Riding Rockets - Mike Mullane [152]
I thanked Hank for the warning, suppressing the urge to ask, “Who do I appeal to for justice? Who runs this asylum called Johnson Space Center?”
But Hank’s warning was the final straw. I broke. Mike Mullane, the man who prided himself on being able to hold it all inside, be it an enema in the colon or an agony of emotions in the soul, the man who had lived a life in abject fear of doctors, the man who thought psychiatry was for the feminine and weak…that iron man, Mike Mullane, called Dr. McGuire’s office and made an appointment. I was losing my mind.
On the day of the meeting I picked up the phone several times to cancel. I was certain that if I walked into McGuire’s office I would be recording a new astronaut first. I would become the first astronaut in the history of NASA to voluntarily see a shrink. I would be admitting failure. I would be violating the “Better dead than look bad” commandment. I could imagine how the office grapevine would carry the news if my dark secret was ever discovered. “John Young put Mullane in tears. He ran to the shrink like one of those weepy women onOprah. ” My finger hovered over the phone keypad as this image of personal failure filled my mind. I would cancel the appointment. But I would always come back to the question, “What choice did I have?” I was going freakin’ nuts. I would hang up the phone only to immediately snatch it back and begin to question myself all over again.
Somehow my resolve triumphed. I made it to zero hour. I told my secretary I was going to the gym and then took a circuitous route to McGuire’s temporary office. He merely consulted for NASA. His primary job was in San Antonio with the University of Texas. I found the unmarked room and walked by it several times, checking the hallways for any prying eyes. A Baptist preacher on a clandestine rendezvous with a prostitute could not have acted more suspiciously. The hallway was deserted. Finally I grabbed the door handle, took one more hurried glance in all directions, rushed into the room, and immediately closed the door. That entry alone was probably enough for McGuire to make a diagnosis: paranoid.
As he had ten years earlier, Dr. Terry McGuire met me with a broad smile and enthusiastic handshake. “Come on in, Mike. Have a seat. What can I do for you?” He was largely unchanged from how I remembered him—tall, trim, yielding to baldness, clean shaven. He had the perfect voice for his job—deep, melodious, and soothing.
While I didn’t think there was a damn thing he could do for me, I cut to the chase. “Young and Abbey are driving me fucking nuts.”
McGuire laughed at that. “I’ve heard that from a number of your fellow astronauts.”
I’m sure he noticed the shock on my face. “Are you saying I’m not the first astronaut to meet with you?”
“Not at all.”
The revelation was like a giant weight being lifted from my shoulders. Misery loves company and now I was being told I was part of a miserable crowd. Suddenly, I wanted to interview him, to find what others were saying, but he quickly steered me back to topic. “So, tell me what’s happening with Young and Abbey.”
For the next hour the demons of anger and disgust flew from my soul like bats from a cave. Emboldened by the thought that others had sat in this same seat, I didn’t hold anything back. I told of my ongoing head-butting with Young on range safety and OMS burn issues and the warnings other astronauts had given me that my career was in peril for doing my job. “We’re all afraid to speak up for fear it will jeopardize our place in line. There’s no communication. Nobody understands how crews are chosen or even who chooses them or who has veto power over them—and that’s all that matters to us, flight assignments. Fear dominates the office.”
I recounted how astronauts had recently attempted to forecast flight assignments based upon where