by Dan Savage
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.
While I knew that long hikes were the main event at the Ashram—the secret to their rapid weight-loss program—I was unprepared for how grueling they turned out to be. Looking at mostly middle-aged women in the van on the way to the Ashram, I thought the hikes couldn’t be that difficult. No one on the van looked like an athlete, nor did anyone appear to be obese. I asked the spa’s codirector, a Swedish woman with a deep tan and a way of beaming at people that made her seem slightly mad, why it was that everyone was so fit. I had expected people to be heavier. The Ashram’s program, she explained, is too grueling for people who are too out of shape.
“We’re not known as the boot camp of spas for nothing,” said Olga. “You can’t be a hundred pounds overweight and make it up the trails you’ll be hiking, yeah?”
Olga was “assessing” me when we had this conversation, helping me outline my goals for the week. We were in her office on the second floor, sitting in brown wicker chairs. Olga made notes on what looked like a medical file while we spoke. They didn’t get many men my age at the Ashram; the movie mogul was in his fifties and the German mogul was in his seventies. While two of the women in my group were younger than I (the singer and the claustrophobic music-industry executive), most of the other Americans were in their forties and fifties.
“You are young, yeah? You are fit. Why are you here?”
I couldn’t tell the truth. (“I’m here to hang with the affluent and pudgy, Olga.”) So I mumbled something vague about my metabolism.
Olga nodded, beaming. She wanted more.
Uh . . . and I was eating way too much sugar lately?
More nodding, more beaming.
Uh . . . and I was drinking way too much caffeine lately?
“Yes. I can see that,” Olga said, sounding grave but still beaming.
The real reason I was at the Ashram, of course, was to hobnob with the enviable rich. Oh, I’d been around rich folks before, but I had never attempted to pass myself off as one. As a fellow guest at this five-hundred-dollar-a-day spa, I hoped the other guests might assume that I was rich like they were.
Olga looked deep into my eyes. She told me there was something wrong with my liver or my kidneys, I don’t remember which, perhaps because I was so startled. We were in a quasi-medical setting, and it sounded like a diagnosis. My jaw dropped. Were the whites of my eyes yellow? How did she know there was something wrong with my internal organs? She wasn’t looking at the whites of my eyes, Olga told me. She was looking at my irises.
“You need to drink a lot of water, yeah? We will detoxify you while you are here. No caffeine, no sugar, yeah?”
Yeah, I thought, except for the two bags of M&M’s in my backpack. I’d purchased them at the hotel in L.A. before the van came, you know, just in case. Maybe there’s a black market at the Ashram; I could imagine that, late at night, the guests get together and swap contraband, candy, and caffeine tablets when most of the staff members were asleep.
“You will probably be sick one day while you are here, as your body rids itself of the toxins. That day only you should take it easy, yeah?”
Yeah.
“And look at you! You’re so white!”
Olga grabbed my left hand and turned my arm over. She examined the underside of my forearm.
“My goodness! Look at you!” she said in mock horror as she traced a finger along one of my visibly blue veins.
“I live in Seattle.” I shrugged. “Not much sun.”
“You will be out in the sun while you are here,” Olga said, beaming, beaming, beaming. “And you will take off your shirt when you hike. I want to send you home not so pale, yeah?”
Our first hike was the shortest of the seven we would go on, just under five miles, but it was straight uphill, and it was late afternoon, and it was hot. Here’s what I learned about myself on that first hike: Not investing in a pair of hiking boots turned out to be a mistake; clothes appropriate for gossiping in an air-conditioned gym in Seattle aren’t ideal for hiking up mountains in the desert. I was even less prepared for looking like a member of a cult. All thirteen of us were hiking in a line along the trail when we passed three people on horseback riding in the opposite direction. (Two of the riders, a young man and a young woman, were impossibly beautiful; the third rider, an older man with a beard and a gut, was teaching them how to handle a horse. They appeared to be actors learning to ride for a film.) We Ashramites were all wearing some combination of high-end hiking gear and red-and-white Ashram T-shirts and sweatpants. If the thirteen of us didn’t look like a cult—nine women and three men dressed all alike, marching along in a line, taking orders from two guides with walkie-talkies—then we looked like a work-release detail from some New Age prison for white-collar criminals.
A hike routine was quickly established: Fast hikers pulled ahead early; slow hikers brought up the rear. My roommate, the movie mogul, was the fastest in our group, pulling ahead of the pack early on every day’s hike. To keep track of the hikers, one Ashram guide would march at the front, marking turns in the trails with little piles of stones so that no one would get lost. (And people do get lost on these trails; while I was at the Ashram, a boy out hiking with his father got lost and barely survived spending three days and nights wandering around hills crawling with mountain lions, rattlesnakes, and wealthy middle-aged women in red sweatpants.) A second guide marched at the rear, to make sure no stragglers got left behind. There were supposedly ways to evacuate hikers who got injured, but the structure of the hikes made it very difficult for anyone to bail out, no matter how much pain we were in. The Ashram vans dropped all thirteen of us off at one end of a twelve-or fifteen-mile trail and picked us all up at the other end. If you went too slow or had to bail, you knew you would be holding the whole group up. So we all pushed on through the pain, up the mountains, and onto ridges that provided us with beautiful views of the Pacific Ocean. Oh, and Cher’s house.
Another routine was established the first night at dinner: The women talked, and the men didn’t say much. A group of women went from complete strangers to beloved girlfriends in less than twenty-four hours. Men can’t do that—or we won’t do that, or we don’t know how to do that, or we’re afrai
d someone might think we’re gay if we did do that. But on the trails the very first day and at dinner on the very first night, the nine women in our group were opening up to each other about their divorces, second husbands, and stepchildren. Walking along the trail that first day, I caught parts of conversations about breast cancer, addiction, and the deaths of parents. By the end of dinner on the first night, the lawyer from New York invited everyone to Thanksgiving dinner at her place. The invitation was made to the whole group, but it was clear she meant only to invite her new girlfriends.
Oh, and that first dinner? After a five-mile hike, an hour of yoga, and a weight-lifting class? A tiny bowl of lentil soup and a single wheat-free cracker.
Later that night, feeling like an emotional cripple compared with the women in our group (and, yes, I was envious of their ability to be so open), I tried to bond with my strong, silent, movie-mogul roommate. I’m bad at small talk in general and guy talk in particular. Tonight would be no exception. In order to bond with my straight, white, older, married, power-hiking roommate, I chose to make bitchy, disparaging comments about the curtains and bedspreads: Didn’t they look like stuff you might find at your aunt’s house? I mean, wasn’t it hilarious that the Ashram, at five hundred dollars a day, was so tacky and spartan?
The movie mogul looked up from his book, glanced up at the curtains. “I suppose so,” he said, returning to his book.
I was surprised, I jabbered on, by just how dowdy absolutely everything about the Ashram was! I mean, swag lamps? Hello? No tubs in the bathroom? And that couch? Ugh. For five hundred dollars a night, I expected more in the way of creature comforts. The movie mogul, who was back at the Ashram for the fourth time, looked over at me and slid a bookmark into The Leadership Engine: How Winning Companies Build Leaders at Every Level.
“There are other places that have tried to copy what the Ashram does,” Movie Mogul said, “but with deluxe rooms and private bathrooms and all that crap. You know what? It doesn’t work. In those places people just want to sit around all day in their rooms. Part of what we’re paying for is to get away from luxury we’re surrounded by in our normal lives. There’s no reason to stay in your room here. The point of this place is the activity, not the facility.”
Then Movie Mogul said good night, turned out his light, and went to sleep.
Just my fucking luck, I thought to myself, sitting in my bed, pretending to read a three-year-old issue of Cosmo that I found in the bathroom. I decide to go hang out with the rich folks for a week and somehow manage to pick the place where the rich folks go to get away from luxury.
I tried to go to sleep, but the two women in the next room—Ms. New York Lawyer and Ms. Marrying Very Well—were bonding kind of noisily. Wedding plans were being hashed over, and I was privy to all the alarming details. Unable to sleep, I got up and explored the Ashram’s living and dining room. I looked through the bookshelves in the living room for something to read, without luck. Ramtha, The World’s Great Religions, Bodymind, Baba Satya Sai didn’t interest me because I’m not a spiritual person. Scentual Touch: A Personal Guide to Aromatherapy, The Brethren by John Grisham, and stacks of old Cosmopolitan magazines didn’t interest me because I’m not an idiot.
So I read the walls. In addition to the plaque over the fireplace, there were little framed affirmations all around the Ashram, admonitions like MANIFEST YOUR OWN REALITY and THE LIGHT LIVES WITHIN ME. Displaying affirmations has always struck me as somewhat idiotic; I mean, what if someone who isn’t a very nice person comes into your living room? Would you want the next Hitler to read “All the things I want are good” on your living room wall?
I once visited the home of someone I took to be a level-headed cynic, much like myself, and was shocked to find framed affirmations on her walls. I couldn’t go anywhere—not even the toilet—without her apartment reminding me that I was a good person, a valuable person, an interesting person, a beautiful person. There was even a little basket of affirmations by her front door, filled with laminated pieces of construction paper: PEOPLE LIKE ME!, I CAN MAKE IT HAPPEN!, SEIZE THE DAY!
When my friend saw me picking through her little wicker basket of affirmations, she folded her arms across her chest, cocked her hip, and said, “Go ahead, Dan, make fun of me.” She was asking for it. So I pulled out an affirmation, said, “I’m Adolf Hitler,” and then I read Hitler’s affirmation: “I’m a good person, and I want good things.”
“That’s awful!” my friend said.
“I’m Pol Pot: ‘I strive to spread love and understanding.’ ”
“I’m Richard Speck: ‘I am respected and admired, and people want to be near me.’ ”
“I’m Trent Lott: ‘My inner beauty is like a bright light.’ ”
By now my sensitive friend was, yes, crying.
I know, I know: I’m a terrible person. Which is precisely my point. The problem with setting out a basket of affirmations is that you’re assuming each and every person who comes into your home or spa is a good person who wants good things. With all the respect due a basket of laminated affirmations, I beg to differ. Most people are bad, and if it pleases the court, I would like to introduce a world-history textbook into evidence. Pogroms, witch burnings, war, total war, religious war, the slaughter of Native Americans, the Holocaust, the Serbs, the indifference of Europeans and Americans to genocide in Rwanda, murderous Islamo-fascists—people pretty much suck. No thinking member of a species that has produced African slavery, the Armenian genocide, and The Mirror Has Two Faces should sit around smugly telling herself that everything she wants is good.
I got blisters on the first day’s hike, but the second day’s hike drew blood. After Randy woke us up that morning, I put on my hiking gym clothes from the day before. I’d tossed them in the wash the night before, but a single washing at the Ashram transformed my old pair of cotton briefs into a lethal weapon. Maybe it was the soap, maybe the water at the Ashram was particularly hard. Whatever it was, the ribbing along the seams of the legholes was so stiff after one washing at the Ashram that the second day’s hike—a brutal fifteen-mile slog in one-hundred-degree heat—left my crotch bloody and raw.
I sensed that my underwear was a little stiff when I pulled them on in my darkened room at five in the morning. But the painful consequence of stiff underwear didn’t make itself apparent until it was far too late to do anything. By the time I realized something was going terribly, terribly wrong in my underwear, I was halfway up a mountain in the desert. There was no way to turn back. It was just me, the sun, the trail, the rich folks, and my saber-toothed underwear. The starched ribbing in my underwear gradually chewed its way through the very uppermost part of my thighs, where leg meets crotch, slowly sawing through layer after layer of skin. When we finally made it back to the Ashram, I limped into one of the bathrooms, locked the door, and pulled down my shorts. I was a bloody mess.
And that was day two; we’d only hiked twenty of the eighty miles we would hike before our week at the Ashram was over. On day three, I was in agony. It was 105 degrees outside, and we were hiking straight up the face of a mountain. Since I couldn’t wear the only pair of underwear I brought with me to the Ashram, I was freeballing it. Now, as anyone with a scrotum knows, a hot, sweaty scrotum expands; it spread, droops, and sags. So there I was on a mountain, surrounded by rich people, when my hot, sweaty, and very, very salty scrotum began sliding back and forth over my chafed, bloody, raw upper thighs. It hurt so bad my eyes were watering.
So I picked up my pace and hiked as far ahead of the group as I could. I may have been one of the youngest in our group, but I wasn’t the fastest. That title went to the movie mogul, my fiftyish roommate, who led the pack almost every day. I couldn’t catch up with movie mogul or pass him, but I could pace myself so that I was always between MM and the rest of the group. When I was fairly certain that I was alone and that I couldn’t be seen by anyone ahead of me or behind me, I put my right hand down my shorts, cupped my enormous, salty scrotum in one hand, and
lifted it up and away from my burning thighs. I hiked like that for most of the rest of the week: alone, balls in one hand, water bottle in the other. I didn’t have to worry about looking like part of a cult or a work-release program anymore; I just looked like a pervert. It didn’t help me get any closer to the rich folks, but it kept me from howling in pain with every step.
“Ach, you heard them the first night.” The German mogul and I are on the last leg of Thursday’s forced march, walking side by side down a long, steep decline. “ ‘Come to New York; come to my apartment for Thanksgiving.’ These women have known each other, what? Six hours? And they are best of friends. Absurd.”
The German mogul was a tall, good-looking man in his early sixties, which was a difficult age for Germans not too long ago. Until very recently, being a German senior citizen invited a lot of questions about your whereabouts in the 1930s and 1940s. Not anymore. A sixty-year-old German today wasn’t yet born when Hitler came to power; the German mogul was just five when the war ended. I was wrapping my head around the concept of old, innocent Germans as we sweated our way through the longest of the week’s hikes, a seventeen-mile ass-blaster. The German mogul—GM for short—was on the second week of his annual fourteen-day stay, so he had hiked this trail last Thursday. He’d been hiking this trail twice a year every year for fourteen years.
Me and GM hadn’t spent much time together before Thursday’s hike. I was usually out in front of him during the hikes, holding on to my balls, praying no movie stars on horseback would spot me, worrying that I’d wasted a lot of my publisher’s money coming to the wrong place. The Ashram wasn’t filled with rich people enjoying their envy-inducing wealth, but with rich people spending five hundred dollars a day to live like poor people—starvation rations, forced marches, uniforms. I wasn’t getting much insight into the lifestyles of the rich and famous at the Ashram. GM and MM, my roommate, kept to themselves, and my attempts to join in the women’s conversations weren’t all that successful. I was beginning to think that everyone suspected, rightly, that I just didn’t belong—not as a guest, anyway. Or, shit, maybe they’d seen me marching along the trails with my hands in my shorts.