The Right Stuff

by Tom Wolfe

And for the fellows, it was pure heaven. None of this altered the Edwards-style perfection of their lives. It merely added something new and marvelous to the ineffable contrasts of this astronaut business. Within hours after lunch at the White House or waterskiing in Hyannis Port you could be back at the Cape, back Drinking & Driving in that marvelous Low Rent rat-shack terrain, back in your Corvette spinning out on the shoulders of those hardtack Baptist roadways and pulling into the all-night diner for a little coffee to stabilize the system for the proficiency runs ahead. And if you had switched to your Ban-Lon shirts and your go-to-hell pants, they might not even recognize you in there, which would be all the better, and you could just sit there and drink coffee and have a couple of cigarettes and listen to the two policemen in the next booth with the Dawn Patrol radio sets in their pockets, and a little voice packed in static would be coming out of the radios saying, “Thirty-one, thirty-one [garble, garble] … man named Virgil Wiley refuses to return to his room at the Rio Banana,” and the policemen would look at each other as if to say, “Well, shit, is that anything to have to rise up from over a plate of french fries and death balls for?”—and then they’d sigh and start getting up and buckling on their gunbelts, and about the time they would head out the door, in would come the Hardiest Cracker, the Aboriginal Grit, an old guy drunk as a monkey and ricocheting off the...