If Your Castle Turrets Don’t Have Monkeys, What Are You Even Doing?

My very, very stupid conversations with Moby, Shaquille O’Neal, India Hicks, and Buzz Aldrin.

For a good twenty years of my journalism career, my day job consisted of asking famous people very, very stupid questions. To be fair, that wasn’t usually the exact request made by my editors. But when you ask enough famous people stupid questions, you have to expect that most editors know what they’re getting into. From Vanity Fair to Rolling Stone, Esquire to MTV, I engaged actors, musicians, athletes, and astronauts in some truly asinine conversations.

It didn’t always go well. Some famous people get very angry when you ask them dumb questions. (Isabella Rossellini comes to mind.) But I’ll share those awkward exchanges in another post. Today, we’re focusing on the stupid interviews where everything went right, and the person being interviewed responds as if what I asked them is a perfectly rational thing to say to a stranger.

Buzz Aldrin

Eric Spitznagel: How do you pee and poop in your astronaut suit?

Buzz Aldrin: We were well skilled in the art of disposal waste. There was such a thing called a “blue bag,” which was kind of messy. There was a stickum on it, and you could stick it around your posterior. For urinating we had an ego-buster, which was like a condom catheter. We were cautioned not to overestimate our size. (Laughs.) Because if the condom was too big, there might be a little leakage.

ES: That doesn’t sound very hygienic. Were you walking around the Moon with a spacesuit filled with wee?

BA: No, no, no. There was a connection to a one-way check valve in your thigh, so you could kind of move around like this (wiggles his leg) and squeeze the urine out into a larger bag that you could then dispose of.

ES: Dispose of when you get back to Earth?

BA: Or on the lunar surface.

ES: On the Moon? So in addition to your footprint, there’s a big bag of your excrement up there?

BA: (Laughs.) Well no, probably not anymore. Sometimes we’d dispose of it during an EVA (extra-vehicular activity), when we were getting rid of a bunch of extra stuff. We did that on Gemini 12. I remember we were headed local horizontal, local vertical, and we opened the hatch and I had three bags worth gripped between my legs,

ES: Three bags of…?

BA: Yeah, yeah. And I just tossed them like this. (Pantomimes throwing bags over his shoulders.) Straight up! Being very familiar with orbital mechanics, I should have realized what I’d just done. I’d put those three bags on a free return trajectory. (Laughs.) Straight back to us!