Uncommon Type

by Tom Hanks

  —

  Twenty-four seconds after clearing the tower, our first stage was burning all stops, and the Max-Q app ($0.99) showed us pulling 11.8 times our weight at sea level, not that we needed iPhones to tell us this. We​…​were​…​fighting​…​for breath​…​with Anna​…​screaming​…​“Get off​…​my chest!” But no one was on her chest. She was, in fact, sitting on me, crushing me like a lap dance from an offensive lineman. Kaboom went MDash’s dynamite bolts, and the second stage fired, as programmed. A minute later, dust, loose change, and a couple of ballpoint pens floated up from behind our seats, signaling, Hey! We’d achieved orbit!

  Weightlessness is as much fun as you can imagine, but troublesome for some spacegoers, who for no apparent reason spend their first hours up there upchucking, as if they’d overdone it at the prelaunch reception. It’s one of those facts never made public by NASA PR or in astronaut memoirs. After three revolutions of the Earth, as we finished running the checklist for our translunar injection, Steve Wong’s tummy finally settled down. Somewhere over Africa, we opened the valves in the translunar motor, the hypergolics worked their chemical magic, and—voosh—we were hauling the mail to Moonberry RFD, our escape velocity a crisp seven miles per second, Earth getting smaller and smaller in the window.

  The Americans who went to the moon before us had computers so primitive that they couldn’t get email or use Google to settle arguments. The iPads we took had something like 70 billion times the capacity of those Apollo-era dial-ups and were mucho handy, especially during all the downtime on our long haul. MDash used his to watch the final season of Girls. We took hundreds of selfies with the Earth in the window and, plinking a Ping-Pong ball off the center seat, played a tableless table-tennis tournament, which was won by Anna. I worked the attitude jets in pulse mode, yawing and pitching the Alan Bean for views of some of the few stars that were visible in the naked sunlight: Antares, Nunki, the globular cluster NGC 6333—none of which twinkle when you’re up there among ’em.

  The big event of translunar space is crossing the equigravisphere, a boundary as invisible as the International Date Line but, for the Alan Bean, the Rubicon. On this side of the EQS, Earth’s gravity was tugging us back, slowing our progress, bidding us to return home to the life-affirming benefits of water, atmosphere, and a magnetic field. Once we crossed, the moon grabbed hold, wrapping us in her ancient silvery embrace, whispering to us to hurry hurry hurry to wink in wonder at her magnificent desolation.

  At the exact moment that we reached the threshold, Anna awarded us origami cranes, made out of aluminum foil, which we taped onto our shirts like pilots’ wings. I put the Alan Bean into a Passive Thermal Control BBQ roll, our moon-bound ship rotating on an invisible spit so as to distribute the solar heat. Then we dimmed the lights, taped a sweatshirt over the window to keep the sunlight from sweeping across the cabin, and slept, each of us curled up in a comfortable nook of our little rocket ship.

  When I tell people that I’ve seen the far side of the moon, they often say, “You mean the dark side,” as though I’d fallen under the spell of Darth Vader or Pink Floyd. In fact, both sides of the moon get the same amount of sunshine, just on different shifts.

  Because the moon was waxing gibbous to the folks back home, we had to wait out the shadowed portion on the other side. In that darkness, with no sunlight and the moon blocking the Earth’s reflection, I pulsed the Alan Bean around so that our window faced outbound for a view of the Infinite Time-Space Continuum that was worthy of IMAX: unblinking stars in subtle hues of red-orange-yellow-green-blue-indigo-violet, our galaxy stretching as far as our eyes were wide, a diamond-blue carpet against a black that would have been terrifying had it not been so mesmerizing.

  Then there was light, snapping on as if MDash had flipped a switch. I tweaked the controls, and there below us was the surface of the moon. Wow. Gorgeous in a way that strained any use of the word, a rugged place that produced oohs and awe. The LunaTicket app ($0.99) showed us traversing south to north, but we were mentally lost in space, the surface as chaotic as a windblown, gray-capped bay, until I matched the Poincaré impact basin with the “This Is Our Moon” guide on my Kobo. The Alan Bean was soaring 153 kilometers high (95.06 miles Americanus), at a speed faster than that of a bullet from a gun, and the moon was slipping by so fast that we were running out of far side. Oresme Crater had white, finger-painted streaks. Heaviside showed rills and depressions, like river washouts. We split Dufay right in half, a flyover from its six to its twelve, the rim a steep, sharp razor. Mare Moscoviense was far to port, a miniversion of the Ocean of Storms, where four and a half decades ago the real Alan Bean spent two days, hiking, collecting rocks, snapping photos. Lucky man.

  Our brains could take in only so much, so our iPhones did the recording, and I stopped calling out the sights, though I did recognize Campbell and D’Alembert, large craters linked by the smaller Slipher, just as we were about to head home over the moon’s north pole. Steve Wong had cued up a certain musical track for what would be Earthrise but had to reboot the Bluetooth on Anna’s Jambox and was nearly late for his cue. MDash yelled, “Hit PLAY, hit PLAY!” just as a blue-and-white patch of life—a slice of all that we have made of ourselves, all that we have ever been—pierced the black cosmos above the sawtooth horizon. I was expecting something classical, Franz Joseph Haydn or George Harrison, but “The Circle of Life,” from The Lion King, scored our home planet’s rise over the plaster-of-Paris moon. Really? A Disney show tune? But, you know, that rhythm and that chorus and the double meaning of the lyrics caught me right in the throat, and I choked up. Tears popped off my face and joined the others’ tears, which were floating around the Alan Bean. Anna gave me a hug like I was still her boyfriend. We cried. We all cried. You’d have done the same.

  Coasting home was one fat anticlimax, despite the (never spoken) possibility of our burning up on reentry like an obsolete spy satellite circa 1962. Of course, we were all chuffed, as the English say, that we’d made the trek and maxed out the memory on our iPhones with iPhotos. But questions arose about what we were going to do upon our return, apart from making some bitchin’ posts on Instagram. If I ever run into Al Bean again, I’ll ask him what life has been like for him since he twice crossed the equigravisphere. Does he suffer melancholia on a quiet afternoon, as the world spins on automatic? Will I occasionally get the blues, because nothing holds a wonder equal to splitting Dufay down the middle? TBD, I suppose.

  “Whoa! Kamchatka!” Anna called out as our heat shield expired into millions of grain-size comets. We were arcing down over the Arctic Circle, gravity once again commanding that we who went up must come down. When the chute pyros shot off, the Alan Bean jolted our bones, causing the Jambox to lose its duct-tape purchase and conk MDash in the forehead. By the time we splashed down off Oahu, a trail of blood was running from the ugly gash between his eyebrows. Anna tossed him her bandanna, because guess what no one had thought to take around the moon? To anyone reading this with plans to imitate us: Band-Aids.

  At Stable One—that is, bobbing in the ocean, rather than having disintegrated into plasma—MDash tripped the “Rescue us!” flares that he’d rigged under the Parachute Jettison System. I opened the pressure-equalizing valve a tad early, and—oops—noxious fumes from the excess-fuel burnoff were sucked into the capsule, making us even queasier, what with the mal de mer.

  Once the cabin pressure was at the same psi as outside, Steve Wong was able to uncork the main hatch, and the Pacific Ocean breeze whooshed in, as soft as a kiss from Mother Earth, but owing to what turned out to be a huge design flaw, that same Pacific Ocean began to join us in our spent little craft. The Alan Bean’s second historic voyage was going to be to Davy Jones’s locker. Anna, thinking fast, held aloft our Apple products, but Steve Wong lost his Samsung (the Galaxy! Ha!), which disappeared into the lower equipment bay as the rising seawater bade us exit.

  The day boat from the Kahala Hilton, filled with curious snorkelers, pulled
us out of the water, the English speakers on board telling us that we smelled horrid, the foreigners giving us a wide berth.

  After a shower and a change of clothes, I was ladling fruit salad from a decorative dugout canoe at the hotel buffet table when a lady asked me if I had been in that thing that came down out of the sky. Yes, I told her, I had gone all the way to the moon and returned safely to the surly bonds of Earth. Just like Alan Bean.

  “Who’s Alan Bean?” she said.

  * * *

  * * *

  Our Town Today

  with

  Hank Fiset

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  * * *

  AT LOOSE IN THE BIG APPLE

  NEW YORK CITY! On my own for three days as my wife let me tag along as she celebrated her Twenty-fifth College Reunion with her Sorority Sisters of Gotta Getta Guy. I had not been to the isle of Manhattan since Cats was on B’way and hotel TVs were not high-def.

  * * *

  SO, WHAT’S NOO in Noo Yawk? Too much, if you have fond memories of the place, but little if the Naked City leaves you feeling, well, naked. I think NYC comes off way better on TV and in the movies, when a taxi is just a whistle away and superheroes save the day. In the real world (ours) every day in Gotham is a little like the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade and a lot like Baggage Claim after a long, crowded flight.

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  HITTING THE STREETS of the Big Town ASAP is a requirement, especially when the Mrs. takes the family credit history off to all those big stores with one name: Bergdorf’s, Goodman’s, Saks, Bloomie’s, not a one of which is any better than our own Henworthy’s, which has been open at Seventh and Sycamore since 1952. For my money (a dwindling supply) those fancy places charge too much for just shopping bags. But give NY, NY, this—walking those streets is a show unto its own. I mean, where is everyone going?

  * * *

  CENTRAL PARK, MAYBE? That big rectangle of greenery has more musicians than the East Valley High School Marching Band, but they’re all solo acts. Those sax blowers, horn players, violinists, accordion squeezers, and at least one Japanese samisen musician are all in competition with the fellow starving musical artist who performs a few yards away, making for a funky fugue that mars the relative peace of the park. Add in hundreds of serious joggers, power walkers, cyclists, an equal number of lollygaggers, tourists on rental bikes, tricycles towing passengers, and the horses and buggies that make the park smell of a petting zoo, and you’ll yearn for our own Spitz Riverside Park, with less postcard views, true, but at least our Tri-Cities squirrels look a lot happier. On foot, you cross the park from the East Side streets tall with former tycoon mansions to the West Side avenues jammed with Starbucks, the Gap, and Bed Bath & Beyond. Had I just stumbled into our own Hillcrest Mall in Pearman? Looked like it, but where was the convenient parking?

  * * *

  NOT WITHOUT MAGIC is Metropolis, a.k.a. New York City, I admit. When the sun drops behind the towers and stops baking the pavement, it’s nice to cool one’s heels at a curbside table with a cocktail in your fist. That’s when Yankee-Town has the charm of our own Country Market Patio Bar and Grill. I sat and sipped and watched as a world of Knickerbocker oddballs strolled by. I saw a man with a cat on his shoulders, European tourists in the tightest pants imaginable, a team of firemen pull up in an engine, go into a high-rise apartment, only to come out later talking about a bad smoke detector, a man rolling a homemade telescope up the street, the actor Kiefer Sutherland walk by, and a woman with a big white bird on her shoulder. Hope she avoided the guy with the cat.

  * * *

  A CAESAR SALAD is the true test of any hotel restaurant—write that down! Our own Sun Garden/Red Lion Inn at the airport serves a beauty, but at a Times Square eatery—pretheater dinner with the Wife and still-foxy coeds—my salad was limp and the dressing too tart. Hell, Caesar! After I picked up the check, the girls headed off to see the B’way production of Chicago—like the movie, but without the close-ups. I don’t know much about musical theater, but I bet cash money what the girls saw that night was not any better than the Meadow Hills Community College Drama Department’s production of Roaring-Twenty-Somethings, which went to the American College Theater Festival last year. Does the Great White Way beat out the best of the Tri-Cities? Not according to this reporter.

  * * *

  IF YOU’RE HUNGRY and crave a frankfurter, they’re for sale all over Manhattan—on street corners, every few yards in the park, in subway stations, with papaya juice. None of them beat a tube steak from Butterworth’s Hot Dog Emporium on Grand Lake Drive. A bagel in Manhattan is the stuff of theologians, but Crane’s West Side Cafeteria serves up a heavenly leavened bun to all in the Tri-Cities. Much is made of N’york, N’york–style pizza, but I fork my money over for a slice of Lamonica’s Neopolitan, and, yes, they deliver within a ten-mile circle of each of their fourteen locations. And speaking of Italian food, Anthony’s Italian Cellar in Harbor View has all the authenticity of any joint in Little Italy without the mobster rubouts.

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  ANYTHING NEW YORK has that we lack in our own Tri-Cities? Not so much, since TV gives us all the sports and media in the world and the Internet provides all else. I admit the multitude of museums on Manhattan is fine, dandy, impressive, et cetera. Being able to walk into, say, an ancient temple from Dendur or a hall full of assembled dinosaur bones makes for a great excursion, even when you have to share it with schoolkids from all over the state and tourists from all over the world. I had a whole day of museums when the women booked facials, massages, and pedicures—a.k.a. hangover cures. I saw paintings I will never understand, an “Installation” that was nothing more than a room filled with torn-up carpet samples, and a sculpture that looked like a huge, rusted, dented refrigerator. Ars Gratia Artis (Art for Art’s Sake), moaned the MGM lion.

  * * *

  MY FINAL MUSEUM was the place for Modern art, where I saw a movie that was nothing more than time passing—really, a lot of clocks ticking and people looking at their watches. I gave it ten minutes. Upstairs, there was a blank canvas with a knife slice down its middle. Another canvas was colored a light blue at the bottom that became a dark blue at the top. In the stairwell, an actual helicopter was hanging from the ceiling, a whirlybird frozen in flight. Up the steps a pair of Italian typewriters, large and small versions of the same model, were kept behind glass as if they were studded with valuable gems but they weren’t! Nor were the machines more than fifty years old. I couldn’t help but think the Tri-Cities could put together a collection of used typewriters and charge admission. The now vacant Baxter’s Ham Factory on Wyatt Boulevard is available. Anyone civic-minded enough to get cracking on that?

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  * * *

  Who’s Who?

  On a Monday morning in early November of 1978, as she had been every day for the past six weeks, Sue Gliebe was up and out of the apartment before her roommates were awake. Rebecca was asleep, eight feet off the floor in the loft bed in the living room, and Shelley, probably, was still conked out behind the locked door of the apartment’s single bedroom.

  Sue had showered quickly and quietly in the half tub with the rubber hose running up from the faucet, the dribbling water a weak stream that was alternately tepid and then as hot as the surface of the planet Mercury. Since she had come to New York, she had yet to feel truly clean and her scalp had begun to itch. She dressed in the fog of the tiny bathroom, slipped on her shoes from under the living room sofa, where she slept, strapped her big leather purse crossways from shoulder to opposite hip, then grabbed the umbrella she had bought on Friday. Another storm was due, the news said, and Sue was prepared; she had already paid five of her dollars to one of the many men who appeared with boxes of umbrellas the moment the clouds grew thick with rain. As quietly as possible, Sue exited through the front door, making sure the lock clicked behind her. She had once failed to confirm that click and Shelley had angrily lectured her on the dangers of an unlocked apartment door in New York City in 197
8. No click was a major no-no.

  Her roommates had come to view her as an unexorcised poltergeist, one that had to be negotiated around. Then again, they were not really her roommates but her hosts, making Sue feel as welcome as an abdominal parasite. Rebecca had been so friendly the last summer when she was working costumes for the Arizona Civic Light Opera, and Sue, a local hire, was playing three featured roles. They were gal pals, then. On days when her duties were slack, Rebecca swam in the pool at the Gliebe family home and partied with the company on the Gliebe patio. She had offered Sue her couch for “a while” whenever—if ever—she came to New York City. When Sue showed up with three suitcases, eight hundred dollars in savings, and a dream, Rebecca’s actual roommate, Shelley, nodded her assent to the deal with a “yeah, okay.” But that was seven weeks ago and Sue was still spending every night on the couch in the small living room. The vibes in the one-bedroom apartment just off Upper Broadway had gone from benign acceptance to Arctic-level iciness. Rebecca wanted Sue out; Shelley wanted her dead. Sue hoped to purchase extra sofa time and goodwill with contributions of fifty dollars to the rent as well as providing milk, Tropicana orange juice, and, once, a thing called blackout cake that Shelley ate for breakfast. Such gestures were not so much appreciated as expected.

  What could Sue do? Where could Sue go? She was hunting for her own New York City apartment every single day, but the agencies named Apartment Finders and Westside Spaces had “listings” that were in dark, urine-stained tenements where no one answered the buzzer, or were no longer available, or never existed in the first place. Shelley told her to post a Need a Roommate notice on the board at Actors’ Equity, but Sue confessed that she had yet to join the union—she couldn’t until she had an acting job. Shelley gave her a half-lidded look of supreme disappointment and another “yeah, okay,” then added, “Next time you go to ShopRite, get a big can of Chock Full O’Nuts, please.” In this eighth week—the start of her third month on the isle of Manhattan—the bundle of Arizona talent who had played Maria in West Side Story (just last season at the ACLO) was prone to weeping at night, silently, in her bedroll on the couch, in the diamond-shaped silhouettes made by the window’s security gates (were such things actually burglarproof?). On the subway, which cost her fifty cents a ride, she often fought back tears, worried that someone would see a pretty young girl undone by her struggles and, well, rob her or worse. For Sue, moving to New York was an act of faith, faith in herself, in her talent, and in the promise of the city that never slept. It was supposed to be an adventure, like something out of the movies, where she would come out of a stage door after a performance and kiss a handsome sailor on shore leave, or a TV show like That Girl, where she’d have an apartment with a big kitchen and louvered shutters and a boyfriend who worked for Newsview magazine. But New York was not cooperating. How could things be going so sadly for Sue Gliebe, who was the very definition of a triple threat; she could sing, dance, and act! Her parents had recognized her raw talent when she was a little girl! She had starred in all the high school plays! She had been selected from the chorus at the Civic Light Opera to become their lead actress for three seasons running! She had done High Button Shoes with Monty Hall, the host of TV’s Let’s Make a Deal! She had had a going away party with a big banner reading ON TO BROADWAY!