Stranger Than Fiction (True Stories)

He'd like to replace the income tax with a national sales tax.

At this point, in 2001, Brian's forty-five years old and engaged to marry a woman named Ilena (not her real name, for reasons you'll understand later), a Russian he met through a website called "A Foreign Affair."

This is the Rocket Guy you've already met. He likes cinnamon Altoids better than regular ones. He's flown in Russian MIG fighters and choked back puke while experiencing zero-gravity dives aboard the "Vomit Comet" plane used to train cosmonauts. He's never been married, but he's ready now.

"My goal," he'll tell you, "is to find a woman who will enjoy life without the necessity of feeling like she has to go out and prove something. That, unfortunately, is what so many women in this culture feel they need to do. The feminist movement in the late sixties and early seventies convinced women that motherhood and being a stay-at-home mom was a lonely existence and not important. Unless you had a career you weren't anything."

Over his hamburger, he says, "One of my missions in life is to do the most I can to foster U.S. and Russian relations. The Cold War's over. Get over it. These people are not our enemy. The Russians are people who want to be just like us. They really love America and love us and what we stand for. And they want to be just like us. I think having a Russian wife will make it inevitable that I find myself speaking in this role."

After lunch he checks his mailbox, and there's a check for $55.06 from a Scottish radio interview. The only money he says he's made from the landslide of Rocket Guy publicity.

This is the Brian Walker the media discovered in April 2000.

"I wanted to be called something," he remembers, "but I didn't want to be called 'Rocket Man. It was too formal-sounding. And too overused. 'Rocket Guy' has a whole lot more friendly sound to it. He's just like the guy next door. The man on the street. The name Rocket Guy just kind of stuck."

Beginning with one interview for a Florida newspaper, Rocket Guy was born, an international media celebrity doing two or three interviews each day. Getting so many phone calls his message system maxed out after the first hundred. His website had as many as 380,000 hits in one hour.

"Out of all the radio interviews I've done, there's only been two or three, maybe a dozen, where the radio personalities were trying to make me look like a fool," he says. "Even when I did Howard Stern, for a half-hour, he did not make fun of me. He did not make me out to be a kook. He made a couple references about 'am I getting laid more often now, but he didn't turn it into a giant penis, sex thing, phallic symbol."

Still, what goes up, must come down.

And even Rocket Guy would tell you: reentry can be a bitch.

Brian and Ilena met in person for the first time in April 2001. Two months later, they spent another two weeks together and became engaged. In July of 2002, Ilena and her eight-year-old son, Alexi, arrived in America on a fiancée visa.

"I didn't want to believe I could make that big a mistake," Brian says. "We had eleven-hundred fifty-five emails between us over a year-and-a-half period. I wanted to believe her so much that I was willing to take the chance, but as soon as we got married, on October 15, 2002, then things just got worse."

Ilena was fifteen years younger than Brian, leaving behind a 700-square-foot apartment she'd shared with seven other people in Russia. Brian had installed a swimming pool for her son. He'd agreed to pay for her $4,000 in laser eye surgery and $12,000 in dental work. He'd traded in his BMW roadster for a sedan. Still, they fought. She refused to speak English at dinner, or to get out of bed before eight in the morning.

Brian brought home a computer for her to use while Alexi was at school all day. Six weeks later, he asked her about the Web surfing she'd done…

"The worst websites were for bestiality and sex with animals," he says. "She had been spending an hour or an hour and a half at a time, several days a week, going to these sites. It was only six weeks between when we got the computer and when she left. I was severely despondent to think this woman who I had loved enough to bring from Russia and marry was that perverse. We're not talking about normal porno, I'm talking about stuff that would make you sick."

Six weeks into the marriage and she'd secretly placed online ads, looking for a new man, ideally an artsy type with long blond hair, living in a city loft-pretty much the polar opposite of brunet, bearded Brian in his log cabin.

"Ilena is a very beautiful woman, but she has no soul. She's soulless," he says. "I'm convinced I was nothing more than a ticket here. That's all."

In Brian Walker's mind, Project R.U.S.H. was connected with being Rocket Guy and being married to Ilena. "I was thinking-in my own little way-what a great way to bring the world together," he says. "To show cooperation and connection between former enemies. We used to talk about how the two of us could do a book together. We could write children's books in English and Russian. I could see a whole tree growing out of this with all these opportunities, and that was just squashed."

The first time he talked to her about her Web surfing, Ilena packed a bag, took her son, and moved in with a neighbor-a Russian man she's been living with ever since.

Brian says, "I've had a lot of guys email me, and their stories were almost identical. These guys believed there was love there, but once their wife had her residency or her green card, she was gone. Ilena didn't even wait that long. She left two months after we were married. She couldn't even play the game long enough to get legal status."

That's where everything fell apart. Brian didn't eat for eight weeks. He lost forty-five pounds, shaved his beard, and couldn't bear to work on the rocket.

"I've been working so hard for so long," he says. "You go back to before I started this rocket project and look at the fifteen years of abject failure. I built a submarine, but I never made it into a business. I'd succeed in one portion, but I'd fail at a different part. The same with my stretcher or my hundreds of other inventions. I would work nonstop for months and years on end. Then I started getting success in the toy industry, and instead of scaling back I jumped into this project, and at this point in time it's completely overwhelming me."

Another shock came in the form of the "X-Prize," an offer of ten million dollars prize money to the first private group to put a rocket into the atmosphere. And the sudden competition Rocket Guy now faces from well-funded and well-educated teams around the world.

Even the media attention had become a handicap. Some two thousand people have shown up at his door, wanting a tour. "I have a really hard time saying no to people," he says. "What's slowed me down the most over the past three years is my desire to appease people's requests. Whether it's the media. Whether it's reading and answering emails or inviting people out to see things. Or doing school fund-raisers. I go speak at schools quite a bit."

It's been quite a ride. Money. Fame. Love. All of it before the rocket even got to the launch pad.

Fast-forward to July 2003, and, day by day, Brian Walker is coming back. A friend introduced him to a woman, an American, a realtor his own age. Her name is Laura, and already her voice is on his answering-machine message. They've skydived, together. There's even talk about another wedding-after Brian's divorce is final.

And he still gets letters, hundreds of letters from kids, parents, and teachers who love his toys.

There in Bend, Oregon, work continues in the Rocket Garden. There's the centrifuge where Brian trains himself to endure G forces. There's the tower where he tests rocket engines. In a couple months he plans to launch himself three miles high in a test rocket. He plans to finish the geodesic dome he's started. And the observatory perched on top of it. Inside the dome, the rocket waits, painted two-toned, light and dark blue. Ready, on the trailer he was making back in December 2001. Back when anything seemed possible. Love. Fame. Family.