He used to be a hippie. Sometime before 4 p.m. on Saturday, September 17, 2022, in the shade of towering redwoods in Berkeley, a 78-year-old man stepped into his hot tub for the last time, naked as the day he was born.
The call to the police came shortly after a woman walked into Deward Hastings’s backyard and found him face down in the tub. When the paramedics arrived, they hauled out his bloated body and attempted to revive him to no avail.
According to the coroner’s report, the cause of death was terminal submersion and hypertensive heart disease. The Berkeley Police Department stated that the death did not seem suspicious.
In a city like Berkeley, the solitary passing of an aging hippie is hardly breaking news, but Hastings’s death made headlines and briefly trended on the platform formerly known as Twitter. Publications like the San Francisco Chronicle and the East Bay Times devoted stories to him, many referring to the intensely private man by his local nickname: Hot Tub Guy.
In 1975, Hastings began allowing strangers to wander into his backyard off Essex Street, strip naked, and soak in his redwood hot tub for free. Long before Airbnb normalized inviting unfamiliar people to stay in your house and ride-sharing apps made it acceptable to catch a lift with whomever, Hastings opened his modest Berkeley home—his backyard, anyway—to anyone and everyone who wanted to soak there, as long as they followed his rules.
The main rule was silence, but there were also prohibitions against smoking, drinking, and sexual activity, as well as a late-in-life edict against trans women that prompted a backlash from many visitors who no longer felt comfortable in the space. For the most part, though, the Essex Hot Tub, as people knew it, was a utopian experiment, one that lasted well into the 21st century. “The thing that has the biggest impact is knowing that it’s possible to do something like this in the world,” Hastings told a Chronicle reporter in his one on-the-record interview, in 2000. “Everything doesn’t have to be monetized.”
In a city that has grown in terms of both cost of living and population, the hot tub remained a tranquil oasis. Over the years, its reputation extended beyond Berkeley: tub-goers have encountered fellow soakers in places as far away as Switzerland and Bali who’d visited Hastings’s backyard while traveling in California. Deborah Barer, Hastings’s next-door neighbor for three decades, once met a rabbi in New Jersey who was familiar with the place. “She knew exactly where we lived because she’d been in the tub,” Barer recalls with a note of displeasure in her voice.
The circumstances of Hastings’s death made for a tidy story: the man who had presided over the famous secret Berkeley hot tub had ultimately died in it. The common response—sometimes a joke, sometimes a sincere statement of fact—was that Hastings had died doing what he loved.
In the almost two years since his death, interest in Berkeley’s Hot Tub Guy has faded, but questions about Hastings’s life remain. Here was a person who had never seemed to work a steady job yet managed to buy two homes in Berkeley and another two in the San Juan Islands, in Washington State. He could also somehow afford to run his hot tub 24 hours a day, six days a week, for almost 50 years. This attempt to reconstruct Hastings’s life relies on anecdotes from individuals who knew him in his old age. For all the tub’s lore, its founder’s story remains a mystery.
Although people have varying opinions of who Hastings was, everyone could agree on this: to love him was to defend him—sometimes reluctantly. Hastings was unafraid to ruffle feathers. When a branch from one of his redwood trees fell onto his neighbor’s property and destroyed their porch railing in 2019, Hastings allegedly refused to pay for the damage. “That’s what home insurance is for,” he told the neighbor. In 2018, he implemented a rule that excluded trans women during Essex’s women-only hours, from 9 p.m. to 9 a.m. In the face of Essex-community backlash, he posted a defiant note on the entry gate that included a dictionary definition of a woman as “a person bearing two X chromosomes in the cell nuclei and normally having a vagina, a uterus and ovaries.”
The notice sent ripples through the community, especially among queer-identifying people and allies. Eden Teller, who is queer and nonbinary, first went to the tub during the fall of 2020 and ultimately decided to stop going owing to Hastings’s transphobia. “It became impossible for me to justify going to a place that was explicitly transphobic and willing to both deny the existence of trans men and trans masc people and exclude trans women and trans femme people,” they say. Even Hastings’s friends struggled to explain away his transphobia. Alissa Blackman, who lived with him in the late ’90s and helped manage the tub, admits that Hastings “wasn’t really willing to acknowledge the truth of trans women’s experience and identity.”
As one attendee at Hastings’s memorial service in Berkeley’s Live Oak Park put it, “people will be mad at you for dying because you are offensive even in death.”
Like most people in life and death, Hastings was full of contradictions. One hot tub habitué described him as “such an idealist,” someone who believed “so much in the fundamental goodness of humans”; another remembered him as “burdened by daily disappointments of the people who he was trying to be connected with in his daily life.” Where some people thought the hot tub was revolutionary, others found it creepy. As Hastings himself once mused aloud to a friend, “people rarely articulate what’s actually motivating them.”
KNOW THE CODE
First, there was the tub.
In 1975, Hastings built his out of redwood planks.
He ran his tub Tuesdays through Sundays, always at 113.5 degrees. Mondays, he did maintenance: draining, cleaning, and refilling the tub; sweeping the pathway; power-washing the shower; and spreading wood chips over the yard. When Hastings bought the property next door to his house—2129 Essex Street—he took down the fence and combined the two backyards into one. He built cedar platforms where people could lounge after bathing, the better to let steam from their bodies slowly dissipate. On the patio in front of the tub was a bronze sculpture of a nude mermaid. The dressing room was a small wood-paneled enclosure with hooks for hanging clothes; blessings and messages of gratitude were scrawled in permanent marker throughout the space.
To gain access to this sanctuary, you had to know someone (or someone who knew someone) and, in the later years, obtain one of the many gate codes, which Hastings would change without warning. Hopeful soakers from around the world asked for the codes in the comments of blogs and articles in which the hot tub was mentioned. With a few exceptions, Hastings gave only women the codes; men were permitted (outside of women’s hours), but never without a female companion and only if they were “kept on a short leash,” in Hastings’s words.
He eventually installed a security camera trained on his gate to catch any unsavory characters. When neighbors objected to the foot traffic caused by the tub, he largely ignored them, even when they reported, as Barer did, that people wandered into their yards thinking they were in Hastings’s. “It was not fun living next to him for 30 years,” Barer says.
Hastings never accepted any donations for use of the tub, an act of generosity that masked his need for control. “If anyone gives him money, then they have a say,” explains Julie Tereba, a former housemate. “He’s not into that.” Sometimes people tried to pay for using the tub, but he declined their offers. When people tried thanking Hastings in person, he shrugged them off with a comment like “It’s just hot water.”
The tub’s “user population,” as Hastings called it, changed over the decades. In the 1970s, it was mostly Deadheads and hippies. In the ’80s, as San Francisco’s bathhouses were closing amid the AIDS crisis, gay men would meet there to soak and cruise. (Hastings instituted the gate codes around that time.) In the ’90s and early 2000s, as Berkeley went from shaggy college town to bobo (bourgeois-bohemian) paradise, the Essex acquired a distinct “wellness” vibe—especially among women.
If the tub was a gift to the community, it was at times a curse to its steward. Hastings’s daily life revolved around its maintenance and its user population.
“I’m in many ways a slave to it, and the ‘tradition’ I created in it,” he wrote to a friend in an email from 2011. “I’m sitting on the fence between ‘give up’ and ‘start over.’ ” In addition to all the maintenance the tub required, running it cost upwards of $1,000 a month. “And that’s if nothing broke,” says Jesse Meade, who was part of the Tub Angels, a crew that helped clean the tub and tidy up the backyard on Mondays. When Hastings left, sometimes for weeks or months at a time, to live on his property up on Shaw Island, the Angels oversaw the operations.
Over the years, Hastings dropped hints that perhaps one of his Angels could take over the Essex Hot Tub, but that seemed unlikely because, as Tereba puts it, he was “a control freak.” It was also a ton of work.
A question that everyone around Hastings asked at one time or another—but none of his obituaries raised—was how, exactly, he underwrote this free space when few people ever knew him to have a regular stream of income. Rumors bubbled up, of course: Hastings had family money; he got rich in Silicon Valley; he worked as a clerk at Safeway; he did seasonal work at the Renaissance and Dickens fairs.
Some of these were true: Hastings did work at Safeway for an indeterminate period of time, and he was affiliated with the Renaissance and Dickens fairs for many years, though working only on weekends and more than likely for minimum wage.
“He had resources that a lot of us didn’t have,” says Kevin Patterson, whose parents started the Original Renaissance Pleasure Faire in 1963. Patterson grew up amid the fair, and among the thousands of people it employed over the decades, Hastings stood out with his long red hair and live snakes wrapped around his neck. “He always seemed to have a bit of mystery about him,” Patterson recalls. “I never knew what he did for a living. It seemed like he was financially comfortable. But I have no idea. I have no idea really what that story was.”
AN AUTHENTIC ATMOSPHERE
The facts of Hastings’s early life are sparse: An only child, he grew up in San Mateo, a sleepy suburb 20 miles south of San Francisco. His 1950s childhood consisted of the stereotypical all-American activities: Boy Scouts, Bible school, piano lessons. He attended Hillsdale High School, where he joined an anti-littering campaign and served as the stage manager for the school’s theatrical productions. He excelled academically, particularly in math and science, and was named a National Merit Scholar his senior year.
After high school, he enrolled in his father’s alma mater, UC Berkeley, landing there just as the school became the West Coast center of the burgeoning youth counterculture.
In Hastings’s first year at Berkeley, he and two friends were jailed in San Francisco for trespassing onto the charred remains of St. Mary’s Cathedral, which had recently suffered an arson attack. Hastings allegedly scaled the tower to reach the belfry, where he rang the bell. When a judge asked about his motivation, Hastings answered, “Like [Sir Edmund] Hillary, we climbed it because it was there.” The stunt was covered by the San Francisco Examiner and the Oakland Tribune, both of which depicted the trespassers as harmless pranksters.
After studying chemistry for two years, Hastings dropped out of Berkeley, moving to a house in the hills above campus. Although he was no longer a student, he joined the Free Speech Movement, which kicked off in 1964.
Barbara Garson, a Free Speech Movement activist and playwright, met Hastings, whom she describes as “a nervous, thin person,” when he fixed an old Multilith printer for one of the student groups. Garson recalls him working day and night, rarely sleeping, as he refurbished the refrigerator-size machine.
While Hastings’s technical contribution was minor compared with the actions of Free Speech Movement heroes like Mario Savio and Bettina Aptheker, it was precisely the sort of behind-the-scenes work that might have appealed to the young man who would eventually become the mysterious steward of the semi-legendary Essex Hot Tub. When he joined the Renaissance Faire in the late ’70s, Hastings brought the same unshowy, backstage energy to concessions, where he sold tankards of dark ale and goblets of wine. A colleague remembers him as smart and organized. “He ran a tight ship,” says Bob Brewer, who overlapped with Hastings in the beverages department for a few years.
Patterson agrees. “He commanded a lot of respect from his peers,” he says. “The quality and authenticity of the fair meant a great deal to him.”
Like many Renaissance Faire employees, Hastings was a self-taught historian of the Elizabethan era. Though not a performer, he had strong ideas about how to create an authentic atmosphere. He had little patience for cultural anachronisms. In his spare time, he wrote reviews of books on topics like medieval stained glass and clerical records for the St. Ives Historical Society, an organization “dedicated to promoting an interest in the lifestyles, arts, and crafts of the Renaissance era.” When the Pattersons sold their fair to a competitor in 1994, Hastings became dissatisfied with its artistic direction and left, although he continued to work for a time for the Pattersons’ other creation, the annual Great Dickens Christmas Fair. Hastings was uncompromising in his artistic and aesthetic standards, and he wasn’t afraid to let people know it. As one friend put it, “he didn’t go along to get along.”
OCCUPATIONAL HAZARD
Those who knew and liked Hastings mostly assumed that the Essex Hot Tub was born out of his love for communal soaking and a generosity of spirit. Those who didn’t know Hastings generally shrugged him off as a quirky Berkeley character like Mark “Hate Man” Hawthorne or Andrew Martinez, a.k.a. the Naked Guy. Hastings’s exact reasons for running his semisecret hot tub died with him.
Sources close to Hastings have theories, though. “The clean-cut version is Deward loves hot springs and wanted to re-create that in his own yard, and then it evolved into a community offering,” says Tereba. But according to Tereba, this version is only partly true, and the untold part of the story is much darker: “He made all his money being a chemist in this drug lab in the desert, making quaaludes.”
The drug was originally prescribed for insomnia and anxiety—the name itself a portmanteau of “quiet interlude”—but quaalude users soon discovered a curious effect: if you fought off the urge to sleep, a conscious euphoria flooded your body, lowering your inhibitions.
Also known as disco biscuits, quaaludes became mainstays in nightclubs across America in the 1970s. The drug was as popular as cocaine and heroin, and similarly addictive. The problem with quaaludes was that the difference between a moderate and a lethal dose was small, especially when the drug was combined with alcohol. And there were reports that men were dosing nonconsenting women. Perhaps the best-known instance was in 1977, when Roman Polanski reportedly drugged a 13-year-old girl with quaaludes and raped her.
In a Drug Enforcement Administration oversight and budget authorization hearing in 1982, Gene Haislip, the DEA’s then–director of diversion control, testified that quaaludes had become “one of the most rapidly increasing drug abuse problems that the country has faced.” Through tighter regulations and a crackdown on foreign manufacturers in the mid-’80s, Haislip was able to curtail the production and distribution of illicit quaaludes in the United States by 1984.
No one knows how much money Hastings might have made working as a chemist, but a source who was close to him in later years estimates amounts ranging from a few hundred thousand dollars to a few million. If the theory is true, the money may have helped him buy four properties and support the hot tub. In some people’s view, it may have also brought a hidden cost. “Deward wasn’t a saint. He had karmic debt,” speculates Meade. “It was important for him to pay it back. He couldn’t keep that money.” (The DEA has no record of Hastings.)
Tereba thinks that this is why Hastings turned his tub into a community offering: “He was trying to make up for that business that probably, you know, had a negative effect on a lot of people.”
Hastings also offered his attic rent-free to a rotating cast of young women whom he was overheard referring to as “sweet young things.”
“He really loved beautiful younger women,” his longtime friend Gary Rosenberg says. “I don’t think he ever realized how tortured he was by that.” Mer al Dao, a documentarian who for months lived in a bus parked on Essex Street and who frequently used the tub, agrees: “He would fall in love with women who’d live there, and he would live heartbroken.”
While Hastings was legally married to a woman named Sippa Pardo, they’d become estranged in the late aughts, and he was lonely, even as dozens of people filled his backyard each day. “He kind of attracted broken people,” Meade says, sighing. “He didn’t have good boundaries with giving.” (Multiple attempts to reach Pardo for comment were unsuccessful.)
In the 53 years he lived on Essex Street, there were a lot of things Hastings never got around to doing: clearing out his pathologically cluttered house, fixing up his cabins on Shaw Island, going to the doctor. He also never wrote a will. Although he’d been living on a shoestring, Hastings’s assets were worth well over $2 million. When he died, everything—the two properties on Essex Street as well as those on Shaw Island—transferred to Pardo, who lives in Oregon. The future of the hot tub was placed in her hands, although some parties familiar with the situation say that Hastings had promised his estate to his tenants.
When Hastings bought the house at 2133 Essex Street in the spring of 1969, it was in severe disrepair. According to City of Berkeley Inspection Services Department records, the bathroom and kitchen floors needed to be redone, the fireplace in the living room was pulling away from the wall, the back porch was not properly supported, and the basement flooring had deteriorated from years of rodents and termites. He bought the place for $12,800.
Last September, Hastings’s home went on the market, listing for $899,000. The sale was covered by the San Francisco Standard, Berkeleyside, and the Wall Street Journal. Half a century after Hastings had moved in, the house was still a mess: There were burn marks and grease stains on the kitchen walls, from which yellow paint was peeling. The front door was ratchet-strapped together, and the back porch was falling apart. In the backyard, yellow caution tape separated the two properties that Hastings had combined.
“It was an oasis of peace and calm that made city life bearable for so many, for so long,” read the broker’s description in the online listing that ran alongside a single exterior photo on the website for the real estate company Compass. Various people in the Essex Hot Tub community attempted to buy the property and keep the hot tub going. After eight weeks on the market, the house sold to someone else for $825,000, below market by Bay Area standards. The future of Hastings’s hot tub is unclear.
INFLOW, OUTFLOW
In his interview with the Chronicle in February 2000, Hastings told reporter Rona Marech, “If I ever write my autobiography, it will open with ‘I used to be a hippie.’ ” It was the only formal interview he ever gave, and yet he asked not to be identified by name, opting instead to be known simply as the “hot tub guy.”
To reduce Hastings’s life and legacy to that of a former hippie with a well-used hot tub would be a mistake when there was so much more below the surface.
In a review for the St. Ives Historical Society of David Cressy’s book Birth, Marriage, and Death: Ritual, Religion, and the Life-Cycle in Tudor and Stuart England, Hastings wrote, “People in the past were not the cardboard cutout characters so often portrayed in ‘history’ books but rather people with lives every bit as complex and confusing as our own.”
The same could be said of Hastings, who Meade says would’ve wanted to be “remembered honestly.” To soak in a mire of anyone’s humanity isn’t easy, but if you can sit in it for a while, new depths may be revealed.•
Bethany Kaylor is a writer and illustrator living in Berkeley. She’s currently working on a book of essays about American subcultures.
