Moondust (26 page)

“Well, maybe I am. My primary goal is to preserve this great adventure, in this way that no one's doing. But I am looking for that, to preserve that feeling, too, if I could find it. And it's thirty years ago, so at the same time I have to be careful not to stray too
far from it. So I'm always talking to other astronauts and looking at the pictures and all that, trying to make sure that I don't turn it from what it
was
into what I
wish
it was.”

We go back to the studio and stand in front of the troublesome Conrad for a while as Bean remembers him with a fondness it's hard to remain untouched by. At Conrad's funeral in 1999, Armstrong, not a man given to hyperbole, referred to him as “the best man I've ever known,” and everyone seems to agree on that. He'd failed to make the Mercury 7 only because of his irreverent attitude to the tests and my favourite story is that when a psychiatrist held up a blank piece of paper and asked him to describe what he saw, he replied, “But it's upside down.” He is thought to have been Tom Wolfe's main source for
The Right Stuff
and was the kind of man other men either wanted to follow or
be
– more like Ken Kesey or Tim Leary than other astronauts.

I can see the problem with the picture, too, because depicting a man clicking his heels in a space suit is difficult without making him also look like he's toppling over. Bean asks me for my opinion on it, which he would certainly never do if he'd seen the paint scheme in my study, and we fall to talking about the trip back, as he describes the intense sensation of slamming into the Earth's atmosphere at 24,000 miles per hour – the point at which they understood how fast 24,000 miles per hour really is … twelve times faster than a high-speed rifle bullet … and they hit six and a half Gs. A fraction of a degree off course and they would have skipped off the atmosphere and joined Major Tom, tumbling away forever, watching the Earth get smaller and then disappear entirely as they sped into the blackest black of an absolute void, blacker than any dye or pigment or mere absence of light could ever approach on Earth. We tend to discuss space as though it's something. Actually, space is
nothing
. Such a strange idea. Bean talks about the lessons Conrad taught him and the home truths he cared enough to tell when the younger man's troubles with Slayton and Shepard were at their peak and he was feeling persecuted or ignored. When I express sorrow at having been denied the chance of meeting Conrad, he sighs and simply says:

“Yes, he'd have been one you'd have remembered. They come along every once in a while.”

Bean smiles as he shows me the Moon tools he uses to give the pictures some of their texture; the boots he stomps across them and the geology hammer “which really belongs to the American people, but I'm using it right now.” He'd been searching for more beautiful – and there, he says it! – more
feminine
colours in the face of “this rugged Moon,” when the tools came to him as a way of resolving the conflict.

“Why was I using these tools?” he asks, holding up a paintbrush, “when I've got tools of my own!”

He'd also dreamt of scattering Moondust on the works, but didn't think he had any. Then one day he looked up and saw his old mission patches, which were filthy with it.

“So I said, ‘I could cut those up.' Then I thought, ‘No, I don't want to do that, those mean a lot to me.' It took me three or four days of thinking about it to decide that, well, I really was devoting the rest of my life to doing this, so that was a good place to put them. Rather than just leave 'em for somebody to sell one day and somebody else buy 'em and put 'em on their wall … it'd be better for me to put them in these paintings.”

It had sounded like a gimmick in the catalogue, but it doesn't when he talks about it. He shows me some of the tricks he's discovered for improving the texture of the work.

“You wish that you'd think of these things right away,” he concludes.

You can't think of everything right away.

“Well, you could,” he smiles, “but it wouldn't be art. That's what I tell myself when the colours don't come out right or something hasn't worked like I thought it would: ‘That's why they call it art!'”

We discuss the problems of painting something that's the same colour all over, surrounded by a uniformly dark sky. Other artists can put a tree or some grass in if they want an injection of colour, but Bean can't.

“There's only a few colours you can use on the Moon and make it look real; you can use reds and oranges – which are becoming my favourite – and yellows. But you use almost anything else and it doesn't look right. It took me years to understand this, but being an art lover, it can still be frustrating. I keep thinking,
‘Well, maybe there's a way.' And I spend hours trying.”

Did he understand the extent of the risk he was taking when he quit NASA to become a painter? I ask. Hardly anyone makes a living at it.

“Well, partly. But I had the advantage that I've always believed you should follow your dream. And I've always been like that. I knew that somehow I could work it out, you know? I didn't know how long it would take, so I had the advantage of staying with NASA and trying to save my money. And I moved into a little apartment that was, like, 1,100 square feet, a little-bitty apartment, and I'm sure that, among astronauts, I had the littlest place. But I said, ‘Who knows how long I'll be living on my savings here? I don't know how this is going to go.' And then when I got there, I discovered that I wasn't as good as I thought.”

He chuckles softly. Bean radiates a rare kind of peace, seems – there's no other word for it –
happy
. I suspect that he would attribute this to the fact that he's lived his “dream,” but my experience is that people who've lived dreams tend to be more discontented and
un
happy. On the other hand, perhaps Bean just hides his shadows well. He seems to have such a positive outlook, I find myself saying aloud …

“I do. That's the thing I'm most proud of about myself, is that I'm productive and not thinking about the good old days and I'm not griping about stuff. I think one of the things I've learned in life is not to get trapped into needing too many things. I don't … I'm not driven by a lot of things that some people are. My aim was not to get rich, although I've got lotsa stuff. Some of my friends have got airplanes or better cars. I've got a nine-year-old car out there. I mean, I've got the money, I could go buy a better car today out of my checking account, but I wouldn't be any happier if I did. But I would be happier if I could paint a better painting tomorrow. And the stuff you like, if it breaks or someone takes it away, then it's gone – it doesn't matter. But if it takes you twice as long as you think it should to get to work every day, that
does
matter. I understand this for me: I'm not saying it's true for everybody.”

Ed Mitchell had a similar outlook. It's unusual among people
who've been high achievers.

“Oh, I think it is. Of all the astronauts, I'm maybe the most that way. I feel good every day.”

He must feel blue sometimes, I insist. What does he do then?

“First of all, I feel like it's me. If I feel like that here, I'll quit doing it and go … the thing I like is eating, so that's not good.” He laughs and pats his actually quite modest stomach. “But I'll say, ‘I'm gonna have a big lunch today, I'll have spaghetti at my favourite restaurant.' ”

Now I'm laughing. Spaghetti –
still!

“And I'll have some garlic bread! I had that today. And I can't do that every day, so I'll be eatin' leftovers tonight to make up for it. So I'll do something like that. There's not too many days like that, though. I mean I got as much ups and downs, as much good and bad that comes in, as anyone else.”

He asks what I do, because “you seem real content.” I tell him that I'm not sure about that, that I get easily frustrated and even more easily bored and have a tendency to make things harder work than they really need to be. That said, I've gradually learned to trust these feelings, to see them as indications that something's wrong and needs changing. Though, obviously, this is not always convenient.

“I agree,” he enthuses. “Now, when I was an astronaut, I was the last one in my class to fly. And that was very frustrating to me and those were kind of unhappy periods, right when they'd announce the new crew and I wouldn't be on it, even though my friends would be. And some of 'em, you know, I knew they were better astronauts than I was, could fly better and seemed to be smarter than I was … they would get selected for crews and I could kind of accept that. Then they'd begin to pick people where I knew I could fly better and knew I was smarter than them – ”

Suddenly, there's a commotion in the kitchen area and Bean dashes off to see that the Lhasas haven't eaten the dog lady who's come to feed them, then comes back and we go off on a tangent about my minidisc recorder (he's never seen one) and a recent trip I made to Intel to hear about the new kinds of computer
processors they're working on, which might be like little organic puffballs, little
brains
that will store information three-dimensionally, and Bean is thrilled by this. Throughout our conversation, he asks a lot of questions and listens attentively to the answers. It would be hard to overstate how unusual this quality is among the alpha-male scions of the Space Age. All the same, when I remind him where we were, he picks up the thread in exactly the right place, with nary a pause for breath.

“Yeah, well, I was disturbed about the fact that I wasn't being selected. And I spent my time blaming my bosses, Al Shepard and Deke Slayton, for not recognizing how wonderful I was and giving me a flight, as opposed to those guys over there. And I put a lot of effort into that and it was nonproductive. And also, probably my attitude toward them when I was with them was not good.

“And I began to realize that if he [Deke Slayton] didn't like me – professionally, as an astronaut, which is the way I interpreted it, since he didn't give me flights – that it was up to me to find a way to make him think of me better than he was at that moment. And that clicked, almost like a binary, that it wasn't his job, it was my job. Then I was standing around not knowing how to do that and realized that I had no skills to do it, because I'd never thought that way. I'd always been in little groups, like a squadron, where, if you could do it better, your boss saw it. The skipper knows who can land aboard ship. So I could do that, but I discovered at NASA that that wasn't enough. My friends would know it, but the boss who was somewhat removed had no idea of this. So I had to learn how to do that, how to let him see me in an advantageous way, without bragging and stuff. Some people are really good at this. And I noticed that the guys whose fathers were generals and things, they knew how.”

I haven't heard him say this before. I assume that he's referring to the likes of Buzz, Dave Scott, John Young.

“Then you had to think of the ethics of it.”

You mean in relation to negative campaigning, badmouthing competitors, I ask?

A note of distaste enters his voice for the first time. He frowns and shakes his head.

“Naw. I don't do that. Never did that once and I'm proud of it. People did that to me, but I didn't do it back. You have to find ways that fit your personality. It's an advantage to be more ruthless than I am, no doubt about it. But I ain't gonna do it.”

“Surely success gained in such a way will be less satisfying in the long run?” I pipe, astounded by my own naïveté even as I speak.

“Well, yeah, but I think you can be just as happy and even more successful if you're able to cast aside the rules. I mean, I'm not gonna do it. But my feeling is from looking at it, that if you can be ruthless, lie, and all those other things – and be smart about it – that's a big advantage, because then you can take shortcuts. It's like football: if you didn't have referees, and you could clip and push and grab face-masks, well, you're gonna win the game.”

A question asked of ethics students is what do you say to the cheating, lying bastard who reclines on his deathbed insisting that he is happy, content and would do it all the same way again? The astute student soon learns that there is nothing to say to this person: placing matches between his toes and lighting them is about the best you're gonna do, though Kant wouldn't necessarily approve of this.

“Well, I don't think they think they've done it,” says Bean. “I think they think – as we all do – that they did what they needed to do. So that's my take on it.”

I'm keenly aware by now of how rare it is to hear astronauts talk like this. I wonder whether the feelings Bean has just expressed still colour his relations with his former colleagues?

“I think, probably … it doesn't with me. Ahm. I think that to get here you have to be very competitive, 'cos it
is
competition – the world is competition. And I think that's one of the reasons I'm an artist, by the way. I don't want to do that. I don't like to do that. I'd rather perform and see if it works out. If it doesn't, I'll try to perform better. That's good. And other people perform better than me, so I'm not saying that I'm the best performer, I'm just saying that there's a lot of ways to do this … but some people don't ever get over it. Some of my astronaut friends have a different attitude. I feel friends to all of 'em, but I can see they don't. I
didn't recognize this as a younger man, but I can see they're just as competitive now as they were when we were really in competition.”

He pauses for a moment, raising his eyes until they're focussed somewhere just above my head. I get the feeling that he's weighing whether to say something or not.