_Live From Cape Canaveral_ - Jay Barbree [49]
My good buddy Martin Caidin had the undisputed best sources within the Russian space program. His ancestors were Russian, and from the time Yuri Gagarin made the planet’s first flight into space, Martin was in and out of Russia; as previously mentioned, he coauthored cosmonaut Gherman Titov’s book, I Am Eagle. Marty never told me how and why he was over there so often, and I never asked. But when he returned a few days before Gemini 12’s flight, he brought back much memorabilia from the cosmonauts.
Our friend Lola Morrow was the astronauts’ den mother. Because James Lovell and Buzz Aldrin had such a record-breaking success to end Gemini, Lola had an idea. She plastered a huge sign on the wall: “WELCOME HOME RECORD BREAKING COSMONAUTS.”
When Lovell and Aldrin walked through the door, they were quickly adorned in cosmonauts’ fur caps and given the traditional red roses and vodka. The Gemini 12 astronauts loved it. Washington wasn’t pleased.
NINE
“I’ve got a fire in the cockpit!”
Gus Grissom stepped out of his door, stopping long enough to study the lemon tree in his backyard. “Ah, there’s a nice one,” he smiled, reaching for the fat citrus hanging about eye level. He wiped the large lemon across his shirt. “I have a new home for you, baby,” he laughed as he turned, walked around the house to his ’Vette. He slid into the seat and backed the sports car out of the driveway. His hand fit comfortably around the shift grip, as he moved smoothly through the gears. His ’Vette purred down the asphalt. His speed was about ten miles over the limit, just where he liked it. Just enough for an early-morning piss-off of the traffic cops trying to down their fourth doughnut.
Gus reminded himself this was most likely the only fun he would have all day—behind the wheel of his ’Vette, with his thoughts taking him back to the good times he and Alan and Gordo had had in the drags at the Cape.
He smiled. They were the good times for sure, but none were better than that one particular late night. That time he’d headed back to the motel in the wee hours when he was backing up Shepard before the first flight.
He had his ’Vette on a deserted U.S. 1, where his speed of 100-plus was sweet. He was dodging an armadillo when he picked up a Florida highway patrol. There was only one thing to do: put the pedal to the metal. He made a high-speed turn onto the 520 Causeway and raced for Cocoa Beach. A sheriff’s deputy felt he should join the highway patrol in the chase. The two were doing their best to wake up the entire spacecoast with their screaming sirens when Gus sped through his turn onto A1A. The hot pursuit was joined by a third man—a Cocoa Beach cop. Grissom stomped his accelerator to the floor and his Jim Rathmann–prepared ’Vette left the long arm of the law hopelessly behind.
Gus made a wide seventy-mile-per-hour turn into the Holiday Inn, where he found his luck holding. The parking slot in front of Alan Shepard’s room was open, and Gus slid his ’Vette between the lines. He ran quickly into his own room two doors away, shedding his clothes in the dark as flashing lights and howling sirens pulled up outside. He slipped into his pajamas and peeked around the curtains to see the sheriff’s deputy and the highway patrolman arguing. They were putting their hands on the hood of Gus’s ’Vette, feeling the heat coming through the fiberglass. “This is the room,” they announced, and began pounding on a sleeping Alan Shepard’s door.
When Shepard opened it, all three grabbed him and threw him to the concrete, with handcuffs locking in place around his wrists. A sleepy Alan Shepard found himself trying to explain to “never-listen traffic cops” when the pajama-clad Grissom opened his door and yelled, “Hey guys, can’t you keep it down out there? Some of us have to go to work in a couple of hours!”
Gus laughed, remembering that Alan’s forgiveness