The Man Who Quit Money (11 page)

Meanwhile, his sexual confusion raged. Daniel continued to strike up close friendships with women, partly because he genuinely liked them, and partly because he hoped Miss Right might marshal his hormones to march to the correct drummer. He reported in a letter to Tim Frederick, “I have had most of my fellowship with a girl, Corinne, who used to be involved in Intervarsity and is a Lutheran. We played ‘hooky’ from training one day and spent the day in Quito going from one cathedral to another, praying and talking about the mysteries of the Universe. I was on a spiritual high for days afterward.”

Corinne, who went on to a career in Foreign Service, was also on a high, but perhaps of a different nature. She recalls Daniel as “very handsome, but not flirtatious, or trivial,” and remembers thinking:
What’s up with this guy? It’s weird we spend so much time together and it’s not leading toward romance. He doesn’t seem to be interested.

Daniel rationalized his indifference in a letter to Tim Frederick: “I told her there was nothing noble in my lack of interest in a male/female relationship. I just had no instinctual desire to be involved with a woman, so I had to turn to a higher goal—my theology.” He had acquired a sort of holy pride in his skittishness. When he got news that a friend was getting married, he joked to Tim, “They’re betraying us and our Celibate Club. Who’s next? The Pope?” But even as his attraction to men roiled,
he couldn’t bring himself to broach the real issue with his best friends. “I have deep-hurting problems that I would like to share with you,” he wrote to Tim, promising to do so in the next letter, but he didn’t.

Finally the pot boiled over. In the second year of his Peace Corps term, Daniel found himself drinking with the locals at a party in his mountain village. He locked eyes with a man on the dance floor. Daniel felt like he was being swept away. They danced closer and closer. “The next thing I know I put my hand on his back,” he says. “I felt this mutual attraction. I was just sober enough to control myself. I thought: ‘I’m in a different culture that doesn’t accept this.’”

Daniel stumbled home alone. He could no longer deny how he felt. But instead of jumping into the arms of the first available man, his first act as an openly gay man was to sit down and write a letter to his parents.

“I am gay,” he wrote. “Homosexual. Have been since birth and there is no way to change it. I believe it’s the same thorn in the flesh that the Apostle Paul had, only he was satisfied in asking God only 3 times to remove it while I’ve begged God thousands of times to take it away.”

Daniel mailed the letter and felt relief and joy wash over him. He came out to Corinne, and their friendship blossomed again. “Now I can say I’m glad I’m gay and it’s no longer something I’m gonna hide,” he wrote to Tim. “I can finally say I love myself.”

The elation of sending his coming-out letter to his parents began to erode as weeks with no reply stretched into months. “I thought they had disowned me,” he remembers. Then a telegram arrived from Peace Corps headquarters in Quito.
Urgent. Call
parents.
Phone service was unreliable in El Hato, so Daniel packed a bag and took the bus to Quito, assuming somebody had died. He rang his parents.

“Did you get my letter?” he asked.

“Yes,” said Dad. Silence.

Finally Mom said, “I want you to come home.”

Daniel later learned that the letter had been damaged and delayed for months in the Ecuadorian mail. The tatters that finally arrived were largely illegible, except for the part where he said he was gay. His parents had reported to the Peace Corps that Daniel was mentally ill, and needed to be shipped home. His bosses, accustomed to such panicked calls from parents, made sure that Daniel called home, and then allowed him to return to his village.

Having been declared insane by his parents, however, he began to feel that all the things that he’d believed in—family, religion, the Peace Corps—were meaningless. Where was God in all of this? For the first time in his life, he understood how someone could become an atheist. To make matters worse, he was slipping into what he would later learn was clinical depression. As Daniel teetered on the verge of despair, an unlikely event pushed him over the edge.

.  .  .

O
NE DAY HE
and some friends went blueberry picking in the mountains. Suelo gorged himself, not only on the sweet, chalky blueberries but on a similar berry, shinier and more bitter. When his friend saw what he was doing, she said, “I don’t think you’re supposed to eat those.”

“What are they?”

“Morideros.”
The name was a pun on the words for “dog bite” and “death.”

Later that night Suelo ran into some other friends, who invited him in for dinner. He accepted, then suddenly found that his brain wasn’t working. “I started to feel like I couldn’t think sequentially. I couldn’t speak Spanish hardly. Incoherent things were coming out of my mouth.” A headache descended, and pleading illness, Suelo left alone.

“I felt like everything was alive,” he says. “I could feel the earth breathing. Everything was in pain and I felt like crying.” He approached a cow tied to a post. The tether allowed the animal to walk no more than a tiny circle. “The rope was chafing her nose, blood coming down,” he says. “It seemed so wrong. I almost let the cow go. Everything seemed horrifying.”

Things got worse. His head was splitting. He looked at a book and couldn’t decipher the words. He tried to speak but no syllables arrived. Daniel could think of no explanation other than he was losing his mind. He ran into another friend, and when he told her what he’d eaten that day, she gasped. “I think people die from those!”

Suelo raced home and locked himself in his apartment, oscillating between panic and grief. “Everything was spinning and my head felt like it was going to burst. My emotions were on a roller coaster. I found myself crying, thinking I was going to die.”

When morning arrived, he was still alive. A few days later, thinking it was over, Suelo smoked some marijuana—a habit his fellow Peace Corps volunteers had introduced. Now the nightmare returned, only worse. “I ended up in the fetal position, twitching, convulsions…. I was thinking I might die in this
room by myself, in Ecuador, thinking about my family. What a stupid way to die.” The drug induced a series of hallucinations: “I had this vision of a cross. I’m on the equator, this is where the tectonic plates come together, I’m at the center of this cross. Jesus on a cross was in my vision. I was saying: ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’” He realized that all the universe was a single being—and yet, paradoxically, each of us is utterly alone.

His vision would stick with him for years. “I felt like I was in eternity, being reincarnated over and over and over, and there was no way out.” The feeling of eternal suffering is common enough during bad trips, but for Suelo it was particularly terrifying. All his life he had believed in heaven. Finally he had tapped into the eternal—but it wasn’t joy and forgiveness. It was misery and suffering. It wasn’t heaven, it was hell.

By morning, the bell jar had descended. The creeping depression was now acute. He lost his appetite, and his stomach was chronically upset. His budding sex drive withered. He didn’t want to get out of bed. He lost interest in administering first aid and in the entire purpose of the Peace Corps, and began counting the days until his stint ended.

After the poisoning, his letters adopted a disturbed tone. “My head is going to explode,” he warned in one, then made a bitter pun on the Peace Corps: “No body can live in peace, in reality, until it’s a corpse.” He complained, “The good people always get screwed, that’s the story of life…. from the beginning.” And in questioning his mental health, he hinted at the path that lay before him: “I may have sacrificed my sanity but have gained something indescribable that is eternal.”

.  .  .

W
HEN
D
ANIEL RETURNED
to Colorado in 1990, the depression worsened. Although he’d pined for a culture where being gay was acceptable, he found the scene in Denver soulless. The guys he met at bars were queeny and materialistic, only interested in partying and having sex—nothing like the male friends he’d made in college, so vulnerable in their longing and contemplation.

His coming-out to Damian was profoundly awkward. Upon arriving home, the two friends went for a drive, and Daniel broke the news. Damian was silent, doing the math.

“Does that mean you’ve had feelings toward me?”

Daniel fidgeted, looked away. Finally: “Yeah.”

It just didn’t make sense to Damian. He loved Daniel like a brother, as much as he loved anyone. But he didn’t have
those
kind of feelings. “I spent the next few years searching for signs of gayness,” he says. “There was a part of me that wanted to be gay, just because I loved Daniel so much. Unfortunately, I came up negative. In those years I wanted to hump every woman I saw.”

The discomfort of his friends was nothing compared to the reaction of his parents. On his first visit home, his mother was unable to speak to him about what he’d written. His father took him to dinner—the first time the two of them had gone to a restaurant alone. As they ate, Dick Shellabarger recounted how he had always loved his children unconditionally, as Christians were supposed to.

“Even if you go out and murder someone, I’ll still love you,” he said. “But this time God threw me a curveball. Because actually there was one sin I thought was worse than murder: homosexuality.
So this has been a big test. You have to know the culture I came from, my generation. They’d go out and beat up gays.”

And then, for the first time, Daniel watched his towering cowboy of a father break down and weep. Dick Shellabarger was sure that some aberration he himself had committed had caused Daniel to be gay. Maybe he should have taken him to more ball games, maybe Mother should have breast-fed for longer. And Daniel found himself in the peculiar position of leaning forward, telling his father everything was going to be okay.

His parents’ disapproval was just one more symptom of his world in collapse. Clinging to the remnants of his beliefs in social justice, Suelo settled in Denver and went to work as a counselor at a homeless shelter. The job soured from the start. The place was operated by a nominally Christian outfit, but while it didn’t preach to the residents, the director was prone to belittling them. She would humiliate them, yell at them in front of others for being dirty, poor, stupid, unable to make their own beds. Suelo discussed this behavior with a coworker, and they decided to bring it up at the next staff meeting.

“I think the way you treat the clients is abusive,” Daniel sputtered. “It’s a dishonor to your religion—if you consider yourself a Christian.” He warned that if things didn’t change, he was prepared to take the complaint further. He scanned the table for support, but his colleagues were looking down at their notebooks. The director didn’t say a word, she just glared. Nobody would even meet her eyes, much less raise their voice.

She never addressed Suelo’s complaints. She merely began to reduce his hours. The abuse continued. If she found the shelter messy, she’d start yelling, working herself into a rage until finally she was hurling clothes and newspapers across the room.
Residents and employees cast their eyes at the floor. Everything came to head in a scene straight out of
Oliver Twist
.

After lunch, a resident asked the director for an extra carton of milk.

The staff knew that locked in the kitchen were dozens of donated milk cartons, approaching their expiration date. Yet the director turned on the resident in a fury. “This milk,” she said, trembling, “is for the
babies
! And you’re so damn selfish that you’d drink it
all
if we let you. The answer is no! You should be ashamed for even asking.”

That night Daniel had the graveyard shift. The director told him to lock the dining-hall doors so the residents couldn’t leave until they’d finished their chores. Daniel considered the order. Not only was it humiliating to treat the homeless like prisoners—it was unethical. What if there were a fire? Defying her orders, he left the doors unlocked, and spent the night penning a furious letter of resignation. He wrote about the door-locking and declared, “I can no longer carry through with your wishes.”

When he was finished, he considered what to do with the letter. It needed a wider audience than the director, who would doubtlessly shred the thing and be done with it. In a fit of moral resolve, Suelo made copies and tacked them up throughout the shelter, his own version of Luther’s 95 Theses. The homeless had found their advocate! One of them collected fifty signatures on the manifesto. Another delivered the letter to the Denver newspapers.

The hounds of hell were unleashed. The shelter’s parent organization launched an investigation, and revealed that the director had been running some sort of black-market milk ring—auctioning off the extras and pocketing the money. She was fired, and for a brief moment Daniel was a hero.

No good deed goes unpunished. The investigation’s other finding was that the old barracks was filled with radiation. There was no option but to raze it. And now dozens of freshly empowered residents were turned out onto the street. And a dozen social workers—including Suelo—were sacked. “Now look what you’ve done,” his coworkers hissed, packing their photos and staplers into cardboard boxes.

Next Suelo took a job at Travelers Aid, a charity that helps needy people in times of transition. The results were similar. On a typical day, a down-and-out hobo shuffled into his cubicle and wanted a bus ticket to Phoenix.

“There’s construction work down there,” said the man.

“We can help you with that,” Suelo said, withdrawing a clipboard with a four-page questionnaire. “We’ll just need a little information.”

Daniel recorded the guy’s stats. Jerry Banks was forty-nine years old, twice divorced, Vietnam vet, worked odd jobs and manual labor, unemployed for two years since he got out of jail for a DUI. Now he’d lost his license, and it was hard to get a construction job when you couldn’t drive yourself to the site. He stayed in cheap motels whenever he got a check from the VA, but mostly it was homeless shelters or camping under an overpass.