by Mark Sundeen
“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.”
. . .
WHEN DANIEL 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 r
aze 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.
“Where will you be staying in Phoenix?”
“I’ve asked the maid to get the house all cleaned up for me.”
Daniel looked up from his clipboard.
“Is there an address for that?”
“If I had a house in Phoenix,” said Banks, leaning in close, “I probably wouldn’t be in here trying to get a Greyhound ticket.”
“Right. Sorry. But to process this application I need to write in the address of where you’ll be staying. Do you have any family there?”
“My sister’s in Tempe.”
“Great. What’s her name?”
Banks said her name, and Daniel entered it on the form.
“Address?”
“I haven’t seen my sister in eleven years.”
“Okay. Fine. We’ll make this work.” In the box for “Address” Daniel wrote “302 Main Street, Phoenix, AZ” and for “Phone” he scribbled his own home number with an Arizona area code.
“Moving on,” said Daniel. “Do you have a job lined up in Phoenix?”
“Gotta get there first.”
“Right,” said Daniel. “I just need to write something here.”
“Hanging drywall isn’t the kind of business where they hire a Bekins van to bring you to town.”
“Can you give me a name?” said Daniel. “Any name will do.”
Banks just looked at him. Then he fished his wallet out of his pocket, pulled out a scrap of paper, and scrutinized it at arm’s length.
“Did you know that the average Somalian survives on twelve cents per day?” said Jerry Banks.
“Excuse me?”
“Twelve cents a day. Sometimes in the library I’ll find some factoid like that and I just have to write it down. Blows my mind.” He opened his wallet so that Daniel could look inside. Dozens of soiled paper scraps clung together in the musty leather. The man flipped the card over in his hand. “Here’s the name of a guy who runs a drywall outfit. I got his number from my sponsor. When I called him he said they were always looking for work and to call back when I got to town.”
Daniel jotted down the name and number. He was required to call the employer to verify that they intended to hire the traveler. That way, Travelers Aid didn’t foot the bill for hobos merely joyriding across the country.
“I’ll give him a call right now and we can finalize this,” Daniel said. “Would you take a seat in the waiting room?”
The client lifted himself out of the chair with a groan and shuffled out of the office. Daniel dialed the number and a gruff voice answered.
“I’m calling for Manny Velazquez….”
“Speaking.”
“This is Daniel Shellabarger with Travelers Aid in Denver, Colorado. I’m calling to verify an offer of employment for our client, Gerald Banks.”
“Who?”
“Daniel Shellabarger,” he repeated. “S–H–E–L–L—”
“And you want a job?”
“I’m calling on behalf of a client, Gerald Banks. He says he’s intending to work for you.”
“I get a lot of calls,” said the man.
“Do you remember a Jerry Banks?”
“That sounds familiar. What do you mean, he’s your client?”
“I work with the Denver office of Travelers Aid.”
“What is this guy—a vagrant?”
“Well, no,” Suelo stammered. “He’s a member of an underserved population with limited social mobility and—”
“I told Hank to quit giving out my number to deadbeats.”
Suelo pressed his pencil onto the application form until the lead broke. “Can you confirm an offer of employment made to Gerald Banks for September of this year?”
“I don’t hire those type of people,” said Manny Velazquez. “I’ve tried it and it never works. I make a donation every month to St. Vincent de Paul. I got nothing against those people, I just don’t want them on my crew. Hey, my other line’s ringing, so I gotta go.”
Click. Daniel set down the phone. His shirt clung damply to his spine. He reached for his water cup but it was empty. He looked at the forms on his clipboard. In the past he had fudged little details like phone numbers and addresses and had got the payments processed. But today he was going to have to falsify the entire document. If anyone audited, he’d be fired. And wasn’t all this paperwork a bunch of bullshit anyway? If Jerry Banks had a job and a home, he wouldn’t need Travelers Aid. The whole bureaucracy was set up to cover its own ass and write clean expense reports—not to actually help anyone in need. He hated it all. He felt like a fraud. After spending eight hours a day in this office, being paid to be kind to someone, he found that at the end of the day, he hated homeless people. When he saw them on his block as he plodded toward his apartment, he wanted to tell them to fuck off and get out of his way. His job was nothing more than glorified prostitution. He was paid to be helpful. It wasn’t coming from his heart. He was just doing it for money. And now he had to lie and commit forgery and risk getting fired just to actually help another human being—although best as he could tell, he’d just ruined Jerry Banks’s chances of getting a job.
He tore the papers off the clipboard, crumpled them into a ball, and chucked it into the wastepaper basket. Then he pulled out his own wallet and counted his money. Two twenties and three ones. He called Mr. Banks back into the office.
“Great news, Jerry,” Daniel said. “Everything was approved and you’re all set to go. Here’s forty-three dollars—that should be enough for the fare to Arizona.”
Jerry’s eyes lit up and he smiled as he collected the money. “Do I need to sign anywhere, or something like that?”
“You’re all set. Have a safe trip.”
More and more, Suelo sensed that the whole enterprise of professional charity was flawed. Instead of counting beans in this dehumanizing system, why couldn’t we just help our neighbors directly?
More than a year since his return from the Peace Corps, all his efforts to do good were backfiring. In 1991 his friends persuaded him to get counseling, but the therapist was so young and inexperienced that as a matter of intellectual pride Suelo convinced her that nothing was wrong. She gave him a clean bill of mental health. His roommate took him to a Bible study one night, on the topic of the parable of the Good Samaritan. But when the people at his table made some snide comments about Mormons—always the whipping boys for evangelicals—Suelo took the opportunity to rub their noses in their bigotry. He flipped open the Book of Luke and read furiously, substituting modern words for the archaic.
“‘An evangelical happened to be going down the same road, and when he saw the man, he passed by on the other side,’” he said. “‘So, too, a fundamentalist, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. But a Mormon, as he traveled, came where the man was; and when he saw him, he took pity on him.’”
Everything was spiraling downward. Suelo was sleeping only
an hour or two a night, lying breathlessly awake on his mattress, making an inventory of his multitude of miseries. And then one May night he bolted upright and dashed for the calendar. With a pencil he scratched off days and weeks. In three entire months, he calculated, he had been happy for precisely five minutes. There was no end to the eternal misery he had discovered in the poison berries.
Suddenly he knew the solution. When he was a child, his father had packed the family into the Beetle and driven them up the steep, treacherous road to Mount Evans. It’s the only fourteener in Colorado that you can drive to the top of. Daniel remembered the road, its hairpin switchbacks into deep gorges that dropped thousands of feet. There was a way to end this suffering.
. . .
AT THREE IN the morning, Suelo dresses and starts the sedan. He takes the highway into the Rockies, the same evergreen range where his father broke horses and courted his mother. He exits at the Mount Evans road and winds up into the mist. It’s spring, and the asphalt is wet from the packs of dirty snow clinging to the mountainside. He knows his destination. He can picture it.
The road narrows and grows steeper. Now, with the black night turning gray, he can see an icy lake so far below it looks like a puddle. His is the only car on the road. What kind of lunatic would be driving up Mount Evans at this hour? he thinks, and gets a laugh out of that. He steers to the precipice and peers over. A quick drop-off, then a steep slope of boulders, the tips of wild grasses poking through the snow, then the big free fall, hundreds of feet down to the lake.
He makes a note of the spot. The shoulder is crumbling into the abyss, and steel girders prop it up. He drives to the pullout and turns around, preparing for a final approach. His heart leaps to his throat.
And then, as he points the wheel toward the edge, something emerges from the fog. It’s an animal, two, three, more. Is he hallucinating again? No: it’s a herd of mountain goats, with their knobby knees and white fur and spiked horns. The goats have descended the slope opposite the drop-off, and are making their way up the road. One approaches the car. Daniel rolls down the window. Man and beast look into each other’s eyes. The goat has wet black compassionate eyes, two saucers of oil. And Daniel feels oddly comforted, as if the animal has given him permission to do what he’s about to do.