That’s my father in the middle, with two of his travel companions on the ship that brought him from India to London. It was the 1960s, I wasn’t born yet, and he wasn’t married. Just a young man heading west, as I would decades later, from London to LA, at around the same age, too, about 29 or so. Who can explain these symmetries? Like history, family rhymes too.

Today, he turns 92. So, I thought I’d post this piece I wrote several years ago about our trip to Vegas together. We’ve had our problems, me and Dad, and we still do—there are more chapters to this story. But at least we had this trip. It was a breakthrough. May you all reconcile with your parents before they pass.

***

I watched him on the Arrivals curb at LAX, standing there in his jacket and slacks. He’s of the generation that still dresses up for air travel, only today he looked even older, staring into space as people streamed past on either side, expressions flickering across his face like ghosts. His inner life was spilling over. A look of concern, a faint smile. Just surface tremors, in the end, things unsaid that surged within, as they would for me too one day. Isn’t that how things go? I’ll end up like this too one day, old and emoting to thin air like a crazy person.

Who was I kidding? I was doing it now, staring at him.

“Dad!” It felt weird to say it out loud.

“Oh Sanju!” Nervous chatter tumbled out. “Yeah, flight was OK, quite good actually. They put me in aisle, not window. That’s better so I can go to toilet. I’m old now.”

We don’t hug in our family, so we just stood there for a moment.

“I’m parked over there,” I said and dragged his suitcase to the cross walk. He followed along behind.

“What about you, Sanju, how is your health?”

“I’m fine.”

“Good, health is most important. Oh, you drove here is it? Where did you park?”

“Over there.”

“You don’t have to pay your ticket first? Sometimes you have to pay.”

“I know how it works, Dad.”

This was his idea. As though he’d sat bolt upright in bed one night and realized that I’d been in LA for four years, his oldest son, and maybe I wasn’t coming home. Maybe I was done. We scarcely spoke as it was, except for the occasional phone call, a brisk, factual exchange about health and weather, and then silence would fall like a curtain and he’d hand over to my mother.

But this last year, even those calls had fallen away. I’d stopped speaking to my parents, I had to. My dad, I’d barely talked to since I was boy, and as for my mom, her pessimism ran me down like a freight train. Just seeing her number flash up would have me googling the Samaritans, so my therapist suggested I “limit the calls.” Like the old joke— ‘Doctor, it hurts when I do that’ / ‘So, don’t.’ And it worked, a weight was lifted. Only now, I felt like a monster for not calling my mother.

Then, an email out of the blue: Dad in a fluster. He’d picked some dates and he wanted to book the flight soon, or the price might go up, so could I confirm I’d be around? I called him back, and I was deliberately clipped and cold. Can’t do it, I said. Busy. My flat’s too small for guests. And my schedule’s unpredictable because I’m freelance, so a work thing could come up at any time. I knew he wouldn’t stand in the way of work and money. If there was one thing he had right about me, it was that both were in short supply. But he insisted.

“You can work, that’s OK,” he said. “I’ll just keep you company.”

That’s how we ended up here, in my Ford Focus, inching along the 405 at rush hour. After a brisk Q&A about monthly payments and insurance, it went quiet, the silence filling the car like fumes. The sound of home, only this time, punctuated by Dad reading out street signs and billboards.

“Yield,” he said. “Howard Johnson. Gay-co.”

“It’s Geico. Car insurance.”

“Pollow Loco.”

“Poyo.” Ten days of this. “You’ve got to pack a bag tonight, remember?” I said. “That job in Las Vegas tomorrow.”

“Oh yes, the boxing match.”

“Not a match, just an interview. Floyd Mayweather. I told you about this.”

“He’s a boxer, isn’t it?”

“Our rooms are booked, that’s all fine, but like I said, I’ll be working in the day, so you have to wait in the hotel. And I don’t know how long I’ll be, and you don’t have a cell phone, so I’ll leave a message in your room. But you have to go back and check, otherwise I won’t be able to find you.”

I’d put all this in an email already, and it stressed me out then. I could just see him wandering about the hotel, lost. Vegas was no place for a conservative pensioner from India. Seventy-two years old. Old enough to drift onto the Strip and look the wrong way as he crossed the street.

I’d made a CD of Motown oldies he might recognize—not that he likes Motown, especially. I don’t know what he likes, my own father. And for an hour, we had nowhere to run and nowhere to hide like Martha Reeves and the Vandellas. But between Gayco and Marvin Gaye, we made it to my little apartment in Sherman Oaks where Tawnya was waiting, the American daughter-in-law he’d never met before, the light-skinned Latina I married without telling anyone. She hugged him, which was awkward, as was the small talk that followed, the rictus ritual of “how was the flight” while my worlds collided, my alien halves, here in my living room. I hadn’t dared imagine this moment, my wife and father face-to-face, contemplating their foreignness first to each other, and then to me. Now that it was happening, I was utterly unprepared.

We gave him a brisk tour like realtors in a rush, then I chivvied him out of the door, back to the cooped silence of the Focus, the tick tock of the turn signal. I felt the snap judgments click into place like seatbelts in that predictable brain of his, all the way to a motel around the corner to dump his bags, and then to the Baja Grill where we ate, father and son under the Sunbrellas. It was just the two of us; Tawnya thought we should have time alone “to bond.”

“So, Sanju,” he said, clearing his throat. “This freelancing. Is it working?”

“What do you mean?”

“If it is working, OK, but you are still young. You can always come back to London and get a job.”

“What job? I’m doing all right.”

He looked skeptical. “Your mum is worried. Every day she says, ‘Why is he struggling in LA? Tell him to come home.’ You know how she is. But I tell her, ‘No, let me go first and see his condition. Only then I will decide.’ Otherwise how will I know?”

“So, you’ve decided, is that it?”

“Not decided, just discussing,” he said. “It is important to discuss.”

I’d seen this act of his so many times—Dad, the voice of reason, Mr. Objectivity. As though he’d been sent by the government, the Department of Impartial Assessors, to survey the facts and dispense his verdict. He was tapping his little clipboard right now—let’s see, your apartment is small, the car is cheap, and your wife appears to be unemployed, so according to my charts…

“Mum always worries,” I said.

Dad chuckled. “Mothers do worry, it’s in their nature!” He clasped his breast, overdoing it as usual. “People come to our house, you know, our Bengali circle, everyone talking about their children. And they are all working in big banks and management consultant. They ask, ‘Oh, how is Sanju, what he is doing,’ and she doesn’t know what to say actually.”

“Just say I write for magazines!”

“That’s what I tell her! Just say what he is doing, who cares what other people think? I don’t care about these things.” A shake of his head to further dispel the notion. “But one article here, one article there. Is it really working?”

“This is about money, isn’t it? I’m not earning enough.”

“Not just money!” Dad snapped. “You always say money, money, money! But you haven’t taken a proper line. Like Sumit, he is management consultant in Coopers. Big company. He is on a track. And Bobby Mukherjee, he’s your age, and he is barrister now!”

I stood up, scraping my chair on the concrete, a child again, throwing a tantrum. “Is that why you came? To say you’re ashamed of me?” My voice was shaking. People were looking. “I should just leave you here. You can get a taxi back to the airport.”
I’d panicked him, the old bully, I could see it in his eyes. But the longer I stood there, the more my threat frittered away.

“Sit down, Sanju,” Dad said, quietly, his face reddening. But I couldn’t, not now. I needed some kind of exit. Then it came to me.

“I never asked you to come here,” I said, like a guy on a daytime soap. Then I pushed my chair away and marched angrily into the restaurant to wash my hands.

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Meet at the lion, Derek had said. The giant golden one in the lobby. And sure enough, there he was, leaning against its paws, watching the revolving doors of the MGM Grand spin tourists into the hotel like a turbine.

“Listen, my name’s Mark for this one,” he said, masking the subterfuge with a fixed grin. “Just let me do the talking. Have you told your old man?”

I had. We’d been mostly monosyllabic since the Baja Grill—or since I was about ten—but when the plane banked and Vegas tilted into view, I pointed to the oasis of casinos sprouting preposterously from the desert and explained that the green one was ours. My friend Derek had wangled us a couple of free rooms. He was a professional gambler, mostly blackjack and poker, and casinos gave big players like him free stuff. Only Derek had won too often, so some places had banned him, which explained the fake ID which, yes, was illegal. Dad accepted all of this without protest.

We hung back while Derek checked us in at the VIP desk. Dad took pictures of the lion on his little Olympus. “So big!” he kept saying. Then we headed for the nearest bar. I had a couple of hours before work beckoned; a pint was in order. Dad found a nearby toilet and Derek lined up a couple of pilsners.

“So, what’s the plan?” Derek said, eyes full of mischief. I’d only met him a couple of times before, through a mutual friend, but we clicked. Another Londoner, portly and jolly, he had a few years on me and a rascal’s grin, the kind where his eyes almost close and you can’t tell if he’s winking.

“Well, I’ve got that interview in a bit,” I said. “Today and tomorrow. I’m going to his house, you know.”

“You taking the old man?”

“God no, he’s staying here. No idea what he’s going to do, though, it’s not his scene, this place.”

“Rubbish, he’ll love it here.”

“He’s so straight-laced, though. Doesn’t gamble, doesn’t spa or whatever. And he hasn’t got a cell so if he gets lost, I’ll never find him.”

“Get him a hooker and an eight ball. Job done!” Derek giggled.

“You can’t talk like that when he’s around, I’m serious. He’s super conservative.”

“Yeah, but he’ll have a drink, won’t he?”

“A beer at lunchtime. Helps him nap.”

“Hmm.” Derek stroked his chin. “OK, here’s what you do. On your way to see Mayweather, drop your dad off at Sapphire. The cabbie will know.”

“What’s Sapphire?”

“Biggest strip club in America!”

“Derek.”

“I’ll bet he’s never even had a lap dance, has he? It’s a crime. His generation, they worked hard all their life.”

Dad returned from the bathroom in a state. “Sanju, I think we should check the room key first, because who knows if it doesn’t work? Sometimes it happens. And then what? I will be stuck, isn’t it?”

“Pops, you want a beer?” Derek said.

“Oh no, it’s too early!” Dad looked at me, concerned. “You have to work.”

“Exactly!” Derek said. “He has to work, but you’ve got no excuse!”

“OK,” Dad said, cheerfully. “I’ll have a bitter.”

Derek bought a round and pulled out his phone. “There’s someone you two should meet, I’ve been thinking about this.” He leaned back to make a call and moments later, a dapper Indian man in a black suit came chuckling over to us from the craps table just a few meters away.

“I’m standing here only!” the man said, in a ripe accent. “Such a coincidence! That is a good sign, heh Derek?”

Arjun was in his 30s, like me, but he looked older and more distinguished. He had a thick beard and big gentle eyes, and he spoke in a rich tenor. He spoke to me in Hindi and I had to apologize.

“Ah, you are an Englishman!” he said, disappointed.

But Dad spoke Hindi, and they went back and forth for a while, delighting in the sound while Derek and I watched it like tennis. At the end, Derek said, “That’s easy for you to say!” and we all laughed.

We ate at a noodle place, happy in the froth of first meetings. New people offer a fresh start. They smile and encourage. Arjun enquired about my life as an “intrepid journalist,” as Derek described me. Had I met Mayweather before? What were the odds of a knockout? As we talked, Dad slurped his soup.

“Tell him the pimp story,” Derek said, about the pimp convention I covered in Chicago. And I would have but Dad hadn’t yet heard it and neither of us wanted to advertise just how little we spoke.

Arjun had a colorful background. A Jain from Gujarat who worked as a diamond dealer in Antwerp, he said he’d come to Vegas a few months ago, “just for fun, like everyone, no?” He met Derek through a poker player they knew, and he had no particular plans, he’d stay as long as he wanted. It sounded glorious, the life of a playboy. When he learned that Dad’s mother tongue was not Hindi but Bengali, he spoke some himself, which made Dad so happy, he giggled, a high-pitched sound I hadn’t expected. Then Arjun signed for it, telling Dad to put his money away. “Let the MGM pay, Baba.”

Afterwards, he invited us up to his suite. It was a thing to see. A lofted two-story apartment in an exclusive wing for high rollers, accessible only through locked glass doors and a separate elevator. It gleamed with chrome and glass and floor-to-ceiling windows with views of the mountains.

“Oof, look at this!” Dad gushed, reaching for his camera.

“Come, Baba, see the bathroom,” Arjun said. “There is a television in the mirror!”

He called him Baba, as I should really. It was an endearing Indian convention to address elders as Baba and Ma, whether they were your parents or not. Dad certainly enjoyed it. I’d never seen him so happy.

“So, what is your program?” Arjun asked. “Must be you are going to shows. O show is very good.”

“We can probably get you Cirque tickets,” Derek said.

It sounded perfect. An evening of Cirque de Soleil, free of charge, with no talking, no risk of a fight, and a little story for Bobby Mukherjee’s mum at the end of it.

But Dad frowned. “I don’t need all these shows,” he said. “If Sanju wants, we can go.”

“What about Grand Canyon?” Arjun said. “Now that is a must!” He twisted his wrist with an Indian flourish, screwing in an imaginary light bulb.

“That is a natural wonder!” Dad exclaimed.

This time, I made the face. “That’s a longer trip, we’re only here a couple of days,” I said, eyes on the horizon. It was the first note of tension.

Derek looked at his wrist. “I should get going actually.”

“Me too,” I said.

“OK, but your Baba can stay, no?” Arjun fiddled with the sound system and suddenly Hindi film music filled the room. A slippery flute, a squealy singer. He stood by the window, his head wobbling and eyes sparkling. “Sanjiv tell me: you like Bollywood? Growing up, I listened all day this music. Melody is nice, no? It is wedding scene of course. Everything is wedding, wedding in India.”

Dad was on the sofa now, tossing peanuts into his mouth and tapping his fingers on the arm of the chair.

“OK Dad, I’m going now,” I said. “I’ll check the room key for you.”

“Don’t worry, Arjun will help me. Just call when you are finished.”

We left them there, Derek and I, with their Bollywood and their peanuts, and walked back to the elevators, back to Vegas Muzak, Britney Spears.

Derek grinned. “You know they’ll just get a couple of brasses, those two.”

I pushed the elevator button again. This was turning into a strange day.

“Listen,” Derek said. “We need to have a proper drink, you and me. I’m having a mate over tomorrow, Lily’s going to cook something. So, you and Pops should come. It’s Brian, you know the one I told you about.”

Brian was famous among Vegas’s most extreme gamblers. Seven years earlier, he’d taken a $100,000 bet to get breast implants for a year, only he’d kept them for reasons unknown. He wasn’t transitioning as such; he was just a man with tits. A father. I wanted to do a story about him, so Derek had been trying to put us together. But with Dad here, it wouldn’t work. Dad, who was already so convinced that I’d lost my way that he’d flown eleven hours to launch a rescue. So far, this trip was only confirming his suspicions. We were in Babylon, already accessories to Derek’s identity fraud. Then Arjun shows up with all his money and his Hindi, saying ‘Baba’ like the son he’s never had. And now this—a man with a C-cup. How could Brian possibly help my case?

At the glass doors I turned to Derek. “Look, I want to meet Brian. But not with Dad there, it’ll freak him out. Why don’t I come over later, after he’s gone to bed?”

“Don’t be silly,” Derek said, as we stepped into the jingle and roar of the casino floor.

“You won’t even notice. Tell the truth, they’re only a bit bigger than mine.”

Go Floyd Mayweather was a wash. An HBO film crew was shooting some promo for his upcoming fight, so there was no time for an interview. I wanted to ask about his father because they were famously estranged. “Me too,” I’d say, and we’d bond like brothers. Instead, I got a tour of the house, an endless bragging tour, like that MTV show Cribs, until at last I’d had enough and decided to call a cab. His number two walked me to the door, promising “tomorrow, tomorrow” while behind him, Floyd was waving wads of cash at the cameraman shouting, “I don’t even know how much this is!”

I did the math in the taxi. There were maybe fifty or sixty notes in that wad, each one of them a hundred. So, five grand or so. A single bet on the Pistons game for Floyd, but also the entire fee for my story, including expenses. Or six weeks of bills.

I’d share none of these numbers with Dad, of course. He’d just flaunt them to my mother—look what I know that you don’t— and she’d convert them into pure, galloping anxiety, a remarkable process, like nuclear fusion, and with a similarly massive yield. Scientists should study it and solve our energy problems. Put her in a power plant, this little Indian woman with the wringing hands, and feed her mundane details about my life, like: “your son has bought a dog.” Oh no, now the dog’s going to take all his time when he should be focused on his future, and what about the vet bills, he can’t afford them, and if he has children, the dog might eat the baby, I saw it on BBC, etc.

But Mum wasn’t waiting for me at the hotel, Dad was. And dinner loomed, a grim prospect. In twenty years, we’d scarcely spoken, much less spent an evening together, father and son—not until the Baja Grill, anyway. There was a time, there had to have been, when I revered him as a son should, but those memories had been replaced by his gritted teeth and raised hand, his spit-flecked anger. In the ’70s everyone got smacked around a bit and my story was nothing special, just the occasional middle-class slap, humiliating enough to shut me down. But that’s where the silence started.

At first, his temper brought Mum and me close, out of fear mostly, but also loneliness. She was stuck in a loveless marriage to an angry man a million miles from home and she had no one to talk to but me. So, while she folded laundry, with the door closed, she let the bitterness flow—how Dad had lied about his job to lure her to England, how he’d crushed her dreams, treated her like a maid, and threatened her physically. She mocked him and laughed at his failings, his fragile ego, and it became our secret. We exchanged knowing looks and eye rolls behind his back; we were like a people under occupation whose spirit hadn’t been broken.

Dad knew. He’d always pegged me as an opponent. I looked like Mum—short, with a wide head and a big nose—and I was academic like her, while he was more practical, an electrical engineer who did DIY and grew tomatoes in his garden. Mum would goad him into sharing his interests with me to teach me something useful, but it always led to anger and scolding. Then I’d end up with Mum again, behind closed doors, commiserating. And when he walked in, we’d stop talking. He became a conversational fire blanket, carrying the silence with him.

What I remembered so viscerally, even sitting alone in a Las Vegas taxi, was the disgust. Because that’s what it came to with Dad and me. Around the house, we repelled each other like magnets, never passing each other on the stairs. Eye contact was rare, touch unthinkable. It was revolting to feel his socked feet brush accidentally against mine under the dinner table. His every habit of speech and gesture made me recoil, the way he ate, walked, sat, and cleared his throat before answering the phone. Decades later I realized that I’d inherited many of those traits myself.

By the time I was a teenager, I had more or less opted out. After years as the Arm & Hammer, soaking up the foul air, I receded from Dad’s temper, Mum’s self-pity, and my own partisan role in their feud. This was my protest, to do and say the bare minimum. And oddly, Dad did the same. We both withdrew from family life. While he shrank to a scowling figure on the couch, I skulked off to my room, each of us resigned to life on these terms. So much so that on Saturdays, when he drove me to and from a music school where I played clarinet in some orchestra—the kind of thing Indian parents force their kids into for the sake of college applications—even then, we scarcely said a word to each other. There was no stopping for ice cream, no attempt to bridge the gulf. He’d given up long ago. We both had.

I knew why he’d come all this way. My leaving for America had shifted the alliances back home. Now, my parents were united by what they saw as my failure. They’d sacrificed so much so that their kids might have a better shot, but here I was in LA, living from check to check, and to salt the wound, I’d married some American girl they’d never met. Arjun was right, everything is wedding, wedding in India.
So, my mother did what she thought a mother should. In a series of phone calls and emails about a year previously, she told me the hard truth—that I was an embarrassment to the family, a source of strife and shame, whose only hope was to fly home at once to get my life in order before it was too late. This was the message Dad had come to drive home.

As the MGM Grand swung into view, I took a deep breath and called.

“Hallo Sanju?” He picked up after two rings. There was no television in the background. He must have been sitting there, waiting. “OK, I’ll come down now.”

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The strip in the late evening was an electric river, swollen with punters who poured in from all the tributary hotels. Flash boys chasing mini-skirts, name-badge conventioneers, and a million fanny packs, all of us giants in the long shadows, with the hot wind at our backs, urging us into the night.

I used to charge into Vegas nights like these. But tonight I was getting a glimpse of the spindly-legged man I might become. He walked slowly beside me, agog at the 40-foot steak he saw on a video billboard, five-stories tall. As he reached for his camera, a woosh of digital dominoes replaced it with a different meat product, a row of shirtless Australian men covered in baby oil. “Thunder from Down Under,” Dad read, lowering his Olympus.

It kept happening—every fifty yards or so, the sexual bacchanalia of Vegas would accost him. Even though Dad had come to London in the ’60s, his disdain for the sexual revolution was absolute. A pillar of his conservatism. Watching TV as a family, he would desperately switch channels at the slightest hint of nudity or even innuendo. We’d go from Benny Hill to golf, from James Bond to the Teletext channel. So, when a stripper van came past with two girls dancing on a flat-bed trailer in the back, he shook his head in disgust. And then a guy with a hoodie thrust a pamphlet into his hands. I knew what was coming before Dad could put on his reading glasses.

“Oh dear,” he said. “Did you see, Sanju? He is giving blue magazines left and right!”

“It’s not a magazine,” I said. “They’re escorts. Prostitutes, really. It’s illegal in Vegas, but not in the rest of the state, so they kind of turn a blind eye. They should just legalize it, like in Germany.”

Now, he looked genuinely distressed. I sounded way too knowledgeable, and there was no trash can in sight, so he was stuck walking around with this thing in his hand.

“Here, give it to me,” I said.

“What? No, you don’t want all this!”

“No, I’ll get rid of it for you!”

“These prostitutes are very bad, Sanju. They carry so much disease and VD, I have seen on BBC.”

I couldn’t tell if this was fatherly advice or if he really thought I visited prostitutes. Either way, he had a great story for Bobby Mukherjee’s mum back home.

Oh, Sanju is doing fine, yes, he’s in Las Vegas now ordering prostitutes from a pamphlet he found in the street. Then he will give the VD to his wife who is white and unemployed. It’s all going very well.

“You know this Arjun is divorced?” he said. “Western girl.”

Was he baiting me? Was he suggesting that I get divorced too?

“I’m a bit worried actually,” he continued. “He is having some problem. Just a few months ago she left him and now he is here gambling and gambling. Must be he is gambling a lot, otherwise they won’t give him such a luxury room.”

After I’d left, Dad and Arjun had spent the afternoon together. They wandered about the hotel, to the poolside restaurant and the shops, and Arjun wouldn’t stop talking. Somehow, he saw my father as a sympathetic ear. His whole life story came out, and now Dad was passing that story on to me. He became suddenly very talkative.

Arjun was a Jain, a part of that life-revering religion whose most devout believers wear masks to avoid killing microscopic bugs by inhalation. There are many Jains in Antwerp, home to the world’s biggest diamond market, and they were rising there because they could outsource the cutting and polishing to family connections in India. Arjun’s uncle had emigrated from Gujarart to Antwerp in the ’60s, just as Dad had arrived in London, and he started a gem business there from the ground up. Then he flew Arjun over to join him, at twenty. And Arjun also flourished, building his own business and a small fortune with it.

“He’s like you, Westernized,” Dad said. “So, he married a Belgian girl, quite pretty, he showed me the picture. But his family didn’t accept her. You know how they can be, these Indian families. It caused a lot of issues. These Jains are very strict.”

Arjun’s family wanted to arrange his marriage. They’d found a match in Antwerp, another Jain from another gemstone family. But Arjun wouldn’t budge.

“Sometimes things don’t work how everybody wants, like marriage especially. But you have to adapt, isn’t it?” Dad said. “His family didn’t adapt. At his wedding, only the girl’s side went, can you imagine?”

“Arjun’s family didn’t go?”

“Didn’t go! It’s very wrong. They didn’t go to wedding, they didn’t welcome her into family, didn’t visit her family. Nothing. These things cause lot of tension for a new couple. So, after two years she had enough.” He dusted his hands clean. “Divorce.”

If only Mum and Dad had divorced, back when they were young and energetic, and could face the challenge of going it alone as immigrants in London. If only they’d chosen happiness over security. Instead, they wanted to arrange my marriage, if only to have one thing go according to plan. As the joke goes, never visit a doctor whose house plants have died. So Tawnya and I eloped. A private ceremony, no guests. Like the man said, you have to adapt.

“The family should have supported him,” Dad continued. “Look at what happened. He married her anyway! You can’t stop someone. He is a grown man, making a good business so let him lead his life!”

“They were ashamed of him,” I said. “They didn’t know what to tell their friends.”

“Just say he is married to Western girl! It is not something to be ashamed. You did it! And I’m not refusing to meet, I have come all this way.”

After the divorce, Arjun took a turn. The future he’d imagined had crumbled, as had his relationship with his family, and Antwerp became a constant reminder of what he’d lost. So, he left, selling his company and going on the road.

“Just gave it all up!” Dad said. “First he went to Monte Carlo to do gambling. I think he has a gambling problem actually.”

“I did a story in Monte Carlo once.”

“He said it was too snooty there, especially being Indian, so he came to Vegas. Three, four months, he is going like this. Imagine the cost he is bearing!”

“Money comes and goes, Dad, it’s not everything,” I said.

“But to waste it like that. We don’t have money like Arjun but we are at least sensible. I have never gambled.”

“You came to London from India with no job. That was a gamble.”

“Like you!” he shot back. “You also came to America without job.”

Of all the things we’d never talked about there was this—the fact that we’d both gone west as young men and struggled with the newness, the loneliness of a new country. The traditional motive for these journeys is ambition, opportunity, a kind of romantic striving. But neither of us is especially ambitious. I left to escape my parents and myself, to some degree, and I suspect he did too. Though it was harder for him, the culture shock, the language, everything. Maybe like Arjun, he wanted to marry a Western girl himself at one time, but it didn’t work out. Would he have been happier that way?

We reached the Bellagio, at the lip of the lake out front, and people were gathering at the barrier, waiting for the show.

“So, what did you say?” I said.

Dad shrugged. “Not much. What can I say? I think he just wanted to let it out actually. It’s easier with a stranger. And because I am Indian. Did you see he calls me Baba?” He smiled. “I think he wants to tell his real Baba but he can’t.”

“You didn’t give him advice?”

“Not advice. He is your age now; he will do what he wants. I just listened and gave encouragement. I told him he is still young, he has his whole life ahead. Just keep looking forward, that is most important. All the time he is saying ‘my wife, my wife,’ but that is in the past now. That’s what I said. I don’t know if he will listen.”

The musical fountains started up and the crowd whooped. Thick ropes of water swayed from side to side, in pink, white and yellow. Out came his Olympus again. He looked so happy, the fountains crisscrossing in his spectacles like fluorescent wipers.

“Not everyone can forget the past,” I said.

“Not forget, but dwelling on it is the problem.”

“It’s not dwelling, it’s remembering. You can’t just pretend things never happened.”

He looked at me. “No one is pretending.”

The jets became spray in the night sky. Forget the past. That’s easy for him to say.

We ate at a Chinese restaurant that night at the MGM. Father and son drinking Tsing Taos. Son teaching father to make duck rolls in plum sauce. We looked the part, at least. And all thanks to Arjun. He’d become the patient, now, the one for whom hands are wrung, a topic we could agree on. The poor man was on a slippery slope and yes, his parents shared in the blame. I think we were both aware of the subtext, but to point it out would have broken the spell. Instead, Dad and I spent a couple of hours in relatively good spirits. It was a strange feeling.

“You remember that Chinese restaurant in Florida?” he said. “The king prawns were so big!”

I had to think. I was eleven then. That was the happy vacation, the one time that we managed to spend two whole weeks without a sharp word. In our family, digging out happy memories is like dredging a bike from a river, but for Dad, they were bobbing at the surface. Dad, of all people, was laughing about the good times, checking his rear view and seeing Space Mountain, not the time he slapped me in front of my cousin for not eating my tomatoes. He was getting off way too easily. You can’t sail in twenty years later talking about king prawns, and suddenly all is forgiven. You can’t break things and fix them whenever you feel like it. I haven’t eaten raw tomatoes since.

“Let’s get the check,” I said. “I have to work tomorrow.”

Dad’s smile dropped and he looked at his watch. “Oh yes. It’s half nine already. Getting late.”

We returned to our rooms, his next to mine, and I helped him with the TV settings before bed. He padded around the carpet on his shockingly white feet, and I jabbed at the screen with the remote in silence. There was no call to feel this angry, I knew that, but this too was his legacy, this temper I’d inherited. And the revulsion returned. The smell in this room, of age and Old Spice, the whiff of his bedroom in Wimbledon. He had his Hush Puppies by the bed. That cheap old suitcase that reeks of India.

“Why are the blinds closed?” I asked. “It’s so dark in here.”

“I couldn’t open it. I think it’s stuck.”

I checked behind the window for the switch and the curtains parted, revealing the Strip at night in all its glory.

“Oh, it’s an electric one!” he chuckled, embarrassed. “Wah, look at that! You can see the whole Vegas from here!”

He aimed his camera at the window. “Sanju, that is your boxer, isn’t it, Floyd Merryweather?” A huge ad for the fight appeared on the wall of the neighboring hotel. “He must be good to have a big advertisement like that.”

“He’s the world champion, I told you,” I said.

“People will be interested to read the article, I think.”

And for an instant, I wanted to tell him about Floyd, the kind of a fighter he was and why I was interested, the kind of person I was. But moods have momentum and we rolled through that station without stopping. I put the tennis channel on and headed for the door.

“Can you send me your article when you have finished?” he said. He’d never asked that before.

I got my time with Floyd in the end. The instructions came in the morning: head to some dingy strip mall downtown and look for a door marked Philthy Rich. Floyd was inside on a barstool in the middle of the office, watching the game and getting a fade. It was just me, him and his barber.

I asked about his rift with his father, which next to mine, was of a different scale entirely, mythic in the way that both men were fighters, with the same name, Jr and Sr, the son trained by the father. It started when Floyd was 16 and Sr went to prison for five years on a cocaine charge. “My career blossomed when he got locked up,” he told me. “But when he came back, he still wanted to tell me when I can and can’t go out. He couldn’t accept that I call the shots now.” So Floyd fired him as his trainer and they’d been talking trash at public events ever since. But Floyd shook it off. He’d surpassed his father in every way. He was the greatest fighter in the world. “It’s not that I hate him, he just never let me become a man,” he shrugged. “He do him, and I do me.”

I got worked up as he spoke, I couldn’t help it. I told him that I had father issues of my own, it all came out in a jumble. I even mentioned the Baja Grill. But Floyd just looked at me, and then turned back to the TV. “Check the sides one time,” he told the barber.

Still, I left that interview on a high. The interview was finished, job done, finito. And some of Floyd’s swagger had rubbed off. Because I wasn’t a kid anymore either. Why should I care what Dad thought? That’s what I told Tawnya when she called on my way back to the hotel. “He can do him, I’ll do me,” I said. And she got all sentimental.

“Give him a chance. He’s trying to patch things up because he doesn’t know how long he’s got left.”

Dad had been at the hotel all day. On his own, this time. Arjun had a friend in town, and they were out for the day. But he’d left Dad a key in case he wanted to hang out in his fancy suite. So that’s where half the day went. Then he went shopping which explained the flustered voicemail telling me to not buy a bottle of wine for Derek’s party, repeat, don’t buy wine. He’d bought a bottle himself, that was why, a Goldilocks bottle: “not too expensive but not too cheap.”

I spotted him waiting by the elevator, asking a waitress for directions. He was all dressed up. The same jacket as on the plane, with the elbow pads. No fanny pack either. Lose the plastic bag and he’d look all right.

“Dad!” It still sounded weird.

“Oh Sanju! How did it go, your interview. Good? I wanted to buy flowers for Derek’s wife but you have to go out somewhere. I think it’s far. Look.” He showed me the presents he’d bought for the kids, some chocolates and a Jordan shirt for Derek’s son.

“Derek’s invited a friend of his to dinner as well,” I said. It was time. I told him the Brian story in broad strokes—the bet, the surgery, how he’d kept the implants. He frowned and said “Oh dear” a few times. I reassured him that this was just for a story. A work thing.

“When he goes in the street like that, don’t people pass comment?” Dad said.

“I guess, I don’t know.”

He went quiet for a moment. “OK, let’s see,” he said. “I won’t say anything, don’t worry.”

Derek lived in one of those tract homes in the burbs, his place a clone of his neighbor’s but for the number on the door. But in Vegas, the outward uniformity masks all kinds of madness. Brian wasn’t there when we arrived. It was just Derek in his Tommy Bahamas, his two scampering kids, and his pretty wife Lily with her thick Sofia Vergara accent. “Oh, how sweet!” she beamed. “You take your Daddy on a holiday. What a good son!”

We got the tour. As expected, Dad asked about the square footage, the down payment, the monthly outgoings for utilities. But Derek didn’t mind. He was proud. “See Pops! All this from gambling!” He showed us his “office,” a bank of computer screens where he plays six games at once. “Online poker’s where the action is now,” he said. “It’s where the idiots go. A fool and his money and all that.”

“Arjun doesn’t play this type of gambling, does he?” Dad said.

“No, it’s not really a job for Arjun like it is for me.”

“Yes, because he doesn’t have all these computers!” Dad became animated. “He doesn’t take it in a professional attitude. Like this office.”

“Well, I’ve got Lily and the kids to support. She likes a mall, my wife.”

“Yes, like Sanju,” Dad said, not quite keeping up. “He isn’t just writing here and there. He is married and settled and doing his work seriously. Like a job.”

Derek and I nodded in agreement, not sure whether he’d finished or not.

“Speaking of jobs,” Derek said, “I think Lily needs a hand in the kitchen.” And as we went down, he took me aside and whispered. “By the way, Brian called, sends his apologies.”

Sweet relief. “Oh, it’s totally fine, we—”

“No, he’s coming, he’s just late. Had to get his tits waxed.”

“Of course.”

“Because his dress is low cut.”

“Appreciate the update.”

When the doorbell rang, we all looked up. But Brian was nothing like I’d expected. Ruddy and blonde, he came bursting through the door in a rustling purple shell suit which he’d zipped up to his chin. If there were breasts under there, they were firmly taped down. He was full of noise, ranting about how the freeway was still one lane on the turnpike and councilman so-and-so. Whatever relief I felt at his outfit was dispelled by his rowdy demeanor—anything could happen with this guy.

“I tell you it’s a mess!” he declared in conclusion, and plonked himself at the head of the table.

Derek was delighted. “Here, Brian, meet Sanjiv. He writes for GQ.”

“OK GQ. That’s fashion, correct?” Brian said. “Very good. I know everything about fashion, as you can tell from my outfit here. I’m just kidding. This was $12. Not bad right? It’s just clothes, it’s not important. It’s what’s inside that counts, am I right? And you must be the father, I assume?”

He gave Dad’s hand a vigorous shake. “Well can I just say it’s nice to have a bit of experience at the table. Some wisdom for a change! So, what brings you here, you checking up on your boy I assume? And so you should. I mean look, he’s mixed up with Derek here, who hasn’t done a hard day’s work in his life. A degenerate gambler I tell you!”

“Here, pipe down a second Brian. Guess who he interviewed today, go on,” Derek said.“Floyd Mayweather.”

“Oh, that guy, I can’t stand him. That guy’s a big mouth! He won’t stop talking! And if there’s one thing I can’t stand it’s a big mouth. Isn’t that right Lily? So, what did Pops do? Did you go?”

Dad had a frozen smile on his face, trying desperately to keep up.

“He’s asking if you went to the interview with me,” I explained.

“Oh no. I stayed in hotel,” Dad said.

“It wasn’t ‘Take Your Dad to Work Day’?” Brian roared.

“That’s a good idea actually,” Derek said, filling everyone’s glass. “My Dad would be like, take a longer lunch, son, don’t work so hard.”

Brian slapped the table. “Yeah! Ask her out, that girl in the typing pool.”

“Typing pool?” Derek shook his head. “Shows how many jobs you’ve had.”

It was a bawdy, noisy evening, the banter just pinging around the table. Too quick for “Pops” and me too at times, but that was OK. Brian and Derek made sure to slow the train from time to time, to include him. It was sweet. See Dad, my friends are nice. No one mentioned the breasts, which was good, but Arjun came up. Brian hadn’t met him yet, and he had a hundred questions, many of which Dad could answer. He had a moment at the table. Everyone leaned in to listen, and we heard it all—the love marriage, the bitter Indian parents, the divorce, the heartbreak, the gambling.

“I thought he looked wobbly,” said Derek. “He bets loose, there’s no strategy.”

Brian sucked his teeth. “We’ve seen this movie before, haven’t we Derek? It doesn’t end well.”

We came to a consensus—that Arjun should return to Antwerp and reconcile with his parents. His parents should apologize, and he should forgive them. There—the world put to rights.

“You only have one family,” Dad said. The wine had unshackled the gates.

“See! That’s what I’m talking about!” Brian proclaimed. “The wisdom of our elders! Listen Pops, I just want to check this one thing.” He pulled a playing card from Dad’s shirt pocket. “I thought so. You’ve been stealing my cards.”

“Oh!” Dad looked alarmed. “No, I didn’t steal it. I was just sitting here.”

“That’s OK, maybe you put it there without thinking. Oh look, there’s another one.” Brian pulled another card from his pocket. “I see what you’re up to.”

Dad giggled. That sound again. It turned out that Brian was, on top of everything else, an expert at close card magic, and for a good twenty minutes, he put on a show. We were all gathered around at first, but then Lily went upstairs to put the kids to bed, and Derek and I went out into the back yard for a smoke, leaving Brian and Dad at the table, a sight I’d never have imagined. Brian in his shell suit, pulling out trick after trick, and Dad, flush with wine, trying to guess how it was done.

I’d always seen him as a bully, the ogre of my childhood, but Brian quite liked him, and so did Derek and Arjun. They saw an amicable old man who meant well, and maybe he was, maybe he’d changed—the regrets had stacked up and he’d come to make amends, to try at least. And if he could change, then so could I. Isn’t that the way things worked? Me being half of him. I had thought of Dad as a grim foreshadowing of my future, but standing at the pool with Derek, watching Brian and Dad in the living room, even ordinary thoughts began to pierce me—that maybe Dad had been deformed by the bitterness of our home just like the rest of us. And surely my rejection of him had been a part of that.

“I’m going to cancel the flight tomorrow,” I said.

“Oh yeah?” Derek pulled out his phone. “Want me to extend your stay at the MGM?” His eyes lit up, tickled by the kindness and the mischief both.

“I’m going to take the old man to see the Grand Canyon.”

This last few months, I’ve done a couple of pieces for the Sunday Telegraph Magazine that I want to share with you. It’s nice to be back in the weekend supplements, where it all started. My first published piece appeared in the Weekend Guardian, back in the early 90s, a comic thing about being short.

Anyway, they’re about cults, which are right up my street. (Maybe literally, I live in LA.) My first exposure was in the ‘Mormon polygamist space’ up in Utah and Arizona. I went to report on the whole Warren Jeffs situation which led to a book about polygamy, living on what you could call a ‘compound’, and many fascinating experiences with followers and prophets. (Secrets & Wives, the Hidden World of Mormon Polygamy is out now!)

With cults, I think the first fascination is always that otherwise sensible, educated people willingly submit to these often mad beliefs and sociopathic leaders. Like frogs in a pot these doctors and lawyers succumb to age-old techniques of manipulation and coercion, the many spokes of thought reform, until they find the yoke is around their necks. Why and how does this happen? What are the mechanisms of brainwashing? What can be done?

We live in cultish times. Just look at the “Trending Documentaries on Netflix”. Or the American President. The long decline of religion has left a vacuum of purpose and belonging, then technology fragmented us further, and cults have flourished in this habitat, preying on a disillusioned public with promises of special knowledge, chosen membership, and a new dawn. When the mainstream feels broken, the fringe swoops in. As Antonio Gramsci said, “now is the time for monsters”.

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Danny Rensch, The Chess Prodigy

Here’s a gift-link for the Danny Rensch story.

The first of these two pieces is about Danny Rensch, who was raised in a cult in Arizona that revolved around a trance medium named Trina Kamp. Trina would channel a 15^th century Englishman named Duran—who was likely invented from whole cloth—and according to his edicts, families were broken up, wives transferred and so on. Cults were culting as they do. Danny grew up this way. But he had a preternatural ability in chess, which the cult saw as an opportunity to bring glory to their group. So the leader employed an old Russian grandmaster, a boorish drunk, to mentor Danny, and make him a champion. Alienated from his own father, and his mother in the end, Danny saw the Russian as something of a substitute parent figure. Until, he finally broke away, that is, and became a huge corporate success at Chess.com.

It’s an extraordinary story, all told in his memoir Dark Squares, and certainly fit for a movie. Educated meets Queen’s Gambit, the marketing says. And I found Danny in a delicate, conflicted place when we met, still unable, after all these years, to fully come to terms with his cult upbringing. As I write in the piece: “When you’re born into indoctrination, to call the whole thing a sham is to tear down your own scaffolding.”

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Rick Ross, The Cult Deprogrammer

Here’s a gift-link for the Rick Ross story.

My second cult story is about Rick Ross. Not the rapper, the famous cult deprogrammer. It came out yesterday, February 15^th. I think of Rick as an American original, the foremost cult deprogrammer in the cultiest country on earth. He has been at the sharp end of the problem for 40 years or so, and as you’ll see from the interview he has a lot to tell us about the world we currently live in.

I went to visit him at his home in Tucson, and we spoke for hours. He’s a generous storyteller. And I came away with more material than I could fit into the space allotted. So I’m going to share some of that material here as a kind of appendix.

At the risk of sounding like one of those earnest advisories at the start of a TV shows, if you know of anyone who might be in a cult, and you’re looking for ways to extricate them, there’s some great advice in this piece. Extrication is Rick’s specialty.

Here’s the supplementary stuff:

1. The MAGA ‘Cult’

Rick doesn’t think MAGA is strictly a cult. Cult-like, sure, but according to the precise definitions of a destructive cult, it doesn’t quite qualify:

“The Republicans in Congress are going to overrule his vetoes on two legislative bills. They forced him to tell Pam Bondi to release the Epstein files. Marjorie Taylor Greene turned on him. They’re not brainwashed. People sometimes think that the word ‘cult’ is a magic bullet, it explains away the problem. But I’ve been in situations where I’ve had to say, ‘sorry, your son is not in a cult. He may have a mental illness, he might be bipolar or schizophrenic, but you don’t want to deal with the reality of this long term problem he has.’ It’s the same with America. There’s a large group of the electorate that genuinely don’t believe in integration, they don’t want white people to lose the majority, they don’t want women to control their own bodies and all the rest. But here’s the thing—these people have always been with us.”

2. America, The Most Fertile Landscape For Cults In The World

Rick has travelled the world deprogramming cult victims and lecturing at universities. And there’s just no competition. America is the perfect cult terroir. Leave aside the credulity of a nation convinced of its own divine purpose that longs to believe, that’s another issue. The legal framework is what matters here.

“In Asia, they’re cracking down. Japan is cracking down on cults. Korea too. China has cracked down. And sure, they get criticized for suppressing freedom of religion, but I’ve been there, I’ve met ex-cult members, and what they’re doing is working. It’s being replicated in Vietnam, Australia, New Zealand. And Europe and the UK have done more to regulate and deal with cults too.

“England denies charitable status, and you can’t take money out of the country. And cults can’t use the courts in the UK like they can in the States. If Nxivm spends $5 million suing me in the States, and they lose, all they lose is the $5 million. They don’t have to pay my costs. But in the UK, a frivolous lawsuit means they would have to pay my legal fees and my costs too.

“So the US is the best place for a cult to set up shop. You might be worldwide online but set your brick and mortar operation in the US and you’ll get religious tax exempt status and you’ll get all kinds of immunities and protections you would not get in other countries.

“In fact, a lot of cult leaders have fled China with millions of dollars and landed in the United States, and said, ‘help me, I’m being persecuted by the Chinese government.’ And we give them asylum. Then they buy a mansion and get tax exempt status as a religious nonprofit.”

Note: Falun Gong vehemently denies that it is a cult, and that its leader Li Hongzhi is a cult leader. The connection between Falun Gong and the dance troupe Shen Yun is described in this New York Times article.

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3. Physician Heal Thyself

The most stunning aspect of Rick’s story is the colossal irony of his life, which I touch upon in the piece at the end. He too was in a ‘cult’ of sorts. An abusive and controlling relationship is cult-like in many ways. The lovebombing, the gaslighting, the manipulation and abuse. That a world expert in these things couldn’t tell that they were happening to him tells a powerful story about how difficult it is to get perspective on your own life.

So how did Rick finally realize that his boyfriend-turned-husband John (name changed) was abusive and controlling? It was a series of clues that seem so obvious in retrospect, but it took them all, an accumulation. Here are a few:

i) Rob Porter’s Ex-Wife on Anderson Cooper

“The thing about John, everyone loved him. My mom thought he was great, ‘oh he’s so charming.’ Now, do you remember Rob Porter? He worked for Orrin Hatch, the senator from Utah. He was going to be Trump’s chief of staff, he was highly respected. But then his two ex-wives went public. First wife: ‘he beat me up’. Second wife: ‘he tried to beat me up, but I ran.’ He was horrible. And I remember the second wife was saying ‘oh everybody loved Rob, he was so well spoken, he dressed beautifully.’ And Anderson Cooper said, ‘but didn’t you tell your own mother?’ and she said, ‘my mom loved Rob.’ I thought ‘oh my God, that’s John.’

“That’s why I always say, how important it is for ex-cult members to talk about what happened. I know there’s some shame, but it’s not about you, it’s about the perpetrator. It’s the cult’s fault. It’s the abuser’s fault, never the victim’s.”

ii) The Belittling

“It happened in so many ways. Like one time, I had major neck surgery, and I had just come home from hospital, with a neck brace and a fistful of Vicodin to take. I really couldn’t manage on my own, but John went to work anyway. And when I took the dog out to pee, I locked myself out. It was awful, I was out there for hours before the locksmith came. When John came home I told him about it, and he screamed at me. ‘How stupid are you? How could you do something so stupid?’ And that’s what I thought. I really was stupid.

“Another time, I was on a walk with my neighbor, after my book came out, and she said, ‘what does John think?’ I said, ‘oh he hasn’t read it. He never watches my shows or reads the articles I’m in.’ And she was shocked. But this is what happens in cults. People are belittled. They’re made to feel like nothing.”

“One question I ask people who are in a cult is ‘did you feel that you could ever be good enough? Wasn’t there always something that needed to be fixed? And didn’t that make that person or group indispensable?’

“Once they recognize that pattern I ask them—do you think that they’re doing that because they like you? Is that for your benefit? Or are they trying to engender dependency and make you feel incompetent?”

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4. A Reading List

Rick cited a number of core works about cults, mind control, and ways that it can be countered.

Cult Formation, a paper by Robert J Lifton

It cites the 3 core criteria for a destructive cult. 1) a totalitarian leader that is beyond accountability, 2) demonstrable use of thought reform techniques, and 3) a harmful effect.

Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism, by Robert J Lifton

Outlines the 8 criteria for thought reform, including things like the use of public confession to create vulnerability and dependency on the group, the demand for an impossible standard of perfection and so on.

Influence - The Psychology of Persuasion, by Robert Cialdini

Cialdini describes the 6 elements of influence, which are neither good nor bad. But important to establish before you can identify what cults do, which is exert undue influence.

Cults In Our Midst, by Margaret Singer

Margaret Singer was a friend of Rick’s. A psychologist and pioneer in the fields of brainwashing and coercive persuasion, she had a storied career, that included interviewing Charles Manson, and wrote the seminal Cults In Our Midst in 1996.

Snapping - America’s Epidemic of Sudden Personality Change, by Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman

Written in 1978, this book describes a theory of conversion, either to or from a cult or religion, or even a political ideology.

Coercive Persuasion - by Edgar Schein

A critical 1961 study by MIT professor Schein of the brainwashing techniques employed on American prisoners, by the Chinese Communist party

In the wake of Honnold’s latest astonishing feat of free climbing the Taipei 101 skyscraper, I thought I’d share the story of my day with him back in 2012 when I profiled him for Esquire. This was around the time of Free Solo, one of his early films, and he was emerging as one of the most incredible athletes of our time.

Below are two pieces that came out of that day. The first is the Esquire piece, the second is a coda about my own fish-out-of-water experience in his world. The running theme is a fear of dying, something that Honnold appears to have conquered. But not me.

———————————————

Eek A Mouse

It was 10pm in the black of night in Yosemite National Park, when Alex Honnold felt the first sharp tweak of fear. He saw a mouse.

No one could accuse Honnold of scaring easily but he was 400ft up a 3000ft wall at the time, the world famous El Capitan, an imperious sheer cliff of granite, as tall as ten Big Bens. And even though 400ft is a piffling altitude for the likes of Honnold, it’ll still kill you if you fall, which is always possible when you’re up there without ropes or aids or a partner, a style known as ‘free soloing’. Not for the first time, Honnold was on the ultimate precipice - one slip, one mishap, one bite from a mouse, and he would die.

“Things were already going wrong,” he tells me later. “The rock was damp because it had dumped rain two days earlier, and I forgot my chalk bag - you need chalk to dry your hands. Also, for climbers, a chalk bag is like a psychological crutch. Whenever you’re nervous, you chalk up.”

Normally, he would have hiked back to the van to get his chalk bag, but that would have taken too long. He was attempting to climb the Triple — the three biggest walls in Yosemite — in 24 hours. And the clock was ticking. He’d started with Mt Watkins (2000ft) at 4.30pm that day, when the wall went into the shade. The plan was to climb El Capitan through the night, and then Half Dome (2000ft) the following morning.

And yet, there he was, alone on a wall in the darkness, sensing his fear flutter inside him like a flock of gulls. His position was awkward. He clung onto a diagonal crack with both hands, with his left foot wedged in below at such an angle that he couldn’t see it, even with a headlamp. The only way forward was this one hold above him, a ‘pod’, the very hold that the mouse had scurried into. And he couldn’t flush him out – he slapped the rock, he whistled, nothing was working.

“I didn’t want to get bitten. My rational brain knew that the mouse was more scared of me than I was of him. But that’s how fear works. When a few little things go wrong, it’s easy to start down that road where you build this escalating sense of panic, like, ‘oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck, I don’t know what to do…’”

It took him thirty long seconds to, as he puts it, “nip that shit in the bud” – to convince himself that the wet walls, the no-chalk, the mouse, none of this mattered. And he went on to make history. He topped El Capitan at 3.30am, free soloing most of it but using aids for the tougher sections. He then hiked down, drove over to Half Dome and scaled that before lunchtime.

“The Greatest Rock Climber Ever”

It’s hard for a non-climber to appreciate how impressive this is. Rock climbing is a rarefied and impenetrable sport in some ways. It combines the primal simplicity of a man on a wall with all the sub-categories and technical lingo of a niche and obsessive subculture. The greatest climbers are virtual unknowns, and the greatest feats are scarcely witnessed by anyone. There’s no Olympic event or national team. And though the sport began with Victorian mountaineers in the Alps, it feels young and new, in part because successive generations, thanks to better equipment and training, keep raising the bar so dramatically, year upon year.

Take Honnold’s Triple. For context, any one of these walls would take several days for a skilled climber. In fact, in 1957, it was considered a pinnacle achievement when a team led by Royal Robbins took 5 days to summit the Half Dome alone. As for the Nose Route of El Capitan, the first person to free climb it – using ropes only for safety – was Lynn Hill in 1994, who took 23 hours. A decade later, Tommy Caldwell accomplished Hill’s feat in 12 hours. To date, the closest anyone has come to Honnold’s Triple was in 2002, when Dean Potter free-climbed both El Capitan and Half Dome in 23 hours.

Honnold speed-climbed all three in 18 hours.

Ask most climbers about Honnold and you’ll hear words like “insane”, “incredible” and “not human”. But whether he’s the best rock climber alive depends on your definition. By his own admission, he’s not the most technically skilled. While some, like Chris Sharma, can climb pitches that are graded 5.15 in difficulty, Honnold’s limit is 5.14.

But rock climbing tests more than just skill. Unlike most sports, climbers are routinely required to overcome their fear of death, to restrain the galloping panic that can begin when a mouse runs into your hold. And this is where Honnold reigns – he is the world’s foremost free soloist, a style of climbing so pure and terrifying that only a tiny fraction of climbers even dare to attempt it.

Free soloists climb without ropes – that is, they risk death at every moment. It’s already an irresistible metaphor for a human speck to scale a colossal wall, but when that speck has no safety rope, it becomes something epic and astonishing. Honnold’s most celebrated free-soloing accomplishment was Half Dome in September 2008. No one witnessed it, but when he recreated a moment for a short film entitled Alone On The Wall, it was so gripping that it led to stories in National Geographic, Outside, and 60 minutes. His accomplishment of the Triple will only inch him inexorably towards his next goal, one that he has been talking about for years – to free solo El Capitan, a feat that is almost beyond comprehension. El Cap is as high as three Eiffel Towers.

“It’s the next logical step, but it’s a freaking big one,” he says. “It would take nearly five hours, and a bunch of the hard stuff is up at the top. I don’t know. Someone’s going to do it.” [Note: Honnold did this 5 years after this piece came out, in 2017]

Race-car drivers and big wave surfers risk death too, but they have at least the illusion of safety – whether it’s helmets and roll cages, or just the knowledge that they’ve wiped out before and survived. There is no such comfort for Honnold. He slips, he dies. The end.

“For surfers, the moments of peril last minutes,” says Peter Mortimer, of Sender Films, who shot Honnold’s Triple. “Alex has to maintain perfect concentration for hours. That’s why free-soloists are so incredible. Climbing is about boldness as well as strength. And Alex’s boldness and vision are on such a level that, for a lot of us, he’s the greatest rock climber ever. And he’s only 26.”

“It’s true. My balls are pretty freaking huge.”

A few hours after he finishes the Triple, I meet Alex outside my hotel in Yosemite. We planned to hang out for a few days, so I drove up from Los Angeles. But, typically, he didn’t tell me about the Triple – he never announces this kind of thing until after it’s over. So I have no idea what he’s just done. He just looks like some skinny kid in flip flops, shorts and a hoodie, standing in the car park looking a bit sunburnt and spaced out.

“Dude, I’m like crushed right now,” he says. “I could use some food, but after that I’m going to have to crash.”

As we eat, the enormity of his achievement becomes clear. But I have to dig it out of him. After three days with him, I think Honnold may be the most humble and extraordinary person I’ve ever met. Nothing about him suggests “elite athlete”. His hands are broad, his fingers wide and thick, but other than that, he looks unremarkable – a slim 5’11, 160lbs, with sticky-out ears. He’s intelligent and well read, funny and fluent in the Cali-lingo of “dude”, “heinous”, “sick” and “gnarly”. He’s utterly driven and clean-living – he’s never had a drink because “I don’t see the point” - and he’s apparently unmoved by material comforts. After we ate, that first night, he spent the night on a mattress in a shabby white van in the car park where he’s lived for five years now.

“It’s perfectly functional,” he says, pointing to a little gas hob, and the storage under his bed. There are climbing ropes and carabiners (climbing hooks) all over the floor, a cooking pot and boxes of Clif energy bars. “A lot of climbers live in their vans. It’s just easier.”

He’s up at seven the next morning, painting antihydral paste on his fingertips to stop them sweating, and sanding down any loose shreds of skin. His hands, he says, are his only physical advantage: “The skin is basically indestructible. I never get cut.”

Incredibly, on the day after finishing the Triple, he’s about to climb again. Only it’ll be “supermellow” this time, nothing “extreme” or “hardcore” – just a photoshoot with a sponsor, the brand Black Diamond. He has six sponsors – The North Face, Black Diamond, La Sportiva, Clif, New England Ropes, and recently, Ball Watch, a luxury watch company, which gave him a $3000 watch. “I feel like a total douche,” he says. “That thing’s worth more than my van.”

Honnold has a purist’s suspicion of marketing departments and PR. He’s not at all seduced by what he calls “the bullshit”. But his sponsors provide him with a salary and a travel budget, which given his simple needs, affords him a lifestyle that is, he says, “pretty fucking awesome.”

Last year he travelled to Morocco, England, France, Spain, Chile, Mexico, Poland and Canada. The year before was Chad, Jordan, Israel, Turkey, Greece, China… He mostly goes where he wants, when he wants, with no strict agenda, and in between, he lives in his van, climbing all over the US and crashing occasionally at his mom’s place in Sacramento, his only permanent address, where he spends “maybe 14 days per year.”

A materialist would milk his fame, and pursue a van sponsor, at least. “But this van works fine!” he says. “And we’re way too consumerist in this country, anyway.” Besides, he doesn’t love being a celebrity. “It’s funny to get sick of people telling you how inspiring you are, but I mean, it’s just rock climbing. I didn’t save the world.”

You’re not proud of your achievements?

“No, I am, I guess, but that’s what I do. I’m a climber. Everyone’s got their thing. I could never hit 30 free throws in a row, but a basketball player would think that was trivial.”

Lebron doesn’t die if he misses. Free soloing and free throws aren’t the same. One takes courage. Like his fans say, ‘it must be hard climbing with balls that big.’

He grins. “It’s true. My balls are pretty freaking huge. But I wouldn’t say courage. Courage is doing something that you don’t want to do, like a soldier. I want to be half way up a mountain. It’s awesome.”

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“Most free soloists die. And they die on easy pitches, not hard ones.”

While we’re at it, there are a few misconceptions about free-soloing that he’d like to address. Firstly, he only free solos a few times a year – most of the time he uses ropes like everyone else. Secondly, he’s not risk-addicted and he doesn’t have a death wish. And thirdly, it isn’t that dangerous anyway.

“Look, I wouldn’t free solo something that I wasn’t confident about. I want to play with my grandkids. I’m saving for my retirement. The reason I do these long solo climbs is because it’s a cool way to climb. I like the simplicity. You don’t have any gear on you, you don’t have a partner, you move faster.”

One of Honnold’s heroes, Peter Croft talks about flow. Croft was the first man to free solo the Astroman wall in Yosemite (5.11), among other accomplishments. “I compare it to a runner’s high,” he says. “With ropes and a partner, you’re always being interrupted, but with free soloing, you can just go. It’s just you on the rock reacting to what’s going on. I’m so focused that when I get to the top, everything looks different, the colors, the light.”

Honnold is less poetic. “I’m more focused, for sure, but it isn’t like all of a sudden the harps strum and you’re in some magical state.” A self-described militant atheist who exclusively reads non-fiction, he isn’t inclined to rhapsodize. As he drives from one wall to the next, he points at the road. “Look, I’m at risk of dying right now.” And he’s right – he’s slaloming around mountain bends, steering with his knee, checking his iPhone with one hand and eating a banana with the other. “Driving is probably the most dangerous thing I do. One momentary lapse and we’re both dead. We’re always at risk. And we’re all going to die eventually anyway, so you may as well lead the life you hoped to lead.”

Not all climbers agree. Tommy Caldwell – Honnold describes him as “a much better climber than me” – doesn’t mince his words. “What Alex does is amazing but I will never free solo. I’ve fallen unexpectedly many times on easy pitches and if I didn’t have a rope, I’d be dead.”

Before Honnold climbed the Triple alone, he free-climbed it with Caldwell, and during that climb, Caldwell fell twice. “Alex just says, ‘that’s never happened to me…’ And I think that to be that good, you have to think that way. Alex and Peter have this calm way about them – they don’t see free soloing as some conversation with death or enlightening experience. But the fact is, most serious free soloists die. And they die on easy pitches, not hard ones.”

In the last 40 years, nine Americans have raised the bar on free soloing, and five are now dead. The most recent was John Bachar in 2009, a close friend of Croft’s, who died on a route he’d free soloed many times before.

“I know the risks,” says Honnold. “I’ve fallen sometimes when I haven’t expected to, with a rope on, too. But that’s with a rope, you know? I trust myself that, when it really matters, I won’t fuck up.”

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‘I’m scared, I’m really scared, oh God oh God oh God…’

All Alex ever wanted to do was climb. His mum Deirdre says, “even as a toddler, he always wanted to be high up. I’d turn my back and he’d be on top of the refrigerator or the closet.” His dad would take him to the local climbing gym in the suburbs of Sacramento, and the obsession took hold. So much so that come his first year at the University of Berkeley, he placed 2^nd in the youth national rock climbing championships and was looking forward to the world championships in Scotland later that year.

That was the year it all changed for Honnold. His folks were both teachers, and he’d aced high school, but he had no interest in college. He hardly showed up for lectures. Then his dad died of a heart attack, leaving Alex with a chunk of money, supposedly to finish his education. But Alex had other ideas. “Dad was part of the pressure to go to college in the first place. So suddenly, he’s gone, I have this opportunity to go to Europe and enough money to live on the road for a while…”

He did poorly in Scotland, coming 39^th. But when he returned, he knew what he wanted. His Mom gave him her Chevy Minivan, and for two years he drove around the American West climbing with whomever he could find. And where he didn’t know anyone, or was too intimidated to make friends, he climbed alone.

“I must have free soloed thousands of pitches,” he says. “And I had all kinds of fucked-up experiences, climbing the wrong route, and getting really scared. But I learned that, to a large extent, the cruxing was self-imposed”. “Cruxing” is climber-talk for those moments of difficulty, fear and panic – those times when, as Honnold says, “you go ‘I’m scared, I’m really scared, oh God oh God oh God…’”

He emerged from this period in 2007 as a world class free soloist, conquering big walls in times that made the climbing community sit up and take notice. And then he scaled Half Dome in September 2008, an ascent which so captured the imagination that it essentially launched him as a pro-climber.

Half Dome has also given Honnold perhaps his most gripping climbing story. It was a moment towards the end when he was cruxing badly on a smooth slab at an 80 degree incline. There were just no good holds available. At his level, he’d happily put all of his weight on an edge as slim as a dime so long as it was sharp, but all he could find were smooth, rounded dimples. Could he trust them? If he slipped, he’d slide down the slab and fall to his death. And yet he was so close to the peak – he was 1900ft up – that he could hear the tourists at the top.

“I’d been stuck in that position when I practiced it, that was the thing,” he says. “I just thought I’d find another way when the time came. But I couldn’t. So I started trying all these other little footholds and rejecting them, because they were even worse.”

There was, however, a bolt within reach, with a big carabiner attached, left by a previous climber. He could easily grab the carabiner and hoist himself up. “But I didn’t want to climb all the way up there only to cheat on one move. And at the same time I was like, ‘how fucking dumb would it be to slide off this mountain when there’s a carabiner right there?’”

In the end, he compromised. Heart racing, breath-quickening, he touched his finger on the bolt, so that if he started slipping, he could grab it. He didn’t need to in the end. And he emerged at the top, pumped and shirtless.

“It was so surreal. I was all stoked, and all these people were up there eating sandwiches and talking on cellphones. They didn’t even notice me because I didn’t have any climbing gear on. I just looked like some idiot who got lost. So I just took off my climbing shoes and started hiking down. And then all these people came up to me saying, ‘woah you’re hiking barefoot! That’s hardcore!’ I was like, ‘whatever dude. You have no idea.’”

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Not Only Sick, But Heinous

The ‘supermellow’ day of shooting turns out to involve hiking up to the rock face, climbing, hiking down, and then doing it again at another face. And another, and another, until sunset. For this soft-bellied suburbanite, the hikes alone are murder. But Honnold is having fun. He laughs when the Black Diamond Team ask him to wear a helmet, he laughs: “I know I’m all about safety first, guys, but this is retarded.” He wears it anyway and spiders easily up a wall that has just turned to gold thanks to a sunset that, by common consensus, is not only sick but heinous.

By nightfall, we’re back in his van, heading back to my hotel. He’s just dropping me off there, he doesn’t have a reservation. The Black Diamond team is staying elsewhere. Only Honnold, the star athlete, is without a proper room for the night, not that he cares. He’s talking about his summer plans.

We pull into the car park. He looks pleased. It’s an easy place to park for the night – plenty of room, no watchmen to give him hassle.

“You see?” he says. “Not everything in my life is super-intense. Sometimes I just do these boring photoshoots all day. I swear a lot of the aura around my life is shit that people project onto it. The truth is way less exciting. Your article should say, ‘I met this dude, he’s totally mellow and he trains real hard and climbs quite well. The end.”’

OK, Alex. I’ll say that.

“Oh and dude, can I get a quick shower in your room, and charge my laptop?”

This is the second piece, about how I came unstuck on the mountain, embarrassingly so.

Softcore And The Mountain Men

I shouldn’t be here. Wherever “here” is. All I can tell you – and the rescue services if I could call them – is that I’m somewhere in the breathless altitude of Tuolomne, just east of Yosemite National Park. I came here with a crew from Black Diamond who are going to be shooting a campaign with Alex Honnold, but they all marched off up the mountain a long time ago. And I can’t see them anymore. All I can see is a load of trees and rocks and bushes in all directions, all of it steep and forbidding. I’m a speck here, lost among bears and snakes and monsters. And as it starts to get dark, I may as well be wrapped in a brown paper bag with soy sauce and napkins.

That was three hours ago. Three going on five, going on 127 Hours starring James Franco.

For the first two hours, I tried to keep climbing. I listened to that voice that said, “if you find the other guys, you’re less likely to get savaged by bears.” But I kept climbing up cul de sacs and followed ledges to edges that just fell off and died. And when I tried to retrace my steps, I ended up somewhere different. It was never quite the same rock or the same tree. I wasn’t going around in a circle so much as a spiral, and I never got back to where I started. Although in a way, I suppose did.

The panic hasn’t set in yet. There’s still time before darkness descends and I doing all the things - I’m breathing, I’m staying calm etc. But the more I tell myself to “stay calm”, the more I sound like I’m panicking. Which… OK, it

Here’s what Alex told me. He said, “dude, let’s hang out while I do some press shots with Black Diamond, they’re a sponsor. We’re going to take some pictures in Yosemite, it’s going to be supermellow. You should probably bring a book or something because most of the day, you’re going to be just hanging out while I climb.”

A mellow day in the country, I can handle. So I brought my little pot pipe, some magazines and a couple of bags of Kettle Chips in case of munchies between meals. I couldn’t wait. The scenery looked gorgeous on the drive up.

But then we met the Black Diamond crew, every one of them in a puffy jacket and proper boots. They were looking at maps and saying “we’ll go here for this shot and there for that shot” and no one mentioned a leisurely lunch along the way. As they packed their rucksacks with sandwiches and trail mix and Gatorade, they looked at my little laptop bag with its dainty little side pockets and asked politely: “hey, you want to borrow a rucksack? Might be easier for the hike.”

What hike?

“We have to hike to the rock face for Alex to climb. About forty minutes, no big deal.”

I knew right then I was fucked. I felt it in my gut. I should have bailed on the spot and booked a B&B or something. Instead, I took their rucksack, and put my laptop bag in it, which made it kind of lopsided. And I pretended that everything was just fine.

Hike #1 started beautifully. They all set off, trudging quietly up into the woods, and I’m marching alongside, trying to crack jokes and make friends. But after two minutes—two—I’m wheezing like Muttley, choking for oxygen, and lagging badly. The fat kid on cross country. The pity case, the liability, the first to get eaten. There was one bit where the snow had hardened and with my smooth-soled sneakers, I came sliding back down into the dirt with every step. “Fucking bollocks fuck.” Then a girl called Sandra said: “Kick your toes into the snow to make a step and push up.” Turned out, I didn’t just have the wrong shoes, I didn’t know the most basic techniques of… walking.

I’m a different tribe. I come from a planet of wine tastings and memory foam in the endless summer of LA. This lot are from Utah and Colorado where they ski and climb and grapple with nature. Immeasurably tougher and fitter, and wilder too, I never heard so much burping and farting. Proper growlers and no one giggles. Maybe farts aren’t funny in the mountains. Maybe expelling waste gases is a matter of survival.

They have their own language which I don’t fully understand – words like “beta”, “cruxing”, “burly” and “rally”. But “hardcore”, that one I know. Outdoors types love a bit of hardcore. So I asked, trying to endear myself in my ineptitude, “does that make me softcore?” And it stuck. Softcore. And Softcore gets treated like a lady. The photographer, Burr, offered to walk with me on the hikes, setting off earlier so we didn’t slow everyone down. Nice guy Burr, even offered to carry my rucksack in the steep parts.

But today, the schedule was too tight. They had to get the afternoon light, and there wasn’t time to walk me up at a ladylike pace. So I got left behind. And now I’m stuck, half way up a hill, in the dense woods, trying not to let the dark thoughts breach the levees.

Far as I can tell, my options are:

1) Stay put until I hear their voices, and then start hitting the high notes like this guy.

2) Accept that I may never hear a human voice again, so better to just write a note to whomever finds what’s left of me after the bears.

3) Go down to the road. At least I can see it from here. Be a man, Softcore, your time has come.

Oh the road! It looks so beautiful from here. A pristine flatland of tarmac and white lines, so much more picturesque than all those blah blah mountains and lakes. Nature is an asshole. It lures you in with peaks and ponds and gentle, duck-down names like Cloud’s Rest but the closer you come, the meaner it gets. It’s granite and rabies and murder. It feeds you to the worms. All I want is to return to my high crime gang neighborhood in LA. I’ll be safe there.

I spot a ridge down below that runs diagonally towards the tarmac though I can’t tell whether it reaches. It’s not the way we came, but so what? At this point, it’s my only hope. So fuck it, I’m going to try. He who dares, Rodney. And even if it doesn’t work, I’ll at least be visible to emergency services.

But the further I go down this ridge, the hairier it gets. Your eyes tell lies from up high. What looks smooth may be nobbled. Gentle slopes have steep and plunging dips. And towards the end, I’m in a predicament. Just fifty feet from the street but this last stretch is treacherous, slick with water.

I crouch down and cling to the rock on one side, like I’m clutching a banister with both hands and trying to get traction with my feet on the way. But the banister is a jagged Toblerone of wet rock, and my feet can’t always find support. At times, I’m just hanging there by my fingers, heart pounding, and my backpack swiveling awkwardly from right to left shoulder, throwing my balance completely.

I’m feeling the strain now. This isn’t a position I can hold. So, clinging on with my right hand, I unclip the pack from my waist, switch to my left hand, and then let the thing drop. Goodbye laptop. And I claw down a few more feet until the ridge just stops. My knuckles are bleeding at this point, the blood running down the rock with the water. And it’s getting harder and harder to keep hold. My fingers are sliding.

There are two choices – either just slide off, and hope I land somewhat upright, or jump now, however high up I am. And there’s no choice really. I have to jump and quickly. Push myself off the wall and turn around mid air so that I land on my front and not my back.

I’m sure it looks comical from the road – a little Indian guy clinging desperately to a rock barely twenty feet up from the street. But to me, it’s epic. And when I hit the tarmac, feet and hands, like a panther, no scuffing, it feels like a triumph. It turns out, the rucksack is reachable, caught in some roadside shrub, undamaged.

When the guys get back and see me in the van, all bloodied up and shivering, they laugh.

“Softcore, what happened?” Says Burr. “You took a piece out of your finger there.”

I tell the story – how I lost my way, shat myself, and ended up holding on for dear life. And Alex, the greatest rock climber in the world, says “we got a word for that. Vision Quest. That’s like when you’re out hiking on your own and you don’t know where to go, and you’re tired, you’re cold, you don’t want to be there anymore – you just want to be down. We say, ‘oh, I was vision questing’, like, ‘I was just guessing and hoping for the best.’”

It’s absurd that Alex is relating my little drama to his own experiences—hours in freezing temperatures, sometimes without even any shoes. But it goes to show what a nice guy he is. What a mensch. He’s including me in his world.

“Dude, everything’s relative,” he says. “What’s softcore to me is hardcore to you, but it could be the other way around depending on what we’re talking about.”

These are the things that people like Alex say to make people like me feel better. But I know this – my weed survived the tumble. So I’m going to stick my own version of Vision Quest from now on.

Hi Everyone,

It’s been a minute, my apologies. Got waylaid working on this book. For a couple of years I spent Thanksgiving with different iconic American subcultures. I should have continued! These pictures are low-res files shot by the English photographer Chris Anderson (not the Magnum guy), with whom I lost touch several years ago. If you’re out there Chris, get in touch!

Thank you as always for reading, and hopefully I’ll see you in the comments.

Sanjiv

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“We Family Now.”

It was 3am when Billy finally brought the van to a halt. We were in a motel car park beside the freeway, somewhere near Gary, Indiana. Exactly why we’d stopped I couldn’t say, only that when we left the party over two hours ago—me and Chris, the photographer, and Billy and his boss Pimp Chicago. We were supposed to collect two prostitutes from a truck park near the Illinois border, but we sailed past that state line 60 miles ago and still no sign of Gypsy or Aphrodite.

“What did I tell you about pimping? It’s a business, that’s right. And in business you got to pay. Now you want to go to the Players Ball, but you don’t want to handle your business. So what—you trying to pimp us?”

As Billy spoke, Pimp Chicago sat imperially silent in the passenger seat. It’s a pimp’s affectation to have assistants and such, so Billy served variously as his minder, driver, gopher and, on special occasions, his door-opener. He was the Walmart version of that guy who went around holding a parasol for P-Diddy. But he’s also Chicago’s older brother by six years—he was 46 then—a double drop in seniority which has done nothing for his general charm.

“Now Chicago don’t need your money, he got money. Tell me, does he look like a man who needs money?”

In a pumpkin suit, flashing rings and twinkling cherry gators, Pimp Chicago delicately tweaked the tilt of his strawberry hat in a wing mirror. A bony five-two, he put the imp in ‘pimp’, an elfin dandy, dressed for a tap dance.

“But you gotta pay the Bishop,” Billy went on. “Everybody pays that n*****—Snoop Dogg, HBO, everybody. So you making a big problem right now, and this ain’t no game–”

Chicago silenced Billy with a wave and turned briskly to look me in the eye. “Now don’t be scared,” he said, quietly. “Stick with me and the Bishop can’t touch you. We family now—didn’t I invite you in my house, didn’t I introduce you to my mother? Well then.” He pulled his jacket to the side and revealed a handgun tucked into his belt. “You know I carry this, right? So I ain’t scared of no Bishop, I ain’t even scared of no penitentiary. I already did 15 years and I didn’t mind. I go there again tomorrow.”

I first met Pimp Chicago a few days earlier because I wanted to go to the Players Ball, an annual pimp convention from which the press are typically banned. I was originally meant to go with Pimp Domination from Miami but one of his girls had been choked in Las Vegas so he couldn’t afford to travel, what with the hospital bills. Domination passed me onto his pimp friend Whitefolks, but Whitefolks couldn’t get me in, so he introduced me to Pimp Chicago. And for a few days it had been going just fine. But now, not so much. Was he going to rob us? Would he take us back to our hotel at least, or leave us here in the icy nowhere?

“Listen, I’m a get you in that Ball tomorrow,” said Chicago, “but you gotta pay the Bishop. That’s how it is.”

At the first cash machine we found, I withdrew as much as Barclays would permit. The rest, I assured him, would be tomorrow.

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The Bishop’s Last Bash

The year was 2003. A simpler time as Gen Xers like to say. So why am I telling this story now? Because, well, two reasons:

1) It’s Thanksgiving and this is a Thanksgiving story. Just a couple of days before robbing me, Chicago had me over for turkey and fixings (God bless America).

2) It’s as relevant today as it was then. Which is a shame and it points to a problem with liberal identity politics, one that we should probably fix. We think the world changes, and we’re so much more enlightened now. But does it? Are we?

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Hi Everyone,

Usually Minority Report focuses on subcultures and fringe groups, but today, I want to switch gears a bit and talk about immigration in the UK, where nationalism has been rising fast. Flags are being hoisted, people are angry, and a third political party, Reform UK, is rising quickly in the polls. As an immigrant myself, twice over, it’s distressing to see the temperature continue to rise, so I’m hoping that sharing my perspective will help calm things down. Certainly, it’s not a perspective you’ve likely heard from an immigrant.

To be clear, this is about the UK not America, which is a very different animal, immigration-wise, so a lot of this stuff just doesn’t translate. Thank you as always for reading, and hopefully I’ll see you in the comments.

Sanjiv

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Disassembling Assembly

It was the mid 80s. I was at Dulwich College in south London, sitting at the back of the hall for morning assembly. Nudging, sniggering, flicking little pellets at the rows in front. Every day, the same routine. A talk, followed by announcements, then the Lord’s Prayer, and then off we go to class… No running!

But this time the Headmaster paused before “Our Father…” and waited for the Muslim students to file out. All over the hall, Brown kids like me stood up and shuffled down the rows, a pair here, a cluster there, while the rest of us watched, giggling through the awkwardness. The Muslims were separating themselves.

As I remember it, the White kids just shrugged—not everyone was Christian, and anyway if you can get out of Assembly fair play to you. But I was rattled. I’d assumed the Muslim kids were the same as me, second generation Brown boys with parents from the subcontinent. The Other. By splintering off like this, they were not only injuring the cohesion of the school but abandoning me, a fellow minority. Couldn’t they see that we were in this together? That in England it was our job to fit in, not walk out? Our parents might be foreign, but not us—we were the bridge, we spanned continents, and this act of division, of separatism, was setting us all back. They were disassembling Assembly.

That was the first line crossed as I remember. And we all know the arguments that held sway—that to impose Christian prayer on non-Christians goes against religious equality and tolerance, it was a sin under Islam and anyway, the Muslim kids were also fee-paying customers who should, to some degree, be accommodated.

But there was another side to this. Dulwich College is a private school that sets its own standards and norms, many of which go back centuries—it was established in 1619, over two hundred years before the British colonized India. Its methods were successful, the school had an excellent record, and the Muslim parents knew very well that the Lord’s Prayer was part of Assembly when they chose to apply. Dulwich has been very welcoming to the children of immigrants. When my parents couldn’t afford the fees, I was offered a generous scholarship, as were many non-White students—this was long before DEI. And in the five years that I was there, I experienced no racism at all.

What would have happened if the school had simply said no, if the prevailing culture in England permitted schools to take such stands? No, you will sit through Assembly because that’s what we do here. The Lord’s Prayer is an important tradition, and if we create an exemption for you, then what’s to stop the Hindus or the Jews or anyone else? Assembly is about togetherness, equality. No one’s saying you have to believe, you can let the words wash over you, but the school must stay together for Assembly. And if you can’t do it, if your religion commands you to leave the room rather than bow your head and mumble with the rest of us, then perhaps keep walking. Perhaps this isn’t the school for you.

Instead, the school made an accommodation for fear of being called racist, and that fear would hold sway across much of the Western world for the next 40 years. Muslim demands for special consideration have been routinely accommodated. Halal food, prayer rooms, blasphemy laws, the niqab. A couple of years after the walkout came the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, for which much of the British media blamed him. The 90s saw growing radicalization followed by horrendous wars and terrorism in the 2000s, which prompted yet more capitulation. Charlie Hebdo in 2015, confirmed just how terrified the West’s media had become of both radical Islam and, ironically, the charge of Islamophobia (the consensus: “they were asking for it”). And so on it went to Sharia Councils, the prayer call, block voting and Muslim mayors up and down the country in London, Birmingham, Bradford, Oldham, Sheffield, Luton…

I’m not the only Dulwich College alum who has watched this escalate with dismay and anger. Another former student, who graduated long before me has since made it his mission to do something about it, and we are all bracing ourselves for what that might entail. His name:

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The Nationalist Rabbit Hole

I’ve seen a lot of Nigel Farage lately, he’s hard to avoid, what with the recent wave of protests all over Britain regarding the migrant crisis. Crowds of ordinary citizens—or “mobs of far right thugs”, depending on your politics—have been gathering outside the hotels that house these new arrivals, whom the government calls “asylum seekers”, but the Daily Mail describes as “hordes” of “fighting age men”, from “alien cultures”.

Their complaints are as you’d expect—the cost to the taxpayer, the uptick in crime, particularly crimes against women and girls. But behind these concerns lurks the deeper anxiety that Britain is changing irrevocably and the native population is being overwhelmed by foreigners. This transcends economics, all those sound arguments that immigrants work hard, pay taxes, sustain the NHS and so on. This is about culture and national identity, and it is calling into question the entire scope of immigration. How has it worked and how has it failed? And what does changing course really mean?

As a Londoner with Indian parents who now lives in LA, I’m an immigrant squared—the son of immigrants who became an immigrant himself. My parents came to London in the 70s from West Bengal, India, and then I moved to America around 2000. So I’ve been thinking about these things for a long time. And I find I sympathize more and more with the nationalists, even though I admit, they scare me.

The algorithm knows this. It knows all of us. So as I started reading the news from England, it sent me sliding down a nationalist rabbit hole. LBC call-ins were the gateway drug, then I was fed GB News, Reform UK and—upping the dose—an Irish nationalist named Michael McCarthy who I find particularly addictive because he smiles through his anger and never raises his voice, even though his posts feel like kindling for a race war. It’s all phony asylum seekers and grooming gangs and clips of Brown and Black people behaving terribly—brawling, harassing women, littering the countryside, and turning Europe’s postcard cities into slums. And the message is always the same—Europe Has Fallen.

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You can scroll your way into extremism. That’s what happened to Eric the Nazi, more or less. And there’s no doubt it gets the blood up. I too have been fretting about Europe lately. I’ll be at the grocery store in Eagle Rock full of rage about the Rotherham rape gangs. Or at the dog park in Pasadena, tossing a ball, and feeling sad about Birmingham.

It’s not unusual for British expats to look across the water, full of emotion. But these days, Americans are at it too, both right and left. The right takes the Europe Has Fallen approach, and sees it as a reason to accelerate fascism over here, while the left is looking for somewhere to flee because America Has Already Fallen. It’s a Chardonnay conversation—yes, London’s great, but what about those cheap villas in Italy, or those abandoned castles in Scotland, and didn’t so-and-so say something about Portugal…?

Then Michael McCarthy rears his head, between the castle and the villa, and I wonder whether Europe might be an even bigger powder keg.

Every immigrant must balance his various identities, racial, national, and cultural. Where we belong, where we don’t. Where our loyalties should lie. And we often have wildly different positions on these things. We don’t speak in one voice.

Over the years, I’ve barely ever seen my perspective reflected in the discourse, so I’ve opted to keep quiet. As we all know by now, it’s tricky when you deviate from received opinion about race and identity. I’ve been Woke-splained many times by liberal White women who advise me that my views are “problematic” and I should keep them to myself if I want to avoid blowback. To support assimilation, I’m told, is seen as a bit sad and Uncle Tom, a bit Stockholm syndrome: Poor colonized Brown Man, he thinks the Whites will accept him if he grovels…

Then again, these are the very people who ignored all warnings that the Woke pendulum would swing back and hit us, the immigrants of color, before anyone else. And here we are, staring down the barrel of a nationalist backlash in England and Europe that seems destined for violence. I worry about being caught in the crossfire somehow. Nationalist rage tends to be indiscriminate. After 9/11, the first victims of American reprisal were not Islamic radicals, or even Muslims at all, but Sikhs.

So I’m done biting my tongue. This is the time for plain speaking if ever there was one, and when it comes to immigration, I have “standing” to use a legal term. So if the court will allow me to share a few unfiltered thoughts that you may not have heard from an immigrant.

And if you disagree, please let me know why. I won’t be offended or get into some big argument. I’m interested in what you think. There are storm clouds ahead, and we need to be each other’s shelter. We’re all works in progress, nothing is set in stone.

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A Short Case For Assimilation

Some loose definitions:

Assimilation is when immigrants attempt to adopt the host culture.

Integration is when we keep the culture of our countries of origin, but fuse with the host where possible.

Multiculturalism is when we make no attempt to join the host culture, and prefer to live separately, side by side.

It seems that multiculturalism has failed. We wouldn’t be here if it hadn’t. And wise souls like Kenan Malik saw its flaws a while back. Like marriage, if you’re not growing closer, you’re growing apart, and separation creates tribalism and conflict. Integration has led to some wonderful fusions of distinct cultures—#enriched—but it’s rare and often amounts to separation in practice. Assimilation, however, is a path to harmony. It just gets a terrible press.

For the progressive argument against assimilation, this is a pretty good breakdown. Essentially, assimilation evokes cultural erasure and a permanent hierarchy that renders immigrants second class citizens by design. Black and Brown people can ape Whiteness all they want, but they’ll never have White Privilege (and they might look ridiculous in the attempt). Also, expecting foreigners to forsake their cultures and deny “their authentic selves” is to do them harm, with echoes of colonialist supremacy etc. There’s truth to all of this.

But equally, assimilation is what being an immigrant is all about. If you don’t want to forsake your culture even a little then don’t be an immigrant. It’s a tiered existence from the start—first the visa, then the residency, then the citizenship. These are all rungs on a ladder to Englishness. My parents accepted that England was not some neutral ground where Indians and English people negotiate on equal terms. To move there is to submit to the primacy of English culture and to invite a measure of metamorphosis. It takes courage and humility and a willingness to change.

When Arnold Schwarzenegger recently said that “immigrants are guests”, it struck me as obviously true. We arrive as newcomers and are allowed in by the good graces of the host culture. And basic manners dictate that we adopt their customs, just as we bow in Japan and remove our shoes outside the temples in India. To refuse is obtuse. I was at the home of a Palestinian family in Orange County not long ago, and my friend nudged me because, the way my legs were crossed, the sole of my foot was facing the host, which is a sign of disrespect in his country. So I adjusted. I’m a guest in his house, just as he and I are guests in America.

As for the fear of erasure, I think it’s overblown. England is a remarkably tolerant and welcoming culture, far more so than Pakistan, say. Say what you like about Rishi Sunak but he was Prime Minister for a minute. And complete assimilation is never the ask anyway. It’s a little alarming and comical when people go too far and cosplay a different culture—like The Coopers in Goodness Gracious Me (in the lead image).

What I’m suggesting is not some totalitarian deletion of your former self, but rather an orientation whereby immigrants make a good faith attempt to participate in the host culture, which in turn welcomes the effort. It’s a nod of deference, a recognition that the onus is on the foreigner to adapt, not vice versa. This is how bridges are built and good will is earned. It’s a cure for prejudice and a path to peace.

Degrees of Englishness

I say I’m English because I’m more English than anything else. The immigrant identity is always fractured. England is where I was born, raised and culturally shaped. I care more about England and the English than any other country or people.

But my Englishness falls far short of a White English person whose family goes back 20 generations. Is this not obvious? Blood and soil matters. English isn’t just a language or a government stamp, it’s a people with an ongoing history in which I am a new and minor entry. My roots are shallow. I’m not saying my citizenship should be downgraded, but rather that citizenship is only a fraction of national identity. Exactly what fraction, I can’t say, but I’m sure there are areas of British life in which I should defer to those whose roots go deeper.

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Sad About Birmingham

Not just Birmingham but Bradford, Luton, Oldham and Tower Hamlets. And the same goes for the non-Muslim enclaves like Leicester, Wembley, Tooting and Southall. It’s the clustering that saddens me, the way South Asians cleave so firmly to their culture of origin that they turn English high streets into a shabby facsimile of a subcontinental bazaar. I would love to arrive in a predominantly British Asian neighborhood and light up with pride, the way an Italian might be proud of Little Italy in New York or Boston. I don’t know that that’s ever happened. Brick Lane maybe?

So that’s one issue—the state of these places, how rundown they often feel. Another is the exclusionary foreignness.

In August 2025, Birmingham celebrated the independence of Pakistan. Flags were hoisted, buildings lit up, huge crowds in the street. And the images were a feast for GB News who asked the question: “guess which country this is. Does this look like England to you?” And of course it doesn’t. It’s all Urdu and kurtas and shalwar kameez, a sea of Brown faces—as one might expect at a specifically Pakistani celebration. But the point would stand on any other day too. Pakistani culture is too dominant in Birmingham where the White population keeps dwindling, and as this trend continues, this great English city, a seat of the Industrial Revolution, risks becoming irreversibly Pakistani, and alienating to virtually any other demographic.

I’m sad because these things may not be fixable. Ethnic enclaves form naturally, with every stripe of immigrant, and they are often poor and unpretty, a first foothold in a new country. Similarly, they feel especially foreign because these immigrants just arrived, they’re the least assimilated of all. I don’t know how to change this, but I do have a wishlist.

If only immigrants could be marbled in like chocolate swirl, rather than clumped in these pockets.

If only the immigrants of these cities were more assimilated into English culture, if the cultural needle in Birmingham pointed more toward England than Pakistan.

If only Asian-dominated enclaves were more appealing and inviting to outsiders.

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A Ministry of Assimilation

Sounds Orwellian, I know. Like a re-education camp where foreigners salute a portrait of the King while Elgar plays over the Tannoy. Not what I was aiming for.

But would it be so terrible for some official body to preserve English culture through these waves of immigration? Perhaps such a body could step in to prevent enclaves from forming. Ensure that customs are respected. Perhaps its very existence would make walking out of Assembly a bigger ask.

When I became an American citizen—“naturalized”, like a health supplement—I had to pass a test and do an interview. The UK has a test too. These things tend to be fairly dry—a spot of history and government, some language proficiency, and you’re good to go. For my American interview, I boffed up on the Constitution and bit my tongue when the interviewer joked that Indians like me burned their wives alive in their back yards (true story.) But that was it—next step, citizenship. No mention of the America that I admire, a colossus of science and culture—Edison, the Blues, Dylan, Salinger, the Wright Brothers, Walt Whitman, James Baldwin and on and on. But there should have been. And the same goes for the English test.

What if new immigrants to England had to demonstrate a working knowledge of British rock n roll? Or The Life of Brian? Or George Orwell? Paul Gascoigne? Some provable attachment to the culture of this country. It’d be a fun job to determine the expansive scope and limits of Englishness—not a job for me, but for people with deeper roots.

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When in Rome

A couple of years ago, I visited an ancient market in Rome like a good little tourist, but all the stalls were run by Bangladeshis. All. Not assimilated Bangladeshis, steeped in Italian culture, who had become expert in olive oil and limoncello. No, it was Ahmed, fresh off the boat, hawking his wares like it’s a market in Dhaka. Sir, come come! Try some sample!

I’m not sure anyone wants this—not the tourists, not the Italians, and I suspect even Ahmed himself would be happier working where he’s wanted. One can admire his hustle and enterprise while at the same time recognizing that something has been lost.

This is the trouble with diversity. Sometimes it can corrode or dilute a culture. True diversity flourishes only when national cultures are strong and distinct. You want England to be English and Italy to be Italian, whatever that means in each case. Instead, globalism gives us a creeping homogeneity—the same brands, the same coffee shops, the same bland gentrification aesthetic the world over, and a steady stream of Ahmeds to operate the markets in London, Rome and Paris. The truth about Ahmed is that he isn’t particularly motivated to become Italian. He just wants to send money back to Bangladesh to support his family. And honestly, I wish him the best. But Rome may be paying the price.

I told a progressive friend of mine recently that you can’t preserve European culture by populating it with the likes of Ahmed and her response was: “Wow that’s so fucking racist.” Honest question—is it?

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Pick Me, I’m A Coconut

I no longer consider “coconut” an insult. To be Brown on the outside and White on the inside is simply what happens when you assimilate. And it’s a beautiful thing to decouple race from culture in that way.

But coconuts get a bad press—fellow immigrants view us as pitiable and shallow, or as self-hating sellouts who prostrate ourselves at the feet of our White masters. Another variation is “Pick me”, as in “pick me, White people, I’m one of the good ones!”

Now, I’m not saying some of those charges don’t stick. I’m not immune to self-loathing, and I can’t say my Indian roots fill me with pride. But the idea that culture should conform with race is fundamentally racist. It makes race—a social construct, by the way—the primary characteristic of our lives, which is an affront to the color-blind ideal of Martin Luther King, the ‘content of our character’. Meanwhile, the progressive left is peddling a similar essentialism, whose tools are often even blunter. That awful acronym BIPOC for instance, presumes that my skin color means have more in common with Syrian refugees, or Black people from Mississippi, than White guys from England, the very people I grew up with.

Another part of the Sellout charge is that immigrants ought to naturally side with other immigrants—as though there are only two sides here, the White hosts and the Brown/Black immigrants. So to call for a limit to immigration, or for immigrants to assimilate, is to betray “my people”. You got in, so now you want to close the door behind you and take the side of the White Man etc.

But immigrants are not some homogenous block. Syrians and Bengalis are not the same and may well be in competition. Furthermore, being an immigrant doesn’t mean I automatically support unlimited immigration. In fact, the opposite is often true. My parents came to England, in part, because Englishness appealed to them. They don’t want England to become less English. They want its culture and its appeal to be preserved.

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There’s more to say—and learn—about all of this. It’s an inflammatory topic, and often difficult to discuss. But discuss we must. And I have to say, there’s something bracing about this era, for all its rage and division, because people are beginning to finally express what they truly feel, however ugly it can sometimes sound.

Speaking personally, immigration has defined me and shaped my personality. And I’m an assimilator at heart—something about being the odd one out, has meant that I’m always trying to fit in, to be accepted, this is my orientation as an individual. I’ve long felt rootless and untethered, which is not an uncommon feeling for a 2nd Generation Asian like me. But still I consider being born in London to be the single greatest stroke of fortune in my life, as my cousins in Kolkata would agree.

Let’s keep the conversation going.

I’m Smart / I Was Scammed

On March 25^th, 2000, a group of polygamist Mormons put on their temple Whites and gathered in a small church in the town of Manti, Utah. They were there for a feast which Jesus Christ Himself would attend, at least according to their prophet James Harmston. For months, he had been ranting about how the end was nigh, the wondrous visions he’d had of fire and brimstone and the destruction of the US Government. He had never been so certain of anything in his life. This is it, you guys, get ready…

Then on March 26^th, Harmston blamed his followers for the no-show. His prophecy was solid, the trouble was his flock hadn’t been righteous enough. His poor flock, some of whom were so convinced that they’d maxed out their credit cards and declared bankruptcy. But when I spoke to these people for my book about Mormon polygamy, not one of them left Harmston’s cult as a result. Instead, they took it as a sign to pray harder, tithe more, and devote themselves more fully to their one true prophet of God.

It’s been fun watching MAGA melt down over Trump’s about-turn on the Epstein files, this past week. So many choice moments. Alex Jones weeping in his car. Laura Loomer calling for Pam Bondi to resign. Tucker Carlson talking about a cover-up. And Nick Fuentes, the white nationalist, going on a wonderful tear—check it out, if only for the odd experience of nodding in agreement with an avowed Nazi. “Fuck you,” he says, addressing the President. “You’re fat, you’re stupid, you’re not funny. You’re not as smart as you think you are… We’re going to look back on the MAGA movement as the biggest scam in America history. The liberals were right. MAGA supporters were had.”

My favorite face-eating-leopard clip though is the comedian Andrew Schulz who admits on his podcast, “So, we’re stupid. We’re the fucking idiots.” His brand as a shrewd social commentator has taken quite a knock given that his principle complaint is that Trump, the lyingest liar in Bullshit City, didn’t keep his word. Now, to save face, he’s pretending he’s just now finding out that Trump and Epstein were besties for 15 years. Oh well, if I’d known all that… Still, he gets points for admitting he was wrong.

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Schulz isn’t a True Believer in the Eric Hoffer sense. He and his bro-podcasters went MAGA for edgelord reasons, they thought it was punk rock. It’s much harder for the molten core of the Trump cult, the frothing congregants of Q Anon who view Trump as not just a politician but as a Messianic warrior against evil who is destined to expose the global Satanic pedo-elite which controls the world and drinks the blood of children etc. They believe that Trump will bring about a mighty reckoning known as The Storm, which would in turn usher in The Great Awakening, a new dawn for mankind. So for Trump to suddenly say there’s no there there—no list, no one to prosecute, nothing to see, moving on…—is more than just a sad trombone, or a mere political flip flop. It’s a spiritual crisis.

Q Anon is much bigger than one might think, and its ideas are widely held. According to a 2023 poll by PRRI, the non-partisan Public Religion Research Institute, 22% of the American public believe that a “storm” is coming, and 16% believe that a pedophile cabal actually runs the world. One in six! And maybe they’re nuts, sure. But one can understand where it comes from. Because there have been a lot of sex crime conspiracies among the elites. The whole Savile business in the UK, Harvey Weinstein, Diddy. Even if you don’t go full cabal, there is something deeply strange about the Epstein saga, a former schoolteacher who ended up with a trafficking empire, an island, and the entire ruling class in his rolodex. That sweetheart deal he got in Florida, a literal get-out-of-jail-free card, from Alex Acosta, a man who Trump appointed as his Labor secretary in charge of human trafficking. And now the list is private, the names protected, no one is going to be prosecuted, while the State Department, just last week, guts its human trafficking division…

Q Anon may be the molten heart of this outrage, but MAGA is powered by its heat. Epstein isn’t some ancillary side-project for the Trump base, it’s central.

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The Double Down

In a perfect world, MAGA would, like Schulz, admit en masse that they were stupid to believe a scumbag like Trump about anything, much less his pedophile friends. But instead, like the polygamists of Manti, they’re doubling down. We’re seeing tortured rationalization. Pretzel logic. An epic display of cognitive dissonance.

Here’s some of the rationales in Q-world, paraphrased:

1) “This just proves that the Deep State is more entrenched than we first thought.”

2) “Trump’s not releasing the files now because it’s not the right time. He’s being strategic. 5-D chess.”

3) “All those incriminating photos and videos of Trump and Epstein, they just prove that he was an undercover investigator for all those years, getting close to them so that one day he would blow it all open.”

It’s textbook Cognitive Dissonance, a phenomenon first coined by the psychologist Leon Festinger in 1957, to refer to the psychological discomfort that rises when beliefs contradict the facts. Rather than change our beliefs—or simply live with that discomfort of holding two opposing thoughts in mind at once, which was for Keats a sign of intelligence, he called it “negative capability”—we often reshape and distort the facts in order to reduce that discomfort and keep our beliefs intact.

1. Effort Justification

One of the principles is Effort Justification—the idea that the more someone sacrifices or suffers for their beliefs, the more attached to them they become. MAGA’s faithful have alienated friends and family members, some were arrested at Jan 6, all of which galvanizes their conviction.

2. Belief Fusion

Another principle of Cognitive Dissonance, is the way that our beliefs become fused with our identity, so to abandon them is akin to self-annihilation. Instead, we justify. The dissonance between the facts and our beliefs becomes the “engine that drives self-justification”, as per the book Mistakes Were Made (Not By Me) by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson.

3. Social Reinforcement

But perhaps one of the most important factors in cognitive dissonance is the social aspect. Cults are communities, little societies unto themselves. The Manti polygamists were a secretive church in a small town, home-schooled and insular, self-reinforcing in every way. Q Anon is sprawling and online, but in other ways similar. Its world view is shared and confirmed within their own ranks, where critical relationships are forged around their sense of mission. To some degree every political movement is cult-like—the woke left certainly had a strong religious framework—but with MAGA it’s overt. Trump is a literal Christ figure.

4. Purpose Over Truth

People want something to live for, more so than the truth. This is a core lesson of cult dynamics. In The Brothers Karamazov, when Jesus returns and performs miracles in the streets, he is quickly arrested, and the Grand Inquisitor visits him in his cell. He explains that the Church no longer needs Him because they have replaced truth with authority. That’s what people want in the end - not truth but comfort, answers, someone to obey. “The mystery of man’s being,” he says, “is not only to live but to have something to live for.”

The MAGA movement provides that purpose and identity. For all its seething resentments and rage, it sees its mission as righteous, so they excuse the lies of Dear Leader. They are content to remain within their echo-system, comforted by their narratives. To leave that bubble now would be unbearable. Not just the shame of admitting that they’d been fools and suckers, much less pedo-enabling destroyers of worlds, but where else will they find such purpose and meaning? They will need to reconstruct their identities once more.

Better to believe the lie than face the void.

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A Time For Apostates

Prophet Harmston may not have lost any followers on March 26^th 2000. But his empire crumbled eventually, and that failed prophecy helped in his demise. I remember a woman there named Angie, one of Harmston’s youngest wives. She was a true believer, she’d been born into the cult. But as we spoke over weeks and months, her doubts emerged, because all cult members have them, tucked safely behind those fierce defensive shells. Bit by bit, she felt more emboldened to express them until eventually she escaped with her children. It was one of the death blows to Harmston’s church.

Every cult has its exiles and apostates. Among the polygamists they were the sister wives who fled in the night and the so-called Lost Boys. But MAGA has them too. For all the maddening dissonance we see in public, we can be reassured that, for some, behind their chitinous shells of self-justification, their conviction is being eaten away by betrayals like this.

This is the tiger that Trump has ridden from day one, the primal passions of nationalism and rage and religious fervor. It never ends well for those guys. Mussolini was hung upside down for his betrayals. There are many such cases. And betrayal is a powerful motivator. More so when there are child victims, whom you have arguably set out to rescue. Of all the betrayals so far—from vaccines to the pardoning of insurrectionists, to war in Iran and the plundering of national parks—Epstein is the most inflammatory.

One can’t help but wonder, as Epstein and Trump’s friendship returns to the center of the conversation, whether somewhere, in his gun-addled flock, a stray follower of Q will ask himself whether the greatest villain in the international Satanic pedo-cabal might actually be Trump himself…

Hello - to my lovely subscribers, sorry I’ve been absent, life called me away, but now business resumes! And to everyone else, welcome, this is Minority Report, a newsletter about subcultures and fringe groups. It’s a somber 4^th of July this year. This is the 10^th year of my US citizenship, my 25^th in Los Angeles, an…

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(Hi there, I’m Sanjiv and this is Minority Report, a newsletter about subcultures and fringe groups. This is the third and final post about Slab City, the quintessential American subculture. I recommend you read the first two, particularly the first, Slab City 1: Ask The Dust, and Slab City 2: “We’re All Here Because We Ain’t All There.” This is a story…

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(Hi, I’m Sanjiv, this is Minority Report, a newsletter about subcultures and fringe groups. This is the second post about Slab City, perhaps the epitome of an American subculture. It won’t make sense unless you read the first, Slab City: Ask The Dust, which is a necessary introduction. Please support however you can!)

—

The term “marginalized” usually refers to race, gender and sexual orientation. Those are the big ones. Disability too. But poverty and sickness, not so much. And as for mental illness or a traumatic childhood, barely at all. They’re on the margins of “marginalized” at best, ever since the left’s doomed turn toward identity politics.

A trip to Slab City is a corrective. These people are marginalized in the most literal sense—they’ve either opted out, or (more commonly) been forced out by a system that has never much cared to catch you when you fall. And most Slabbers are white and straight with a smattering of other identities thrown in—in other words, they seem to reflect America at large in demographic terms. The difference is that these groups are more unified here, their distinctions are less important. There’s a solidarity here that is hard to find out in Babylon. You don’t find MAGA flags or “in this house we believe” yard signs. Because at the Slabs, people are brought together by what binds us all, no matter your demographic—the elemental need for food, water and shade, and a vulnerability to the cruel twists of life that afflict us all without prejudice.

I’ve narrowed the selection here; several interviews didn’t make the cut. The goal isn’t a representative cross section but a reflection of the stories that I found most affecting. My question was always the same: “how did you get here?” And the answers roamed and wandered as you’ll see.

But to a fault, they reminded me to be grateful, and to remember just how powerful the forces beyond our control are, and how easily they can send us flailing. Of course poor choices were made too, but—at the risk of sounding like a bleeding heart—these are choices shaped by childhood, family, mental illness and trauma.

As a wise man once said, the more you know about someone, the more you forgive them.

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MARTY

At the entrance to Marty’s camp is a sign: “Trespassers will be shot. And survivors will be shot again.” One of those joke signs you get, and common enough in the right company, it’s like an NRA version of “Bless This Mess”. But with Marty you have to wonder. He was once in a biker gang out of California known as the Riders Association. “Riders Ass” it said on the patch, but they were no joke. His exploits sent him to prison for 25 years.

“If there’s stuff on the seat just move it,” he says, ushering Sanctuary Val and I into his camp. “We had quite a crowd last night.”

Marty hosts the karaoke at the Slabs. Every Friday night Slabbers come to his outdoor lounge area to do shots and choose a song. It’s a Slab City institution. He set up a small stage in the corner of his camp, with a mic stand, and a little bar, and an old school popcorn machine that he’s fixed up. And it’s all free, even the liquor.

“It’s free, even the shots,” he says. “It’s not about squeezing money out of people. Just come for a good time.”

You’d never guess from meeting him that Marty had such a checkered past. Though he looks like an old biker, with that mustache and beard, and the slightly bowed legs after years in the saddle, he’s 72 now, and all his edges have been smoothed. He’s calm and level-headed, a grandfatherly figure at the Slabs, a voice of moderation and order.

“I have no problem calling the cops,” says the former outlaw. “The cops are a gang, and sometimes that’s what you need. They’ll say ‘you're a cop caller’ but I don't care. You act right, you won't get the cops called on you. Period.”

Marty’s story is perfect for Slab City - it’s like a fable of freedom, its risks and rewards. He set out to be free, giving up everything for the open road, a life outside of society and responsibility. But it cost him his freedom, which took him a quarter century to win back. And now, in his final quarter, he has found a home in the Last Free Place, where freedom has a different flavor, a tepid echo of his biker days.

“I just like not being under the thumb of a lot of regulations,” he says. “That's the main thing right there. It appeals to the rebel inside me.”

He was a teenager in Baltimore when he was drafted for the Vietnam War in 72, straight out of high school. He served in the Navy, trained in electronics and radar equipment, and he found work in that field after the war, fixing up military equipment. For a few years he was a 9 to 5 guy. He got married young, had a boy and a girl. So far so conventional.

Then he bought a Harley.

“I started taking off for the weekends and not making it back by Monday,” he says. “Then it was Tuesday. Until eventually, I just quit. The road called me you could say. And yeah, it caused a lot of problems.”

He rode all over these United States. Wind in his hair and all that. An American archetype. “It’s probably the same feeling people get from jumping on trains, or hitchhiking. I went barhopping from town to town - I don’t know if I was an alcoholic, exactly, but I loved to party. And pretty much every town I pulled into, there's a woman in a bar that's lonely enough to take you under her wing for a while. What can I tell you, I was young, dumb and full of… you know what.”

He fell in with the gang when he came to the high desert in California. And it wasn’t long before it happened. “Someone died during a robbery. It’s nothing I’m proud of, I have to live with it. The charge was homicide. I started out in Old Folsom and Soledad and then when I finally paroled in 2005, I was in San Quentin. All the big houses.”

The reason he was paroled was because at San Quentin he became a Buddhist and took a vow of non-violence. The Green Dragon Temple, also known as Green Gulch Farm in San Francisco would visit the prison every week and Marty stuck with it for five years. The transformation was immense.

“I meditate every day now, it keeps me pretty centered. And I loathe violence. I'm like a teetotaler, I can't stand to be around people who do that anymore. Of course when alcohol’s involved some people become bullies, but I try not to let that happen here. That’s what the cattle prod’s for.”

Often, under the desert sky, the music will take him back to his youth. To when he was a foolish young buck burning the days in bars from LA to Chicago.

“That’s why I do the karaoke,” he says. “It reminds me of my biker days. Because it’s a party basically, but without all the negative trappings. For me, it’s a labor of love.”

“I love it here, but honestly the community is up and down. Some people are so full of themselves that they think they can do what they want because it’s the Last Free Place in America. Most of the thefts and stuff are drug addicts. Twenty years ago the place was different. People were older, they were RVers who would travel around the country. But then young people started to come in because of that movie Into The Wild. The traveling kids started coming and when alcohol gets mixed in…

If you study any of the Bibles you’ll see the history of human nature, and it's not very good. We definitely need some form of government and I think America has a good system. Our capitalist society needs to be preserved. It has its faults, but it's better than any other scheme that’s been invented.

The fact that this place exists within a capitalist society is a good thing. And I promise you Imperial County doesn’t want this property sold off. Because once it’s in private hands, they have to enforce the codes like they do everywhere else . That's why I think that every county in the United States should have a Slab City where people can go and just be left alone, stop all those draconian regulations. I think it would solve homelessness.”

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FLEURISH

I meet Fleurish at the Oasis Cafe. She makes space for me at her table. Soft-spoken and friendly, polite to a fault, she agrees to an interview after breakfast, so we head out back to where it’s quiet, to a little library behind the Oasis, one of two at the Slabs. A trailer full of books, essentially, with a couple of seats, shaded and cool. A haven.

Fleurish is a bearded lady. That means she has polycystic ovaries that disrupt her hormone production. She could shave, as many others with this condition choose to, but she doesn’t see the need. “I’m lazy,” she says.

Unlike most Slabbers, she came from privilege. Her father was a corporate insurance guy in Washington DC, and her mother an ambitious 2^nd wave feminist—political and engaged, they met at the Democrats Club in New York City. Fleurish was the oldest of two, and her folks were hopeful that she would follow in the same WASPish path of a prestigious degree followed by a well paid career and so on.

But instead, Fleurish grew up anxious and depressed, and these emotional issues have derailed her time and again. While she seems cheerful in person, even joyful, her friends know her as deeply pessimistic, with a lot of anger against her parents in particular.

We are all wounded children to some degree, and our adulthoods are the measure of how well we tend those wounds. Fleurish is a picture of that struggle. She sought meaning and solace in various intentional communities, turned broadly towards New Age mysticism, and has been coming to Slab City on and off since 2018, leading an itinerant life, spending a summer here, a summer there. She’s 43.

“My mother didn't really want kids, she wanted to be a feminist businesswoman. She felt bad for all the stay-at-home moms who didn't have the professional life in Manhattan that she had. So, growing up, I never felt a connection with her. I always wanted more affection but she didn't have it. And dad was never home, he was a workaholic.

I struggled at school. I failed out of Bard College in New York State. That was when I first became suicidal. I eventually went to Earlham college in Indiana and graduated in politics and history but I was so focussed on graduating, I didn’t think about what career to do afterwards. So I ended up working at Starbucks, which felt like a huge failure. Everybody I went to school with was off doing big things. Then I broke up with a boyfriend. That was the first time I was hospitalized. I cut my wrist.

I worked at IKEA, Toys R Us, all these retail jobs. And I loved the customer service part, interacting with people. But I was also really hard on myself. If I was going to be late to work, I’d be so embarrassed, I wouldn’t get out of bed all day or call anybody, so I’d get fired for being a no-show. And then I’d feel like I disappointed everyone. This happened over and over, first out East and then when I moved to Denver. The second time I was hospitalized, it was pills.

Eventually, I couldn’t bring myself to go to work anymore. I felt like, well, if I'm not happy here, let me go explore. I was looking for an intentional community. So I did a dozen tarot readings about where to go, and the cards said San Diego, and a friend was like, ‘hey check out Slab City, it looks really cool.’

I came in 2018. I left on the Spring Equinox. And it was wonderful. I was in this place where people don't do anything all day. It was social without getting a job. I could go meet people and learn the guitar. I love meeting people. And I could rent someone’s trailer for like $200 a month.

I had a boyfriend here called White Wolf. He was a white albino Black man who played the harmonica and had blonde dreadlocks. Really cool guy. But he was a Flat Earther, and I wasn't allowed to disagree, it was like I was crushing his dreams. Then COVID hit, and everything shut down. No more socializing. So we went to his place in South Carolina for a few years. I lived with a medicine woman, I did stuff with pagans out there, but I really missed the Slabs. So I came back in 2023. It was a brutal summer. But I couldn’t leave. I couldn’t afford gas. My parents were giving me a monthly stipend on the 20th of each month when the new astrology sign starts, but I'd spend it all the first week. I know.

When I first got here my mother was like, ‘you have to get a job, you can't live off the money we're sending.’ And I said ‘I'm not prepared to get a job so either stop sending it or let me do what I want with it.’ And they kept sending it. I think my dad was able to talk her through it. They've always told me, ‘we’ll help you if you need, but we’ll be disappointed.’

They actually visited for the first time last week. I think they expected more snowbirds, like fully intact RVs, not burnt out. I asked my mother, ‘what do you think?’ And she said, ‘things seem to be falling apart a lot around here.’ Like she was at a museum—“what was the theme?” Very distant, observational. But I was impressed. In the past they've been more judgmental. Maybe it’s because they’re getting up there. My mom's 79 and my dad's 84. Me, I’m 43. I know I look younger. Part of me is like, ‘you just have baby fat because you never actually matured and you're just a little stupid little…’ You know, that voice! Aargh! Shut up!

Have you heard of bibliomancy? You can open up a book too and just start reading and it’s got a message. Look at this one: “The Language of Flowers”. That’s already perfect, because my name is Fleurish. Let’s see: “He stepped toward me and dropped the camera strap around my head…” Oh wow, how funny is that? Reading about photography while I'm sitting here and you’re taking a picture!

That’s how you know you're on the right path.”

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BERYL

Beryl—“it’s Burl”—was the first person I met at the Slabs. I popped into the Oasis and there she was, her unlit joint parked in the crook of her mouth. “How you doing honey? Coffee?”

Once the fight petered out—the fight at Sunday breakfast I wrote about in Part 1 of this series—we sat across the table and she told me her story. Lit the joint and laid it out. No bullshit, because that’s Beryl, she calls it like she sees it. She’s been at the Slabs since 2008, which makes it 17 summers and counting, so now she’s considered an Elder. They call her to weigh in on disputes and scandal and community decisions. At the Range, she’s on the harmonica in the house band. She does the food there too—$5.50 for a double cheeseburger—as well as breakfast at the Oasis every morning at a round $6. “People gotta be able to afford this stuff!” She’s a worker, always has been.

As we spoke, she was clipped and flinty at times, seemingly eager to push the conversation along. But at others, she spoke in long paragraphs, tears springing to her eyes as recounted her life in Babylon, the Slabbers term for the world outside Slab City. It wasn’t that she had struggled there, or that life was cruel, it wasn’t. She thrived in Babylon. If only she could have stayed.

Born and raised in Chicago, to an American dad and a Japanese mom, she was the ADHD kid at school before they diagnosed that kind of thing. After high school, she worked in a bank for years and had a knack for it—she was working with the boss, going on golf trips. But then they laid her off. And she realized that maybe banks might not be the good guys. Or as she puts it: “I was playing all that little junior exec shit but then Reaganomics hit and my eyes opened. I don’t want to be on this corporate pirate ship!”

Restless and eager to work, she quickly found a job with Fedex, out in her truck delivering packages. How she loved that job! She was in a long term relationship with a girlfriend at that time. Happy days.

Then: breast cancer. Chemo, mastectomy, the works. The end of her relationship after a decade. And perhaps worst of all, she couldn’t do her route anymore. “I didn’t want to let a disease take my job!” She’s crying now. “But chemo did a number on my body.” And the Chicago weather, that bone cold of winter and the draining humidity of summer. She had to move to the South West for the climate. Down by Yuma where the air was dry and warm.

So at 47, she packed her Ford Escape with a heavy heart. And she drove.

“I split out January 2nd of 2008. That's when I left Chicago. I didn't know anything about this place. Didn’t know what I was going to do. I just came out west via Route 66.

I was camping at the Salton Sea, and this Canadian couple, they were birdwatchers, they took me to see Salvation Mountain and Slab City. Just keep an open mind, they said, it's all about the love. And I liked it here, it was just an extension of camping to me. I could get food stamps. I had a car, so that made me marketable. And I liked the system. I like bartering, you know.

First thing I did was come here and volunteer at the Oasis. People saw that I’m willing to work, I don’t need no handouts. And I won't play that game like, “oh, I'm just a girl.” Never.

My first tent died real quick out here. It disintegrated in the heat. So I lived in a friend’s trailer before buying my own. But one time I left town for New Mexico, and on the way back, I had this vision of my camp getting destroyed, and that vision caused me to get stuck in the sand. I got a flat tire and had to call 911 for help. When I finally got back, someone had sold my camp from underneath me, and my stuff was all over the place.

I didn’t leave, though. People helped me out and I just kept going. Just because there's a couple of jerks doesn't make the whole place bad. I felt comfortable here. I felt at home. There's something incredible here. I can't explain it, but shit happens here all the fucking time, like a special vortex.

I know people say this place is lawless because that’s what they see on social media. That’s why social media’s going to kill this place. Because people see this stuff and act stupid when they come here. But it's not lawless. I know guys that have been torched out of the Slabs because we found paper on them as being child molesters. But we don't like that in our community. And there's people that take care of that.

I had to handle a hit and run recently—Tori, she's all over the Slabs helping people. Then someone hit on her electric bike and drove off. No broken bones, nothing like that, but her bike is destroyed. Anyway, we found the person and I told him we could call the cops or he could have a face-to-face with Tori. Either way, he’s not driving around this community anymore. And he decided to sign his car over to Tori and leave. But he wasn't forced to, he had a choice.

I'm going to do whatever I can to protect my community. It's our home. Where are all these people going to go, you know?”

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VALKYRIE

She said she’d do the interview, Valkyrie, she volunteered. Because she loves talking about this place, how it saved her life and her kids’ too. But then I ask about her past, and she gets evasive.

Seems there are places she just can’t go at 9.30am on a Sunday. Not with the day just starting and her kids hovering. Anyone can see in her eyes that there’s pain there, and regret, and all kinds of memories that she’d rather not awaken.

This much I do know. That she’s originally from Virginia, from Roanoke in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Thought not from a traveler family herself, there were always travelers around growing up. “We had a house full of dirty kids and train hoppers,” she says. And after school, she chose that life for herself. “I became what you’d call homeless for about four years. Living out of a book bag. It was OK.”

What happened next, though, that’s where it gets hard. Val takes a lug on her joint, looks off into the distance, meaning deep inside herself, and she sighs a long plume. It’s as though she caught a glimpse of it all, the thirty years before Slab City, like she opened the door just a crack and what came pouring out was just too much.

“That’s… a whole lot of stuff I'm not getting into,” she says. “I've been married a couple of times, got a handful of kids. But here and now there's four of us. That’s what matters. It’s me and these three kids.”

There’s Zander a 15 year old and his older brother Sincere, who’s 17 and six foot eight. And Penelopy who hides her face behind her hoodie the whole time. She’s 12. When they got here three years ago, they had nothing. And this community took them in, fed them, gave them a shot. Valkyrie can’t say enough about this place, the people, the kindness. That special quality you find here.

“My boy Sin [Sincere] is autistic, and this here is the first place in the entire United States that he can come out of the house without me making him,” she says. “He feels comfortable in his own skin, like he can conversate with people in the coffee shop. He wouldn't do that back home.”

Sincere looms behind her with an affable grin.

“The difference is these people here are just like him,” Valkyrie continues. “A lot of people end up here because they've been traumatized. They've been through stuff. Life has kicked them around. But we can come here and not be judged you know? We're all here because we ain't all there.”

She pauses a moment and looks at me. “You know we came here on the run right? I can tell you that story if you like…”

“OK so the day before I came out here, I was supposed to go to court for child support. Not for these kids. A previous marriage. One kid’s already in her mid-twenties. But the dad was trying to get back child support and they were going to put me in jail and put these three kids in foster care. After a year of being fostered you can be put up for adoption, and I was going to be in jail for a year if they caught me. I wasn't going to allow that. So I ran.

We had moved around a bit before then, just going state to state. Sometimes there’s a house I can land at and get set up myself. Friends who are travelers and have kids. We settle down for a few years, then start traveling again. You don't have to do the settle down thing, you know.

But the reason I picked California this time is it’s too expensive to send me back if they catch me. I only owe 5,000 and to take somebody back it's at least a 5000 per state line to cross. It’s expensive

So we went to Florida and hung out there for a bit. And then we was gonna hit Mexico but the border patrol scared the shit out of me. This was three years ago. I was like fuck that, that's a lot of cop cars. So I came all through Texas to here. Took us seven weeks.

I was broke coming across the country. Broke. Spent every bit of money on taking care of them and getting gas to get as far from Virginia as I could. It was awful, but we had some fun times. We stopped at Rutherford Beach in Louisiana, on the Gulf. It’s like a mile of beachfront and behind you is alligators. We were there for two weeks. We slept in the station wagon, in our tent, wherever.

I heard about it from travelers back home, but we never looked it up except the directions. Then the kids started watching videos on the way here and they were like ‘mom it’s all about murder and death.’ I’m like ‘baby don't don't pay attention, that’s more to keep people out.’

And soon as we got here, everybody embraced us. It was welcome home soon as we walked in the door. We lived off grid without food stamps, without phone without anything for six months, because I didn’t want to get flagged on the system. And you can do that here. There's different pantries and free meals. If you play on stage at the Ponderosa, you get a free bowl of chili. You can work for Beryl, she'll feed you on Wednesday night. It can work. But, now we been here a while, I got on food stamps.

Let me ask you this. How many people you know in your apartment block? Like in your building? Because we can get on the roof right now and I can tell you whose trailers is whose, where people are staying and where they were last season. I know my friends and we check on people in the summer. It's more like a Viking village or a Native American village than American society.

And it’s real here. We’re not worried about our outfits here, or our nails or hair, any bullshit like that. So my kids are seeing the real world here. A lot of parents want to shield kids from the bad parts. But why? So it's a shock when they hit reality when they're 18?”

If reading this has inspired anyone to want to help any of these people, or the Slab City community in general, please get in touch and I can help make that happen.

And stay tuned for Part III, which I’ve been saving up, to be honest. It’s a wild story about the underbelly of Slab City, a nascent Deadwood-style gangster economy.

(Hi there - I’m told that it’s “good practice” to introduce the newsletter at the start of every post. So bear with me a sec… This is Minority Report, a newsletter about subcultures and the issues they raise. Because every society is defined by its edges. You’ll find original reporting here as well as think pieces and commentary.

Today, we’re going to visit Slab City, perhaps the epitome of an American subculture. This is the first of three pieces. If you’re enjoying Minority Report, please subscribe, share, and send oodles of money. Thank you as always for your support.)

🎵 Fist Fight At The Oa-sis 🎵

It was about 9am or so, when the fight broke out, on an ordinary Sunday morning in Slab City. Maybe you’ve heard of the Slabs. “The last free place in America” they call it, a self-governing encampment of squatters out in the brutal California desert near the Salton Sea.

I was at the Oasis Café with all the other desert rats scarfing eggs and sausage off a paper plate. Bleary from the night before. We’d been at the Range, the music venue, up the street, for open-mic night. Quite the spectacle for a newbie. And now this. A Star Wars Cantina for the castoffs of capitalism. Mad Max meets Burning Man meets Faces of Meth in the post-apocalypse. Dusty dogs squabbling for scraps at our feet. Leathery old timers and “dirty kids” wake-and-baking side by side. Hard lives, worse teeth and eruptions of coughing from about as deep in the tar pits as you can go.

And yet, tenderness, at least at our table. Hugs and even tears, a rawness you don’t find outside Slab City, a place Slabbers call “Babylon”. I was sat between Fleurish, a heavy set bearded lady in full tie dye, and an ex-junkie called Tomahawk who had so ravaged herself—I’m assuming meth—that she’d lost most of her teeth, and her voice had fallen to a low, Stephen Hawking buzz.

“You’re looking cute today,” Fleurish told Tomahawk. “If I wanted to sell that dress, I’d have you wear it.”

Tomahawk immediately reached into her bag and pulled out a red translucent stone she’d found. This is what she does, she finds stuff on the ground, in the strewn desert trash, little artifacts and shiny things, and she gifts them to people. “This is for you,” she rasped.

They’re sweet to each other here. The bruised caring for the broken. It reminded me of the barfly grace of Bukowski and Denis Johnson, only here in this far flung desert outpost on the edge of the world.

Then it all kicked off.

A tall rangy woman stormed past our table, angry and snarling. “You fucking thief!” Her target was a woman in a white sun dress, one table over. “Don’t deny it, you bitch!”

Sun dress pled ignorance, calmly batting the allegation away like a fly on her eggs, which only riled up the tall woman even more. And, as per the primal order of these things, Sundress’s boyfriend rose to defend her which in turn summoned the tall woman’s male defender who was bigger. The dance continued, the men squared off, a square dance. They were shouting now, which set the dogs barking, a proper racket to announce the ruckus to come. And then the owner of the Oasis, a tiny bird-like lady named Beryl, darted into the fray, a joint on her lips and one shriveled arm in a sling. “Take it outside!” she commanded, which launched the entire cafe into a Coliseum roar. “Outside! Outside!” And with much scraping of chairs and tables—one of which was etched with the words “Real Slabbers don’t call the cops”—a ring of men formed around each of the combatants and maneuvered them out of the cafe into the dust and the glare.

Slab City fights can get nasty. With plenty of felons and mental illness and poverty, you have all the kindling, and sure enough, bodies have shown up in the canal from time to time, or face down in the dirt under a halo of flies. The Sheriffs are often the last to know. There’s an outlaw spirit here. Rather than call the authorities this community prefers to police itself. Posses form to drive out the undesirables by force, particularly sexual offenders whose trailers often get burned to the ground.

This time, though, a schoolboy dust-up. I went to watch, with about half the café, and Beryl out front, formidable. Like most fights, it was over in a blink. A flurry of fists and a bloody nose. To complete the ritual, the loser—the smaller man of course—protested as he was pulled away. And it was done.

As Beryl passed me on the way back to the cafe, her joint still wedged in the corner of her mouth, she shook her head and muttered: “Welcome to Slab City.”

Experiments In Freedom

I first visited the Slabs for the Observer in 2003, back when California was still strange and new. It left its mark, its dusty footprints. No one who visits the Slabs leaves unchanged. I knew at once that it represented something essential about this country, an inherent and uncomfortable truth. And ever since it has lingered like a reminder of where I am and what could be if things go south in this new country I was trying to call home. It seems, lately, we may be headed in that direction. At a time when America is unraveling, it felt apt to return to a place where America has already unraveled and yet somehow persists in the punishing Sonoran desert.

“The Last Free Place In America” is an experiment in freedom, accidental but enduring, for over 70 years at this point. The story begins with a military base—because of course it does, this is America—Camp Dunlap, which was established in 1942 for the Marine Corps, deep in the hinterland of the Golden State, between the Salton Sea and the Chocolate Mountains. General Patton used it for desert maneuvers and bombing raids and the Enola Gay pilots trained there, setting an apocalyptic theme that continues today. When Dunlap was dismantled after the war, leaving a few pot-holed tracks and a series of concrete slabs around the perimeter (hence the name), squatters began to trickle in. Itinerant fruit-pickers from the north, back-to-the-land hippies, rebels, dropouts and many a veteran from all the campaigns—Korea, Vietnam, the Gulf War, Desert Storm and on and on. All of them drawn to the clement winters and, yes, the freedom. Because, though there was no water, sewage or electricity—which is why Slab City is officially recognized as a homeless encampment—the rent couldn’t be better. It was state land and the state wasn’t charging. So a settlement sprouted from the dust, like a daisy in the rubble in a cheesy stock photo.

The Slabs offered not only freedom from rent, but also from the usual rules of modern life, like zoning or building codes or no music after 11pm. Freedom too from society’s expectations. You can be who you want here, leave your past behind and reinvent. Which is why, for all the unfortunates who wash up here, there are also the dreamers, the visionaries, the desert homesteaders and artists, who speak of the Slabs as a Utopia stripped bare, a prototype for the idea that people can self-govern, barter, make art and create community. To the believers, Slab City isn’t just a desperate refuge of last resort, but a sandbox of creativity, self-expression and child-like play.

Take Salvation Mountain, the defining art piece of the Slabs, whose splendid hosanna —God Is Love—greets you at the outskirts. It’s childishly rendered in primary school colors, like a blankie draped lovingly over a hill.

But climb to the top of the mountain and what you’ll see is not a place for children (though some live here), but a scree of dilapidated trailers, makeshift homes and charred carcasses of cars. Freedom in the Bobby McGee sense of nothing left to lose. Driving through, I could see that some of the structures were sturdier and more ingenious, but still the first impression is one of anarchy and ruin. It’s a lot of scattered tires and stray dogs, violent warnings to pedophiles and many a fuck-you to the cops. And so much jagged trash that Slabbers have made art from, a wild and sometimes disturbing bricolage of all that we discard.

Meet The Slabbers

I met a couple of Utopians on my visit. Smart folks, eccentric but sane, who could leave if they wanted but instead choose the Slabs for the off-grid lifestyle, and that tenderness I saw at the Oasis. But they seemed far outnumbered by the sadder stories, the reminders of how swiftly in America the dice can roll you right into the dirt, but equally, how resilient we can be once we get there.

Most Slabber stories start with calamity. As Beryl puts it, “a lot of people come here because Babylon crushed them.” There’s Marty, the biker who went broke after the 2008 crash. Beryl herself who lost her job at Fedex after chemo, a loss that makes her cry to this day: “I just loved that route.” And farther down the tunnel, much farther, are the tweakers like Alice, who was named after the Wonderland character, but found herself somewhere else entirely, after a cascade of terrible choices. She ended up living under a tree in Slab City, in a blanket fort, with a horrendously violent ex-boyfriend. “I was never much good at adulting,” she told me, with a rueful laugh.

One thing that struck me, even on my first visit, was just how freely Slabbers volunteered their stories, however harrowing. We all want to be heard, I think, especially if you feel forgotten or left behind. Perhaps when you’re hand to mouth and the day is long, a curious stranger is a respite.

This time around, folks were even friendlier. In 2025, it seems tourists are as critical to Slab City as they are to the Maldives, and for the same reasons. In 2003, the internet was young and most people I knew hadn’t even heard of the place. But today, it’s a tourist destination and a well of content for edgy influencer types: “I stayed in the most lawless place in America!” Amateur billboards herald the turn-off on the 111. Film crews show up from Germany and Australia. And certain Slabbers have become minor YouTube celebrities. Like Dot, for instance, who seems made for TV, a sunny and garrulous fifty-something mother of two.

She was once a financial analyst in Columbus, Ohio, but they fired her out of the blue, and the cruelty of it inspired her to reject the corporate world entirely. In a full blown mid-life crisis, she sold everything, her house included, and took to the road, coming to the Slabs and opening The House of Dots, a bizarre museum/store of taxidermy, vintage clothes and other madcap bric-a-brac. And she works it. With her marketing savvy and commercial instincts, Dot brings gentrification energy to the Slabs. She greets every visitor with a smile, cracks jokes, takes pictures, and chats to anyone who passes by, selling Slab City like an old-time booster.

“It's safe, it's friendly, it’s free for you to come and live here,” she says. “It’s a land of opportunity to live the life that you want!”

In a single morning I went from hearing how Alice’s ex-boyfriend attacked her with a machete to Dot’s glowing sales patter. How she’s seen tweakers get sober here and move out. And what about that single dad who brings his boys each year, to teach them how to build a camp? Wonderful things happen here all the time.

“No one would have anything here if it weren't for tourism,” she says. “All these donations, all the food and clothes, it’s because we’re not just a bunch of poor people, we’re poor people doing cool shit. People feel good about helping an art scene. But nobody wants to help a bunch of tweaker thieves. So we're trying to get that reputation wiped.” She laughs. “I’m just trying to to prove that not everyone out here rolled out from underneath a dumpster!”

🎵 It’s A Cruel (Cruel) Summer 🎵

It’s easy to forget, listening to Dot, just how difficult life can be here.

Water is a constant struggle. Slabbers store it in meter cubes and ration it ruthlessly. They used to fill up at a gas station in Niland, the nearest town, but the city caught wind and put an end to it. So now, some make deals with Niland residents. There’s a Slabber named Jerry who, for about $50 a cube, will fill up at a commercial water station, and deliver it to your camp, but he’s getting old now and his truck’s having issues. Which means many end up getting water from the canal that irrigates the vast agricultural operations nearby. It’s a felony but who’s counting at this point? The real risk is falling in because of the steep banks. Every year, animals go down for a drink but can’t climb out afterwards and drown. People too.

“It’s best to pump from the Upper Canal where the water’s cleaner,” says Val, a veteran Slabber of 20 years. She’s sixty now, a rugged eco-hippy and Slab City Utopian, who calls her camp the Sanctuary. “It’s tricky. You’re practically hanging off the side of this cement canal to reach the water.”

Getting around is another challenge. So many Slabbers don’t have wheels, and are essentially stuck there. Like Tomahawk who came out here with a boyfriend who abandoned her, so she had no way of leaving—that was nine years ago. Others came with a car which broke down and they can’t afford to fix it. They all rely on those who do have cars, and either pay them for rides into Babylon—for water, medicine or groceries—or they barter somehow. The so-called Slab Cab system.

There’s a love-hate relationship with cars out here. It’s an auto graveyard full of rusted out carcasses, vulture picked and destroyed. The symbolism is stark—an end to mobility, the last stop. It has become a pastime here, to destroy what you covet. At the Slab City skate park, I met a bunch of “dirty kids”—travelers who stay at the Slabs for part of the year. They were getting high and whooshing up and down the slopes. And I got talking to a guy called Lurp, thin as a bean, who showed me the trashed car he sleeps in. “Kind of minimalist”, he said, clambering in through the side window. He told me about Car-Henge down the 111, where they wreck cars for kicks, donut them to death and tip them over on their ends. “And just last week, dude, we took a car out there, it was pretty much done anyway. And we stuffed it with fireworks and propane and we blew that shit up. Boom!”

Explosions are a thing here. The military legacy of the Slabs continues. The Marines still use the Chocolate Mountains for bombing practice, and at night, Slabbers get the full show—the fireworks are free too. Sonic booms from the Top Gun pilots overhead. Random detonations whose shock waves rattle the shelters. The bombing range is cordoned off—all around the Slabs are wire fences with warning signs not to trespass. But they do, of course. Brassing is a way of life for many. They collect the shells that are left after an exercise, and sell them on, as jewelry, artifacts, trinkets. The Marines are wise to it now, and send men out the next morning to guard the perimeter, so the most intrepid brassers will sneak in before the bombing even begins. They hunker down somewhere, so as to avoid getting killed, and as soon it’s over, they run out to salvage what they can.

The fact that some of these brassers are veterans themselves may be the most poetic and savage indictment of America that I’ve ever come across. The moral failure. The bitter irony. For shame.

Then there’s the heat, the brutal heat. Winters are bearable. That’s when the Snowbirds descend in their gleaming RVs, swelling the population from 200 or so to 4000, like a Campervan Coachella. Like tourists, Snowbirds are embraced—they spend money, they’re a blessing. But when the mercury rises, they leave, and the hardcore are left to endure the 120 degree summers. The key to survival is to stay wet, to lie in a bath or pool, or failing that, to burrow into the ground (mind the rattlesnakes). And watch out for the occasional whipping winds that dust storm the camps and hurl the trash about.

Every summer, Slabbers die. For all the joy here, the art and resistance, there is a pall of death too. Though it’s not spoken of so much, some people even come here to die, because they don’t want to be found by their families.

“I tell you, those trailers are like ovens,” says Marty. A mellow ex-biker in his 70s, he’s been here nearly 17 years now, and has a camp on one of the actual slabs, where the Dunlap chow hall used to be. Now he runs the Slab City karaoke night.

“A lot of people here are old with health conditions, so they’re already vulnerable. And when you’re looking at 100 degree nights, it cooks your organs. People don’t wake up. And if no one checks on them, their bodies expand and… go pop.” These are the other explosions at the Slabs. “Yeah, it’s rough. Those Airstreams are the worst.”

In The Shadow Of The Golden State

Psychogeography may not be the word. It sounds like a map of psychopaths. Maybe what I mean is mythogeography, the way that certain places embody mythic and psychological meaning. Just as Wall Street represents greed and Hollywood represents fantasy, Slab City is something like America’s conscience, a living critique of a dream in decline.

In the American psyche, California represents the final frontier of that dream, the brink of possibility and transformation. It offers a dichotomy—either paradise or apocalypse, Eden or the Fall. And driving from LA to Slab City, is like going from one to the other.

Of all the iconic Californian drives—the PCH, Big Sur etc.—this stands apart. Dreamlike but not dreamy, unpretty and strange, it’s like a journey into the subconscious. As you pass through Joshua Tree and Coachella to the 111, the skyline shrinks and recedes all around, until you’re a lone speck bisecting a vast plain on a straight and vanishing road. A scroll of sky and desert streams over you, blue and brown, heaven and earth. It’s cleansing and meditative. And you end up on a side of the Golden State you never see. Back of house, behind the facade. The whole area around the Salton Sea feels like a Jungian shadow.

This is the forgotten California where the bill comes due. Steinbeck country which provides all our food but keeps its workers hungry. The flyspeck farm towns here are pictures of neglect. The only jobs are seasonal and grueling, or if you’re lucky, at the prisons at Calipatria and Centinela. Because in the hinterland, poor folk are either grinding for Big Ag or locked up behind electric fences, like the cattle in the horrific feed lots that emerge from the earth like nightmares by the freeway—a million cows bent and still in the glowering sun. Cowschwitz.

The Salton Sea itself is a parable. Not a sea, but a lake, it was once a holiday resort in the 60s, known for water sports and the occasional concert by Frank Sinatra or The Beach Boys. Now all that’s left is tattered signage. The water’s unfit and much of the marine life has died, owing to years of agricultural runoff and a spike in salinity because of climate change. Come the summer, instead of Good Vibrations, the lake gives off a thick sulfide stench that carries for miles.

In this landscape Slab City becomes a symbol of defiance. Surrounded by Babylon’s ugly reality, here is a community of exiles holding up a mirror and a middle finger. Look at your system, they say. Look at your values. It abandoned us because that’s what it does. But what will happen when Babylon abandons you too? Can’t you see, it’s already happening…

All the apocalyptic metrics are rising—inequality, homelessness, fascism, the rampaging rise of AI that might impoverish us all by the millions, no one knows. So you have to wonder: is Slab City what awaits us all?

Night Moves

The military operations kicked off around midnight. Some kind of Black Hawk Down scenario that sounded like it was more or less directly overhead. I was in bed by then, not a real bed but a skinny box in a wooden shack at Val’s camp. She’d painted a quote from Thoreau on the side. “Fitting for a writer,” she said. “Leave your door open and sleep under the stars!” But I couldn’t do it. I’m just not that guy, the Wendell Berry type, at home in nature and moved to poetry. I’ve never been the off-grid type. Back home it’s all goosedown and cappuccinos. I’m soft. So when the choppers got going, I was already up, coughing from all the dust and fretting about rattlesnakes, given the stories I’d heard, like the one about the guy who got bit above his eye in the middle of the night. That one.

I couldn’t rest anyway, there was too much to think about. So many people in such a short time. In just a couple of days I’d met Fleurish and Beryl and Alice the tweaker, and Valkyrie and her kids who came all the way from Appalachia. And Sanctuary Val and Marty the biker and Agent Karibe and Dot. Everywhere I went, people let me in and filled me with stories. (The opposite to my experience with the Sneeze Fetishists.) It’s true, there’s something about this place. A genuine warmth towards outsiders. And yet, all this wonderful human connection was bookended by violence—a fistfight in the morning and war games at night. So Slab City!

(I’ll share these stories with you in the next post. It’s about to get real.)

As I lay awake that night, however, there was another story was tugging at me. I kept returning to what Dot had said about how “tourism brings revenue”, which seems such a simple and uncontroversial statement. And yet, surely at the Slabs this presents a profound conflict—that here, of all places, in a living indictment of capitalism, Babylon had planted a seed nevertheless? It was that word ‘revenue’, the language of balance sheets. There’s no surer way to ruin Utopia than with money. Dot saw it as a sign of a maturing community, but might it also be a death knell for The Last Free Place In America?

And I thought of Val, the same Val whose hut I was staying in. A Slab City Utopian to her core, she told me a story from her own life about the ugly side of encroaching commerce. How it threatened her camp and her life at one time. It’s a dramatic story of greed and violence, of gangster capitalism Slab City style. A story that reminds me of Deadwood.

There’s more to come. Stay tuned….

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On September 24th, 2016, a Saturday morning in the suburbs of Fullerton, Orange County, a six-year-old girl called 911 to report a horrific scene. Her parents had been murdered as well as a houseguest who was staying on the sofa, each one shot in the head at clos…

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[Thank you to all the new subscribers! A lot of interest in cult murders and Nazis out there. Today, a vibe shift. A different era, country, tradition. And perhaps a story of hope to see us through the madness.

This piece is from the archive, from my first trip to Japan in 2002, a few months after 9/11. It was only ever published in the dummy for a start-up magazine called Lemonade that never quite started up. I travelled to Kyoto with this wonderful photographer who I’d credit if I could remember her name, but somehow it’s not in my notes.

We visited the Enryakuji Temple to join a community of monks who live out on the farthest extremes of human experience. And we had the immense honor of spending hours with their most fabled devotee, Yusai Sakai, a great man who passed in 2013.

As always, if this piece sparks any thoughts, please comment below, I’d love to hear from you.]

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Two Thousand Days

In the lush foothills of Mt Hiei, overlooking the city of Kyoto, they call the monk Yusai Sakai a living God for the way he once ran—further and harder than anyone in Japan, perhaps anyone in our lifetime. Sakai ran to within a gasp of death, not just to visit the brink of mortality but to stay there a while. His austerities were so tortuous, it hurts to even recount them.

The last time was in 1988, when at the age of 61, he completed two marathons per day for 100 days in succession. According to the unsparing strictures of his practice, he would rise at midnight for a simple meal of vegetables, tofu and miso soup, his only daily sustenance. At no time was he allowed to stop for rest or refreshment, nor to remove the heavy, invariably rain-sodden monastic robes and long furled hat. The only footwear permitted, despite the jagged, slippery terrain, was a crude pair of straw slippers, no socks, and at all times he had to carry a burden of candles, food for strangers, and books containing directions to the innumerable places of worship he had to visit en route, the prayers he had to recite. On a good day, Sakai would return relatively intact about 18 hours later. On a bad day, he'd limp in gashed and bloody having been attacked by wild boar or bitten by vipers. His wounds often became infected. He received no medical help. Either way, by midnight, he'd be running again.

Fellow monks recall seeing the old man labor up and down the hard, wet mountain in his distinctive upright running style, his hat bobbing behind the trees and disappearing into the mist. They recall his stoic expression, a mask for the myriad agonies that tore through his body—the raging thirst, burning muscles and shredded feet, not to mention the knowledge that his only alternative to completing the course was death, either by exhaustion or suicide. That’s why Sakai also ran with a knife at his side, a rope known as the 'cord of death', white robes symbolizing death and a white ceremonial handkerchief used to veil the dead in funeral ceremonies. In his distinctive hat, shaped like a lotus blossom, he would carry a coin, in case he died, so that he could pay the ferryman to cross the mythic river between life and death. And he would always put on his sandals indoors before leaving, indicating that he was prepared to never return (the Japanese never wear shoes indoors). Death is ever present. The itinerary is graced with shrines to monks for whom the end came before the finish. Since 1885, only 47 monks have completed this pilgrimage, perhaps the most punishing ascetic feat ever devised.

The Sennichi Kaihogyo is the summit of achievement for monks of the Tendai Buddhist order, the fabled 'marathon monks', or 'running Buddhas' of the Enryakuji Temple on Mt Hiei. It lasts 1000 days, commonly distributed in 100-day chunks over a period of seven years, and in addition to traditional monastic chores, it includes no end of 'kaihogyo', literally "the practice of circling the mountains". Starting with 19 miles per day for 100 days at a stretch, then climbing to 200 days, the Sennichi Kaihogyu also includes a grueling 9-day fast known as Do-iri during which the monks are not only denied food, water and sleep, but must recite mantras and maintain correct posture at all times. Only then does the distance increase to 34 miles and then 52 miles, for a 100 consecutive daily double-marathons.

It is believed that to complete the 1000-day challenge makes one a "Saintly Master Of The Highest Practice", or “Living Buddha”. And of the few that survive today, Sakai, the 9th Living Buddha of the modern age is the greatest. When he hung up his straw slippers in 1988, he had completed his 2000th day of training. In other words, he had finished the Sennichi Kaihogyo twice, one of only three monks in history to have done so.

“The first time I didn't feel satisfied, I could have done a lot of things better," he said. So as he approached his sixties, he set about completing his second 1000-day challenge, without sustaining a injury. And he did it in six, rather than seven years.

Piece of cake.

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The Living Buddha

Panting up the hill to his temple abode, I felt woefully unworthy of an audience with Sakai. Never mind the agonies he has transcended, he’s also a national hero in Japan, the subject of several books and documentaries who explained Buddhism to Pope John Paul II.

The photographer, interpreter and I were greeted at the gates by his younger brother, a cheerful scruffy man in turned-up jeans and battered sneakers who, despite the hushed serenity of the scene, was in a Lewis Carroll hurry. Paying no heed to the babbling brook below or the scintillas of sun bursting through the canopy above, he whisked us off on a whistle-stop tour of the temple: courtyard, idol, prayer bell, fountain, fish pond, garden, big gold Buddha, wow d’you see that Buddha, and finally, the exhausted drop-off at Sakai's door where we removed our shoes.

Suddenly, all was still. Creeping nervously through Sakai's quiet carpeted home, we discovered him sitting at a low cluttered table, under the fierce gaze of a figure of Fudo, the God to whom the temple is dedicated. (Fudo is said to have appeared to a mountain monk here over 1000 years ago.) At his feet were a profusion of gifts from his many global visitors, and on the walls were several shots of his meeting with the Pope in the early 90s.

"Come in, come in!" he beckoned, springing to his feet, a short, beaming man in full cream cotton right down to the dinky foot gloves that individually wrapped his toes. He hadn’t been expecting us, despite numerous email confirmations—“I don't pay much attention to that thing," he said, tossing his diary to one side. "I believe that life is now!” He poured us green tea and smiled so warmly his thin eyes disappeared into a concertina of calming wrinkles. My trepidation dissolved. "Now what is it you would like to know?" he asked. And we spoke that day for three hours, sitting on the floor around his table. Myself, Sakai and an interpreter.

Sakai has none of the severity or obscurity I expected—he neither dispenses wisdom from on high nor shelters behind koan riddles. Instead, he laughs and tells simple stories about "once when I was going around the mountain.” The way he describes it is fitting—he says guru-guru-guru-guru-guru very quickly and stirs the air with his hands. I had brought a list of questions, but wasn’t sure if I could ask them, what with the formal politeness of the scene—the accumulation of Japanese manners, a spectacular monastery, and a Living Buddha. But Sakai was attentive, curious, patient. He answered everything I asked.

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A Man Adrift

He told me his story, a remarkable tale of a man adrift, wracked by guilt and grief who, in his forties, undergoes a tremendous metamorphosis through spiritual labor. It’s all the more inspiring because Sakai was never "likely to succeed,” rather he was considered a shiftless dullard who would never amount to anything.

The eldest of ten children, he grew up in poverty. His father was a rice merchant who went bankrupt and was later drafted in the war against China. In an effort to support the family, Sakai found work at a military hospital laboratory but the pay was so poor that he often went hungry himself, living off the feed for the lab animals. He couldn’t find better work because he kept failing at school, so he enlisted in the army, because the recruitment drive offered automatic graduation if you completed military training. Given his morbid bent, Sakai picked the kamikaze pilot program. He was stationed at a naval base in Kagoshima that was routinely bombed by Americans, and he witnessed the death of many comrades. But he never got to fly his kamikaze mission because WWII ended before his training was complete. So he still didn’t graduate. And the survivors guilt clawed at him. “Why have so many fine men perished,” he said, “while a no-account like me remains alive?"

He found filing work at a university library and, seduced by his new setting, resolved to graduate from school once more. This time he was so confident that, before retaking his exams, he boasted far and wide that he'd already passed and would definitely be a university student next term. When he failed again—“I was third from the bottom in all subjects!”—he was so ashamed, that rather than admit it, he faked it.

“When I took the train to go to university, I’d get off at the stop beforehand and just wander around all day. That was the start of my wandering lifestyle,” he said. He drifted from job to job, from clerk to noodle vendor to black marketeer, propelled either by necessity or any number of fleeting whims. "Sometimes I'd find work for a month, sometimes two years, but I'd wander and work, wander and work. I had no purpose. That's how it was until I was 40.” At which point, his aimlessness led to the transformative tragedy of his life—his wife committed suicide.

"My poor wife," recalled Sakai. "Her mother told her to leave me because I was a good-for-nothing, but my wife’s position was very difficult. It is very difficult for her to leave her husband, but she also had a responsibility to her mother and father. So she was caught in a dilemma. The only thing she could do was to leave us both, so she removed herself entirely. She saw herself as the cause of this problem between mother and husband. It was very sad.”

Although he didn’t dwell on the loss with us, at the time, her death left him devastated, alone and approaching 40. He was so anguished that his ex-mother-in-law, of all people, and asked him to stay close for the mourning period. She was a part of this Enryaku-ji temple, the home of the marathon monks, and she enlisted his help in traveling there—it was his first ever visit. When they returned to Osaka, however, she kept on at him to make something of his life, and he found himself turning again toward the mountain.

“She always scolded me about my aimless life and told me to pull myself together and become a man. I would tell her, ‘please leave me alone!’ But the only way to escape her scolding was to come here. So one night, I left Osaka at 7pm, and walked all through the night and arrived here at Enryakuji at about 4 or 5 the following afternoon. She called the temple and asked them to look after me because I was a bit unsettled, a bit off. I was standing right there in front of the monk when he got the call. He said, ‘what do you mean? He’s not mad at all!’”

Taking pity on Sakai the monks broke their rules of not permitting anyone over 35 to become a disciple. They had him purify himself by standing beneath a freezing waterfall and then they taught him some rituals that he could begin his practice with. “I had to perform a prayer ceremony three times a day that involved rising from kneeling to standing 108 times,” he said. “After two days I asked them to ‘send me back, I’ve had enough’. But after a while, I got used to it. And every time that I rose, I could feel my devotion grow.”

It was 1965.

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The Nine Day Fast

Sakai invited us to stay that night at the temple guest house. Simple quarters but pristine. We had come at a good time, apparently. A monk named Fujinami, 42, was performing kaihogyu, the first in 10 years to attempt it, and we could witness if we wished. He was undergoing the excruciating throes of Do-iri, the nine day fast which meant that every day, at around 2am, he would emerge from his seclusion and perform the water ceremony—walking 200 yards downhill to the well, and returning with two pails. It sounds simple but come Day 6, he was already withered by dehydration and wrestling powerful hallucinations. This fast is absolute—he doesn’t just skip food, but also water and sleep.

The temple was abuzz with anticipation. A coach load of followers arrived in the afternoon, and a TV crew, and the coffee lounge beside the gift shop was thick with their cigarette smoke. It's odd, all this smoking here in the crisp mountain air, around such dedicated runners. But the Japanese are also dedicated smokers and anyway, the marathon monks are not traditional athletes in the pursuit of health and perfection. Rather they are looking to transcend their bodies, the husk of the soul. One veteran of Sennichi Kaihogyo is even a smoker himself.

Sat among the smokers was Sakai, in golden robes this time, bashfully accepting the reverence of those around him. "I don't like to wear all this gold," he whispered. "But if I don't these people will be disappointed." Sakai had come to preface the water ceremony later that night with a lecture about his own experiences.

"Your nails die during Do-iri and you develop deep furrows in your hands, between your fingers," he explained, as members of the audience moved around the hall taking pictures. "You also realize how sweet water tastes. When you are permitted to rinse your mouth out, many men become hysterical and delirious, they want to seize the cup, they speak to it." Sakai chuckled. "You get a full glass of water but to make sure you do not drink any, there is a test. When you spit it back the glass is supposed to overflow, because during the fast, your mouth accumulates a lot of residue, mostly blood." The first time Sakai underwent Do-iri, he spat out a thick brown fluid, as is typical. The second time, however, his spittle was clear.

Do-iri is regarded as the most treacherous stage of Sennichi Kaihogyu, more dangerous even than the endless marathons. But incredibly, Sakai regards his first Do-iri as only his second closest brush with death. His nearest miss took place in 1971, barely six years into his monkhood, when he revived the "ceaseless nembutsu", a practice that involves chanting the name of Buddha ("Hail to Amida Buddha") incessantly for 90 days at a temple called Jogyo-do, while walking around a blood-red candle-lit hall and stopping for only two hours of sleep per day. It’s deemed so dangerous that it had been banned since the Meiji era when the last monk who attempted it collapsed, his legs swelling to twice their normal size. His parting words were “please do not let anyone do this anymore.” So in wades Sakai a century later; he always had a taste for the ultimate showdown.

“I began to fall,” he said. “I’m sure if someone else saw me it looked like I just fell like a stone, but what I experienced was more like a glider coming down. Like its taking an age, this fall, like slow motion. When I closed my eyes I saw this golden glow in the distance, and all these dancing specks of light, and I remember coming down from what seemed like an immense height and gliding into the specks of light. I’m sure that if I’d just followed the feeling, and if I hadn't opened my eyes when I hit the floor, I would have passed over into death."

When Sakai spoke of suffering like this, I felt pulled in different directions. Awed that a man could accomplish such things, and further convinced by the ancient traditions which teach that mortification can bring transcendence, after all Sakai does seem to have emerged cleansed from his ordeals. But the path is so stark as to be unreachable. It’s a realm apart.

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The Water Ceremony

Fujinami's water ceremony took place on a fittingly drenched night, at one of the temples tucked deep into the mountain, a good hour’s hike away. Sakai himself couldn't be there, but he'd arranged for a young Zen master called Takyebashi (literally "Bamboo Forest") to accompany us instead. Bamboo was an unlikely companion – a 31 year old meditation teacher with a secret penchant for hard rock. As we trudged down the mountain, squelching and crunching on wet pebbles, Bamboo would call out the names of bands he liked. “Marilyn Manson-o! Ozzy Osbourne-o!” In the distance we could make out the natter of old women, huddled under temple-blue umbrellas but charging up the mountain nonetheless—the same women who were chuffing ciggies in the lounge hours before. "Nine Inch Nails-o!" announced a delighted Bamboo.

At the temple, lit loud with lanterns, one hundred pilgrims and a TV crew jostled for a glimpse of the heroic Fujinami. When he appeared, weary on his feet, he was swiftly surrounded by stern monks bearing lanterns and umbrellas, and as the sombre procession marched down the hill, the crowd began to pray for the monk's soul, a leaden dirge that Sakai later informed me, had no literal translation since it was not composed of any recognisable words—rather it was a crude Japanese mimickry of the sound of a Sanskrit chant. "It is the sound that matters," said Sakai, "the sound has the power."

It was a visceral, elemental night. There was fire and water and a full moon on a mountain top. A small crowd of strangers had gathered to witness the near-death of another and the air was humming with ancient incantations that few understood. I had an odd feeling of collective solitude. The rain was relentless—even as I cursed my puddle shoes, I thought about rain, the bane of a marathon monk’s life. When he runs, it triples the burden of his robes, ruins his sandals and makes him slip and fall. And when he fasts, every drop mocks his fatal thirst. Everywhere you looked tonight was rain and the lush forest life it provides—you could hear it, feel it, smell it in the air—but only Fujinami, the wilfully dehydrated monk at the heart of it all was discovering its Buddha nature.

After 20 minutes, Fujinami returned, buckling under the weight, but otherwise focussed, impenetrable. As the temple doors closed behind him, and he returned to his punishing deprivation, we tramped back up the mountain, brimming with mortality.

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“I Die Every Night”

The next morning we sat together for the last time, Sakai and I. Green tea, cross legged on the floor, that warm smile. It was just a final send-off, but I didn’t want it to end, so I asked some more questions, there were still a few left.

“What did you think about when you were running 84km per day for 100 days?” I ask.

“I remembered Tokyo,” he said. “When I was supposed to be at university, I would roam around all day instead, guru-guru-guru-guru. Stopping here and there, at the shops, the baseball park, the station. And I kept all the landmarks in my mind, going form one to the other. Little did I know that this was a rehearsal for what I did 20 years later—Buddha had obviously planned this for me! If you think about 84km per day, it’s very intimidating. But I did the same thing—I broke up my journey into stops, always thinking about the this statue around the corner or this temple, like that. That’s how you reach your destination. You must live your life step by step. Everyone has their own journey.”

“You came so close to death, so often. Why do you think you survived each time?”

“Because I did many bad things in my previous life, Buddha’s not going to let me off so easily. He will make sure I atone. I’ve been tapping on his door for a long time now, but no, he always sends me back for more!”

“And when the time comes, how would you like to die?”

“Oh I die every night!” he told me cheerfully. “And each morning I am born again. I have one life today and one tomorrow. This feeling grew within me each day after I circled the mountains.”

The interpreter tapped his wrist. It was time. So we stood and bowed and bowed again, thanking Sakai profusely. And he put a hand on my shoulder and kept it there as he turned to the interpreter for a final thought.

“Don’t put me a pedestal,” he said. “Everyone has to walk like me through life. If you take me away from the mountains, I’m just like anybody else.”

Sakai Yusai died on September 23rd at the Imuro Fudodo Chojuin Temple.

Further Reading:

Todd Tsuho Sattersten of Dharma Rain on The Marathon Monks

Enriyakuji Temple Brochure

Marathon Monks of Mount Hiei, by John Stevens (Echo Point Books & Media, 1988).

[UPDATE: Since this piece was filed, Jack LaSota (“Ziz”) was arrested on February 18th in Maryland along with a couple of his followers/cohorts who feature in the story below - Michelle Zajko, 32, and Daniel Blank, 26.

They were all dressed in black and trespassing on a property, asking the residents if they could camp there for a month. Officers found two white box trucks parked at the end of the road where they found a long rifle in the back of a truck, and a handgun on the floorboard. Two of the suspects were wearing gun belts. They have been charged and held for further investigation.]

—

Hands up who’s following this Zizian story? It’s pretty hard to resist.1 I mentioned in my first post that we were entering an age of cults and madness, and here it is, with bells on—a “murder cult” that is allegedly connected to at least six victims, across three states. Its members are computer scientists, mostly trans and vegan, and their (alleged) leader, Jack Amadeus LaSota, 34, is a trans woman who now goes by “Ziz”. (I’ll be referring to her interchangeably as Ziz and LaSota).

I’ll summarize what’s happened in a minute, but know that it is unhinged. The violence, the ‘vegan Sith’ philosophy, the use of swords. It’s the center not holding. It’s Yeats’ falcon that cannot hear the falconer, “turning and turning in the widening gyre”. And in a mocking irony, this madness grew out of a group that could scarcely sound more sensible, more tucked in—the Rationalist Community.

There’s been some great reporting already—the investigations on Open Vallejo, and this diagnosis by David Morris, which feels dead on: the existential threat of AI is driving people insane.

I’m going to take a ramble through all of this stuff. Join me.

The Crimes

On January 20^th in Vermont a couple of Zizians were pulled over by Border Patrol—a pink-haired computer scientist named Teresa Youngblut and a German math wizard named Felix Bauckholt. Out of nowhere, Teresa Youngblut opened fire, killing the Border Agent before her arrest. Felix was also killed in the shootout. Three days earlier, on the opposite coast in Vallejo, Northern California, an 82 year old man named Curtis Lind was stabbed to death, and another Zizian was arrested—Maximilian Snyder, a 22 year old data scientist from Oxford University, who had applied for a marriage license with Youngblut last November. His motive seems straightforward. Lind was due to testify against a group of Zizians who had attacked him a couple of years earlier over an alleged rent dispute—they were said to be living in vans parked on his land. Lind fought back, shooting two of his attackers and killing one, but he was blinded in one eye with a samurai sword.

Meanwhile in Pennsylvania, just outside Philly, an elderly couple, the Zajkos, were murdered in January 2023 by—so it’s believed—another Zizian, potentially their own daughter Michelle, who’s apparently connected to the gun that Youngblut used in Vermont. LaSota, Ziz herself, was arrested in a nearby motel shortly afterwards, but soon released on bail. Until she was found that day hiding in the bathroom, it wasn’t clear that she was even alive, since she’d faked her death in the previous year. As of now, she’s at large and wanted in two states.

So, the ‘murder-cult’ branding seems fair enough.

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The one time I got a tarot reading, it was from a professed Nazi in Manhattan Beach. Eric was his name. He sold solar panels and lived in a condo a few blocks from the water. We’d been chatting for a couple of months by then, having all kinds of vigorous debates. Long emails and calls from the road. One time he sat in the car park, after the gym, and we…

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I’ve been remiss, I haven’t posted a piece in a minute. I was working on something a bit longer, but then LA caught fire, we evacuated, I caught the flu… It’s been busy. But we’re lucky, we were spared, unlike so many of our friends.

I took that picture from our back deck at about 11pm or so, on the night the Eaton Fire started eating up the Angeles Forest. We fled a few hours later.

As I write this, I still haven’t returned home or shaken this flu. Still a bit scrambled.

But I did write about this experience for The New Statesman, so for those of you who haven’t already seen the piece on my social, have a read.

And hold tight. Regular programming will resume very shortly.

Stay strong LA,

Sanjiv

Hi there, I’m Sanjiv. Apparently you’re supposed to introduce yourself with each post, so here goes. This is a newsletter about subcultures and the ways they reveal who we are as a society. You’ll find original reporting here as well as new takes on archive stories I’ve written for GQ, Esquire, the Telegraph and others.

If you’re interested in outsiders,…

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I’m Sanjiv, an “English” reporter based in LA. I write about subcultures and fringe groups because I love weirdos they’re a fascinating way to make sense of the world.

I’ve been writing since flip-phones, mostly for GQ and Esquire, where I interviewed a ton of celebrities, several tons, (and yes there will be stories). But the rest of the time, I was off exploring the fringe, all the oddballs and outlaws, the freaks and seekers that America churns out with such abandon. I moved from London to LA around 2000 and immediately found the scale and wildness of America daunting. Subcultures seemed the most interesting way into this mad country—not quite the front door but the side hatch that leads to the crawl space…

I’ve covered pimps, Nazis, swingers, trolls, bikers, border vigilantes and sovereign citizens. Also furries, Bronies, hackers, hookers, ultra runners and sneeze fetishists (bless them). I’ll take you into all of these worlds, and more. Like the polygamists of Utah and Arizona. I fell down that rabbit hole in the 2000s during the whole Warren Jeffs saga. My investigations led to a documentary for Channel Four (UK) called “The Man With 80 Wives”. There was also a book, Secrets & Wives: The Hidden World of Mormon Polygamy (Counterpoint).

Since then, I’ve found a new rabbit hole, with actual rabbits this time (or at least that’s how they identify). If you’re interested in furries and you like true crime, then stay tuned…

Why Subcultures

Lurid fascination. That’s usually how it starts. Weird obsessions, secret lives, it’s all so juicy. But then the curiosity deepens. The day I learned, for instance, that there’s a whole community of people online who can’t get off until their partner sneezes, the questions kept coming, one drawing out the next like a box of tissues. Why sneezing? How do fetishes begin? Is this an internet thing or does it go back a thousand years? What part of the human mystery does this reveal? (A post is in the works…)

I want to be clear, this is not some freak show. None of us are “normal”, whatever that means, and freaks in glass houses etc. Besides, once I get chatting to a sneeze fetishist or polygamist—or any other ‘other’ for that matter—I’m always reminded that whatever our differences, we are all human and vulnerable, born into lives we didn’t choose, and subject to forces beyond our control. And that alone is reason enough to write about subcultures.

But there are other reasons too.

1. They’re a window into society

A warped window, perhaps. A lens. The fringe is always a comment on the mainstream, it circumscribes the center and contains it. Every society is defined by its edges.

2. They force us out of our comfort zones.

Which is never a bad thing. It’s healthy to look at life a little differently from time to time, and stress-test our assumptions. From what I can tell, there’s a lot of that going on right now anyway, which brings me to…

3. They’re more relevant than ever.

The center is not holding, to borrow a famous line. Groups and ideas that were once considered ‘out there’ are now very much ‘in here’, by which I mean, ‘in charge’. Fringe groups are actively shaping our world. We’ve succumbed so fully to technologies of fragmentation that our institutions are crumbling while feverish little subgroups grow in strength and number. The pendulum swings from majoritarian to minoritarian, the old order gives way and norms perish. We’ve entered an age of cults and madness. From Q Anon to Queers for Palestine. From Stop The Steal to Great Replacement Theory. Men can get pregnant now. Everything is racist. And the center has become a clamorous town square full of jostling out-group minorities, not just ethnic , but religious, political, ideological, sexual…

4. I’m a minority.

Perhaps you’ve noticed. My parents came to England from West Bengal around 1970 and three decades later, I left for America, as though afflicted by the same restless immigrant gene. I’ve tried living in London, Bombay, Delhi and LA, but no matter where I go, I never quite fit in. Which is probably why, out of the four, I ended up in LA—with its uncanny gravity for the untethered. And also why I’m drawn to fringe groups, because they’re outsiders too. Only they found each other and made a home, a place they belong.

To be honest, I envy them. Who doesn’t want to belong? It goes beyond the immigrant thing for me, back to when I was a squalling baby with two warring parents snapping at each other over my crib. I’ve always felt like an outsider looking in, a visitor, on the wrong side of the glass. I don’t think there’s a subculture I’ve covered that some part of me hasn’t wanted to join. Except the pimps, but we’ll get to them later.

I once gave a talk to a bunch of polygamist kids at their school in Short Creek, southern Utah. Not that the kids themselves were polygamist, they were kids, but they were part of the fundamentalist community there. You know what I mean. It wasn’t a great speech. More of a rambling account of my life as a rootless young man trying to scrape a living as a writer. Plus ca change. But I thought it might inspire some of them to break free of their dogmatic little world and venture forth, as I had done. Didn’t they want to be like me? Well, no, as it turned out. They looked up at me, puzzled, all these polite white faces. Why had I chosen a life like that? With no church, no children, no sense of home?

The bell rang and they returned to class, leaving me to walk back to the house in town where I was staying. The streets were empty, there was desert all around. A sharp wind rolled tumbleweed across the plains and whipped dust up into my eyes. And as I walked, all I wanted was to be one of those kids, to join their class on Mormon history or whatever. Not for the polygamy, but for the sense of tribe and home. The comfort of being exactly where you’re supposed to be.

I may not have found my people yet, but I’m still looking. That’s why I’m here.

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