The Man Who Quit Money (18 page)

In terms of Suelo’s journey, the loss of his relationship with Mathew represented the loosening of one more worldly attachment. In mythological terms, we might call the romance his
meeting with the Temptress, one of the many trials the hero must overcome. It was also the last significant romance of his life.

“I’d be completely happy if I never had a relationship again,” Suelo says today. “And I’d be happy if one came. But it’s not something I’m going to go looking for.”

In the fifteen years since his heartbreak, Suelo has had a few flings, but nothing that lasted more than a couple of months. He mused after one such failed affair, “My lifestyle is a bit much for him.”

Suelo’s closest friends see his love life as problematic. “I think not being in a relationship is his great suffering,” Damian Nash says. “He was happiest when he first came to Moab, because he was young and the prospect of love was very real. Back then he was falling in love with the land, having the best sex of his life. Now he’s given up on that, resigned himself to the solitary life of a monk.”

“He was at that time more consumed with finding a lover,” says Conrad Sorenson. “He has become much more of a monk.”

And yet he hasn’t entirely given up on love. When I was in Moab interviewing Suelo, a strikingly good-looking kid hitched into town. Cody was wiry and androgynous, with blond dreadlocks, an ox ring in his nose, tattoos rising out of his collar. He was in his early twenties, and after reading Suelo’s website had come to find him. The two camped out together, talked late into the night about God and love and the cosmos. Cody kept referring to his “ex-partner, Jesse.” The stage was set for tragicomic misunderstanding. The whole thing unfolded in Suelo’s excruciating candor on his blog.

“I told Cody he can now tell everybody that he came all the way to Moab and caused me to fall crazy in love with him. Just when I’d thought I was immune to all that. Totally unexpected….
He’s got a beautiful girlfriend [Jesse] back in Colorado he is madly and faithfully in love with, and he is young enough to be my son. In other words, I’m trying to pick up my heart weighed down by crushing, unrequited, romantic love.”

I had to admit that I didn’t think this fifty-year-old man in a cave was being realistic about his romantic options, especially when chasing straight guys half his age. One night after dinner at my trailer I asked him: really, what kind of man, even if he is gay, is going to move into a cave and stop using money, just for love?

“It’s almost like I set myself up to make it difficult,” he conceded. “Setting up the field of natural selection: if they can make it through, they’re the one I want. That’s part of our mythology, our fairy tale. The feminine and the masculine. The feminine—the princess—sets up obstacles. The masculine has to go through these twelve trials, conquer the dragon, or whatever. It’s like biology. The egg is sitting there, and the sperm have to go through this toxic fluid to get to it.”

I asked why he didn’t spend more time in a city with an actual gay population.

“I was turned off by the gay community in Denver,” he told me. “It was too easy.” He paused. “People weren’t refined.”

Refined? I was floored. To me, “refined” meant piano jazz, pinot gris, knowing which fork is for salad. “You live in a cave,” I said. “How can you complain that other men aren’t refined?”

“My idea of refinement is someone who can stand on their own, without all these fluffy comforts. When I think of refinement, I think of ore refined through the fire, all the excess is burned off. Just the gold.”

It’s a gloriously—you might say impossibly—romantic ideal. It made me wonder if Suelo really wanted to find someone, or
just to pine away for the unattainable. Maybe he was like Snow White, or Moneyless Beauty, putting himself through ridiculous hardship with the secret hope that Prince Charming might one day kiss him back to life.

“How much of your life is just a reaction to not falling in love?” I asked. “Do you think you were driven into solitude by a broken heart?”

“Yeah, I think that had a lot to do with it,” he said. “Mathew…. I felt it was an enlightening experience. There was a turning point there, where I felt like: why should I put so much investment into things that aren’t lasting, that are temporary, like relationships? But I’ve had people ask me over the years: isn’t this just an excuse? A compensation for not having a fulfilling relationship? Maybe it is. I feel like every single thing we do in life is a compensation for something else. This is just the path I’ve chosen, and it’s the most fulfilling. I felt like a relationship would spoil that, unless it was a relationship where somebody was willing to do this with me. But it’s put me in a spot where it’s very unlikely, too. So does it mean I’m afraid of a relationship, that I’m running? Maybe.”

.  .  .

Take courage, boy! The Earth is all that lasts.

—Black Elk

A
LONE IN THE
canyon one April day in 1997, three years before quitting money, Suelo attempted to eat a live animal. “I got hungry and caught a sand lizard,” he wrote. “He went totally limp, fully giving himself to me. I put his body in my mouth and bit his head off.”

This is one of my favorite moments in all of Suelo’s writing, because it obliterates my occasional suspicion that he is merely on some practical quest for survival. No, this is a man looking to solve life’s mysteries. In the preceding months he had come up with a theory about food, the spiritual bond between the eater and the eaten: “Cultures the world over consider their staple the incarnation of God: Buffalo for the Cheyenne, Corn for the Hopi, Cattle for the Massai, Wheat (bread) for the Christians. What I’ve seen about hunting and gathering peoples, they are the only ones who can fully grasp and accept the Holy Communion.
(Funny how we think we have to cram our little wafers down their throats.) All life forms are the sacrificial victim—there’s absolutely no exception; all are food.”

Like any good scientist, Daniel endeavored to test his hypothesis—with alarming results. “I tried to swallow him but spit him out in revulsion,” he wrote. “The root of all life, and I’m revolted!”

It was no coincidence that Daniel was conducting this experiment on Passover—the feast thought to have been the occasion for Jesus’s Last Supper. On the verge of crucifixion, he instructed his disciples that bread was his body and wine his blood, and that they should partake in remembrance of him. So you see: Suelo wasn’t eating this lizard for protein. For that he would have cooked the thing. Rather, he wanted to understand
spiritually
what it meant to consume another life. To be granted life through the death of another. You might call it training for the day when some other creature—whether a grizzly bear or an earthworm—consumes him.

Daniel’s Passover Seder concluded: “So I thought, ‘This is my body,’ and tried again. I swallowed him, tasting the pungent blood. After that, everything in the canyon smelled like lizard blood—even my own sweat.”

The Last Lizard was a particularly memorable episode in Suelo’s attempts to test the philosophical framework for the moneyless life, in the years leading up to his decision. In a broad sense, he was trying out two theories about the good life. The first came to him courtesy of Henry David Thoreau. As a million pairs of soon-to-be-chapped lips have recited at the head of the Appalachian Trail, “I went to the woods because I wished
to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”

But before Suelo could begin to discover what the effects might be of living simply, free of artificial distractions and closer to the rhythms of nature, he had to prepare himself even to embark on such an experiment. He had arrived in Moab pickled to the gills—like 10 percent of Americans in the 1990s—on a skull-warping cocktail of Prozac, Zoloft, and Wellbutrin. When one antidepressant stopped working, they’d give him another, and when a few replacements crapped out, they’d revert to the first. The problem with Zoloft was that it made his mouth dry and his brain fuzzy. Once, while being interviewed for the local television station about a Habitat for Humanity program he was launching, he got so parched that he started to stutter right there on camera. Then it seemed to him that the buzzing of the neon light overhead grew deafening. Worse, when he looked up at it, he discovered that there was no neon light—the buzzing was inside his skull. “Luckily no one watches that station anyway,” he says.

One day, blinking into the sun as he stepped out of the post office, he bumped into his former roommate, Linda Whitham. She asked how he was and he couldn’t fake it.

“Shitty,” he said. “I’m out of a job. Anxiety attacks. Life sucks.”

She looked at him with supremely kind eyes.

“Don’t worry about anything,” she said. “Not jobs or money. Until you find your health. That’s what’s most important. Concentrate on that.”

A little light switched on—not the buzzing neon in his head, but a pleasant bulb illuminating some forgotten corner of will. He resolved that day to cure himself of depression without the
use of pharmaceuticals. He began splitting the pills in halves, then quarters, then eighths, then finally he flushed the last of the particles down the toilet. His naturopath friend Michael Friedman suggested a natural alternative, St John’s wort, which Suelo began brewing as tea three times a day.

“I started visualizing my thoughts,” Suelo says. “My mind was a weed garden of negative thoughts about people, things, myself. I thought: ‘I don’t care if it takes me until I’m eighty years old—I’m going to weed out this garden. That’s my priority.’ I kept seeing these negative thoughts rising in my mind. Why do I hold on to them? It’s useless. I’d let it go.”

And slowly, living in his cave through 1997, his mental health improved. He would look up from what he was doing and notice that he hadn’t been unhappy in hours. The depression had begun to evaporate. Thrilled by the progress of his mind, he began to focus on his body.

Even on an emotionally good day, physically Suelo still felt bad. His stomach fought most of what he fed it—the chronic gas and indigestion was so bad that he wondered if he was carrying a parasite from his stint in the Peace Corps. He was dizzy and his head ached. And mostly he was just plain tired—so tired he didn’t want to get up in the morning.

Dr. Friedman diagnosed chronic fatigue syndrome, and prescribed antifungals and digestive enzymes. They seemed to help, enough that, for the first time in a decade of feeling feeble and sickly, Suelo dared to imagine himself strong and robust. As the youngest in his large family, Suelo had lived his whole life as the weakest and the littlest, the one who could be bossed or scolded or pushed around. No more. Having expended so much energy protecting his right to differ from the norm of masculinity—to
be sensitive and feminine without apology—suddenly he realized he didn’t have to choose. He could have it both ways. Hell, he wanted to be a man!

He began putting his body to the test. When he finished his four-day shift as a live-in assistant at the women’s shelter, he’d spend the rest of the week alone, deep in the canyon, farther up than he’d ever camped before, a full two-hour walk from town. He didn’t see anyone up there, and the long walk filled his calves with blood and his lungs with cold air. He stayed the entire winter in a north-facing alcove where the sun rarely hit, and the trickling spring froze solid. He got a second sleeping bag and didn’t allow himself a campfire—he wanted to see what he was made of. He adopted a strict diet: organic, vegan, raw. His body weathered the winter with just the protein of nuts. “I feel like I’m in my prime,” he wrote. Suelo’s stint of simplicity in the wilderness appeared to reveal, as Thoreau promised, that man thrives in nature.

The second theory that Suelo was exploring had to do with chance and fate. From his observations of the natural world, he suspected that free will is mere human myth, and that the time we spend planning and worrying about the future is folly. While there are a few industrious exceptions, like beaver and squirrels, most wild animals don’t plan ahead. They take what is available—that is, plants and bodies of other animals—and when they die they give what they have: their own bodies.

Suelo found support for his theory in Jesus Christ Himself. After years of cutting himself off from the religion of his parents, he was giving it another look. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus articulates the core principles of what was to become
Christianity: love your enemy, turn the other cheek, judge not lest you be judged, the meek shall inherit the earth. And he also talks about nature.

“Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in the barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they?” In other words, if God provides for the birds, wouldn’t He also provide for humans? And then Jesus gets into the revolutionary stuff—things that weren’t stressed in Suelo’s upbringing: “Do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more important than food, and the body more important than clothes?” And then the kicker: “Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to his life?”

It was a breakthrough. Suelo’s anxiety had been the cause of so much misery. He was always worried about what would happen next, where he’d live, how he’d pay off his student loans, what his parents would think. And now here was Jesus Himself saying that worrying won’t get you anything, won’t add an extra hour of life, or as the King James has it, won’t add a single cubit to your stature.

If the best-laid plans were folly, then did it follow that mere chance was divine? This was Suelo’s hypothesis: “Chance is God. To know the mind of Chance you must break all attachments (preplanning) and move with chance. Faith = taking a chance.” The corollary to relinquishing control of the future was assuming that whatever happens, happens for a reason.

Take Saint Francis of Assisi, perhaps the second most influential Christian after Jesus, who founded the Franciscan order of monks in thirteenth-century Italy and is credited with bringing
vows of poverty to the religion. Il Poverello, the Little Poor Man, was one of Christianity’s great renunciates, inspired by Jesus’s famous teaching: “If you wish to be perfect, go sell all you have, and give to the poor, and come, follow me.” His clothes were so shabby that, according to his biography,
The Little Flowers of Saint Francis,
“for a long time he had been going around Assisi looking contemptible and so mortified by penance that many people thought he was simple-minded, and he was laughed at as a lunatic and driven away with many insults and stones and mud by his relatives and by strangers.”