by Mark Sundeen
Daniel and his colleagues spoke first, and painted a grim picture. They blamed Reaganomics and unconstitutional city ordinances and plain greed and callousness in the human heart. “Woe is the world,” is how Suelo recalls his talk. He offered as the solution: more people like us, more funding, more institutions. In short, we are needed to help the poor. And then the poor themselves spoke up, and were equally morbid. Woe is the world times two! They railed against unjust economic practices and a playing field that was anything but level, and had nothing but gratitude for the selfless caseworkers like Daniel who helped them in their time of need. Consensus had been achieved.
But wait: the street people spoke up.
“I don’t see what’s so bad about living outside,” said one. “It’s a big party, if you ask me.”
“Yeah, fuck the shelters,” said another. “Life is free!”
Suelo mulled this over in Moab. Why was he so terrified of being homeless? Was it the physical hardship? No. He loved camping and being outdoors. He thought that pitching a tent in a windstorm and figuring out how to stay dry through the thundershowers was fun. No, the real fear of being homeless lay in worrying what other people would think. The stigma. And he thought: If I can overcome what people think about me, I can overcome anything.
In Moab, homelessness was not only acceptable, it was sort of romantic. Everyone was doing it: itinerant rock climbers and river guides and cocktail waitresses. Instead of a stigma, homelessness had cachet—a reverse status symbol! Suelo had arrived, finally, in a town where money was the filthy lucre of creeps—and living without a home was cool.
When his second spring in the desert bloomed, in 1994, Suelo was staying at a friend’s house, and had been asked to house-sit in the summer. But for the coming months, he had no home, and the rental market was tight as the seasonal workers flooded back. He gathered his backpack and his courage, along with a stray mutt he’d found on the river, and wandered up a nearby canyon. Suelo poked his head into a musty cave. He took a step, then waited while his eyes adjusted to the half-light. He unrolled his pad and sleeping bag. He trembled with exhilaration. If only for a short time, he had joined the ranks of the homeless.
The same month, he landed a job as the homeless coordinator at the women’s shelter, thus earning the ironic nickname of “Homeless Homeless Coordinator.”
“I got such a kick out of it,” he says. “It gave me an edge with the clients.”
As the summer heat arrived, vagabond men would land at the shelter—which only housed women—and ask to be put up in a hotel. Suelo explained that the budget was small, and they were conserving it for winter. “We have vast public lands all around us,” he counseled them. “And the weather is beautiful.”
“That’s easy for you to say,” the men grumbled.
“Yeah, it is,” said Suelo. “I’m camping out.”
Suelo liked the work. Absent was the hierarchy and hypocrisy he’d felt working with the homeless in Colorado. In Moab the line between haves and have-nots was not as distinct. Suelo had found his niche—a good job that didn’t require moral compromise, a community that accepted him, and a way of living homelessly without shame.
“The desert reminds me that there is sanity in existence,” he wrote to a friend. “This place is just so beautiful. It’s morning and the sun is just starting to shine through the canyon walls and sparkle through the leaves of the cottonwoods below me. The breeze is cool and I have my dog by my side. Ah—life is good.”
9
. . .
My lover thrust his hand through the latch-opening; my heart began to pound for him.
I arose to open for my lover, and my hands dripped with myrrh,
my fingers with flowing myrrh, on the handles of the lock.
I opened for my lover, but my lover had left; he was gone.
—Song of Songs
SUELO ARRIVED IN Moab still a member of the Celibate Club. His romantic life till then had crashed in waves of self-pity. Looking back at what he called the midlife crisis of his thirtieth birthday, he wrote: “I had never been in any kind of relationship and was feeling withered and without hope and chronically lonely.”
On that first night watching movies in the back of the co-op, Daniel was introduced to a gentle lion named Rocky who was into hiking and literary theory and had recently been excommunicated from the Mormon Church. He was strong and fit and freckled, with a mane of strawberry hair. Damian had met Rocky at a Quaker meeting and thought the two would be a good match. Like Daniel’s, Rocky’s coming-out had been a cataclysmic rejection of his upbringing. His LDS childhood rivaled Daniel’s fundamentalist roots in intensity. The two hit it off—just as Damian had planned—and Daniel’s first romance blossomed. “Rocky and I could walk around holding hands, and people don’t seem to care,” Suelo says now.
The acceptance he found in Moab, however, was not equaled within his family. In the four years since coming out, Daniel had insisted to his parents that being gay was natural. The Shellabargers had done their best to put his sexuality into biblical perspective. Their conclusion: like Daniel the prophet, their son was a eunuch, an idea that Daniel himself had floated before coming out. They clung to a belief that Daniel’s lack of appetite for women was brought on by the loss of one testicle during college, after a case of testicular torsion—a belief for which there is no scientific basis. His family believed that his longing for other men was a sin, but as long as he didn’t act upon it, it was not a mortal sin.
“I was trying to maintain a relationship with my family and have no religion,” says Suelo. “I labeled myself an atheist. I felt like I needed to build some bridge with my family. And it’s impossible to do that as an atheist.”
Daniel’s coming-out was just one in a series of trials that befell the family. Around the time Daniel went to college, Dick Shellabarger had left his job at the dealership and was hired as a minister in a newly formed evangelical church. With all five children grown and out of the house, the couple settled into the parsonage, seeing a stable and pleasant future for themselves. But hard times were just around the corner. In 1987, while Daniel was in the Peace Corps, his sister, Pennie, left her husband and brought her eight children to live at the rectory. Within the year, Dick’s father died, Daniel wrote his coming-out letter from Ecuador, the minister job fell apart, and the family was forced to move. Sixty years old, Dick and Laurel had no means of supporting themselves, much less their eight grandkids. The Shellabargers took a job as relief managers for Motel 6, traveling from state to state for short stints wherever they were needed. They lived briefly in Wyoming, New Mexico, Montana, and Nevada, then finally landed a permanent position in Salt Lake City—which is where they got the news of Daniel’s suicide attempt. Eighteen months later, just as Daniel was settling in Moab, came his brother Rick’s diagnosis with the brain tumor; he was dead within a year. After an onslaught of such Job-like proportions, the Shellabargers were inclined to suspend their most severe judgment when Daniel brought Rocky to visit them at the Motel 6 in Salt Lake City, and they welcomed the “friend,” relieved that their youngest son, though perhaps not what they had hoped he’d be, was at least alive and healthy.
For Daniel, the liberating thrill of romance soon gave way to the messy business of an actual relationship. Rocky saw fireworks and wanted a lover. Daniel wasn’t so sure. Maybe he was just lonely. He wanted space. He rented his own apartment. “Things are starting to get a bit more realistic between Rocky and me, and we’re finally starting to develop a friendship like we shoulda done from the beginning,” he wrote to Tim Frederick. His pursuer persisted. “I can’t get space from Rocky,” Daniel complained. “I consider him one of my best friends (but not a lover).”
Real or not, the affair with Rocky plodded into the next year. The romance ended when Rocky dropped by unannounced and accused Daniel of acting irrationally. “He wouldn’t leave when I told him to, so I physically pushed him out the door and shut it,” Daniel wrote, just minutes after the f
ight. “I’ve never done anything like that to anybody in my life. Working at the women’s shelter and learning about abusive disorders has given me a new empowerment and I feel good.”
As he is prone to do in the face of disappointment, Suelo waxed philosophical. “I am actually feeling kind of privileged being a late bloomer. Guess I feel better being a cherry tree than a tulip. And I still haven’t been in a real relationship.”
Though still depressed, Daniel was entering his first stable period in a decade. He worked part-time at the shelter, and took other odd jobs—pulling espressos, substitute teaching, grading exams for a local company that taught English to Japanese students via overnight mail. He and Damian Nash pooled their meager funds, along with some cash from Nash’s mother, and for five thousand dollars purchased a dilapidated trailer home, stripped to the studs by the meth heads who had inhabited it. Damian and Daniel hauled the thing to a ramshackle trailer park at the mouth of a canyon and began renovating. Daniel paid a nominal rent of one hundred dollars per month that Damian banked as Daniel’s share of partial ownership.
In the meantime, Daniel pressed on in a quest for Real Love that would sweep him into a state of ecstasy he’d so far found only in prayer and male friendship. It hitchhiked into town the following summer.
One day from the trailer Daniel saw a young man walk past on his way to the canyon. He had a limp and no backpack or sleeping bag—just a Mexican blanket and a conga drum slung over his shoulder. His hair was dark and curly and his skin olive, and he had a world-weariness about him, an old soul. He was elfin and mysterious, like some feral creature raised by coyotes. Daniel was transfixed—not just by the boy’s beauty, but by his lack of possessions. How could someone live like that? Daniel sensed immediately that he and this youth were destined to meet.
It happened a few weeks later. Daniel was reading poems at an open mike in a coffee shop—some pretty esoteric stuff, the result of his chronic malaise combined with his lifelong fascination with biblical numerology.
The Seven Heads are Seven Mountains
On which the Woman sits
The Tower of Babel
has touched
heaven
The stranger approached afterward. He loved the poems, he said. He spoke in a bizarre sort of cockney, the result of having spent part of his childhood in New Zealand. The more he spoke, the more exotic and alluring he became, like some pirate spawn from a Robert Louis Stevenson novel. He’d sailed around the world with his father. The reason he limped was that as a child he’d had polio. He was only nineteen but had already lived an eternity. He had this aura about him. Everyone in the room was drawn to him. Especially Daniel.
Daniel invited him up to the trailer. They lit a few candles and uncorked a bottle of wine and talked until late. Daniel had never felt such a connection. Mathew ended up sleeping on the couch. Daniel lay in his own bed, his heart thumping, the dawn wrens beginning to sing.
The two became inseparable. Mathew spent nights in the trailer, and they camped out in the canyon, tucked into caves and alcoves or just lying on the rock beneath the stars. But when Daniel revealed that he was gay, Mathew said that he was not. Daniel couldn’t believe it. The energy between them was too strong.
Then one night, Daniel felt Mathew’s hand creep over his shoulder and slide across his chest. A bolt shot along his spine. Hardly able to control his breathing, he inched his hand toward Mathew’s until they touched. Mathew recoiled.
This happened night after night. It was driving Daniel crazy. He confided in Conrad Sorenson at the co-op. “Be patient,” Conrad assured him. “You two belong together.” The pursuit continued. Some nights Mathew would hold Daniel for a few minutes, then leap out of bed, returning an hour later and dozing off.
Finally Daniel’s persistence paid off. One night, as he remembers it, the walls fell down. They fell into each other’s arms and confessed to be madly in love. Total bliss. As winter approached, Mathew moved into the trailer, and the new couple became happily domestic.
“Mathew is plastering over the fake wood-grain paneling and rounding the corners in the bay-window room,” Suelo wrote. “We’re then going to paint a rain forest on the walls. It’s starting to look less and less like a trailer in here.”
Like most new lovebirds, the two appeared unutterably adorable to each other, and nauseatingly self-absorbed to everyone else. “Sometimes I’d hear Mathew and Daniel giggling and flirting in the bathtub through the paper-thin walls, candles lit,” remembers Damian Nash. “I’d have to go outside and take a walk. They were both unbelievable slobs. You had to wade knee-deep through the junk not put away.”
It was an eccentric household. Damian, a nationally competitive chess player, was a psychology teacher who would eventually coach Grand County High School’s chess team to become state champions. (Later he would take a Colorado team to its respective championship as well, and in 2010 he became Utah State Chess Champion.) He held a master’s degree in neuroscience and cognitive science and was a practicing Quaker, but self-identified as a “mystic groupie” with a personal set of beliefs derived from Rumi and the Sufi poets. His girlfriend, Linda Whitham, was a fetching New Englander with a master’s degree and a Protestant work ethic; she clocked at least forty hours a week for an environmental group, and had never caught or understood the Moab Fever that induced such loafing.
Such eclecticism was not the exception but the rule in the Powerhouse Lane Trailer Court. Nestled beside a peach orchard and a clear creek on a rutted dirt road at the mouth of the canyon, the run-down collection of Airstreams and Detroiters had gained the nickname “Third World Trailer Park,” largely for the pack of stub-legged mutts that ran wild at all hours, menacing passersby with their howls and supplying the city shelter with ample broods of stub-legged pups. The property had been all but abandoned after the uranium mill closed in 1984, with just a few holdouts hunkering beneath the mulberry trees. But when a local hippie bought it and planted apples and peaches, and began renting berths for sixty-eight dollars a month, the place quickly filled up with manufactured homes well past their prime. The new owner, Andrew Riley, had only two rules: no meth, no pit bulls. “If they showed up and had a deposit and rent, I let them in,” Andrew says. He is now in his sixties, with white hair and a face burned pink by years in the orchard. “I usually had a waiting list to get in.”
And what sort of people chose to dwell there? “Quality people who didn’t want the responsibility of ownership” is how Riley characterizes them. But as someone who twice took up residence in the Third World Trailer Park myself, I’d say my neighbors shared a certain je ne sais quoi which in these parts could be called “Moab Chic.” I’m talking about people who rip through a tin wall with a Sawzall to build a straw-bale adobe addition, who thatch privacy fences from hand-harvested willow shoots, who sink wood-fired hot tubs into their driveways. Among the forty or so inhabitants were a navy veteran, a Broadway dancer, a New York fashion model, the hobbled author of the definitive guidebooks to rock climbing in the Canyonlands, the ethereal publisher of a Jungian journal called Dream Network (“Evolving a Dream Cherishing Culture”), as well as the usual muster of river guides, seasonal waiters, Indians, environmental activists, and drunks. The only nonwheeled structure on the lane was a collapsing cottage leased as a crash pad for Outward Bound guides, whose fleet of dented pickups and campers were overgrown with green tumbleweeds during the August monsoon. Surnames were seldom spoken, and denizens went by Hippie Bruce and Wild Man Jimmy, Rattlesnake Kate and Stormin’ Norman. What the place lacked in the pit bulls and meth labs that typify so many trailer parks, it more than made up for in love triangles (and quadrangles, and pentagons), bitter feuds about stupid shit, and fires ignited by smoking in bed.
“There is strange energy on that property,” Riley says. “Something dark had happened there, maybe with the Indians.” Indeed, the trailers were parked a short jaunt downstream from panels of Anasazi rock drawings that give some people the heebie-jeebies. Over
the years, Wiley employed increasingly unorthodox methods of healing the land’s bad juju, including one ceremony with the dancing and drumming of “witch women.” (“Where did you get the witches?” I asked, scribbling notes. He looked away and murmured, “Just have to know where to look, I guess.”)
On a night that, for my money, typifies the glory days of Powerhouse Lane (the court has since been dismantled), Damian brought home the Russian chess master Igor Ivanov to sleep on the couch. Ivanov was in town for a tournament Damian had organized, and he wanted to save hotel costs. The four men—Daniel, Mathew, Damian, Igor—opened a bottle of vodka and argued politics all night. (Linda was presumably out of town or had the good sense to knock off early.) The Russian was six foot seven and about three hundred pounds, an ultraconservative who had defected from the Soviet Union. With each shot of vodka, he bellowed louder that communism was the world’s greatest evil, how it squashed creativity and eradicated the individual. Tiny Mathew, the leftist elf, would not be bullied. He stood toe-to-toe with the ogre, matching vodka shots and railing point for point about the abuses of fascism and corporations.
At dawn, as Damian drove the sodden Russian to the tournament, Igor said with begrudging respect, “He’s a young man with much to learn. But at least he defends his ideas.” He was so hungover that he lost the match.
The reverie between Daniel and Mathew bubbled through the winter, eventually straining the relationship between Damian and Linda. One night Daniel and Mathew left a candle lit and accidentally burned a hole in Linda’s beautiful rug, a gift from Damian’s mother. They tried to conceal the burn beneath a piece of furniture, but it was discovered. Daniel did not apologize to Linda, and she took her case to Damian. She was tired of having to share her home and her life with this freeloading, insolent, chronically depressed mooch and his demon lover. She gave Damian the ultimatum: him or me.