Skipping Towards Gomorrah (29 page)

So I picked up my pace and hiked as far ahead of the group as I could. I may have been one of the youngest in our group, but I wasn't the fastest. That title went to the movie mogul, my fiftyish roommate, who led the pack almost every day. I couldn't catch up with movie mogul or pass him, but I could pace myself so that I was always between MM and the rest of the group. When I was fairly certain that I was alone and that I couldn't be seen by anyone ahead of me or behind me, I put my right hand down my shorts, cupped my enormous, salty scrotum in one hand, and lifted it up and away from my burning thighs. I hiked like that for most of the rest of the week: alone, balls in one hand, water bottle in the other. I didn't have to worry about looking like part of a cult or a work-release program anymore; I just looked like a pervert. It didn't help me get any closer to the rich folks, but it kept me from howling in pain with every step.

 

“A
ch, you heard them the first night.” The German mogul and I are on the last leg of Thursday's forced march, walking side by side down a long, steep decline. “ ‘Come to New York; come to my apartment for Thanksgiving.' These women have known each other, what? Six hours? And they are best of friends. Absurd.”

The German mogul was a tall, good-looking man in his early sixties, which was a difficult age for Germans not too long ago. Until very recently, being a German senior citizen invited a lot of questions about your whereabouts in the 1930s and 1940s. Not anymore. A sixty-year-old German today wasn't yet born when Hitler came to power; the German mogul was just five when the war ended. I was wrapping my head around the concept of old, innocent Germans as we sweated our way through the longest of the week's hikes, a seventeen-mile ass-blaster. The German mogul—GM for short—was on the second week of his annual fourteen-day stay, so he had hiked this trail last Thursday. He'd been hiking this trail twice a year every year for fourteen years.

Me and GM hadn't spent much time together before Thursday's hike. I was usually out in front of him during the hikes, holding on to my balls, praying no movie stars on horseback would spot me, worrying that I'd wasted a lot of my publisher's money coming to the wrong place. The Ashram wasn't filled with rich people enjoying their envy-inducing wealth, but with rich people spending five hundred dollars a day to live like poor people—starvation rations, forced marches, uniforms. I wasn't getting much insight into the lifestyles of the rich and famous at the Ashram. GM and MM, my roommate, kept to themselves, and my attempts to join in the women's conversations weren't all that successful. I was beginning to think that everyone suspected, rightly, that I just didn't belong—not as a guest, anyway. Or, shit, maybe they'd seen me marching along the trails with my hands in my shorts.

I was on a long, unauthorized break during Thursday's hike when I saw GM coming down the trail, so I let go of my balls and joined him. He was by far the wealthiest person in our group, so I figured I'd hike a ways with him. I'd overheard one of the other Ashram veterans, the real-estate lawyer, telling the other women that GM owned newspapers and a publishing house and, inevitably, horses. “He's worth,” she said, lowering her voice two octaves but speaking just as loudly, “an awful lot of money.” I've always enjoyed Germans, rich or poor—heck, even German senior citizens—so I endured the misery of my sweaty balls moving back and forth between my bloody thighs to spend some time with GM. In this case, there was the added incentive of learning something about the absurdly affluent—namely, why someone with the money to go anywhere and do anything would go to the Ashram to be starved and marched through the desert.

This time I played it cool, refraining from making any airy-fairy comments about the curtains and bedspreads back at the Ashram. I told GM that I lived in Germany for two years, and soon we started talking about WWI, WWII, the Cold War, the wall, and German reunification. GM met JFK, and as a young man advised LBJ during the Vietnam War. (“My advice? I told him to get da hell out.”) He was friendly with the Reagans. We walked; we talked.

“Why pay for this?” I asked GM as we rounded a bend in the trail. “You've been walking these trails for years; you must know them by heart. Why not come get a cheap motel room for a week and walk them alone. You'd save, like, twenty-five hundred dollars.”

“Wouldn't work. I'd be sitting in my room making phone calls and watching cable TV, and if I ever did get out on the trails, I'd quit before I was halfway up. It's the psychology of the place that keeps you walking.”

The psychology?

“Yes. You keep walking when your feet and legs are aching because everyone else is walking. You keep walking because you don't feel like you have a choice. The others are walking, so you are walking. You cannot quit.”

I wasn't going to argue with a German about the psychology of a forced march—not even a guiltless German. We walked on in silence for a few minutes.

“If we were women,” he suddenly said, “this is probably the point where one of us would say, ‘You will come and stay with me, yes?' It is something I will never understand about women. How do the nine know each other a day or a week and decide, oh, we are best friends now?”

I can read between the lines, especially when they're drawn right in front of me in thick, black strokes: No invitation to spend the holidays at GM's country place (a castle outside Munich, as I later learned) would be forthcoming. An hour talking on the trail together barely qualified us as acquaintances, much less friends. We were sensible, stoic, unfeeling men, after all, not mushy, effusive women. Unlike “the nine,” as GM called the women in our group, we discussed only what we had in common: our opinions about German history (his were somewhat more informed than my own), our opinions about forced marches (ditto), and our time together at the Ashram. We didn't discuss our lives, wives, kids, hopes, dreams, diseases, or traumas.

 

L
ong, painful hikes through the desert weren't the only way the rich people at the Ashram lost weight. We were starved, too. We were fed three times a day, like any other prisoners, but we weren't fed much: one egg for breakfast, a tiny salad and two pieces of vegetarian sushi for lunch, a bowl of soup for dinner. We were taking in a lot fewer calories than we were burning out on the trails in the morning—to say nothing of the calories we were burning in the yoga sessions (in a geodesic redwood dome), pool exercises (in the teeny, tiny pool), and weight training classes (in a gym with a sloped floor and rusty equipment) that filled our afternoons. On the trails, people stopped sharing stories about breast cancer and divorce and started sharing stories about restaurants and snack foods.

The rich folks seemed to take the deprivation in stride—deprivation was, after all, what they were paying for. Their normal lives were filled with too much: too much food, too much free time, too much money, too much freedom from want, too much luxury. Here at the Ashram, they were paying good money to experience too little: too little food, too little control, too little comfort, too little luxury. Our days were filled with hardship, deprivation, and hard physical labor. It's impossible to overstate the misery of hiking a long, steep trail in the desert. You look ahead and see the trail disappear around a bend. You push on, hoping that just around the bend the trail will level off or—please, God—the blessed descent will begin. You force your legs to pick up your feet, you round the corner, and . . . up the trails goes, until the trail rounds another bend, and you round that one and still the trail goes up.

We were powerless to do anything about our predicament—a point driven home one day on the beach. One of the seven hikes took us from the Atlantic side of the Santa Monica Mountains all the way to the Pacific Ocean. The hike was a killer, so the distance between the pack leaders—Movie Mogul, German Mogul, Motion Sickness, and me—and the stragglers was considerable, so Randy loaded those of us who finished the hike early into a van and drove us to a beach, where we could lie in the sand and while the rest of the group finished the hike. (I got to ride shotgun—
yes!
) The four of us were wearing Ashram T-shirts and sweats and carrying water bottles. We looked like, again, the members of some strange cult when Randy dropped us off on a crowded beach. Halfway through our week at the Ashram, we were all starving, all the time. All along the beach vendors were selling hot dogs, ice cream, and soft drinks . . . and there we were, a wealthy German, a wealthy movie producer, a wealthy tech businesswoman, and me, without a cent between us. Our clothes, ID, credit cards, and cash were all back at the Ashram.

It had been a decade since I was broke and hungry and exhausted and powerless to do anything about it. The joke was on me: I had gone to the Ashram to envy the rich up close and personal only to discover that the rich go to the Ashram to live like the poor. For a mere five hundred dollars a day (which is more than the annual per-capita income of 33 percent of the people on the planet), the Ashram's guests are bossed around, fed starvation rations, marched through the mountains, and coerced into various yoga positions. GM, MM, and The Nine came to the Ashram to enjoy what may be the only perk of poverty: It's slimming, darling.

There is power and status in freely giving up your power and status for a set period of time. Pretending to be poor and powerless has always been an option for the rich and powerful. Marie Antoinette dressed up like a milkmaid and sat on a silver stool in a twee little farmhouse she had built on the grounds of Versailles. According to the Roman historian Suetonius, the Emperor Nero would disguise himself as a common citizen and carouse in Rome's slums and taverns; the Emperor Commodus liked to fight in the Coliseum as a gladiator (his opponents were given swords made of lead). At the end of the day, though, Marie Antoinette left the farm and returned to being Queen of France. While the rich can afford to live like the poor for a day or a week, only the rich can experience how the other half lives. The wealthy can go slumming, but it's not so easy for the poor to go mansioning.

The thirteen of us at the Ashram were guilty of a kind of conspicuous nonconsumption—there was certainly something hedonistic about our week at the Ashram. We were paying five hundred dollars a day for a shared room, starvation rations, and forced marches through the desert in one-hundred-degree heat—all so we could lose a little weight. (I lost ten pounds, coming in second place; only the woman about to get married lost more than I did.) Even hardship is a commodity in America, a product that is packaged and sold to the wealthy. Want to get away from luxury? Treat yourself to a week at the Ashram. Hardship is in such short supply in our rich, comfortable country that the ability to purchase a little poverty has become a thoroughly modern status symbol. Everyone at the Ashram that week was a spiritual descendant of Marie Antoinette, I guess, but I unfortunately didn't get to tag along when everyone joyfully returned to their palaces—much to my sorrow.

—Bill O'Reilly,
The No Spin Zone

—Robert Bork,
Slouching Towards Gomorrah

 

 

 

 

K
evin and Jake pursue happiness in Los Angeles.

Kevin is in his thirties and so is Jake. Kevin makes a lot of money and so does Jake. Kevin looks much younger than his actual age and so does Jake. Kevin has a gym-built body and so does Jake. Kevin is deeply tanned and so is Jake. Kevin is clean-cut . . . and so it goes.

Kevin and Jake are one of those enviable ubercouples upscale gay magazines will occasionally profile. (“Meet the guys who have everything—including each other!”) Together three years, Kevin and Jake had just moved into a new home when I invited myself over for the weekend. The previous owners of their home, an older straight couple, did a lot of damage to the fifty-year-old house before selling it to Kevin and Jake. It was late June when I came to visit, and this pair of all-American homos were dividing their summer between the beach and Home Depot.

While they showed me around the house, Kevin delighted in describing the design sins of the home's former owners: window treatments, flower beds, and wallpaper choices so offensive that he shuddered when he described them. Kevin and Jake had undone most of these sins by the time I visited; windows were bare, flower beds mostly empty, wallpaper stripped away. After the tour, Kevin handed me a small photo album. “The before pictures,” he said with mock gravity. The pictures were appalling; while I personally don't care how many times bell-bottoms and skin-tight T-shirts cycle in and out of fashion, may God protect us from the return of cork walls, shimmery wallpaper, and swag lamps. (Still, before-and-after pictures of a house you're redecorating seems like a peculiar form of boasting; it's a way of saying, “Look at how much better my taste is than the taste of the people who used to live here.” In Kevin and Jake's case, considering the age of their home's previous owners—and the design-challenged era in which they lived and decorated—better taste isn't much to boast about.)