Way Out in Rancho Mucho Are the Faux Things in Life

We were heading toward Rancho Mucho Dinero, my friend Peter and I. We were doing what people do for kicks these days. See, we don’t do drugs. We don’t do cholesterol. We do open houses.

Rancho Mucho is the name I have given to a certain development of million-dollar-plus houses an hour out of town where civilization and water once stopped. There, in that arid, Godforsaken place, we suddenly come to a faux lake, a faux creek and a faux waterfall. We are about to enter an entire faux universe.

To get through the locked gates, we must first visit the sales office. “Wait a minute,” Peter says. “What’s our story?”

“No story,” I tell him. “I’ll just say my husband, Shlomo, and I are looking for a nice Hasidic community. . . .”

In the sales office, standing beneath a huge poster showing the security patrol that protects Rancho Mucho, is a latter-day suburban salesman. His impeccable dress is marred only by his dragon breath. He tells us that there are no open houses today, but we can drive around and look at the full range of properties in the Rancho Mucho community. It turns out the place is well stocked with less publicized cheapos.

We could start with the $300,000 town homes in the Point Negras Blancas area. “They’ll be selling for $400,000 in six months,” the salesman warns. If they’re still standing.

I began to wonder if the million-dollar jobs were the loss leaders for these mass items.

Next, we could visit the Vista del Visa pool homes, right there on the main road and priced to move at $750,000. And, finally, old fire breath suggests, we could drive up toward the million-dollar customized homes on “The Gold Coast.”

Coast? What coast? The nearest body of water is 80 miles west.

We cruise the dry coast but can only press our noses at a locked gate within the gates. Here, a gardener points out the manor house up on the hill, a 30,000-square-foot hacienda that the developer of Rancho Mucho has built for himself. “The bedroom is 4,800 square feet,” the gardener says. Then he adds, laughing: “I don’t know what they do there.”

He is busy working on the faux green lawn of a big pink Mediterranean, where a brass plaque announces that the house is titled: “Una Espressione D’Amore.”

We stop off at Rancho Mucho’s own supermarket, Alpha Mucho, which has items ranging from a little bag of potato chips to a nine-liter bottle of Moet & Chandon for $475. In the corner of the black-and-white tiled floor, a pianist plays a grand piano that is parked near the veggies. I recognize the Muzakified strains of an old Beatles tune: “I don’t care too much for money--money can’t buy me love. . . .”

A few days later, I come back to the open houses. I must see what lurks behind the faux Tudor exteriors. This time I bring my real husband instead of my faux husband.

During the time between my first and second visit to this real estate Disneyland, I have reread “The Great Gatsby,” Fitzgerald’s saga about a guy with a mansion trying to win the love of a gal. Gatsby’s pad is an “imitation of some Hotel de Ville in Normandy, with a tower on one side . . . and a marble swimming pool and more than 40 acres of lawn and garden.”

The houses at Rancho Mucho are no less pretentious but sit on small lots, one on top of the other, your Jacuzzi up against your neighbor’s wet bar.

In the wine cellar of an executive Georgian, I inspect a case of bottles stacked on its side. The label reads, “Cheap Red Wine.”

My husband notes the high voltage line running directly over a 1985 antebellum mansion. He looks up from the veranda and says, “Five bedrooms, a pool, a fur closet and cancer.”

Every house has a library--a man’s room, all in dark wood, with bar, mahogany desk, leather desk set and wooden duck decoys. I had heard that the books weren’t real or that they were painted-on faux libraries. Or perhaps the volumes were acquired from some “Books by the Yard” discount store. But the books I saw were real. Each house had a well-worn copy of “Iacocca” among the untouched leather sets.

I thought about a scene in “The Great Gatsby” set in Gatsby’s “high Gothic library, paneled with carved English oak, and probably transported complete from some ruin overseas.” There, a drunken man is raving about the books. He says, “Absolutely real--have pages and everything. I thought they’d be of a nice durable cardboard. . . . He didn’t cut the pages but what do you want? What do you expect?”

After looking at three of these houses, my husband began to get ill. He compared it to mall syndrome and thought the decaying formaldehyde in the building materials was getting to him. “I hate the 20th Century,” he said as we drove off over the faux bridge at Rancho Mucho.

But I think what was really sickening him was the thought that this was all a million dollars gets you these days. That’s why the middle class loves to laugh at the nouveau riche. All that effort for so little more. You can’t be a Great Gatsby; you can only be a tract Gatsby.

It’s a faux world after all.