Joy and Spiritual Exhaustion

A Weekend of Pretending to be Rich

This weekend (July 14-16) I stayed in a very nice $3 million house in The Mesa in Santa Barbara, watching the owner’s 11-month-old Rhodesian Ridgeback. I’ve been watching this man’s dog for about eight months, since the Ridgeback was three months old. He’s a gorgeous dog, tall and lean and muscular with a shiny coat. The owner of the house is 65, a retired doctor and theatre actor who once lived in both Los Angeles and New York City. A highly intelligent creative Jewish man.

He paid me $250/day. Yes. You heard right. I made $625 for two days and a few hours. Not bad. The house has five rooms and four bathrooms, a big spacious backyard, a bocci-ball court, a jacuzzi, and tall trees and bushes surrounding the entire property allowing me to literally (one morning) drink hot green tea outside first thing in the morning…in the nude. Yes. That’s right. I did it.

There are framed photos on the walls all over the place—his father, for example, at age 47, many decades ago, at Mount Everest base camp. He has tasteful art, a Picasso reproduction in his personal master bathroom. A lovely queen bed with appropriate reading lamp. A large walk-in closet. He is divorced since 2015 (a 17-year marriage which ended heinously) and has no kids. Only the Ridgeback.

Having been an actor he is well-read. Often we discuss such authors as Flaubert, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Rousseau. At his desk in the master bedroom he has a well-worn and dog-eared copy of the poems of Rilke. He and I are about the same small size: 5’7, though he is a little pudgier and I am 25 years younger, thicker and more muscular. He admitted to me recently that, due to my intensity and body build and my arm tattoos he at first felt intimidated by me. I laughed, reminding him that when push came to shove I’m a rich boy from Ojai; I grew up with a pool, jacuzzi, all the bourgeoisie fixins.

In short: We like each other. He’s a good man.

I relate to him because I know what it’s like to feel profoundly lonely, which he clearly is. Just that big house and he and the dog. He’s bitter towards woman, based on what he went through with his ex. He lives an expensive, simple life. In the backyard you can look past the bocci-ball court and past the myriad roofs and beyond the valley and see the sparkling blue creamy ocean. It’s delicious; gorgeous; satisfying.

This weekend I came Friday morning, 8am. He was leaving from Santa Barbara Airport at 9 with his 95-year-old mother (a “tough old broad” as he calls her) who still lives independently and only stopped driving two months ago. (Wow, right?) His father—his folks were married for 75 years!—died at the age of 98 literally days before my own father died at age 77 (a young man, practically) on June 2^nd. So we experienced both being “fatherless” together, though at very different ages and times in our lives. But we connect on many levels, is my point.

Anyway we chatted for a while and he gave me last minute instructions about the dog—he is classically neurotic, but to be fair it’s the first trip away from the furry beast—and then his mother’s young female assistant arrived and picked him up and he was gone. I had the whole gorgeous special palace to myself.

Mostly I read. Specifically Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions which, for having been written in the goddamn 18^th century, are wildly erotic, perverted, honest, fascinating, and radically revealing. Some critics call his Confessions the first real modern memoir. You can easily see why. His life was tremendously unique, hard and terrifying. He was an orphan of sorts, a 16-year-old kid who took off on his own. He read greedily, voraciously, insanely, literally selling the clothes off his back at times to buy books. He had many intrigues with older women. He was seen by some as a genius, by others as an idiot.

I of course walked the dog a couple times a day, in the morning and then at night when it was cooler. A nasty heat wave had rolled through. Low 80s. Relentless heat. Blue sky; no clouds. The views were spectacular. I bought salmon and fruit and had it delivered. I sat outside, on the couch, in the shade. I played with the dog. I walked around naked. I wrote a little on my laptop. I thought about my dead father, my frustrating, fractured family, my narcissistic older half-sister, the upcoming cross-country trip Britney and I are going on July 20^th for a week and two weeks (she a week, me two). I pretended we lived in this house, glittery and ornate, spacious and artistic.

Around 9:30 the first night the owner texted me and said his mother had had a mini stroke. She was okay. She feinted and then it took them seven minutes to revive her. For a moment he thought he would lose her. He took her to the nearest E.R. She stayed three hours, felt fine, went home. That was that. He said the hospital was under some kind of special lockdown, that it sounded like some sort of school shooting had just occurred. This was in the Bay Area, East Bay.

On Saturday I read all day, mostly on the couch, the door to the backyard wide open letting in the sunshine and the lovely, light breeze. The dog barked a little here and there. I talked to him reasonably. I walked him. I fed him three huge meals each day. I cooked the salmon and ate the fruit. I got lost inside Rousseau’s mangled mind. I did not turn the large flat-screen TV on once, as is typical of me. I loathe TV. I’m a reader.

Around 7pm that evening I called a good friend of mine out in Manhattan. We’d met through the recovery community when I’d lived in New York between 2019 to 2021, that wild time of singleness and discovery and Covid and Harlem and the Upper East Side. He and I talked for two-and-a-half hours. We always do. He’s a smart older man who used to work in local NYC politics and for the parks service and had once been a copywriter for Wall Street. I invited him to my wedding reception in mid-November. He was thrilled and honored and wants very much to come.

At night in the master bed I used the bed lamp and read more Rousseau. The book was actually not the Confessions but a large, thick collection of his essays and thoughts; it included the first three books of the Confessions. I wanted to finish the first three books. I had less than 50 pages left. Then I’d start my Frederick Brown biography on Flaubert, called Flaubert.

Sunday I got up and took the dog for a run up a steep hill. We sweated and breathed heavily. The sun shone down, beating us restlessly, ruthlessly. It felt invigorating. Then I took a hot shower and cleaned myself. I thought about this house compared to our house in Lompoc. There was no rational comparison. Nor with my own little house I rented out in El Cerrito, north of Berkeley in the Bay Area. Our homes—though we’re profoundly lucky to own any property in California, no doubt—were 1,000-square-foot little two bed, one bath things. Lovely, don’t get me wrong. I liked them both quite a lot. And was/am grateful. But this house was something else. Imagine it, I thought to myself; imagine writing here and relaxing here and traveling and coming back to here. I shivered with excitement just thinking of the fantasy.

He landed at the S.B. Airport early, at 10:30. He texted me: Be there in ten. I’d cleaned by that point. Everything looked good. The fridge was clean. The trash was empty. All the poop had been removed. I’d cleaned away the grass and dirt the dog had shoved with his paws all over the backyard sidewalk. I’d made the bed. Done the dishes. I’d even left him a half pound of extra salmon I hadn’t eaten. Why not.

Then he was back, grinning and smiling, kissing the dog as if they were married. We chatted for five minutes. He paid me. We shook hands. I took off. Easiest money I ever made. I wish he went on trips more often. Usually it’s just two, three hours.

Money, I realize, can’t make anyone happy. I saw that in real time with my mother. Ditto my older half-sister and her husband. How many famous artists, musicians, actors, writers do we know of who had it all and killed themselves? Robin Williams. David Foster Wallace. Philip Seymore Hoffman. Earnest Hemingway. Jim Morrison. And Rousseau understood this. He came from nothing and had to make his own way. But money in and of itself never intrinsically interested him. He was always more interested in experiences.

I’ve always been like that, too. I’d rather hitchhike across America (like I did in 2009, age 26) or walk 450 miles across northern Spain (as I did in 2016 across El Camino de Santiago) than worry about my “investment portfolio,” which I don’t have anyway. Money cannot save you. We all die. Only love, self and other, can do that. Passion. Belief. Faith. In God, in a “Higher Power,” in “Something Other Than Yourself,” in Nature, whatever.

These are all random, chaotic thoughts bubbling up in my mind like percolating coffee. Staying at the house made me feel both grateful and desperate: Grateful for the life I have, but desperate to feel more like I did when walking around that large, expansive, fancy space. I felt like a court jester somehow, and yet I felt like a successful literary man of letters, too. Perhaps my imagination is simply too grand, too inexpressible in realistic terms. Who knows.

Life is good. That’s the honest truth. Complex sometimes. Blurry and confusing at moments. But good.