Escaping a Cult

a true story a la 1960s postmodernism or Tom Wolfe or something

One minute you’re so free it hurts. Hundred miles an hour, everything all around you with its arms flailing in the air — the air! — squeezing the stuck from you, oozing, trailing behind you through the rust, over the hills of Hopi Nation. Errant operator and willing accomplice, our heads and hands out the windows like sick dogs, panting tongues, sweaty knuckles coiled around the steering wheel, fidgeting with dials like a god damned junkie. It’s absolutely euphoric, isn’t it, nothing existing beyond the horizon? isn’t it wonderful, isn’t it so gracious and so humble of God (and I sincerely do believe in God, of course, but it’s a silly thing…an impulse rather than ideology, a glitch – an ugly twitch in an otherwise critical system – syndicated to every synapse, a minute revelation at the mere sight of some meager sunset because it must only be divine and not simply an inevitable symptom of a desert expanse), isn’t it so merciful and so like God to lay down this asphalt before me and to fill up the shales with crude oil and to pump petroleum into the pipelines that run through the very earth beneath my feet – beneath my divine wheels!

And how free we were, until suddenly we’d turned down a long, gravel road, and everyone knows I get nervous when the roads aren’t well maintained. The road is slow and the tops of the omnipresent mountains somehow recede into nothing and to everyone’s disappointment, God has abandoned us, and ironic as it is we’re in some kind of God country now. If we thought we ever had been before, we’d been comically wrong – the Deep South with its wooden crosses littering the highways and an undertow of fear and the word of Christ bestowed upon every hotel nightstand; North Carolina with its abandoned evangelist amusement park and its everything being CLOSED on Sundays; Appalachia with its toothless Hail Marys and Blessing Your Heart and Saying Grace and Saving Face – and how we would’ve taken the God country we thought we knew over this a million times. How comforting it would’ve been to be embraced in the condescending bosom of a Lutheran, to welcome a modicum of sympathy from the pitying eyes of a Protestant.

What fools we were to have strayed from our holy path of godless lowlands, sacrosanct secularity of the canyons. All for a job! For a few months scooping slop for a bunch of old crackers and hoity toity Europeans wearing skinny jeans and kitten heels to hike the jagged buttes, the foreboding trails of the American Southwest. We came, obviously, for the experience, for a little pocket change…for some so-called break from reality, which is really just the experience of living upon closer inspection. Nobody expected heaven on earth, but we surely couldn’t have expected what we arrived to find. Green gable rooftops, more parking lot than terrain, PVC signs demarcating GLAMPING from TENT SITES. An eerie emptiness, hundreds of acres silent save for a family playing mini golf. This is a place – “resort” would be an overstatement – for people who want to see the natural wonders of this nation but aren’t interested in beauty or grandeur. People who are content to shell out a few hundred a night for low-brow amusement served on a plastic tray. Akin to a glorified boarding school; a treatment center for troubled teens; summer camp sans the lifelong friends or magic or nostalgia or a notable compassion extended by your superiors. (Superiors – ha! Nobody was in charge. The founder of the place is worth half a billion dollars, and everyone in the hierarchy below him apparently resides in one of two tiers: the nepotistic management – nowhere to ever be found – and the poor suckers who get tricked into traveling to the Middle of Nowhere, America to make minimum wage working for the lousiest cult in history.)

The first person to greet us was a front desk girl who couldn’t have been older than seventeen – blonde, braces, suburban face, Christian name, the fear of God behind her eyes. We took the welcome packet from her. A single piece of paper:

ROOM: 1F
SHOWER: 6
TOILET: 5
KEY CODE: 2552

Assigned toilets! With a wordless look, Alex and I saw our imminent future in each other’s eyes: proverbial shackles. Empty stare. Dead smile. Spiritual rigor mortis!

It was Friday when we arrived. We wouldn’t start tomorrow, but the following day, on Sunday. The evening was ours to roam around the property (mostly grass and courts – volleyball, tennis, putt-putt – no evidence of buttes or peaks or canyons or desert glory in sight). Ours to wait for any sort of acknowledgment, find our bearings, plan our escape. Leaving was permitted, but hardly feasible – the nearest gas station was a half hour away. Same for the nearest pharmacy, restaurant or grocery store. At the dining hall, where we would be expected to work in a few days, we met Gus, who I liked immediately for his Jewishness and his bluntness and a gruff sex appeal. He could’ve stepped out of a John Ford movie – button down, stiff denim, leather boots, glinting spurs, cowboy hat as high as the heavens. He wore the wrangler’s uniform – the “resort” had a ranch with a few horses and some goats and a rooster, a glimmer of redemption, a hint of authenticity at a place that had been developed into the least impressive stretch of land in a thousand mile radius, with so little natural beauty we’d almost forgotten its proximity to several of the country’s most revered national parks – and that uniform was undoubtedly the sexiest part of this whole endeavor. The next seventy two hours were sexless and almost entirely humorless.

Our new friend informed us that we would likely be proselytized, even bribed. These weren’t no Southern Baptists, oh no, damn sure not your everyday Roman Catholic! A much more sinister breed with a far more callous leader, one whose impiety would’ve turned poor Lot’s wife to a pillar of salt at a single, fair glance over her shoulder. These were followers of Joseph Smith, follower of Jesus Christ who everyone knows walked the foothills of Ohio, the American prophet Joseph Smith who read from the golden tablets with an inexorable vision, who seduced his teenage daughter, who – oh no! – oh, but yes, commanded the husbands to bring many wives to their heavenly extraterrestrial afterlife and commanded the wives to obey their heavenly terrestrial husbands. Maybe, if we let him, our boss (never to be found – he didn’t acknowledge our presence at the place except to express disdain for our having eventually left) could convince us to accept the word of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints into our hearts and we would be so humbly, so divinely granted an extra few dollars on our paychecks.

Gus invited us to his room one night, which was different than our room mostly for the apparent testosterone that permeated everything, sunk into the cracked leather ottoman, wafting from boots and empty cans and crumpled paper towels, but also because it was in a different, exclusive dormitory building altogether, more like a fraternity house than our humble asylum. We drank a few illicit beers — it was satire, really, all of us well into legal adulthood, clutching PBR cans and averting our eyes from the windows and sneaking a cigarette on the fire escape, naughty little kiddies in their parents’ house. Two other young men introduced themselves. They were brothers, one named Mormon and one named Hon, short for Mahonri Moriancumer, brother of Jared (as revealed to Joseph Smith, sole purveyor of esoteric ancient knowledge), distant descendant of Adam and Eve. We met two college-aged girls, blonde, braces, pink cheeks, sinless smiles. There was another skinny young guy with an awkward gait and a thick country accent. A devout crowd, no doubt. Everyone we met at the place had a coldness. Difficult to pinpoint, impossible to articulate, but there, certainly, unrelenting. Sapient clarity, emotional exorcism, servile sanctimonium, polite People’s Temple, the true descendants of the Lost Tribes of Israel – how blessed we must be to serve at their corporate tabernacle – and they’re here! in Orderville, Utah!

It would’ve all been laughable, a hilarious sideshow, but the days were eerie and quiet and boring and the nights were cold and long and loud and devoid of our usual nightly festivities – girlish whispering, whimsical giggling, endearing sleep-deprived drunkenness. Our room was in the basement of the staff dormitory and across the hall was the recreation room, where each night, one young man sat from dusk to dawn in a recliner in front of the television (dusk to dawn!) screaming – absolutely howling and yowling – positively caterwauling! into the headset of a video game. A different one each night. Call of Duty or Fortnite or any RPG with virtual machine guns and someone equally obtrusive presumably on the other end. We learned that this severely autistic young man’s parents had dropped him at the doorstep of this purgatory and subsequently disappeared. Nobody could find them, so he was now the default property of the resort place, although it’s unclear whether any individual had claimed him (although, perhaps, it’s better nobody had, for his sake), so he sat – not staff, not client, just there – and screeched into his headset until the sun reared its ugly brazen head. So I didn’t sleep almost at all for two nights, and I was restless and shaken and starting to feel a burning of ignominy behind my eyelids when I awoke on the third day. Sunday. That day we started our job, about which we’d been lied to. (It’s a real restaurant, you’ll be real life waitresses, just like Ryan Reynolds and Anna Farris in Waiting! You’ll love it here, really, it’ll just be a dream, we’d really love to have you.) We weren’t supposed to scoop carton eggs! We didn’t want to! It wasn’t fair! And this terrible burden of scooping, and the horrible repetition of taking people’s silly little meal tickets and dropping them into a little plastic bucket and smiling morbidly and saying “thanks, just that way for the slop,” well, it was not enough, and the suddenly it was all just too much and –

– What if we left today? I said, and Alex said yeah, what if we did? and I said we could go to California, and she said we could go to Colorado, and I said Vegas and she said Portland and I said Montana and she said Wyoming and we both said anywhere, please!!! and so then we shuffled around anxiously until the soles of our shoes created so much friction against the tile that our angst ricocheted around the walls and practically cracked the glass windows that overlooked all the vast nothing in the middle of nowhere, and we looked around and locked eyes and unlocked until our pupils fell straight out of our heads and rolled around on the floor until they found some gangly young guy who’d fallen for the same stupid scam as us, but he’d been sorry enough to stay. And we said – and we need to have tact, because we shouldn’t pity him for staying, but we need to be firm, because this is unjust! In fact, we should call up the LA Times tomorrow and tell them all about this madness, shouldn’t we – we have to go, actually right now, because we don’t like this not one bit. And we hope you understand – I do, I really do, because I’m kind of in the same position, and I used to be a bartender out in California or Montana or something (I can’t quite remember the exact words, but he was really a nice and normal guy who got sucked in to this vacuous, puritanical place) but they got me to come all the way out here with the promise of something fantastic, which it’s not, but I’m here, so I guess I’m just accepting the money in exchange for the fear of God and Jesus Christ and Joseph Smith – and we’ll be going now.

So we packed up and we threw our bags in the car with haste – everything was so planned, so ordered, so intentional until this point, and I felt the proverbial wrench being thrown in it, wreaking real havoc on my plans and in my guts, twisting and pulling and clenching. Completely unravelling both the plans and my slipping grasp onto sanity. It was a total one-eighty, you see, from euphoria in overdrive, some transcendentalist dream sequence to a Mormon fever dream asylum, brace-faced Chitty Chitty Bang Bang Doll on a Music Box greeting girls, painted rouge on cheeks, empty cabins, trash piled up in the woods, broken glass, nail in a wooden plank, worn leather and hide, a massive brassiere on a clothesline, a strange smell (everything – EVERYWHERE – there was a strange smell of rot, body odor, feces – mostly feces, animal and human – and it permeated everything, even the grass and the trees. We took shallow breaths and constantly cupped our palms over our mouths), a pristine Book of Mormon, the Doctrine and Covenants, the Third Nephi, the Pearl of Great Price…

Just before we left, Gus took us on horses up the mountain. Occasionally turned around to flirt or wink at me so I would briefly take my eyes off the horizon where the hills of Zion stared back at me in confusion, for how could I have left that for this? The true holy land was out there and now it was out of reach forever and ever (at least until tomorrow when we’d drive into the Rocky Mountains and hide our food from bears and tuck our feet underneath each other’s pillows for warmth and choke with exhausted laughter all night again like we’d wanted to do all along) for I’d been scared off the beaten path, back to total normalcy, how could I keep going after this? How could unfettered freedom ever be untainted by this haunting aside? On horseback we bobbed up a dirt path for around two hours and I rode on Ringo and Alex rode behind me and we actually had a moment of levity when our horses loudly and repeatedly shit and pissed beneath us (I’ve never been fond of horses). Up on the mountain atop a hard saddle, bruised groin, flies swarming, bursts of laughter, turning to see the beautiful, bobbing, smiling face of a true, sane friend – those were our last sweet, strange moments at that place, in that brief cult, in a strange uncanny valley in the Wild West.