Skipping Towards Gomorrah (27 page)

I was in a rush to get my ass to the airport, so I took Mary's advice and brought very little, throwing just one pair of underwear and some gym clothes into a backpack. I paid full fare for my ticket, and the check-in clerk noticed and bumped me up to first class. I'd never flown first class before, and it was a fitting beginning to my journey. Not only was I headed to a place that most people can't afford (which makes 'em envious), I was sitting in first class, too! I was used to being treated like cattle on airplanes, flying exclusively in coach, and the level of service in first class was positively unnerving. I wasn't accustomed to being served by an aggressively servile steward, nor was I accustomed to being on the receiving end of the dirty looks grumpy people headed towards coach shoot people in first class. People flying coach envied my orange juice, they envied the real glass I was drinking it from, and, of course, they envied my wide leather seat. Envy may create sorrow out of joy, as Peraldus pointed out, but only for the person doing the envying. For the envied, envy is positively delightful. I know I'd never enjoyed a glass of orange juice so much in my life as I did on that flight to Los Angeles.

Once I got to L.A., I was reduced once again to cattle (my normal flying status), packed into a shuttle bus, and driven to a nearby hotel where incoming Ashramites rendezvous. Walking into the lobby, I spotted some of my fellow guests: handsome, well-preserved middle-aged women without much luggage. Everyone had the pensive expression of a kid on her way to camp, and each one was wearing incongruous-looking hiking boots. We would all be giving up control over our schedules, diets, and daily lives for the next seven days, and these moments in the lobby were our last chance to do whatever the hell we wanted. Most of the incoming Ashramites were having one last cup of coffee. Keenly aware that I wouldn't have access to my daily doses of refined sugar, I wolfed down a candy bar.

A big white van appeared in the hotel's driveway, and everyone made their way to the doors. THE ASHRAM was written on the side of the van in a groovy, Yellow Submarine-era font. A cute little “Love Is . . .”-style angel hovered over the name. The font and the angel betrayed the Ashram's early seventies' roots, but the van was brand-new. A tan young man with thick blond hair on his head and on his legs jumped out of the van. Randy stacked our bags in the back of the van as everyone took one last sip of their coffees and Cokes. There were nine of us; seven women and two men. Four other Ashramites were already at the spa, Randy told us, two women and another man, and the drive would take about forty-five minutes. The van was cramped, and no one spoke as we made our way out of Los Angeles.

We drove through L.A., in and out of canyons, along the Pacific Ocean, past Cher's house, and deep into the desert. When we were nearing Malibu, an older blond woman with a deep tan broke the ice by telling all of us about a wedding she'd been to recently. Apparently, the bride's family budgeted a hundred thousand dollars for flowers alone. My ride in first class suddenly seemed like ancient history as my class envy was kicked into gear. Soon two women sitting behind me started swapping stories about their horses. “I can always spot a horsewoman,” the first horsewoman said to the second horsewoman.

We pulled up in front of the five-hundred-dollar-a-day Ashram, “the boot camp of spas,” according to Randy, who was not only a driver but one of the Ashram's guides and yoga instructors. The boot camp of spas? For five hundred dollars a day I expected luxury—hell, I paid for luxury. The thirteen of us came to this spot in the desert to lose weight and reconnect with our spirits, sure, but before and after the daily hikes I expected private baths, thick towels, deep tubs, deluxe mattresses, and some swank window treatments. What I saw out the van's windows when we pulled up, however, didn't look promising. Randy parked the van in front of a completely unremarkable single-family home, sitting on a small hill at the end of a road near the bottom of a canyon. Aloe plants and cacti were scattered around, baking in the sun, while here and there paint peeled off statues of Saint Francis and Buddha. The house itself was covered with dusty white stucco and some dry vines.

The inside wasn't any better. A heavy Spanish-style door opened into a narrow vestibule; there were benches, cubby holes for our hiking shoes, and an ancient framed map of the mountains on the wall. The living room straight ahead was dominated by a low, semicircular couch/conversation pit upholstered in a purple-brown-green color that won't be cycling back into vogue any time soon. A low, heavy, dark-wood coffee table with a white marble insert sat in front of the couch, and a long dining room table was just a step or two away. The Ashram's tiny, L-shaped kitchen was just off the dining area, with crystals hanging on fishing lines strung up in the window over the sink. The living room had fake box-beam ceilings, several swag lamps, and gas flames lapping at fake logs in the fireplace. Hanging over the fireplace was a wood plaque: BE STILL AND KNOW THAT I AM GOD/ BE STILL AND KNOW THAT I AM/BE STILL AND KNOW/BE STILL/BE . . .

I was being charged five hundred dollars a day to hang out at my best friend's house in the suburbs, circa 1977.

The place had once been a single-family ranch house built in the early 1970s—think the Brady house. To accommodate thirteen paying-through-the-nose guests, rooms had been haphazardly added to the home. My bedroom was in a boxy, un-air-conditioned, two-bedroom addition on the side of the house that got late-afternoon sun. There was one bathroom in the addition, which I shared with four complete strangers. (For five hundred dollars a day, I didn't think I should have to use a can that someone else stank up.) The bright yellow bedspread on my bed matched the yellow curtains and yellow walls. A simple pine dresser was all that separated my bed from . . .
my roommate's bed.
I was paying five hundred dollars a day to share a bathroom and a bedroom with strangers at the Bradys' house.

 

L
ike other well-off conservative scolds, Robert Bork clearly recognizes the character-building benefits of other people's poverty. “Religion tends to be strongest when life is hard,” he writes, “and the same may be said of morality and law.” He's right, of course. A man who isn't sure where his next meal is coming from is likelier to be found on his knees in a church than he is in a restaurant. But if hardship and the fear of want render people and nations virtuous, it's hard to understand why Bork and other conservatives object so strongly to taxing the wealthy. If the government soaked the rich to finance a single-payer national health-care program it wouldn't make the working poor affluent, and therefore less virtuous. It would, however, make the affluent a little less affluent and, according to Bork's logic, a little
more
virtuous.

Even if money extracted from the wealthy in the form of taxes wasn't spent on social programs or anything else that might minimize the socially toxic impact that wealth inequality has in the United States, reducing the net income of the wealthy Americans is something we should do
for their own good.
In addition to making money available to provide for the common good (health care, meat inspectors, national defense), hiking the taxes of the affluent would make the rich less affluent and therefore—provided Bork is correct—more religious, moral, and mindful of the law. (Who knows? If Ken Lay had to shoulder a slightly more onerous tax burden, perhaps Enron wouldn't have been run so crookedly.) If the government should come between music lovers and rap, pot smokers and pot, adulterers and other people's spouses, well, why shouldn't the government come between the rich and their money? Even if envy is the motivating factor, as Bork believes, the end result would still be a net increase in American virtue.

William J. Bennett is another big fan of other people's poverty, listing affluence among the many threats to the American family. Bennett's list of threats to the American family is long; it includes individualism, the Pill, women in the workforce, “legalized abortion” (illegal abortions aren't a threat to the family, just the women), “new rules governing male-female relations” (the new rules: men can't beat, rape, or murder their wives and girlfriends with impunity; women aren't the property of fathers and husbands; having children is a woman's choice, not her obligation), popular culture, gay people who want to get married, gay people who don't want to get married, gay people who want to be parents, gay people who don't want to be parents, gay people who want to join the army, gay people who want fries with that, et cetera. If conservative scolds truly believe that affluence leads to rootless hedonism and threatens religion, morality, the law, and the American family, then where was Bennett when George W. Bush eliminated the inheritance tax? With the stroke of a pen, a Republican president condemned future generations of wealthy families to lives of rootless hedonism. The children of today's millionaires and billionaires (and their children, and their children's children) won't have to work a day in their dissipated lives thanks to George W. Bush. They'll know only affluence; they'll never fear want or have to engage in hard physical labor. The urban poor and the working class may envy the rich and aspire to rootless hedonism, but nothing enables an aspiring hedonist to become a world-class rootless hedonist like a large trust fund.

 

I
was still recovering from the shock of having to share a room with a complete stranger in a five-hundred-dollar-per-night spa, to say nothing of sharing a bathroom with four people, when Randy began rounding us up. We'd been given some time to get settled, meet our roommates, and sit for an intake interview with the spa's director. Now it was time for our first day's hike. Some of the women who had been to the Ashram before asked why Randy was skipping the routine weigh-in before the first hike.

“We've been trying to get away from weighing people,” Randy explained. “It's shallow. Our focus while we're here this week should be on our health and our energy and not on arbitrary, meaningless numbers.”

There was a long silence.

The women looked at each other, then back at Randy; eyebrows were raised; women exhaled in not-so-silent protest. Sisterhood is powerful—the eyebrows and loud sighs weren't lost on Randy. He must have known that no one came to the Ashram for the deluxe accommodations; the ladies were here to lose weight. So was I. At the end of the week, we would all wanted to know just how much weight our three thousand dollars lost us, thank you very much. It wasn't just the women and the gay man who were fixated on the shallow stuff. My straight roommate, a fiftyish male movie-mogul type of very few words, wanted to be weighed, too. No doubt we would all compare our “before” and “after” weights at the end of the week, with the biggest loser being the most enviable Ashramite.

Randy was clearly disappointed in our shallow fixation on weight, but he was also clearly outnumbered. One by one he called us into a shed behind the house. From the outside the shed looked like one of those assemble-it-yourself garden sheds for sale in the parking lot of Home Depot. On the inside, though, the shed was tricked out with a carpet, a double bed, a dresser, a lamp, and a scale. One Ashram staffer slept in the shed every night to prevent the guests from ordering pizzas or escaping into the mountains in search of coffee beans. The overnight staffer was also in charge of getting all of us up and out of bed at five A.M.

When it was my turn to be weighed, Randy called me out to the shed and asked me to strip—so the week wasn't without thrills. My arbitrary number turned out to be 185 pounds.

We may have looked like kids on our way to camp waiting to be picked up in Los Angeles, but now that we were at the Ashram, we began acting like kids at camp. As we headed out to the van, one woman announced that she had to sit in the front passenger seat because she was claustrophobic. With a nervous laugh—a nervous-because-it's-a-lie laugh—the woman, a music industry executive, started telling us about her lifelong phobia of enclosed spaces. It was simply impossible for her to sit in the back of the van, she said. She hoped we all understood. Another woman, an unemployed (if still wealthy) dot-commer, announced that
she
was plagued by motion sickness; the back of the van bounced around too much for her, so
she
needed to sit in the front passenger seat.

Neither could prove she suffered from the malady she claimed to have, and I assumed that both just wanted to ride shotgun all week long. I hung back, waiting to see how our group's first conflict would be resolved. Would they take turns riding shotgun? What about the rest of us? Could we vote them off the island? Then a second van pulled up, which I should've seen coming. Our entire group of thirteen guests and two trail guides wouldn't fit in one van. So it was settled: Ms. Claustrophobe hopped into the front of the first van; Ms. Motion Sickness hopped into the front of the second.

Now, it hadn't occurred to me to covet the front seat. I didn't really want the front seat—not, of course, until I couldn't have it. The women riding in the front seats seemed pretty pleased with themselves (joy), while I sat in the back of the van seething (sorrow). Hmph. How dare they lie and scheme their way into riding shotgun all week, I grumbled to myself, and I found it hard to concentrate on anything other than the injustice of it all. Now I wanted to ride shotgun. I
had
to ride shotgun. I
would
ride shotgun.

The nonseething members of our group got acquainted as we drove to the trailhead. We were nine women and three men; nine white people, two African Americans, and one Southeast Asian. One of the men was a German mogul who comes to the Ashram two weeks every year; my roommate was the well-known head of a big movie studio. One of the women was a singer with a couple of dance hits under her belt who needed to lose some weight before a big television appearance; the claustrophobic music-industry executive was the singer's best friend. There was a diplomat from the United Nations, a dot-com entrepreneur and motion-sickness victim lucky enough to cash out before the crash, an opinionated real-estate lawyer, a genetic engineer, a wealthy businesswoman about to marry into an insanely wealthy East Coast family, two housewives, and one impostor.