The Man Who Quit Money (17 page)

For Daniel, the liberating thrill of romance soon gave way to the messy business of an actual relationship. Rocky saw fireworks and wanted a lover. Daniel wasn’t so sure. Maybe he was just lonely. He wanted space. He rented his own apartment. “Things are starting to get a bit more realistic between Rocky and me, and we’re finally starting to develop a friendship like we shoulda done from the beginning,” he wrote to Tim Frederick. His pursuer persisted. “I can’t get space from Rocky,” Daniel complained. “I consider him one of my best friends (but not a lover).”

Real or not, the affair with Rocky plodded into the next year. The romance ended when Rocky dropped by unannounced and accused Daniel of acting irrationally. “He wouldn’t leave when I told him to, so I physically pushed him out the door and shut it,” Daniel wrote, just minutes after the fight. “I’ve never done anything like that to anybody in my life. Working at the women’s
shelter and learning about abusive disorders has given me a new empowerment and I feel good.”

As he is prone to do in the face of disappointment, Suelo waxed philosophical. “I am actually feeling kind of privileged being a late bloomer. Guess I feel better being a cherry tree than a tulip. And I still haven’t been in a real relationship.”

Though still depressed, Daniel was entering his first stable period in a decade. He worked part-time at the shelter, and took other odd jobs—pulling espressos, substitute teaching, grading exams for a local company that taught English to Japanese students via overnight mail. He and Damian Nash pooled their meager funds, along with some cash from Nash’s mother, and for five thousand dollars purchased a dilapidated trailer home, stripped to the studs by the meth heads who had inhabited it. Damian and Daniel hauled the thing to a ramshackle trailer park at the mouth of a canyon and began renovating. Daniel paid a nominal rent of one hundred dollars per month that Damian banked as Daniel’s share of partial ownership.

In the meantime, Daniel pressed on in a quest for Real Love that would sweep him into a state of ecstasy he’d so far found only in prayer and male friendship. It hitchhiked into town the following summer.

One day from the trailer Daniel saw a young man walk past on his way to the canyon. He had a limp and no backpack or sleeping bag—just a Mexican blanket and a conga drum slung over his shoulder. His hair was dark and curly and his skin olive, and he had a world-weariness about him, an old soul. He was elfin and mysterious, like some feral creature raised by coyotes. Daniel was transfixed—not just by the boy’s beauty, but by his lack of possessions. How could someone live like that? Daniel
sensed immediately that he and this youth were destined to meet.

It happened a few weeks later. Daniel was reading poems at an open mike in a coffee shop—some pretty esoteric stuff, the result of his chronic malaise combined with his lifelong fascination with biblical numerology.

The stranger approached afterward. He loved the poems, he said. He spoke in a bizarre sort of cockney, the result of having spent part of his childhood in New Zealand. The more he spoke, the more exotic and alluring he became, like some pirate spawn from a Robert Louis Stevenson novel. He’d sailed around the world with his father. The reason he limped was that as a child he’d had polio. He was only nineteen but had already lived an eternity. He had this aura about him. Everyone in the room was drawn to him. Especially Daniel.

Daniel invited him up to the trailer. They lit a few candles and uncorked a bottle of wine and talked until late. Daniel had never felt such a connection. Mathew ended up sleeping on the couch. Daniel lay in his own bed, his heart thumping, the dawn wrens beginning to sing.

The two became inseparable. Mathew spent nights in the trailer, and they camped out in the canyon, tucked into caves and alcoves or just lying on the rock beneath the stars. But when Daniel
revealed that he was gay, Mathew said that he was not. Daniel couldn’t believe it. The energy between them was too strong.

Then one night, Daniel felt Mathew’s hand creep over his shoulder and slide across his chest. A bolt shot along his spine. Hardly able to control his breathing, he inched his hand toward Mathew’s until they touched. Mathew recoiled.

This happened night after night. It was driving Daniel crazy. He confided in Conrad Sorenson at the co-op. “Be patient,” Conrad assured him. “You two belong together.” The pursuit continued. Some nights Mathew would hold Daniel for a few minutes, then leap out of bed, returning an hour later and dozing off.

Finally Daniel’s persistence paid off. One night, as he remembers it, the walls fell down. They fell into each other’s arms and confessed to be madly in love. Total bliss. As winter approached, Mathew moved into the trailer, and the new couple became happily domestic.

“Mathew is plastering over the fake wood-grain paneling and rounding the corners in the bay-window room,” Suelo wrote. “We’re then going to paint a rain forest on the walls. It’s starting to look less and less like a trailer in here.”

Like most new lovebirds, the two appeared unutterably adorable to each other, and nauseatingly self-absorbed to everyone else. “Sometimes I’d hear Mathew and Daniel giggling and flirting in the bathtub through the paper-thin walls, candles lit,” remembers Damian Nash. “I’d have to go outside and take a walk. They were both unbelievable slobs. You had to wade knee-deep through the junk not put away.”

It was an eccentric household. Damian, a nationally competitive chess player, was a psychology teacher who would eventually coach Grand County High School’s chess team to become state
champions. (Later he would take a Colorado team to its respective championship as well, and in 2010 he became Utah State Chess Champion.) He held a master’s degree in neuroscience and cognitive science and was a practicing Quaker, but self-identified as a “mystic groupie” with a personal set of beliefs derived from Rumi and the Sufi poets. His girlfriend, Linda Whitham, was a fetching New Englander with a master’s degree and a Protestant work ethic; she clocked at least forty hours a week for an environmental group, and had never caught or understood the Moab Fever that induced such loafing.

Such eclecticism was not the exception but the rule in the Powerhouse Lane Trailer Court. Nestled beside a peach orchard and a clear creek on a rutted dirt road at the mouth of the canyon, the run-down collection of Airstreams and Detroiters had gained the nickname “Third World Trailer Park,” largely for the pack of stub-legged mutts that ran wild at all hours, menacing passersby with their howls and supplying the city shelter with ample broods of stub-legged pups. The property had been all but abandoned after the uranium mill closed in 1984, with just a few holdouts hunkering beneath the mulberry trees. But when a local hippie bought it and planted apples and peaches, and began renting berths for sixty-eight dollars a month, the place quickly filled up with manufactured homes well past their prime. The new owner, Andrew Riley, had only two rules: no meth, no pit bulls. “If they showed up and had a deposit and rent, I let them in,” Andrew says. He is now in his sixties, with white hair and a face burned pink by years in the orchard. “I usually had a waiting list to get in.”

And what sort of people chose to dwell there? “Quality people who didn’t want the responsibility of ownership” is how Riley characterizes them. But as someone who twice took up residence in the
Third World Trailer Park myself, I’d say my neighbors shared a certain je ne sais quoi which in these parts could be called “Moab Chic.” I’m talking about people who rip through a tin wall with a Sawzall to build a straw-bale adobe addition, who thatch privacy fences from hand-harvested willow shoots, who sink wood-fired hot tubs into their driveways. Among the forty or so inhabitants were a navy veteran, a Broadway dancer, a New York fashion model, the hobbled author of the definitive guidebooks to rock climbing in the Canyonlands, the ethereal publisher of a Jungian journal called
Dream Network
(“Evolving a Dream Cherishing Culture”), as well as the usual muster of river guides, seasonal waiters, Indians, environmental activists, and drunks. The only nonwheeled structure on the lane was a collapsing cottage leased as a crash pad for Outward Bound guides, whose fleet of dented pickups and campers were overgrown with green tumbleweeds during the August monsoon. Surnames were seldom spoken, and denizens went by Hippie Bruce and Wild Man Jimmy, Rattlesnake Kate and Stormin’ Norman. What the place lacked in the pit bulls and meth labs that typify so many trailer parks, it more than made up for in love triangles (and quadrangles, and pentagons), bitter feuds about stupid shit, and fires ignited by smoking in bed.

“There is strange energy on that property,” Riley says. “Something dark had happened there, maybe with the Indians.” Indeed, the trailers were parked a short jaunt downstream from panels of Anasazi rock drawings that give some people the heebie-jeebies. Over the years, Wiley employed increasingly unorthodox methods of healing the land’s bad juju, including one ceremony with the dancing and drumming of “witch women.” (“Where did you get the witches?” I asked, scribbling notes. He looked away and murmured, “Just have to know where to look, I guess.”)

On a night that, for my money, typifies the glory days of Powerhouse Lane (the court has since been dismantled), Damian brought home the Russian chess master Igor Ivanov to sleep on the couch. Ivanov was in town for a tournament Damian had organized, and he wanted to save hotel costs. The four men—Daniel, Mathew, Damian, Igor—opened a bottle of vodka and argued politics all night. (Linda was presumably out of town or had the good sense to knock off early.) The Russian was six foot seven and about three hundred pounds, an ultraconservative who had defected from the Soviet Union. With each shot of vodka, he bellowed louder that communism was the world’s greatest evil, how it squashed creativity and eradicated the individual. Tiny Mathew, the leftist elf, would not be bullied. He stood toe-to-toe with the ogre, matching vodka shots and railing point for point about the abuses of fascism and corporations.

At dawn, as Damian drove the sodden Russian to the tournament, Igor said with begrudging respect, “He’s a young man with much to learn. But at least he defends his ideas.” He was so hungover that he lost the match.

The reverie between Daniel and Mathew bubbled through the winter, eventually straining the relationship between Damian and Linda. One night Daniel and Mathew left a candle lit and accidentally burned a hole in Linda’s beautiful rug, a gift from Damian’s mother. They tried to conceal the burn beneath a piece of furniture, but it was discovered. Daniel did not apologize to Linda, and she took her case to Damian. She was tired of having to share her home and her life with this freeloading, insolent, chronically depressed mooch and his demon lover. She gave Damian the ultimatum: him or me.

Three days later, Linda moved out.

Soon the drafty trailer carried too much responsibility for the happy couple, and as spring blossomed, Daniel bought an old Chevy van for five hundred dollars. They planned to split the summer between the van and the canyon. But even as Daniel followed Mathew into reckless freedom, he chafed at his lover’s unpredictability. Daniel wrote, “Sometimes I think Mathew is an old-soul sage mature way beyond his years, sometimes (maybe more often than not) I think he’s a 7-year-old trapped in the body of a 20-yr-old. It makes me glad I’m going on 35.”

Daniel was jealous of Mathew’s friendship with a woman in the trailer park who liked to joke that Daniel was Mathew’s sugar daddy. When quizzed about her, Mathew grew defiant. A triangle formed. Mathew spent more and more time with the woman. “Mathew was exploring, Daniel was settling,” says Damian. Finally, Daniel couldn’t stand it any longer.

“Are you in love with her?” he demanded.

Mathew started laughing. “Why in the world would you say that?”

“Well, aren’t you in love with the person you spend the most time with?”

Mathew didn’t answer.

So Daniel stormed over to her trailer and asked her the same thing. She laughed, too. It was demeaning. He was furious.

The next day Mathew was downright cavalier.

“I’ve been thinking about what you said,” he said. “I think I am in love with her. You opened my eyes.”

And just like that, Mathew and the neighbor packed up her car and left for parts unknown. Love blew out of town as easily as it had blown in.

“It’s been utterly devastating,” Daniel wrote to Tim Wojtusik,
his closest friend from the Peace Corps. “Just when I think I’ve explored all the byways of pain, I find there’s a new, even more intense one to relish. I feel so incredibly betrayed. My heart’s been broken and shredded and used to wipe Mathew’s ass. So strange that I didn’t realize how very much I love him—the pain is overwhelming.”

At work, the English exams from Japan gazed up nonsensically from his desk. Four days later, he quit. He slept in his van and had little contact with friends. But even as the pain sharpened, he noticed something peculiar: It was real. It wasn’t the sort of metaphysical ennui that had depressed him for five years. This pain was different—more visceral and human. He wrote, “Deep down I knew all this shit would happen and I needed to go through it for some sick reason.”

The current misery of heartbreak was preferable to the previous miseries of loneliness and existential angst. He wallowed in it. He spent two months in the canyon, lingering in the sites where love had sparked. “It forced me to face things,” he wrote. “All kinds of shit surfaced and I did a lot of crying, as well as laughing and feeling joy and beauty.”

Suelo emerged believing that maybe he just wasn’t cut out for relationships. “I keep thinking that if I can feel 100% comfortable with being alone, then I’ll know how to do this human-interaction thing,” he wrote. “I often feel foolish for having put so much importance on my little vapor-in-the-wind relationship. I’ve had so little experience with romance that the rare times it has happened I haven’t known what to do with it, like an adolescent.”