The Man Who Quit Money (12 page)

“Where will you be staying in Phoenix?”

“I’ve asked the maid to get the house all cleaned up for me.”

Daniel looked up from his clipboard.

“Is there an address for that?”

“If I had a house in Phoenix,” said Banks, leaning in close, “I probably wouldn’t be in here trying to get a Greyhound ticket.”

“Right. Sorry. But to process this application I need to write in the address of where you’ll be staying. Do you have any family there?”

“My sister’s in Tempe.”

“Great. What’s her name?”

Banks said her name, and Daniel entered it on the form.

“Address?”

“I haven’t seen my sister in eleven years.”

“Okay. Fine. We’ll make this work.” In the box for “Address” Daniel wrote “302 Main Street, Phoenix, AZ” and for “Phone” he scribbled his own home number with an Arizona area code.

“Moving on,” said Daniel. “Do you have a job lined up in Phoenix?”

“Gotta get there first.”

“Right,” said Daniel. “I just need to write something here.”

“Hanging drywall isn’t the kind of business where they hire a Bekins van to bring you to town.”

“Can you give me a name?” said Daniel. “Any name will do.”

Banks just looked at him. Then he fished his wallet out of his pocket, pulled out a scrap of paper, and scrutinized it at arm’s length.

“Did you know that the average Somalian survives on twelve cents per day?” said Jerry Banks.

“Excuse me?”

“Twelve cents a day. Sometimes in the library I’ll find some factoid like that and I just have to write it down. Blows my mind.” He opened his wallet so that Daniel could look inside. Dozens of soiled paper scraps clung together in the musty leather. The man flipped the card over in his hand. “Here’s the name of a guy who runs a drywall outfit. I got his number from
my sponsor. When I called him he said they were always looking for work and to call back when I got to town.”

Daniel jotted down the name and number. He was required to call the employer to verify that they intended to hire the traveler. That way, Travelers Aid didn’t foot the bill for hobos merely joyriding across the country.

“I’ll give him a call right now and we can finalize this,” Daniel said. “Would you take a seat in the waiting room?”

The client lifted himself out of the chair with a groan and shuffled out of the office. Daniel dialed the number and a gruff voice answered.

“I’m calling for Manny Velazquez….”

“Speaking.”

“This is Daniel Shellabarger with Travelers Aid in Denver, Colorado. I’m calling to verify an offer of employment for our client, Gerald Banks.”

“Who?”

“Daniel Shellabarger,” he repeated.
“S–H–E–L–L—”

“And you want a job?”

“I’m calling on behalf of a client, Gerald Banks. He says he’s intending to work for you.”

“I get a lot of calls,” said the man.

“Do you remember a Jerry Banks?”

“That sounds familiar. What do you mean, he’s your client?”

“I work with the Denver office of Travelers Aid.”

“What is this guy—a vagrant?”

“Well, no,” Suelo stammered. “He’s a member of an underserved population with limited social mobility and—”

“I told Hank to quit giving out my number to deadbeats.”

Suelo pressed his pencil onto the application form until the
lead broke. “Can you confirm an offer of employment made to Gerald Banks for September of this year?”

“I don’t hire those type of people,” said Manny Velazquez. “I’ve tried it and it never works. I make a donation every month to St. Vincent de Paul. I got nothing against those people, I just don’t want them on my crew. Hey, my other line’s ringing, so I gotta go.”

Click
. Daniel set down the phone. His shirt clung damply to his spine. He reached for his water cup but it was empty. He looked at the forms on his clipboard. In the past he had fudged little details like phone numbers and addresses and had got the payments processed. But today he was going to have to falsify the entire document. If anyone audited, he’d be fired. And wasn’t all this paperwork a bunch of bullshit anyway? If Jerry Banks had a job and a home, he wouldn’t need Travelers Aid. The whole bureaucracy was set up to cover its own ass and write clean expense reports—not to actually help anyone in need. He hated it all. He felt like a fraud. After spending eight hours a day in this office, being paid to be kind to someone, he found that at the end of the day, he hated homeless people. When he saw them on his block as he plodded toward his apartment, he wanted to tell them to fuck off and get out of his way. His job was nothing more than glorified prostitution. He was paid to be helpful. It wasn’t coming from his heart. He was just doing it for money. And now he had to lie and commit forgery and risk getting fired just to actually help another human being—although best as he could tell, he’d just ruined Jerry Banks’s chances of getting a job.

He tore the papers off the clipboard, crumpled them into a ball, and chucked it into the wastepaper basket. Then he pulled
out his own wallet and counted his money. Two twenties and three ones. He called Mr. Banks back into the office.

“Great news, Jerry,” Daniel said. “Everything was approved and you’re all set to go. Here’s forty-three dollars—that should be enough for the fare to Arizona.”

Jerry’s eyes lit up and he smiled as he collected the money. “Do I need to sign anywhere, or something like that?”

“You’re all set. Have a safe trip.”

More and more, Suelo sensed that the whole enterprise of professional charity was flawed. Instead of counting beans in this dehumanizing system, why couldn’t we just help our neighbors directly?

More than a year since his return from the Peace Corps, all his efforts to do good were backfiring. In 1991 his friends persuaded him to get counseling, but the therapist was so young and inexperienced that as a matter of intellectual pride Suelo convinced her that nothing was wrong. She gave him a clean bill of mental health. His roommate took him to a Bible study one night, on the topic of the parable of the Good Samaritan. But when the people at his table made some snide comments about Mormons—always the whipping boys for evangelicals—Suelo took the opportunity to rub their noses in their bigotry. He flipped open the Book of Luke and read furiously, substituting modern words for the archaic.

“‘An
evangelical
happened to be going down the same road, and when he saw the man, he passed by on the other side,’” he said. “‘So, too, a
fundamentalist,
when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. But a
Mormon,
as he traveled, came where the man was; and when he saw him, he took pity on him.’”

Everything was spiraling downward. Suelo was sleeping only an hour or two a night, lying breathlessly awake on his mattress, making an inventory of his multitude of miseries. And then one May night he bolted upright and dashed for the calendar. With a pencil he scratched off days and weeks. In three entire months, he calculated, he had been happy for precisely five minutes. There was no end to the eternal misery he had discovered in the poison berries.

Suddenly he knew the solution. When he was a child, his father had packed the family into the Beetle and driven them up the steep, treacherous road to Mount Evans. It’s the only fourteener in Colorado that you can drive to the top of. Daniel remembered the road, its hairpin switchbacks into deep gorges that dropped thousands of feet. There was a way to end this suffering.

.  .  .

A
T THREE IN
the morning, Suelo dresses and starts the sedan. He takes the highway into the Rockies, the same evergreen range where his father broke horses and courted his mother. He exits at the Mount Evans road and winds up into the mist. It’s spring, and the asphalt is wet from the packs of dirty snow clinging to the mountainside. He knows his destination. He can picture it.

The road narrows and grows steeper. Now, with the black night turning gray, he can see an icy lake so far below it looks like a puddle. His is the only car on the road.
What kind of lunatic would be driving up Mount Evans at this hour?
he thinks, and gets a laugh out of that. He steers to the precipice and peers over. A quick drop-off, then a steep slope of boulders, the tips of wild grasses poking through the snow, then the big free fall, hundreds of feet down to the lake.

He makes a note of the spot. The shoulder is crumbling into the abyss, and steel girders prop it up. He drives to the pullout and turns around, preparing for a final approach. His heart leaps to his throat.

And then, as he points the wheel toward the edge, something emerges from the fog. It’s an animal, two, three, more. Is he hallucinating again? No: it’s a herd of mountain goats, with their knobby knees and white fur and spiked horns. The goats have descended the slope opposite the drop-off, and are making their way up the road. One approaches the car. Daniel rolls down the window. Man and beast look into each other’s eyes. The goat has wet black compassionate eyes, two saucers of oil. And Daniel feels oddly comforted, as if the animal has given him permission to do what he’s about to do.

He punches the gas. The car jerks toward the cliff. Daniel thinks:
If God has some purpose for me, then not even I can resist it.

The rocks scrape beneath as he launches. Then blackness.

Part Two

. . .

Do not expect me to be a man in the worldly sense.

—Milarepa, eleventh-century Tibetan Buddhist saint

M
AY 30, 1991
. Daniel Shellabarger drives his car off a Colorado cliff toward certain death. Even viewed as a solitary event in a troubled life, it’s a dramatic moment. Yet in the context of all that came next, the crash assumes almost supernatural importance. Instead of a series of disconnected episodes without clear purpose, Suelo’s life begins to resemble an ordered fable, in which one scene leads irreversibly to the next, in which things happen for a reason.

The term for such a tale—in which the hero’s journey and ultimate battle against the dragon is choreographed by fate—is myth. Suelo’s quest to rid himself of money, when measured by modern yardsticks like politics and economics and psychology, just doesn’t add up. People in the real world
don’t behave like this
. The genre in which people wander for years in the desert, give up all worldly possessions, dwell in caves, and survive a series of near-death trials, is mythology.

“A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder,” wrote Joseph Campbell in
The Hero with a Thousand Faces
, his 1949 exploration of religion and mythology that inspired, among other things, the heroic journey of Luke Skywalker. “Fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.”

Outlining the journey’s three phases—Departure, Initiation, Return—Campbell proposes that a hero’s “visions, ideas, and inspirations come pristine from the primary springs of human life and thought…. not of the present, disintegrating society and psyche, but of the unquenched source through which society is reborn.”

Suelo long struggled with the ordinary world. As a child, he believed that through faith in Jesus he would spend eternity in heaven, but early in adulthood he lost faith in God, and doubted the eternal. As a young man, he was mired in a world in which his admiration of the great heroes—Jesus, John the Baptist, the prophet Daniel—was met with the same reply:
We’re living in different times now
. But Suelo did not accept that explanation. He demanded a life that emanated from more primary sources.

Then one day he was called to adventure. While innocently collecting berries in the woods, he ate the poisonous fruit, the
morideros
. “A blunder,” writes Campbell, “apparently the merest chance—reveals an unsuspected world, and the individual is drawn into a relationship with forces that are not rightly understood.”

Poisoned by the magical berries—“bites of death”—Suelo had his first true vision of the eternal. Much to his horror, it was
not a place where angels strummed harps. It was a place of Christ nailed to the cross and never-ending suffering. It was hell, and his path of Bible study and good deeds would never lead him to heaven.

Is that reading a bit too much into a case of accidental poisoning? Couldn’t Daniel have just as easily seen fairies and unicorns? But blunders are not random, according to Campbell. “They are the result of suppressed desires and conflicts,” he writes. “They are ripples on the surface of life, produced by unsuspected springs.” Suelo’s vision of hell was already within him; the
morideros
presented themselves on the vine in order to make him see it.

Thus called to his quest, Suelo reacted by refusing it. He was like Moses, who, when apprised of his task to free his people, cried out, “O Lord, please send someone else to do it.” Suelo’s method of refusing the call was to drive off a cliff.

And that’s when he first experienced what Campbell calls “Supernatural Aid.” The car soared into the abyss but never reached bottom. As if lifted by angels, Suelo found himself alive on the side of the road. Helicoptered to a Denver hospital, he emerged virtually unscathed. He could not refuse the call to adventure. Fate would not allow it. He cursed God, bitter that the Father would force him to endure an existence that, like it or not, would last forever. The purpose of his quest, then, was becoming clear: to transform this life from hell into heaven.

The year was 1991. The economy was in recession, and our hero was a thirty-one-year-old social worker with a case of suicidal depression—trapped in the belly of the beast. A year passed. Everywhere he looked, the world was ugly. He wanted to get away from its materialism and headaches and phoniness. He wanted to start fresh in some place that was uncluttered by
modernity, where man’s folly was cast into puny relief by nature, where a man might indeed believe that these times are no different from those of the ancient heroes.