1/16/23
Newsletter #221
The Crack of Dawn
The second time I lived in L.A. was in 1979 when I was 21. Although I didn’t make it into the film business again, I did learn an extremely important lesson: how to write a rational screenplay. It took me four previous attempts, but on the fifth try I managed to conceive and co-write Bloodbath (with my buddy, Sheldon) – my first functional script – which would ultimately become Thou Shalt Not Kill…Except five years later. I also got a full-page essay published in the L.A. Weekly, and got paid for it, so I felt like I had taken a solid step forward in my career. Now I was going to hitchhike back to Detroit to work on my pals’ movie, Book of the Dead (which would become Evil Dead).
So, I was hitchhiking outside Denver when two F-14 fighter jets appeared in the sky heading into Denver. A moment later a Boeing 747 came out of the clouds with the space shuttle, Enterprise, sitting on top of it. The shuttle was half the size of the 747, and had been designed to be transported by the 747, but it didn’t seem like a happy combination — it looked awkward and cumbersome. A minute later the two F-14s came back over going the other way, soon followed by the 747 and the shuttle. I guessed that they hadn’t gotten clearance to land. Then the two jets came back, then the 747 and the shuttle, and I suppose they got clearance and landed.
Two years later I was living in L.A. for the third time. I was hanging out with my buddy Marvis when he announced, “The space shuttle Enterprise is landing for the very first time ever at Edwards Air Force Base tomorrow morning, let’s go see it.” Being 23 years old I said, “Sure.”
Edwards Air Force Base is located in the Mojave Desert about 3-4 hours from L.A. We arrived at dawn and there were perhaps 500 people assembled at the edge of the dried lake bed that they used as a very long landing strip. The Air Force had set up what Marvis and I felt was an arbitrary boundary for the spectators that was kind of far from where the landing would take place. Since there were no military personnel anywhere close to us spectators, Marvis and I just began walking across the lake bed toward where the landing would occur. When he and I were way ahead of the rest of the crowd, an Air Force helicopter took off from the base, flew over the lake bed, hovered directly over our heads and announced on a speaker, “You have entered a restricted area, please go back.” Busted. Marvis and I turned around and as slowly as we could headed back. The helicopter left, so we just stopped, still a couple of hundred yards ahead of everybody else.
After a couple of hours of peering up into sky, not knowing which direction it would be coming from, we heard the sound of approaching jets. There were the two F-14s that flew in low over the lake bed and kept going.
A moment later there was a sound that I’ve never heard before or since. As the shuttle entered the atmosphere it broke the sound barrier causing a cosmic boom. It’s not a boom, or a bang, it’s an implosion. It sounded like a giant cork was being pulled out of an enormous bottle. Then a circle of clouds or gas vapor appeared way up in the sky, then the space shuttle came shooting right through the circle at an almost vertical angle, like it was going to crash. At the last second the shuttle miraculously changed its trajectory to horizontal, skimmed over the lake bed for about a mile – Marvis and I were the closest people, but not that close – and it landed perfectly.
It all happened really fast, but it was way, way cool. The cosmic boom was spectacular in its own strange, opposite-of-what-you-thought-it-would-be, kind of way. Half-buried in the baked lake bed was a used, 4-inch-long, 50mm machinegun shell. I dug it out as a souvenir, and I now hold it in my left hand. That’s some big bullet.
For the youngsters in the crowd, the next space shuttle in 1986 was the Challenger that blew up as it launched and killed all seven astronauts. There were several more space shuttles, then in 2003 the Columbia disintegrated upon reentry and seven more astronauts died. Even though the shuttle program hung around for eight more years, everybody lost interest.
When I began writing this newsletter, about 221 days ago, it actually was the crack of dawn when I posted it. As the days now grow longer, the dawn keeps arriving earlier. Soon I will sync back up with the sun.
Here comes the sun, and I say, it’s all right.