Some frowned skeptically when we said we were building a home in a 55+ community in Rancho Mirage, CA called Del Webb, especially after they got a glimpse of the website. The Lifestyle Director. The planned activities. Pickleball. Home models that had a dedicated garage room for a golf cart. Would we be content in such an artificially-created and controlled environment?
Citing a minimum age requirement, to our minds, meant a discerning demographic. These were the folks who had outgrown the shallow pursuits of youth — the chasing of status, the desperation to gain the affirmation of others.
“No, no, no,” we corrected our friends. “You misunderstand. We won’t be actually participating in any of that nonsense. But we ARE over 55, and it will be nice to be in a neighborhood free of unsupervised kids and bikes and prams.”
But we actually began to think of it as an endless loop of a drive-in horror film: Dawn of the Del Webb Dead.
Let me say this upfront: this isn’t the fault of Del Webb. The blame is as much with us, that we bought into the marketing’s veneer and didn’t look enough beneath the surface to find a whole shit ton of wrinkles and unrealized need.
Del Webb wasn’t 55+. It was 70+. We were never inconvenienced by strollers. That much was true. No, we were blinded by the chrome of walkers. LIFE ALERT was the jewelry of choice. A lot of plaid shorts, dark socks collapsed around the ankle, hard dress shoes…and that was just on the ladies. We met more Karens and Gladys Kravitzes than you can shake an assistive device at, most of them wearing leopard print, with bright white veneers as big as playing cards. The Senior Moments of Del Webb would warrant a truckload of stopwatches.
And, BTW, there were children: we didn’t count on the grandkids and great-grandkids who come to visit every weekend and populate the community pool, dashing around and splashing everyone as their chaperone’s jaws go slack during their afternoon nap.
Del Webb has a large LGBTQ+ percentage. It even boasted a Rainbow Club…rendered meaningless when so many straight “allies” eagerly joined that they outnumbered the gays and it turned into something as benign as the Wine Appreciation Society. At one point, I half-seriously suggested starting a club entitled ‘Gay Men Who Like Cock’ just to exclude the wizened fag hags. It seemed to be more about “walking” women, for whom Kotex was a distant memory, who were thrilled to have a gay male friend to tell them how pretty they were even though they weren’t.
Most of the gay men groomed as though it were still 1983. I cannot begin to count the sweaters loosely knotted around shoulders, stickpins, popped collars and feathered silver (with unflattering mustard undertones) hair. Many seemed to cling to Lisa Birnbach’s ‘The Official Preppy Handbook’ as their style guide.
What we also discovered: many of The Eldergay, in their “former lives”, had been married and had grandkids. I don’t have much patience for that. This isn’t 1812. Sorry you had no courage to be your Authentic Self until you were 68, but I’m not interested in hearing the torments of your closet. By marring, you grabbed the low-hanging fruit — so to speak — and hurt a ton of people in the process. Telling us how you “snuck out” to frolic with men doesn’t make you sly and mischievous. It makes you a deceptive adulterer.
Along those lines, we also intuited many of the men here in traditional heterosexual unions were on the “downlow”. Within a week of move-in, a graying gentleman in the community married an especially-precious, Madras-loving nymph, greeted me via Facebook Messenger, then began asking a series of increasingly-intimate questions. When did I know was gay? Had I been with women? Were Greg and I monogamous? I replied as blandly as possible, thinking I would have preferred a green bean casserole from the Welcome Wagon.
Another couple, in our one and only evening in their company, candidly offered they had a “very open” relationship. This was over our first drink, so this was clearly setting the stage for something more. Who I was meant to pair off with: the one with enough sun damage to fill the appointment books of a dozen dermatologists or the bitter, sarcastic partner whose jeans were belted near his tits? There must’ve been some misunderstanding: we were looking to share interest, not spouses.
And cliques! Oh! the cliques! Utterly convinced they were tastemakers and arbiters of all that was good in Del Webb. Full-disclosure: I am very wary of clubs and groups. I never really had one as a kid, and in adulthood came to regard them as allied conformity, a smug unanimity, freed from thinking on their own.
Unluckily for us, we lived quite close to one especially precious specimen. I’ll call her Missy. She essentially wears a sandwich board begging the community to ‘Notice Me,’ since her husband — a disagreeable fellow with a beard that looks more like a patch of wiry whisker he missed shaving — doesn’t. They clearly loved their wine, brought in by trunkload. I don’t begrudge anyone a fondness for grape; I only wish they could have helpfully broken said boxes for recycling, rather than allowing them, along with CHEWY.com boxes, to bounce around their walkways.
They didn’t much like staying home together. That Missy, she needed affirmation, so they’d turn up at every block party, fundraiser, clubhouse brainstorming session, garage gathering or housewarming with lawn chairs and matching flasks.
Missy especially cherished plastering her Facebook page with a series of personal pleas. No problems there…until, dissatisifed with the responses (there were often none), she aggressively invaded and destroyed the official Del Webb FB Groups.
Where might I buy an outdoor clock?
Help me choose the right tile for our spa.
She needed advice on upholstery wallpaper, outdoor furnishings, a window washer…”but nothing too pricey”. She always stressed affordability.
And the photographs! She would memorialize and post nearly every meal, usually involving a form of eggplant smothered in a red sauce and resembling roadkill, then tease us with “And what’s your favorite Eye-talian recipe?”
To break up the dinner pics, she’d often update her profile photo with something snapped way too close, exposing crooked lipstick or powder caked around one nostril. When those didn’t yield the attention she craved, she’d unearth her high school Senior photograph and encourage others to do the same with a “cute caption”.
As someone who had common sense noted wryly to me “She doesn’t even realize she’s the joke of the community.”
Add in two yipping dogs no larger than rodents she’d drag into Gelson’s for “support”, dyed black hair that didn’t quite disguise a bald spot and a cement rabbit figurine in the front yard whose tail had broken off and you get the picture.
And what serves as the ironic twist ending to this rant is that Missy markets herself as a life coach, the woman who requires an informal committee to decide when she should wipe her own butt.
The conflicts of interest ran rampant. A member of the HOA, a dull man with a slow look, had an insincere husband who advertised himself as a “concierge” to the community, which I took to mean he pinched off full catheters and changed light bulbs for old people afraid of stepstools. So when an issue comes before the Board that intersects with the husband’s little concierge checklist, to whom do we defer? And who do we reward? “Sure, I can rent your home for a week to a tourist, but sssssshhhhhhh, keep it quiet, it’s against the HOA rules and my husband is kinda on the Board.” But give them dubious credit: they had their heads up so many asses I don’t know how they could see to drive. They just couldn’t get it together enough to have much of a relationship with the children they adopted and raised. It was little wonder they became quite close with Missy.
Achieving seven decades with not a single interest is an achievement unto itself. I still cannot quite understand how someone accumulates so many birthdays yet have no hobbies, proactive or reactive. I have more than I have hours. I could have loaned them some. How many times did I hear “I don’t have anything to do” and “All the days look the same”. Maybe retirement wasn’t for you, dipshit, if you got that much validation from you did for a wage. Venturing to the clubhouse in pursuit of bad coffee, companionship and conversation seems not only lonely, but vaguely narcissistic. Maybe no one wants to hear endless anecdotes about your Midwestern funeral home and how you did it up “all Victorian”.
I think the final straw — as if the excruciating sock hops at The Westin ballroom across the street, comedy nights with comics no one had ever heard of, overpriced food truck get-togethers weren’t enough — was a smug vanity musical production about Del Webb itself. Besides the obvious, built-in exclusionary component of it, what could possibly be said about an overly-zealous HOA and a speed limit of 25? How does one parody something that IS a parody? Well, you rip off lyrics and music from famous Broadway songs and call rehearsals that are more about getting on-and-off the stage without a hip fracture, then times its premiere so it doesn’t interfere with the Blue Plate Special. The subsequent reviews were predictable, that so-and-so “stopped the show”. So did unexpected fires and, in the case of Del Webb, a choking fit in the audience. Before this self-absorption trickled into our own psyches — I’ve sadly seen several folks drink the Del Webb cult Kool-aid that should know better — we KNEW it was time to vamoose this big, yet very small, community of people terrified they were no longer relevant.
We also acknowledged some gratitude, that the move had confirmed that our pre-move editing had been prudent…unlike 99% of the residents we met. We went into homes still crammed with damask upholstered sofas that sagged worse than the owner’s jowls, coffee-brown armoires that scraped the ceiling and, in one case, a dining room table that could have comfortably seated Jesus and his disciples. Our own people were the worst, forcing a dusty pew rescued from a German church and wall lights that suggested Dracula’s castle into what could’ve been a nice guest bedroom. Now: did we probably overdo the mid-century modern stuff in compensation? Maybe. But I was hellbent that we be not trapped in furniture and accessories from our glory days.
So we planned our escape with a realtor well-versed in Del Webb, efficient but arrogant, the type who favors cordovan loafers with no socks (and skinny pants just a tad too high on a pale ankle). During our initial pre-sale meetings, he was usually accompanied by his husband? life partner? lapdog? and we never quite knew why. The plus-one mostly hung out on the periphery and rarely spoke (maybe his disproportionate dentures made him self-conscious). We reasoned it was either some form of mistrust or rabid codependence whenever he reliably turned up like an accessory. Subsequent paperwork was riddled with errors — our actual street name was spelled wrong on one and, on another, the actual sales price of the house! — and our realtor raced to blame others, sometimes even us, or would text “My bad” without apology. He wasn’t used to clients who were alert enough to ask questions, follow-up or challenge some of his suppositions; he much preferred the docile and the anesthetized, the ‘On Golden Pond’ theme gently playing on the Victrola. That wasn’t us. The house sold quickly, so I suppose one could chime in that “the ends justified the means”. It wouldn’ve been more pleasant if he hadn’t been such a prick.
Perhaps other 55+ communities are not like being thrust back into Junior High School…but I doubt it. It’s the nature of it. One foot’s on the banana peel, the other is in the vestibule of a nursing home. A few we spoke to even admitted moving here was a mistake, but they didn’t have the damn energy to move.
Well, we did, and I must say, it’s nice to see people with their own pre-schoolers, tending their own front yards and curbing their dogs. It’s even nicer to not have a single person monitoring our comings and goings, why we sometimes hand-watered when we had an irrigation system (it’s called Miracl-Gro, dumbass) or coolly commenting that “you boys don’t socialize much”.
I may yet write an essay, or a fiction, for publication. Call me Grace Metalious.