I'm Coming Out of My Cave and I'm Doing Just Fine

Imagine a stay in a mental institution that feels like the most amazing holiday. An outdoor, rule-free, 640 acre lunatic asylum that lets you be who you truly are.

On the rocks: Garth’s Boulder Gardens at 6.48 am this week.

Some people have been asking how life in the California desert has been going of late. There was a story I wrote in the Guardian in 2021 about my life living in a cave at Garth’s Boulder Gardens. But since then I admit I have become a little vague.

 I’m still reeling from the experience, to be honest. I thought my memoir about female sexuality, Sex Drive was the top of the rock in terms of life-changing encounters and experiences. But then I found an even higher rock. I’d always been drawn to write about charismatic women, like Betty Dodson in Sex Drive. But then I got to know Garth Bowles and his 640 acre Shangri-La bubble in the Mojave high desert three hours out of LA. It was like the land that the Pied Piper led the children - suddenly the clouds parted at the top of the hill and the children of the revolution entered a world beyond their wildest dreams. I couldn’t believe my luck that I’d stumbled across this story.

It was like an ancient tale told around a fire: the king who creates a fairytale land in the middle of the California desert. He fills it with peach trees and exotic plants and pools carved into huge boulders. He opens up his 640-acre garden to anyone who needs to escape society. There’s only one catch. “If you need healing,” the king warns, “Spirit will find it out. And healing doesn’t mean going back to the way things were before.”

I lived in that free range lunatic asylum for a full two years, and then events happened that made me realize it was time to come back and write up the whole extraordinary, fantastical, heart-breaking, life-enhancing tale.

  So I rented a cabin 30 minutes down the road from Boulder Gardens in a place called Landers. Landers is known as the high desert UFO place. It’s home to the Integratron, a mathematically perfect acoustic dome built in the late 1950s by Aviation engineer, George Van Tassel. Van Tassel’s dream was to achieve high speed time travel and he said his instructions came from the captain of a scout ship from Venus. (Having lived at Garth’s for so long, it seemed a good idea to wean myself slowly off that alternate reality by living in some place that wasn’t a cave but was still pretty weird.)

Little House on the UFO Prairie in Landers

 Now that I have only one foot in the cave, I feel a bit like Henry Hill in the final scene of Scorsese’s Goodfellas when he leaves the Mafia to join the witness protection program. “And now it’s all over,” he goes. “And that’s the hardest part. Today, everything is different. I’m an average nobody... I get to live the rest of my life like a schnook.”

When I was at Garth’s full-time, we’d have people coming up from Loa Angeles for parties and retreats at the weekend. Execs and movie producers a lot of them. When they found out I lived there, they were impressed. But when I told then I lived in a cave, it was better than saying I lived in a mansion in Bel Air

 But that’s all ego stuff.  And the thrill isn’t gone. The desert outside the boulder walls of Garth’s still enchants. It’s same same but different. There are no boulders here in Landers but at night, when I go out of the back door of the cabin to pee (there’s only a peat toilet which I prefer not to use and anyway, peeing outside is one off my favorite things) there’s the shock of  the massive dome of the sky above and all the twinkling stars and I remember that wherever you’re at, it’s always Millionaires Row in the desert.  If it’s the early hours of the morning, there’ll be the waft of the creamy orange scent of the Coyote Melon flowers that open up at night and close soon after sunrise.

 Not for much longer though. The turning of the seasons is finally happening. It was  a hideously hot summer of 100+ degrees most days (40+ centigrade.) I’m very excited because next week temperatures get down to the 80s which means the Coyote Melon flowers will stop coming out, but so will the creatures in the cabin. My cabin has way more spooky insects living in it than the cave ever did. Remind me to tell you about the “spider ballet” one day. These creatures will soon all go to sleep in the cold as will the rattlesnake who I occasionally encounter during my early morning jogs around the perimeter of the cabin property. Thanks to the Garth’s training, I learned that rattlesnakes won’t bother you if you don’t bother them, although they’re definitely “strong medicine” as they say, when you see one. There’s no being cool or faking anything when you see a rattler.  There’s a local “rattlesnake lady”  called Danielle who will come and take your rattler away for a donation, but after five summers in the desert I decided to just keep an eye out.  My neighbor Olivia, Aldous Huxley’s 86-year-old niece, says that you have to call them a name- like “snaky’ and then they seem less scary.

You’ll hear more about Olivia in this substack, as well as some of the other desert characters. I’ll also be sharing some of the out-takes from my cave memoir: the dud medicine ceremony by Charlie Chaplin’s granddaughter, for instance, although the main story of those two golden years living in the cave, the era when the king was still alive - that’s the ultimate For Subscribers Only or at least for the right publisher when I find one. It’s funny, it was hard enough to sell a book on female masturbation and I assumed that living in a cave would be a more acceptable topic for the publishing world. Well, I’m here to try and convince people of that.

I was initally drawn to Substack by reading Hanif Kureshi’s gripping tale of his life-changing accident in Italy last year.  I’m also very aware of something an LA friend of mine recently termed “internet panhandling”  But my asking you to follow me here is not just to try and stretch my $100 weekly entertainment and food budget – which is doable and living in a cave teaches you that you don’t need much. (I ate so much boiled kale and quinoa during my cave years. My friend Pxl, who lived in the penthouse cave near me, grew better kale than cannabis though I didn’t like to tell him this.)  

 The point is that if my cave memoir is to come out into the light of day, I will need the support of a community. I  learned about the importance of community when I wrote Sex Drive and subsequently tried to sell it to a series of risk-averse publishers.Friends didn’t just help me drive round London with a 4-foot fiberglass clitoris in the back of a yellow Mustang convertible, they helped me keep my spirits up and reminded me that trying to change the world was something good to at least attempt to do.

A propos of Sex Drive: On The Road To A Pleasure Revolution which was released in paperback this June in the UK and last month in the US, I’ll be posting some juicy stuff from that book on Fridays, including video footage of some of  the “characters” i.e. the rock star feminists of the 1970s and ‘80s that I met along the way. And as per my insta post today about Indigenous Peoples’ Day, I am looking forward to reporting some more about Red Road Journey. Casting some light on the stories that have yet to be told, letting native peoples tell their own stories and learning something about how they managed to live in harmony with the earth without destroying it. The topic of native American healing seems a natural progression after living at Garth’s for so long. I thank any readers who might want to follow any of these stories.