The Man Who Quit Money (16 page)

Conrad and Gerda launched Moab’s first health food store, which, in addition to the spelt and quinoa, served her home-baked pies and distributed his eclectic taste in literature. The store closed after four years, but by then hippies had gained the critical mass to form a cooperative, purchasing bulk oats and polenta and selling them to members from a small storefront three days a week. Conrad volunteered to manage the floor, and after some disagreements with the directors, dissolved the board and took the helm. As a result, although Conrad was able to sign checks and access the bank account, he was never legal proprietor. “It was an unowned business,” he says. For almost two decades, the Moab Co–op was a case study in utopian anarchy, with Conrad as the benevolent dictator. Nobody—including Conrad—was ever paid a wage. Volunteers recorded their hours in a ledger and were then allowed to take approximately four dollars’ worth of food per hour. The system was loose. “I never looked at the book,” Conrad remembers. “We got ripped off regularly. But something was working.

“My mission was to provide organic food at cost,” he says. Any profits were either poured back into the business or outright given away. Living rent-free in his sod hut, Conrad could afford to give away hundreds of books and loads of food. He particularly prided himself on sussing out a stranger in a few short minutes, and then gifting an appropriate book. Among the browsers at his first store was noted author and philanderer Ed Abbey. “I had a sexy woman behind the counter,” Conrad says. “He came in to chat up the boobs.” Conrad gave him a book about feminism.

“By giving things away right and left, by having no interest in turning a profit, we had loyal customers from Salt Lake City and Colorado who came to shop,” he says. “They saved so much on food that it paid for the price of the drive—and they got a little vacation. I put thousands of dollars into the library. Despite all that, we grew twenty percent each year.”

The co-op ultimately rented an entire building—an old plumbing shop constructed of World War II wooden ammo boxes with a canopy of trumpet vine shading the porch. More than half the building was dedicated not to retail, but to community space. There was a free lending library with thousands of titles, an art and dance studio, a xylophone gallery. On the back sofas you might find women nursing babies, couples making out, somebody waking up after crashing there for the night. Conrad lingered nearby—he says he worked about eighty hours a week—offering free advice on herbal remedies and love affairs. Below the surface of Moab’s Mormon ranching and mining establishment lay a counterculture, and the co-op became its den, Conrad its Fagin.

It was through these doors that Daniel Suelo walked in the winter of 1992. Damian Nash had invited his friend to come live with him while he recovered from depression. On the evening of Suelo’s arrival, Nash was screening movies in the back room. Suelo found the old building. The wooden door creaked and as he crossed the concrete slab floor the place smelled of tamari and lavender oil. In the aisles, men in cutoffs and flip-flops stocked the shelves with hand-packed baggies of granola and dried mangoes. Behind the counter, a dreadlocked girl in flowing skirts, baby on hip, weighed out grains on a stainless-steel scale and punched the numbers into an antique register.

“People who live this lifestyle ended up at the co-op,” says Suelo. “And of course that planted ideas in my head. Showed me that there were alternative ways to live.” Moab provided the community that Daniel had sought. Soon he began working the floor in exchange for food, one of his first steps toward forsaking money.

Beyond the co-op, Suelo found other sectors of the Moab community where the value of money wasn’t a given. He landed a job as a prep cook in a health food café. “It feels really good doing mindless work,” he wrote to a friend. “And the people I work with are great people. So many folks in Moab are so down-to-earth. It’s refreshing.” Chopping spinach and boiling beans in Honest Ozzie’s felt more like hanging out in the family kitchen than going to work. “It really feels nice getting my concentration off ‘career’ and onto life,” he wrote. He felt “more and more a part of humanity, with no hierarchy—not separate from, not above or below anybody—just a common member of humanity. Loving our neighbor as ourself! That is what life is all about.”

This was where I met Daniel in the summer of 1993, on my own nebulous quest to pursue life instead of career, and I can attest that Honest Ozzie’s was a good place to do it. Ozzie’s was situated in a converted old cottage with plenty of outdoor seating, and it specialized in natural foods like locally grown pinto beans, whole-wheat pancakes, and all things soy-derived. Having worked a summer flipping burgers, I was hired on the spot as breakfast cook—the previous guy had quit to float the Grand Canyon. (Nobody asked for my résumé, with its bachelor’s degree in English literature.) With waiters and cooks like me more interested in living than working, Ozzie’s was the kind of
place where forty-five minutes after the waitress took your order for veggie enchiladas, you might get up to investigate and find her doing cartwheels on the lawn with a golden retriever.

But the food was great and who cared about the customers, right? It was a fine time to be footloose in Moab. By then the Atlas uranium mill was boarded up, and in that brief window between the uranium and mountain-biking booms, one could live virtually for free in the most spectacular place on the planet. Jobs were plentiful and easy to get—in cafés and bike shops and white-water raft outfits. Wages were strictly minimum, but rent was negligible. Mere river guides were buying cinderblock homes for no money down, just picking up the hundred-dollar mortgage payment after the miners packed up and left.

And once it got hot, who needed a house anyway? A few newly met friends and I circled our dented station wagons in a thicket by the creek and lived in our tents all summer. All our needs were met. We bathed in the river. Food was easy enough to come by—guiding and restaurant jobs fed us on the clock—and the co-op was dirt cheap, or even free if you volunteered. Each night during happy hour at the Rio Bar and Grill we drank dollar pints and ate half-price nachos and chicken fingers—a fine meal for less than five bucks.

Suelo did not simply decide one day that he’d live in a cave. Just as giving up money was an incremental journey over many years, giving up a home was something he did gradually. In the same way that men who are obsessed with prostitutes become vice cops, Suelo’s fascination with the homeless had led him to work in shelters, and while he’d been working in Denver, something happened that changed his perception of charity. He’d been invited to sit on a panel on homelessness for a sociology
course at CU. The students invited a handful of social workers and a handful of residents of local shelters. To spice things up, they also trawled the Boulder Mall and brought back a smattering of punks and hobos panhandling on the streets. All three groups sat onstage together.

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.”

. . .

—Song of Songs

S
UELO 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.