Babe soup
It was a women-only thing. A man got in only if they came accompanied by women, if I remember correctly, and even still, those women needed to know someone who knew the gate code to slip into the silver-laden backyard. Gurgling over to the left was the star of the show: a large wooden tub gurgling with hot, fresh water hotter than your average Jacuzzi. It was like sitting in a babe stew, each glistening, naked, and always young feminine frame melting, like dissolving bouillons. Protocols demanded a simple rinse-off before wading in, so I guess you could lap up the broth if you wanted to.
I wondered then—in 2012, the period in which I visited Essex—if maybe the person paying the mortgage for the home attached to the yard ever did drink from the pool.
Ten years later I felt pretty positive he must have.
Leaning over a chilled bottle of pinot grigio with a younger friend, she detailed a recent trip to the Bay. Chelsea flew cross-country partially to skip around San Francisco, partially to bang it out with a hot mom she met via coincidence while visiting family in Florida. Waxing poetic on Muir Forest, the beautiful co-op where the hot mom lived, and a night marinating nude in a stranger’s backyard bath tub in Berkeley. When I soaked a decade prior, my friend Malaika, who sherpa’d us effortlessly past the heavy gate, called the place Essex. Chelsea called it Goddess Bath but I knew it had to be the same place. Sure, the Bay is notorious for being “weird,” but how many people welcomed unfamiliar guests to bathe naked on their property? Especially when it wasn’t like the dude who lived in the attached house exactly mingled with his mostly-young, almost-always naked, largely-female non-paying patrons.
My maiden voyage felt dangerous and poetic. Malaika rolled a spliff with Bugle tobacco, mids weed, crushed up white sage, and navigated us over in her van. We had peeled off from the compound where I was staying at the time, a zero-waste commune outfitted with renovated school buses stuffed with bunk beds. There, I became accustomed to peeing in a compost toilet, performing whatever duties my name landed on the chore wheel, and tolerating sharing those chores with a temperamental woman who often flaked on responsibilities and blamed it on being an Aries.
It was nice to get away. Even scorching all my delicate bits in the steaming Essex people soup felt like a luxury—otherwise I got about 30 seconds of warm water in the eco-friendly shower back on the compound (or had to flirt my way into the modern bathroom of the poolhouse someone else in the program was house-sitting. It was actually incredibly kind he let me and my friend Nasimeh do laundry there as much as he did, and I feel a little bad for exploiting his obvious affections for us for our own personal water gain).
I was the solitary East Coast prude who opted for a bikini bottom while boarding the broth—a gesture vaguely made out of respect for my then-boyfriend who was busy fucking rising VICE columnist stars and snorting cocaine off shattered toilet seats back home in Brooklyn. Since we had brought a dude. His name was—I shit you not—Cello Joe. Tall, lanky, permanent smoldering scowl fixed to his face. When he wasn’t farming with us, he traversed the country on his bicycle, cello strapped to his back, sometimes pinpointing various festivals to perform at or simply take drugs at. After huffing patchouli and showing young inner-city school kids how to grow and maintain fruit trees for a solid month or so, I felt my “tour goggles” settle firmly. I craved Cello Joe’s validating chuckle when I cracked a sarcastic joke, wanted him to let me rinse off his mess kit after another oatmeal breakfast, hoped he cast his brooding dark eyes in my direction.
But that first night at Essex, Cello Joe’s eyes were mostly closed. I feigned respect for my friends’ privacy and my flailing relationship drowning 3000 miles away, sending my gaze upwards. Later, Malaika was delighted to share with me that she didn’t bother feigning, so she could confirm Cello Joe wasn’t only packing a huge woodwind instrument.
I’m surprised hot, hot water doesn’t kill people more often. Though I did hear about that one older gentleman who another patron found dead in the bottom of Spa Castle’s rooftop hot tub in Queens. I kinda get it, honestly. The warm and waviness lulls you into a stupor. It can’t be that unlike pre-life in the womb, sloshing around peacefully, cocooned in warmth and the illusion of safety.
One time years later after drinking too much at a daytime music festival in East Atlanta Village, I fell asleep on top of my then-boyfriend in the bathtub. He fell asleep, too, exhausted from drumming then shoulder-rubbing for hours in the hot summer sun. Luckily he woke us both up before we slipped under the surface.
Maybe that’s part of why the mysterious tub-owner keeps Essex so fucking hot. It’s so fucking hot, even, I don’t think it would be possible to stay in there sober more than a couple minutes at a time (and luckily I always was at least mostly-sober in there). I took breaks to bathe in the moonlight, watching the steam lazily raise from my limbs I tangled into a pretzel on a swing in the garden. Some naked women I didn’t know did similar, perching on chunks of wooden deck, petting a cat, I saw a few bust out complicated yoga poses.
I sat under the tree canopy, bright swaths of starry night peeking out, the moon so round and full that once your eyes adjusted, you could maybe forget it was the middle of the night. Passing a herbaceous spliff with Mila, we talked about dreams. She wanted to do comedy—Mila didn’t need prestigious success to be satisfied, she just wanted to pick up less shifts in Humboldt during harvest season. At the time, weed still was available only via prescription in the state of California, and a lot of illegal family farms operated under the radar. Every fall, Mila stripped down to her underwear to trim up buds to sell. The money was good, but the threat of the feds busting up the entire operation always loomed. And then, of course, there were still “legit” lurkers, overjoyed to have any sort of power over the barely-clothed young women largely taking on the trimming work. Mila didn’t do much to sell the experience as a romantic one—she actively wanted out—but we made loose plans for me to join the following September—she had an old barn with a couch, she said. I wondered if I could pitch covering the experience to VICE, for whom I had only started contributing. Mila longed for uproarious laughter as she stood proud and tall on-stage, I just wanted a couple sexy bylines and the esteem I deluded myself into thinking that came with it.
We visited Essex a couple more times before I flew home. We were almost never the only bathers present and after that first trip, I never wore any kind of clothing—bathing suit or otherwise—when we brined in the barrel. Even the rare occasion when we appeared to be alone, it never quite felt that way. Like those glowing eyes I remember from The Great Gatsby watched over, memorizing the ripples left in our wakes while rising from the steaming tub, how the silver moonlight cradled a boob, almost certainly taking in the bizarre, naked yoga poses.
I changed some names, but not Cello Joe. Because I think he would be proud, TBH.
