Hot Tubs and Lost Worlds, Part II

A Time Machine to the Hot Tub

In the 1970s, the San Francisco Bay Area was ground zero for hot tub culture and the new tribe of people who would rally to it. It was the era when the counterculture went mainstream. Squares were turning on and hippies were selling out, and, along the coastal stretches of southern Marin County, just over the Golden Gate Bridge, a strange hybrid was observed in growing numbers. These Aquarian Age professionals brought to grey-flannel-suit careerism an alloy of Haight-Ashbury hip and New Age cant that they believed would redeem them from the Philistinism of their unenlightened peers who were only in it for the bread or the power trip, man, and who didn’t know where it really was at. They could be recognized by their high levels of education and wealth, their fearsome appetite for acquiring lifestyle status objects like Volvos, Cuisinarts, Halston, and wines with appellations more elaborate than simply “white” and “table,” and also by their overweening self-obsession, which found expression variously in psychotherapy, Transcendental Meditation, EST, jogging, casual sex, drug abuse, consciousness raising, bumper-sticker political activism, and obsessing over organic food.

In retrospect, this was clearly an early strain of yuppie. But the soft and over domesticated yuppie we know today pales before its feral ancestor. Just check out this clip from a 1978 NBC special news report I Want It All Now:

The definitive account of this period is Cyra McFadden’s The Serial: A Year in the Life of Marin. Published in 1977, the novel is a collection of 52 chapters that had run in weekly installments for the Pacific Sun—the same Marin-based paper, incidentally, that first published Armistead Maupin’s Tales from the City. Long out of print, McFadden’s book is not easy to come by, but the 1980 movie adaptation, staring Martin Mull and Tuesday Weld, is available on DVD and enjoys something approaching cult status.

Writing from inside the beast, McFadden describes the customs of proto-yuppies, such as mingling after work in upscale fern bars, where happening professionals got it together amid lush, subtropical greenery and sipped sophisticated drinks with exotic sounding names like chardonnay and piña coladas.

And when these swingers chose to make the scene at home, the venue par excellence was the hot tub. It was natural fit: With its Zen garden associations, the hot tub bestowed on its owner an aura of spiritual depth and equipoise; but it was also fun, like playing in the bathtub with all your friends, with the added frisson of bubbles and boobs. Best of all, it was very expensive.

The story of Homo hottubiens hits close to home for me, because I was just a newborn living in San Francisco’s Marina district when Perry’s, arguably the first fern bar, opened its doors across the street from the apartment my parents were renting.  So, conjoined by sidereal alignment, hot-tub culture and I are twins of a sort. And as is the case with twins, our bond is deep and enduring—even if it has not at all times been a source of pride.

In fact, I resisted the hot tub for years, before finally succumbing in my mid-twenties. A college friend had moved into her boyfriend’s house. This was in Berkeley. In the yard behind their tiny stucco bungalow, the sole feature, aside from an expanse of dying lawn and a single, spiky artichoke plant, was a deck upon which sat a redwood-sided hot tub.

A Virginia native, the boyfriend had a less vexed relationship with hot tubbing than I did. He and my college friend became great enthusiasts, and so it was only a matter of time and the right number of bottles of syrah before I was eventually induced to shed my clothes and test the waters.

Public nudity and hot tubbing: It was a double first. But, since I’m as sightless as a mole without my glasses, the strangeness of the moment was quite literally blurred, which gave it a solipsistic quality. Gently simmering in the 101 degree caldron, I let my thoughts wonder to visions of macramé plant hangers, laden with feathery fern fronds, the bearded profusion of creeping charlies, the snaky vines of the wandering jew. The minutes were tolled by sweeping hands of a clock set in an amorphous slab of driftwood, gathered from the Mendocino coast and varnished to a glassy sheen; and the evening light took on a mysterious, submarine cast, as if someone had draped a gypsy scarf over the moon. I had never snorted lines of cocaine off an art nouveau mirror, or worn a velvet blazer, or made soulful love to a crimped-haired nymph in a peasant blouse beneath a bower of redwood branches—but I knew this legacy was mine. Like Alex Haley entering the Gambian village of Juffure, where his forefather Kunta Kinté once lived, young, proud, and free, I too had come home.

But the hot tub is not just my story. The symbol of the wanting-it-all-now lifestyle pioneered in the Bay Area now belongs to the world. If the spark that fired that revolution was the desire to seize the perks of establishment success without letting go of the arcane prestige only the counterculture can provide, then today we are all yuppies. Anyone who’s dressed their child in a Joy Divison T-shirt or taken a baby stroller into a bar to hear a friend’s band perform; anyone who’s worn thrift store clothes to the office or thinks that shaving once a week is business casual; anyone who’s ever conflated a consumer choice with political action; we all owe a debt to those insufferable Marin pricks from thirty years ago. We have inherited their freedoms. And, like it or not, we have not escaped all their vices.

If, like me, watching Hot Tub Time Machine leaves your jones unsatisfied, do what I did and rent Serial.You might be surprised to see that its representation of 1980 is much less alien than Hot Tub Time Machine’s 1986. Listen to Tommy Smother’s shamanistic sermons, which are eclectic to the point of incoherence, or Sally Kellerman’s contorted attempts to express her narcissism in the language of communal politics or ascetic spirituality, and tell me if that is any more parodic than what you can read in the Living section of the Huffington Post on any given day.

Don’t get me wrong—Serial is not a great film. It almost certainly delivers fewer yucks than Hot Tub Time Machine, but it does pack in almost as much drug use, more sex, and more hot tubs. These hot tubs might not travel time, but they don’t have to. After watching the Serial, you might discover that you’re soaking in one already.