objective perspective. When I talked with Clancy about what I was going through, it helped bring clarity to my problem.

Clancy visited me at my workplace at the Hillcrest Cadillac dealership in Beverly Hills. “Leave this job,” he told me straightforwardly. “Get out of here. You’re not doing anything. You’re just sitting in this office all day and people come by to look at the astronaut on display.”

Then one day Clancy came in and told the Browns that I should not be working there. “This is not the sort of job for Buzz Aldrin,” he told the owners. Clancy felt it was demeaning for a man like me, who was an American hero who had walked on the moon, to be making a living selling used and new cars.

I knew he was right, but I had nowhere to go. In Clancy’s opinion, the dealership was simply trading on my celebrity, and I couldn’t blame them for that; I certainly wasn’t selling any cars for them. I had no desire to sell cars, used or new. I walked into my boss’s office and said flatly, “I quit.”

I met with Clancy and his group three or four times each week for months, and little by little, my perception of the world and myself began to change. In the process, Clancy and I became good friends. When an opportunity came up for me to go to Lyon, France, to appear in a parade and convocation with a group of other astronauts and cosmonauts, I had no one else to go with me, so I invited Clancy to accompany me, which he did. Good thing, since the event turned out to be sponsored by a wine company!

Clancy was not merely a friend and an adviser to me, he once even negotiated a contract for me, when the New Orleans Symphony invited me to do a dramatic reading as the orchestra performed Gustav Holst’s
The Planets.
I gave Clancy a sizable commission for his services, and he relieved me of the burden of having to close a sale.

At Clancy’s meetings, I met various women who were also alcoholics. I struck up relationships with several of them, and their company met a variety of needs in my life, but provided no long-term satisfaction. One woman, however, captured my attention—at least for a season. Her name was Kathy and we met in Clancy’s group.

Kathy met more than a sexual need. She and I became close friends, but she kept slipping back to alcohol. I tried to help her again and again, finding in her a deeper addiction than my own. Kathy and I shared an off-and-on relationship, with no real commitment on either of our parts. But when she struck up a friendship with a carpenter with whom she had become codependent, I became concerned. He was not helping Kathy and I knew it.