What Does Your Paradise Look Like?
Not just the gardens of eden, but your dream getaways, the oases you run to in your mind and on your holidays?
What is your idea of heaven?
What image do you conjure to bring about the perfect balance of stimulation and relaxation that we associate with the word paradise? Where is it that you go in your mind to dream about the you that you most like to be? And what do you do when you get there?
Maybe it is something fundamental to the human experience that we need to imagine, to believe, to expect even, that, just there, beyond the next hill, over the next mountain, beyond the desert in which we find ourselves, just there, we will reach the perfect place. Solace. An oasis, yes. But, more than that. We don’t think only about reaching a place of rest, relief before we begin the journey again. We dream of the perfect place as an ultimate destination, a kind of culmination — completion, fulfillment, satisfaction, in life, love, career — where we can finally stop all of the striving and stressing that is bringing us down and our blissful lives can really begin.
Certainly all writers think that way. Maybe all artists, all people: One day, we tell ourselves, when this book sells or I get that promotion or my crush slides into my DMs, then, when that lucky lottery number comes in, then I can finally deal with the things I have put off, have been letting slide, all of the parts of myself that I’d hope to inhabit but cannot afford to just now, can finally move into the dream home, take the dream job, live dream life, and then I will be happy.
In the meantime, while we wait on our jackpot to come rolling in, we dream of escape. Of getting away from it all. Of dream vacations. And we have had a lot of time to think about our dream vacations of late. Too much time, in a purgatory of lockdown, or else betwixt travel restrictions that seem to be in constant rewrites by Kafka, endless amounts of time in which to dream, to bookmark our digital Baedekers with dream jaunts, to pin all of our ambitions for amusement, relief, release on a map of the world.
For a lot of us, though, the first trip out of the pandemic, the obligatory trip, is to see family. About a decade ago, my dad moved to Palm Springs, making my visiting him there something potentially more than obligatory, potentially even fun, like a getaway. “Potentially” — because you’ve all spent extended times with your family, and we can talk about it together later in therapy. But the idea of a visit there always presents itself as an opportunity, to sip margaritas poolside under the dramatic arch of the nearby mountains, to do Palm Springsy things. This time I even got it into my mind that I would take pictures of my dad and his world as a kind of homage to Larry Salter’s great Pictures from Home, a book he made about his parents who’d retired to the valley here in the 1980s. And maybe it was this project that put me in the mind of paradise in general, and paradises themselves as oases in a desert of dreams.
Sultan’s images of his folks’ sun-soaked ‘good life’ cast a sort of gimlet lens on the comforts and pursuits of the boomer generation, of their palm-tree-lined paradise, while at the same time making Reagan-era icons of his mother and father who, for so many of my generation who grew up looking at those images, catching perhaps some whiff of the irony involved, or not, became avatars of a kind of silver-haired sadness and stillness of the upper middle class. It was a stillness and a sadness both that we, the late Gen-X-‘we,’ couldn’t imagine for ourselves, which we rejected outright, assured as we were that we would live a dream life of stimulation and satisfaction from the start, that we would bend the entirety of commerce and capitalism to our humane and artistic interests.
Fast forward to the pandemic and the Gen-X creative class geezers are all a bit underemployed, and everyone our age and younger is quitting their jobs in the content mines (so the newspapers tell us) to, if not go make goat cheese upstate, at least to have their zoom calls and do their CMS publishing from a hammock in balmier climes. Paradise not exactly lost, perhaps, just sort of beside the point these days as we are all just trying to pay rent without losing ourselves in the process.
And so it occurs to me that my dad, who largely survives on his social security but hustles far harder than I do with two teaching gigs and at least one ghost writing job on the go, is ahead of the curve here. My dad, who turns 87 this month, and who lies about his age (because he too is still waiting for his lottery number to come in and does not what the industry to discriminate against him because of his age) and who has a boyfriend 60-odd years his junior, did a decade ago what so many of us only thought to do this year when the world unplugged — moving to his approximation of an affordable paradise — and, honestly, I don’t know whether his example is terrifying or comforting in that respect. His example is not without its red flags, its challenges. But if I am to look on the bright side here, maybe that example will prove out and the paradise we collectively imagine and project in the future will not be an ecologically-unsound 10-hour flight away, but instead a happier, healthier, more fulfilling home life. It won’t be about future dreams, not about a hateful job that affords you a weeklong holiday hiking through the Himalayas to escape and unplug while creating the very need to, but about present-tense satisfaction in the now, and nurturing community and sustainable lives, lifestyles — living in a place where you are happier and healthier, whatever that means to you? Maybe. Sounds good to me, I’ll take one.
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And so while I entertain myself with the idea of an artistic project during my visit, the question remains: What does one do in Paradise? We’ve all experienced that sensation — after a day on the beach in Bodrum or wherever, the boredom kicks in. Now what, we wonder? What do we do now that we are in Eden? What do we do that is not an exact replication of the time-killing behavior in which we engaged ourselves throughout the pandemic on our depressing couches at home?
For his part, my dad thinks there is absolutely nothing to do in Palm Springs. Last time I visited I dragged him to a drag show, or a lounge act in a gay club that his friend put on — I can’t quite remember — but he was embarrassed by it all and it was probably past both of our bedtimes. I cannot for the life of me get him to go to Melvyn’s, a kitchy white-piano bar where the Rat Pack vibes never died nor seemingly did any of their friends who are still the clientele. Maybe my dad thinks that my enthusiasm for the gin-pickled crooners and smoking jackets and Liberace-lite décor is a way of making fun of him and his generation (it is definitely not). So I make us an endless stream of martinis of which Frank and Dino would approve and we sit down in front of the television to watch Anthony Bourdain travel to various purgatories and paradises in our stead. Maybe, in fact, it is more fun to have the fantasy of an adventure, with a remote in hand, than it is actually trekking up and down the stony cliffs of Basilicata, for example, anyway.
Last time I visited Palm Springs I was positively busy. I went to the museum, to the Living Desert zoo, into Indian Canyon to make watercolors, went hiking up and down the old “Cactus to Clouds” trail. But that was in October (usually I like to come in December, around Christmastime, when the colors of the light are all perfectly pastel and the air is so thin and clear the mountains look almost two dimensional, as if they’ve been cut out of a pop-up book). This time around, from the tail end of August into September, it barely gets as low as 90 and it is all I can do to drape myself on pop’s midcentury furniture, so I do not run up the hills like those crazy big horn rams you find out in Palm Desert, standing precariously on thumbnail-thin ridges, looking around sort of amused at our human need for surface area on which to feel comfortable and safe. I don’t golf, so that’s out. I email both Jeremy Scott and the supermarket billionaire Ron Burkle to see if I can visit either of their Lautner homes, but no dice, both are under renovation. The local museum operates the brilliant home that the late architect Albert Frey designed for himself — the one with the giant boulder protruding into the living room — but they are dramatically understaffed due to the pandemic and cannot accommodate a visit. So, what to do in paradise? We do what everyone has always done upon finding themselves in paradise, going all the back to Adam and Eve, we eat.
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Time was Palm Springs was just tourist taco joints, desert delis and the kinds of blue-plate specials diners that cater to seniors. Times have changed, just, but still my dad’s favorite place in town is a nondescript Mexican place in a strip mall near the airport. It’s almost the only place he eats out — I even had them cater his 80th birthday with platters of their shrimp diablo, racks of his beloved bean and cheese burritos, a bag upon bag of their lusciously lardy homemade corn chips to go with their firey tomato salsa. We did order from them a few times this visit — they do a shrimp and octopus campechana that I crave — but when my dad and I get together we like to cook, to “fix” dinner as he says it with his subtle Missouran slang. When we first really bonded twenty odd years ago, it was food that sealed the deal, Italian cooking and the romance of the peninsula, specifically, but our comfort food is all waspy picnic fare: fried chicken and potato salad, ham and scalloped potatoes with green beans. And so it was in this arena we tarried on this trip. Mostly to spare ourselves from going out into the sweltering inferno of the desert. Well, desert may be overstating it — Palm Springs is humid now, thick with mosquitos. Something almost subtropical. Not quite a desert, or not only that. And when I start moaning about this to my dad, wondering aloud at what damage the millions of golf courses in the valley have made on the ecosystem here, he nods and then reminds me that Palm Springs and the surrounding area sits atop an enormous fresh-water aquifer. All the water down there is presumably what keeps all those greens and fairways so green. It is also apparently the primary source of the stuff Coca-Cola bottles as Dasani — a word made up by focus groups to conjure feelings of relaxation, suggesting purity and replenishment, I read, for god’s sake.
And while I am moaning and my dad is explaining and I am googling, I wonder if this is to be the fate of all of our paradises, that we will fundamentally alter their character by our visits, our demands on them, to the point that they will forever more be un-paradisical because we have found them to be so in the first place? Even the most bounteous aquifers to not spring eternal.
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Paradise in modern America is architectural as much as it is geographical. With enough capital, and acreage, our happy utopianists can start building their own sim-style estate anywhere from Agoura to Zion. And they do. That is a lot of the history of places like Palm Springs. Picking a spot, any spot really, with enough free space, a temperate-ish climate, and no arbitrary customs against the kind of fun you like to have, and a resort comes together. In the case of Palm Springs, the legend is that, during the studio system reign in Hollywood, contracted players had always to remain within two hours of the studio gates. Palm Springs fit the bill and a city was born.
Of course it is Slim Aarons’s 60s-era images of a very white C-suite executive’s good life that so many of us think of when we imagine Palm Springs (if not paradise itself) these days. And those images are still making themselves to some extent around the pools at The Ace and the Parker hotels. Hope Springs and The Lautner in Desert Hot Springs too are perhaps quieter removes, if that’s your thing. When I first started coming to the desert in the 90s, I guess, I always loved the six or eight room midcentury motels built around a pool, but now I find it hard to beat AirBnb-ing a ranch style house with a backyard and a pool in the Movie Colony, say, for creating your own Aarons-y vignette with a Rat Pack you’ve invited and vetted. But I like that kind of insulation, isolation; I’m from Los Angeles.
My dad has neither capital nor acreage, and he does not think of this resort town as a place of semi-permanent vacation we see in Aarons’s images. Which maybe puts paid to the idea that we can ever be in holiday mode in an area code where our rent is due. In a way, my dad has convinced himself that he is trapped in this paradise, because of the easy access to quality healthcare he finds here. He knows his doctor and even has him over for dinner. In fact, his doctor and the manager of the local Ralph’s who he badgers with unnecessary calls to see what has come in (it’s Ralph’s! everything is the same every day, I tell him) are probably his closest friends here.
But, on second thought, if I really listen to what people are saying, even the greatest escapists among them, so many of the paradises they describe now have only to do with survival, with the relief from one concern or another. For one of my friends who is married to a Swede, it is the alleviation of a healthcare bill by a move back to Scandinavia. For some people with extortionate prescription bills it is the ease and cost of over-the-counter meds in Mexico that has them thinking about moving. So what if my dad comforts and confines himself to a place where there is never any traffic, where his Medicare covers most of his healthcare, and where the manager of Ralph’s humors his belief that his is shopping the Campo da Fiore ever Friday?
While we are watching Bourdain traipse around San Sebastian or Sicily, I listen to my dad spin his own fantasies, about where he would like to live, where he would like to go “one last time.” And I’m struck that even in his most exotic imaginings, all of the trips he takes in his mind are the stuff of nostalgia. His dream escapades are all re-visits to places he’s already gone, to sites seeded with memories and stacked up with the kind of synaptic layering we build upon our favorite places. I can’t get him to even imagine going to Tokyo for the first time, for example, but he waxes endlessly about going back to places he visited in Rome in the 1950s — or, indeed, where we ate when we visited there in the 2000s. For my dad, paradise has been a place entirely constructed from nostalgia, a kind of Disneyworld populated by ghosts.
And, really, am I so different? Are my ideas of paradise even my own, or those that I have inherited from my father, images and ideas that have been sold to be by the consumerist machine, projections I have adopted as my own but which I have inferred from influencers, saved of my Instagram folder under Places to Go?
What is my idea of paradise, anyway? And how much longer will it be that way?
