"So how was it? How was...the moon?" You have no further questions. Because he went to the moon. And now he’s sitting here, at your table in a dark and crowded D.C. restaurant. It’s disorienting. The moon! The crescent and the eclipse, the waxing and the waning, the cheese—the lunar glow hanging right there, night after night on the periphery of your busy coming and going. No matter what your age, gender, politics, nationality, social or financial standing, every single person inhabiting the planet Earth has the same reaction to him. Holy crap, Buzz Aldrin, you went to the moon!
You smile at him, your face opening the way every single face in the entire world opens when it encounters him. Because he is: Buzz Aldrin. And we are: mankind.
He takes note of your smile, and just as quickly looks past you. It’s the same way with everybody. It’s your pregnant anticipation: I can’t wait to hear the amazing synthesis of moon wisdom you are about to bestow upon me.
He has no idea what to do with that. None. He’s turning 85 this month. He went to the moon when he was 39. Mankind has been coming at him with your same smile ever since. What do you expect him to do with that?
He orders the veal. He’s wearing a lapel pin of his famous moon footprint in miniature, cast in pewter. He’s wearing a tan corduroy jacket, a tie with pictures of planets all over it. He’s wearing bracelets, big beads. Turquoise on one wrist and a string of translucent alien faces or something on the other. "And all of a sudden here’s a rocket," he’s saying, his voice low and gravelly, as he tries to make plain what landing on the moon can do to a man’s life. "And you’re gonna get on top of it and go somewhere. People are interested. People want to be able to put down in writing something about how you were feeling." He gesticulates when he talks, the bracelets clattering. "Look, we didn’t know what we were feeling. We weren’t feeling."
The jewelry is distracting. There is more. A gigantic double watch, two faces fused together like heads on conjoined twins. There are gold rings, a moon, a star, diamonds, a pinkie ring, many rings. What is up with the jewelry? It’s confusing. Wait, jewelry?
Never mind all that. You have no idea what to do with all that. His jewelry, your pregnant smile, the distance between you and him is a chasm and you don’t know how you feel about that. Imagine how he feels about that. He doesn’t know how he feels. He’s been feeling this way ever since he came back, fell spectacularly out of the sky in July of 1969, splashed into the Pacific in an airtight capsule with his Apollo 11 crewmates Neil Armstrong and Michael Collins.
He’s a museum piece. He’s a mascot—for Team Universe.
He talks in very long paragraphs about rocket science. Orbits and going to Mars and the "Aldrin Mars Cycler." He holds three patents for things like a modular space station, and he started a foundation devoted to advancing space education. "But this is not what you want to talk about," he thankfully says, and so you say let’s get back to that day you went to the moon. It was a moment for the world, a particular historic moment when scientific, military, and nationalistic interests intersected perfectly—and him and Neil and Mike blasting off atop a Saturn V as if in celebration of that perfect union. And doesn’t he have a perspective on that? A way of thinking about that?
"It’s something we did," he says. "Now we should do something else."
(You feel like an idiot. You feel like you’re asking Mona to offer insights into the Mona Lisa.)
He’s a relic of the twentieth century, a snapshot of American glory—of human achievement—living right here in your same life span. He’s a picture in every history book in every language in every country of the world, and every single human being who even thinks about him has the same question. "How was it? How was...the moon? What did it feel like to go to the moon?"
He came back burdened. By what he did, and what he didn’t do. Significantly burdened. Suicidal. His grandfather, a bullet through the brain. His mom swallowed pills. Moon or no moon, that’s in his blood. "There was some genetic association," he says. "My grandfather had committed suicide, and then my mother did right before we went to the moon."
Abruptly he switches subjects, talks rockets and boosters. Orbits. His comfort zone. "And now Obama says he wants to send a human to an asteroid. Why would he say that? I’ll tell you why he said that. To satisfy the public. To show progress. But that’s not going to the moon. That’s not going to Mars. That’s playing around with a Mickey Mouse rock. We’ve got to get rid of that. I’m the creator of a new way to get to Mars."
He takes a sip of his soda. He hasn’t had a drink in thirty-six years. He’s got his chair positioned against the wall, his shoulders open and relad, his round blue eyes busy and alert. "My mind might wander a little bit," he says, surveying the room. "I’m on the scout for cute-looking ladies, being divorced a couple of years now." Someone turns the music up. The speaker is not far from his knee. "THIS IS USUALLY QUITE A SHOWPLACE," he says over the beat.
"The melancholy of all things done" is the way Buzz once described his complete mental breakdown after returning from the moon. Booze. A couple of divorces. A psych ward. Broke. At one point he was selling cars.
Neither Neil Armstrong nor Michael Collins had a mental breakdown after returning from the moon. The public pressure was never as great on Mike; he was up orbiting the moon in the command module while Neil and Buzz puttered off in the Eagle and then gently touched down on the Sea of Tranquillity. Neil was of course the first to open the hatch, the first man to walk on the moon. He would go on to retire from space with dignity, people said. He turned into a buttoned-up academic, and then a businessman, honorably testifying before Congress about space exploration when called, and turning down just about every media request coming his way, turning down biography offers from people like James Michener. He sued Hallmark Cards for using his name and a recording of his "one small step" quote for a Christmas ornament.
Buzz was of course the second man to walk on the moon.
Buzz made a rap video, "Rocket Experience," with Snoop Dogg. He did the cha-cha and the fox-trot and was eliminated in the second round of season ten of Dancing with the Stars. He has appeared on WWE Monday Night Raw, The Price Is Right, Space Ghost Coast to Coast, 30 Rock, The Big Bang Theory, The Simpsons, Futurama, Top Chef, and many dozens of other shows and movies as himself. He has written eight books, mostly about his own exploits in space, including four memoirs, two science fiction books, and a children’s book. He sells "get your ass to mars" T-shirts on his website, along with $600 Buzz Aldrin "First Step" autographed lithographs.
The second man to walk on the moon. Number two.
When Neil died in 2012, the White House issued a statement saying he was "among the greatest of American heroes—not just of his time, but of all time."
Recently Buzz had a hard time getting anyone at the White House to answer his calls about maybe doing a ceremony or something to commemorate the forty-fifth anniversary of his moon walk. (Eventually they pulled a little something together.)
He drives a zippy red 2014 M3 with the roof open to the California sun. He’s hugging tight to the bumper of a silver Chevy in front of him that will not move, his engine growling. He wears a pair of glasses over his sunglasses, and a blue NASA ball cap with red flames on the sides. He pulls around the Chevy with one quick motion and only inches to spare, nearly rams into a Camry, so he veers left, and with nothing now in the way he floors it, the sudden burst pitching his body back. Seventy miles an hour, eighty miles an hour down L.A.’s 405, zigging and zagging like a fighter pilot shooting down two Soviet MiG-15’s, which incidentally he once did, from the cockpit of an F-86 Sabre in Korea.
At the end of the exit ramp, he exhales. "Pretty good instrumentation," he says, looking at the dashboard of the M3. "It says fifty-one miles until I run out of gas. That would have been handy to have in an airplane." He demonstrates the paddle shift. "I could recommend some modifications." Incidentally, regarding the glasses he’s wearing, his eye doctor does not know his business thoroughly, he thinks. "I need to create a device to overcome a defect in the lens housing." Also, the wristwatch industry has never fully capitalized on quartz. "But that goes back to 1970, and I told Bulova—" His fingers are all bent outward, like wings. His cuff links are tiny American flags.
He is a man who studies and invents. He has always been this way. He got the nickname Buzz when he was a kid, from his sister who called him "buzzer" because she couldn’t pronounce "brother." There was already one Edwin in the family, and that was his dad. The family lived in Montclair, New Jersey, and his mother’s maiden name was Moon, and yes, he knows how crazy that is. The melancholy ran in the Moon side of the family. His dad, a career military man, an early aviation man, cast a long shadow. His dad knew one of the Wright brothers, and Amelia Earhart, and took a transatlantic flight on the goddamn Hindenburg before it blew up. Buzz was the youngest, the only boy, small, shy, awkward, and sensitive. His father wanted him to be brave and brilliant. So Buzz drove himself to become what his father wanted. Sheer will. West Point, fighter pilot, decorated war hero.
"And?" his father said.
After Korea, Buzz came home and got a doctorate in rocket science from MIT. It was the extreme sport of science, and Buzz found himself luxuriating in the learning and the language. "A rendezvous guidance technique, designed to extend man’s control capabilities," he wrote in his 1963 doctoral thesis, seemingly fully in command of this point, "is derived, whereby, through a sight reticle programmed to vary inertially for a selected exact nominal Keplerian trajectory, the astronaut can initiate, monitor and correct his intercept...." That kind of lingo got him an invitation to join NASA, to go up in a rocket ship, for the first time in 1966 in Gemini XII, when he went out of the rocket ship, went floating out in space to find out how long a human could survive without dying—the longest space walk ever attempted. Buzz calculated ways to avoid wasted muscle energy by applying his scuba-diving training to the challenge. He beat the record handily, staying outside the capsule for two hours and twenty-nine minutes—then he went out twice more.
Then came Apollo 11, and he walked on the moon.
"The second man to walk on the moon?" his father said. "Number two?"
Sheer will. In his sports car, Buzz’s knuckles on the steering wheel are white. The double-headed watch hangs loosely off his wrist as if unsure of its own point. The California sunshine lends a glow to the alien-head bracelet and makes the aliens’ red eyes sparkle.
"Yeah, I sort of like to be on the unique side of life," Buzz says. "Or I don’t mind it. Yeah, it gets lonesome." He’s not sure about his glasses, removes the outer pair. "If I wear lenses, my eyes aren’t going to train to fix the problem," he says. "The muscles are just going to get lazy." You should always be improving yourself, he thinks, never sit idle. Never.
After the moon, Buzz cracked up. There was nothing left to do. The media frenzy was worldwide; twenty-four countries in forty-five days—and that was just the beginning. NASA clearly had no further use for him in space; now he was just supposed to be some kind of NASA PR flack. He resigned from NASA in 1971 and returned to the Air Force. It didn’t seem like the Air Force knew what to do with someone who had been to the moon. He was an outsider, the egghead from academia who’d just tumbled off the speakers’ circuit. He drank a lot. His marriage to the mother of his three children fell apart, and he retired from the Air Force. He went to rehab. He got married again, but that lasted a year. He drank a lot more, fell in love a lot more. His Air Force pension wasn’t much. That was when he started at the Cadillac dealership. He sucked at selling cars. Rehab was the first time he ever really talked about feelings. It turned out he had so many feelings. An emptiness so deep. He discovered the melancholy of all things done.
He was in his forties, a conqueror with nothing left to conquer but his own demons. The second man to walk on the moon. Number two.
His father never accepted the fact that Buzz was not number one. Grasping, his father waged an unsuccessful one-man campaign to get the U.S. Postal Service to change its Neil Armstrong "First Man on the Moon" commemorative stamp to one that said "First Men on the Moon" so it could include Buzz. As for Buzz’s mental breakdown, his depression and alcoholism, his father never accepted that, either. Or if he did, he blamed the moon, the absence of gravity, the unknown physical properties of space. The moon must have ruined Buzz.
Buzz turns the car with precision into the parking lot of his apartment building, coming to an abrupt stop. "Radio off," he says, fixing his gaze on the dashboard, pushing the button. "Top up." Check. "Seat belt off." Check. "Hat off." Check. "Neutral." Check. He thinks. Anything else? "Sunglasses off." He looks in the mirror. "Somebody says I look pretty good in lenses," he says. "And that’s part of my game, too." Glasses on.
Christina, his manager and "mission control director," comes out to meet him. She’s tall, early forties, a strong Amazon type with blonde hair and super-thick eyelashes. She used to work for John Tesh and before that was a backup singer for Ringo Starr. She is terrified of driving with Buzz and so she never does. They bicker. Buzz has had three wives, and after the last one, Lois, things were a real mess. Christina now acts as a bouncer for all of the gold diggers trying to pry themselves into chez Buzz. Not that there’s very much in the way of gold. Christina accompanies Buzz on his appearances, stands in the back waving her arms, telling Buzz to stay on topic. Or wrap it up. Mostly: Wrap it up. She has been working for Buzz for six years and never expected to stay this long. At one point, a few years ago, she was starting a family and wanted to move on with her life. But when she saw what was happening to Buzz, what the relationship with Lois was doing to him, her heart wouldn’t let her walk away.
He climbs with no trouble up and out of the car. He is fit and tan and short. He can’t find his phone. "Where’s my thermos?" He’s a little ADD. "I can’t turn the damn thing off," he says, referring to the car. That is one button he could not locate. Christina leans in, yanks here and there on the dashboard; she has no idea how to work the ignition on an M3, but it can’t be that hard. His license plate is marsguy. Lois was moongal.
"Okay, Buzz, come on up," Christina says. "Rob figured out a way to shorten the presentation."
"I don’t want it shorter," he says.
"They’re only giving you thirty minutes, Buzz."
"Well, don’t re-arrange my slides," he says.
"We had to re-arrange the slides, Buzz," she says.
Upstairs in the apartment, Rob, his personal assistant who also refuses to drive with Buzz, is re-arranging the slides. It’s a modest home with a sprawling view of West L.A. and leather couches and dark walls tidily decorated with Buzz memorabilia. Fox News stays on the big screen. A coffee-table book, Marketing the Moon, lies on top of a glass case displaying some of Buzz’s medals and a signed photograph of him and Mike and Neil. Buzz had a much fancier apartment down the street when he was married to Lois, but now Lois has that one, and she also has a lot of Buzz’s moon stuff, which Christina and Rob would like to help Buzz get back.
Lois was supposed to be the one. Lois propped Buzz up after rehab in the late 1980s. "The fuel of love was pretty much sending Lois and me into the stratosphere," he writes in "Every Superman Needs His Lois," just one of multiple chapters devoted to Lois in one of his books. "Lois took me on as her one-person challenge to rebuild my sense of self. Whenever I got down on myself, she wrote more notes to me, page after page, telling me how brilliant, physically attractive, creative, and innovative I was...she sat close to me and read her notes aloud." They married in 1988. Buzz had his three grown children from his first marriage, and Lois had two. Lois was a banker’s daughter, worth millions. Buzz was never a big-money guy. He was a pay-the-bills-on-time guy. But with Lois’s money they were living the high life—plenty of fancy parties in L.A. But all of that disappeared in 1989 with the collapse of the savings-and-loan industry. For the first time in her life she had to figure out how to make money, and the most obvious thing to sell was: Buzz.
"My petite little platinum blonde beauty of a wife suddenly turned into a public-relations dynamo," Buzz would later write proudly of his wife. " ’The business is Buzz!’ she proclaimed, and indeed so it became."
He went on every talk show imaginable—all over the world. She turned down virtually nothing. He made none of the choices. He imagined himself promoting space, doing something good for the world and the future of mankind. He did what Lois told him to do, and now they were raking in millions, endorsement deals with Louis Vuitton, Tommy Hilfiger, Apple, Grundig, Nike.
Buzz emerges from the kitchen with a bowl of berries and a protein shake in his Dancing with the Stars souvenir mug. He sits at the computer with Rob and Christina and tries to persuade them to undo the way they re-arranged the slides for this afternoon’s keynote speech, "Buzz Aldrin’s Unified Space Vision," at the International Space Development Conference at the Sheraton Gateway Hotel in Los Angeles. Why did they have to go and re-arrange his damn slides?
Buzz: "Okay, now look. This is wrong. And this, which is wrong. And this, which is wrong! It shows too much of the solar dynamic. It doesn’t make the point. And we want the node to clearly show. And the two halves. So it will cement in their minds."
Christina: "I know that’s super logical in your mind, but Buzz—you won’t have time for all of this. It’s a thirty-minute speech."
When Christina came along, it was to help with the business. She’d answered an ad in the Hollywood Reporter, and it was just a job. At night she would come home to her husband and say, "I don’t feel good about this" and "Some of the stuff I’m seeing doesn’t seem right." He would say, "Stay out of it." She would say, "Believe me, I’m trying."
One day Buzz came to Christina and said, "I need you to look into my bank accounts." She said, "Buzz, I can’t." He said Lois was always bragging about all this money they were making. "But I don’t see the benefit of it." Buzz wanted to help his son Mike. Mike was going down the same path as Buzz. Mike was the black sheep of the family, never fit in. Buzz did not understand the problem, but he never turned his back on Mike and neither did Andy, Buzz’s other son, or Janice, his daughter. Buzz wanted money to help Mike, and Lois kept saying they didn’t have any. "Yet somehow I’m paying her kid’s salary?" Buzz groused to Christina. Christina said, "Buzz, you have every right to go to your accountants and ask them to look at your own bank accounts."
Lois fired Christina in 2011 and kicked Buzz out and changed all the locks on the doors.
Buzz hired Christina back, and together with his kids he’s been rebuilding. Women keep swooping in, tell Buzz how handsome he is, and Buzz gets enamored, and Christina says: "No." But the women keep coming. Like everyone else in the world, women like to reach out and touch Buzz. It’s some kind of natural human reaction to the man who walked on the moon. It’s maybe like touching the moon. Or it’s just the intoxicating allure of fame. And he’s a cute old man, kind of wacky, thoroughly accessible in that way—and somehow it seems okay to walk up and hug him. And when pretty women do that, especially pretty women with large breasts, well, Buzz takes it personally. He takes it seriously. He falls in love easily.
Christina is his shield. She wants him to slow down, to stop with the ladies, to stop feeling like he has to fly to friggin’ Dubai to give a speech, but she knows he’s incapable of stopping either. Forward momentum is the antidote to madness. He learned that a long time ago.
Christina: "It’s a thirty-minute speech, Buzz. They’re only giving you thirty minutes."
Buzz: "I’m not going to explain each slide. I’m just going to say look at how easy this is to read."
Christina: "What? How easy what is to read?"
He clicks on the "Unified Space Vision (U.S.) Civil Space Missions" slide, a graph of red and green and blue with arrows and labels: Testbed to ISS, Phobos Recon, MEV to CSS, M-Ph Landing Site, 3 Crew MEV Return.
Christina: "I look at that and that’s, like, chaos."
Rob: "It’s pretty hard to just sit there and read that."
Christina: "The normal person is not—just no, Buzz."
Buzz: "But people need to know!"
Christina: "You cannot have a grid like that."
Buzz: "Please just do what I say."
At the Sheraton, fans are circling. Five teenagers from India in black suits and matching red ties wait to capture Buzz’s attention; he’s in the back at a fold-up table still arguing with Christina about the slides as they prep for the speech. A middle-aged man in a tight Star Trek shirt waits for Buzz. A former girlfriend of Buzz’s brazenly goes in for a hug. Two girls in sexy space suits have given up waiting for Buzz; they position themselves with Buzz in the background and snap selfies. The crowd in the ballroom is mostly science fiction types, a smattering of elderly engineers, kids with school projects, and says a lot about the degree to which the National Space Society, which has been holding the conference for thirty-three years, is feeling its age. On the one hand, superhero tech entrepreneur Elon Musk will make an appearance to accept an award, and on the other hand, tonight in the California Ballroom the "Space Is Sexy!" party will be held. All weekend long, speakers at the conference extol the promise of "building a spacefaring civilization," and the crowd cheers, revival-meeting style. It’s an aching. For a day when space was cool. When people—humanity—wanted to go there. Not just a couple of billionaires on a joy ride.
It’s hard to even remember when human spaceflight was part of pop culture. It’s hard to even remember Tang. When MTV debuted in 1981, they used a photo of Buzz standing on the moon saluting the American flag. They superimposed the network logo over the flag. A mash-up. Space was retro—in the 1980s.
If there’s an appetite to return to the moon, or push on to Mars, it’s not in the twenty-first-century vernacular. NASA retired the Space Shuttle program in 2011. The so-called Constellation Program to get back to the moon by 2020—a Bush-administration plan—was canceled. In 2010, Obama called for missions that go beyond low Earth orbit, including the asteroid mission by 2025 and a manned mission to Mars before 2040. "Our goal is no longer just a destination to reach," Obama said. "Our goal is the capacity for people to work and learn, and operate and live safely beyond the earth for extended periods of time." But an entire presidential term and a half has gone by with virtually no further mention of Mars.
The inaction, the lack of motivation, the utter lack of imagination, is what bothers Buzz. Let’s go to Mars! To him it’s as primal as scuba diving, his one and only hobby besides space—and women. (This per Christina.) Any infant learning to crawl knows that exploration is the driving force behind the whole gig. Primal.
The Buzz Aldrin Unified Space Vision is Buzz’s plan to get human beings to Mars by the year 2032. And he’s here in the Grand Ballroom about to tell the crowd all about it, sitting at the fold-up table with his PowerPoint, still arguing with Christina about the slides. Maybe she could resize the font. Magnify the images. Can this whole thing go down? If you could remove the title, you could make it full-screen.
That won’t make any difference, Buzz. Just go straight to the messy chart.
Please don’t call it the messy chart, Christina.
People are eating their salads, Buzz. There’s no more time.
He reaches for his jacket draped over a chair, stuff falls out, pens, an electric razor clunking to the floor.
Where’s my laser pointer?
In the side there.
Is that my phone? Did I bring both phones?
[[#image: /photos/5582c930e52bc4b477a9d7f0]From left:_ David Calvert/Bloomberg via Getty Images; David M. Benett/Getty Images for Virgin; Tony Barson/Getty Images; JC Olivera/Wireimage._
The guy at the podium says Buzz needs no introduction. The crowd cheers stadium-loud as Buzz walks up. He waves. He beams. He’s charming and quirky—the little old man with the bracelets rattling, cracking jokes Bob Hope-style, or maybe more like a cross between Merv Griffin and Joe Biden. They present him with a thank-you gift, a pewter moon trophy, and when he takes it he looks out into the audience, ducking his head to avoid the glare, and calls, "Christina, don’t I already have one of these?"
(Yes, Lois has it.)
He tells the crowd why we should go to Mars, and for a while you can follow. But not for long. He shows the slides, and they’re not helping much.
"Okay, now, this chart shows two synodic periods, it’s pretty complicated, but this is the one that’s going to show it in motion. This is going to blow your mind. It’s really quite fantastic when you see it in motion. No, we’re not going out there. Hold my horsepowers!"
Twenty minutes in, Christina starts her hand motions. Wrap it up, Buzz. It would be a lot easier if he just had a canned presentation, a little motivational speaking for the people, dream the impossible dream, reach for the stars—normal hero stuff. But that is not Buzz. He is a man of science. He has important space concepts to share, beseeching mankind to understand. He’s delivering the speech he would to serious space-minded politicians and science foundations thirty years ago, but now the audience has morphed into Trekkies and _Star War_s hobbyists.
For the record, when it comes to Mars, Buzz knows what he’s talking about. Orbital mechanics was his thing at MIT. Orbital mechanics is the beautiful science of how artificial objects move through space. He became something of a savant on the topic. Think about hitting a golf ball off the rim of a hole. The ball zooms around the rim, then quickly glances off in another direction. There’s an equation that explains that. Similarly, when a spacecraft approaches a planet, it can zip around the planet and fling off in another direction. There are equations to explain that "gravitational slingshot," too. It’s how we’ve gotten probes to Saturn and Venus and Mars, and Buzz had a lot to do with it. His MIT doctoral thesis was an orbital-mechanics lovefest that NASA ended up incorporating into its standard operating procedures. Then, in 1985, Buzz proposed a beautiful equation to the scientific community that showed how we could slingshot our way to Mars, as if on a highway, except you don’t need much fuel because you’re flinging in and out of orbits. Scientists calculated and confirmed it. Buzz called it the Aldrin Cycler. He has equations and slides to explain all this.
He’s an equation man who feels an obligation to be a man of the people. A translator. A space-science ambassador who will get people excited about these concepts, get people to commit resources, to get people to Mars. But he is, in the end, still an equation man. Soaring rhetoric is not his thing.
Thirty minutes in, Christina’s swirling her wrists and mouthing, TIME TIME TIME!
"Now. Here. This is the slide I wanted. Obviously the earth’s orbit is in blue, Mars orbit is in red. And the transfer is in green. And then it shows a number of orbits, an orbit and a half that goes by Mars."
Forty-five minutes in, Christina is up at the stage.
"Christina tells me I have to go," he says to the crowd. "Um, remember to follow me on Twitter @TheRealBuzz."
The applause is all generosity and relief. And then people rush to him, swarm him for autographs, pictures, selfies, or just to reach out and touch his shoulder. "I love how you gesticulate!" a blonde woman with a tight V-neck sweater says to him. "The way you move your hands, it’s so beautiful," she says, reaching out to touch him. "Oh, my God, such strong shoulders!"
So why, anyway, was Buzz second? Why didn’t he get to be the first man to walk on the moon? Urban legend has it that NASA planned for Buzz to go first but then at some point decided it would be Neil Armstrong instead because Neil, a less excitable guy, would handle the fame better. People who subscribe to the theory point out that NASA got it right; look how much better Neil handled his life.
But then again, we never got to find out how Neil would have ended up if he were number two.
A more likely explanation begins with the fact that Buzz was supposed to be the first man to walk on the moon. That’s how they practiced it, because that’s how NASA did things back then: The commander drove and the pilot did the space walk. Neil, the senior o∞cer, was the commander and so naturally he would stay in the driver’s seat while Buzz, the pilot, opened the hatch and got out.
But there was a hitch in the plan. The hatch itself. It was in front of the astronauts, on the floor. It hinged inward, so you had to pull it open. The hinges were on Buzz’s side, so it swung toward him, blocking him. Neil had the clear path out, not Buzz. And no, you couldn’t trade positions; the lunar module was about the size of a pup tent and the walls were thin as Reynolds Wrap, so you had to be careful not to...lean on it. Once Neil was out, Buzz had to close the hatch, move over to Neil’s side, and then reopen it to get out.
To the rest of the world it didn’t seem to matter much who was number one and who was number two, certainly not in the beginning. A half-billion people watched Neil and Buzz walk on the moon, the world’s largest television audience in history, and afterward there were parades around the world to welcome Neil, Buzz, and Mike back to the planet.
Buzz’s mom probably killed herself because she couldn’t take the media glare. Maybe that put her over the edge. That’s the way Buzz always figured it. The frenzied attention had started long before blastoff. Her son was picked to walk on the moon! She had long been suffering from depression, lived in seclusion. She had tried with pills before. This time the pills worked. Buzz’s father denied the suicide. He persuaded the coroner to say she died of a heart attack.
How was it? How was the moon? What did it feel like to go to the moon?
It felt like: second.
And it felt like: My mom just killed herself.
How do you think it felt?
"Magnificent desolation" is what he said when he climbed down the ladder and first saw the moon.
Christina has determined that Judy, Buzz’s current girlfriend, is a winner. That is a very hopeful sign. Buzz is an old man and he needs someone to take care of him. Like any old man, he has his good days and his bad, cycling through sharp, blurry, confused, clear. The day an Al Jazeera film crew comes to do an interview, he’s on his game.
A camera guy, the on-air talent, and a producer. All three of them take in the moon memorabilia on the walls of the apartment. Buzz Aldrin! He went to the moon. He put his footprint on the moon. We can’t wait to hear the amazing synthesis of moon wisdom that he is about to bestow upon us.
Buzz comes out wearing a blue shirt with a white collar, and he’s holding his Dancing with the Stars souvenir cup.
They smile at him. All of them. The same exact smile. Here we go again. This is what it is to be Buzz, over and over again, for forty-five years this smile coming at him.
Hello!
Oh, my gosh, we’re so excited!
We-are-so-honored!
All at once they take notice of Buzz’s jewelry. Buzz looks at his jewelry, then up at them. "Yeah, I’ve got bling," he says.
The laughter is all awkward repositioning.
"I’ve got blings that are meaningful to me," he says. "I pick up things. I saw this one on someone else and I said what is it and she said it keeps away evil spirits, do you want one? I said, hell yeah."
"Are they...skulls?" one of them asks.
"I tried to make them patriotic by painting the eyes red, white, and blue," Buzz says. "Didn’t work. Then I was going to alternate red, white, blue; I didn’t want white, blue, red. Well, I used too many whites. Then the string got a little loose and I lost it, so..."
"Uh-huh," says one.
"Is Christina around?" says another.
"Let’s get started?" says the third.
"Getting old is not for sissies," Buzz tells them.
They want to get started. They talk about the Eagle, a replica of which is on display at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. "Do you ever look at it now, do you ever stand back and say, ’This is such a fragile thing, it looks like a little box covered in tinfoil’?"
He looks at them, cocks his head. They lean in, all anticipation.
"No," he says.
"Well, did you ever say, ’I’m going to get in that thing and land on the moon’? Did that ever sort of flabbergast you?"
He looks down at his double-headed watch. The distance between him and these people is a chasm.
"I understood the construction of it," he says. "It’s got landing gear. It’s got struts that compress. It’s got probes that hang down. It was a marvel of engineering."
"What were your emotions as you walked on the surface of the moon?"
"Fighter pilots don’t have emotions."
"But you’re a human!"
"We had ice in our veins."
"Was there a feeling of awe and majesty?"
"There wasn’t any time to do that, really."
The producer has her head in her hands. The on-air talent looks at his notes.
"Do you look upon the moon at night? What do you think about when you gaze upon the moon?"
"Not a whole lot."
The producer stands up. "Why don’t we stop here—"
"I am trying!" says the on-air talent.
"I know—"
Buzz is tired. Buzz is so tired of these moon-wisdom questions, nearly a half century of the same questions about feelings that leave him feeling inadequate. He is a man of science. Next time NASA should send up a poet, he wrote in one of his books, a philosopher, an artist, a journalist. He wasn’t being flip. He thought mankind clearly needed to send up people who know how to translate feelings.
"Returning to Earth, that was the challenging part," he says. That was and remains the insane part. He fulfilled a goal for humanity and then humanity required only that he remain its proud symbol. Adored, obsolete, stuck in time. "In my history book," he says, "when the pilgrims got to Plymouth Rock, it wasn’t to get a return trip home."
He needs to keep going. "Improve something. Innovation. That’s the name of my game." He is a man of science. He is old. His mind is slipping. He has so little time. He has ideas for watches and BMW instrument panels, optical-lens housings and missions to Mars. He has a son in trouble, Mike; he’s so worried about Mike. He wrote him an e-mail, he said, I love you, Mike, just come home. He’s got a president who thinks fooling around with some dumb-ass Mickey Mouse asteroid is a space program. Someone needs to light a fire under that man. There’s so much left to do. He has a new girlfriend and he’s thinking of making her exclusive.
JEANNE MARIE LASKAS (@PittWriters) is a GQ correspondent.