The Best American Essays 2014 (29 page)

 

They were
reality.
Like everybody's parents, they were the most real thing there was. It was not possible to blame them, it would not have occurred to me at ten. The truth is I was sickened by myself for being a child they wanted not to know about. I repudiated myself because I could find no way to matter, it was my failure, and I understood that another, more beautiful child could have had a hold on them. Yet it seemed possible that by force of will I could become this other, more beautiful child. Was it a thing a nonbeloved child could figure out—could replicate? How long would it take? This was an emergency. I was wrong, in my wrongness I was alienating them, and either I was doing things wrong or I was imbued with wrongness, irretrievably wrong, a wrong self, and that could not be changed, and it could not be borne. Therefore it must be the case that I was doing things wrong, and if I was doing things wrong, then it was only a matter of beginning to do things right, and I could do that, I would, I had to, it was life or death to me to be loved by them, so I would do things beautifully, beginning now.

If they have both been lost to me by death, gone for years, that hasn't changed things: death, it turns out, can't touch the deep aura of waiting, the lifelong spell that is the need for them to
see.

FROM
GQ

 

T
HE LAND, THE VERY
atmosphere out there, is alien, malignant, the executioner of countless wagon trains. I am afraid to crack the window. Huge dervishes of alkaline dust reel and teeter past. The sun, a brittle parchment white, glowers as though we personally have done something to piss it off. An hour out here and already I could light an Ohio Blue Tip off the inside of my nostril. One would think we were pulling into this planet's nearest simulation of hell, but if this were hell, we would not be driving this very comfortable recreational vehicle. Nor would there be a trio of young and merry nudists capering at our front bumper, demanding that we step out of the vehicle and join them. These people are checkpoint officials, and it is their duty to press their nakedness to us in the traditional gesture of welcome to the Burning Man festival, here in Nevada's Black Rock Desert.

The checkpoint nudists are comely and embraceable, in the way that everyone ten years younger than me has lately begun to seem comely and embraceable—the women's dolphin smoothness still undefeated by time and gravity; the men bearing genial grins and penises with which I suppose I can cope: neither those lamentable acorns one pities at the gym, nor fearsome yardage that would be challenging to negotiate at close quarters. But here is the question: Do I want some naked strangers to get on me? Or, more to the point, do I want them to get on me with my father watching? This quandary is no quandary for my father. He is already out of the vehicle, standing in the coursing dust, smiling broadly, a stranger's bosom trembling at his chin.

My father and I are staid, abstracted East Coast types without much natural affinity for bohemian adventures. But we are here less for the festival itself than in service of an annual father-son ritual. Fourteen years ago my father was diagnosed with an exotic lymphoma and given an outside prognosis of two years. When we both supposed he was dying, we made an adorable pledge—if he survived—to take a trip together every year. Thanks to medical science, we've now followed the tradition for a solid decade, journeying each summer to some arbitrarily selected far-flung destination: Greenland, Ecuador, Cyprus, etc. This year we've retooled the concept and departed instead on a bit of domestic ethnography. We have joined the annual pilgrimage of many thousands who each year flee the square world for the Nevada desert to join what's supposed to be humanity's greatest countercultural folk festival/self-expression derby. Or it used to be, before people like my father and me started showing up.

Now I too am in the daylight, being hugged by a small, bearded Mr. Tumnus of a fellow, and also by a bespectacled lady-librarian type with a scrupulously mown vulva. “Welcome home,” they murmur in my ear. “Home” this is decidedly not. Whether it is good to be here, we shall discover in the coming week. Still, I reply, “Uh, it's good to be home.”

At the adjacent welcome booth, dreadlockers, having been duly greeted, are trudging back to their hippie wagon. “I hope it doesn't suck this year,” one of them says, eyeing our vast and foolish RV. “We're surrounded by all these bougie people.”

“I'm so fucking
stoned
,” complains a bikini-clad girl wearing a fedora snugged over dreadlocks stout as table legs. “Man, I gotta focus. Gotta get ready for the Slut Olympics.”

We climb back aboard, tracking pounds of dust into the RV. My dad is enlivened. “What a nice greeting that was,” he says. “Did you know that woman didn't have any trousers on? I was so focused on her breasts I didn't notice she was naked until after the ceremony.”

 

When I mentioned to friends that I was going to Burning Man with my sixty-nine-year-old father,
Good idea
were the words out of no one's mouth. Perhaps this was a poor idea. Mere moments here and my emotional machinery, specifically the feelings-about-my-family manifold, is beginning to smoke, creak, and blow springs with a jaw-harp
bwaaaang!

The root causes of my embarrassment, unsurprisingly, naturally, track back to my childhood, a montage of my father perpetually falling short of the dull, decorous Ward Cleaver ideal I imagined everyone else had for a dad. Because my father is constitutionally incapable of being embarrassed, I spent much of my early life being embarrassed on his behalf. In elementary school I was embarrassed by his car, a mulch-colored Datsun coupe which, when the clearcoat gave out, my father repainted, with brushes, a pupil-puckering shade of kelly green. I was, and am, embarrassed by his house. After my parents divorced (I was six), the home became a tribute to unreconstructed bachelorhood, a place where the dominant cuisine was ramen noodles, where the dirty-clothes hamper was a delta of fragrant laundry on the kitchen floor, and where, when the furnace broke, it went unrepaired for the better part of a decade. For much of my adult life, my father's house has existed in a state of entropy so ideal that were a band of vandals or a flood to hit the place, it could only enhance the house's orderliness.

I was embarrassed by my father's fearlessness about his body—how, for example, when we met for a tennis game, he never bothered to change ahead of time or repair to a restroom but instead shucked his trousers off in the parking lot without a care for who observed him in his sagging BVDs. I was embarrassed, and also sort of impressed, one day when I was seven when I saw him drink some of my pee. The setup was this: I'd spent the morning pissing in a Collins glass I'd hidden in the garage, which I intended to take down the street to show a neighbor friend, for reasons unclear to me now. In any case, I set it on the kitchen table while I went to find my shoes. When I returned, my father was hoisting the glass to his lips and uttering these words: “What's this, apple juice?”

I recall yelling, “Noooooooooo,” in slo-mo basso. Too late. He took a generous slug. Then he set the glass down, turned to me, and said only this: “Don't ever, ever do that again.”

But I think what I'm feeling now is the opposite of the old embarrassed feeling, more a kind of petulant recognition that my father's heedlessness, his lack of inhibition, are in fact virtues that I failed to inherit. Did I mention that my father is no free-ranging hippie papa but a professor of economics who once voted for George W. Bush? Yet when I asked my father to come with me to Burning Man, though he'd never heard of Burning Man, “Absolutely” was his prompt response. Never mind that his immune system is faltering. He now requires monthly transfusions of immunoglobulin. His chronic chest cold seems to be getting worse. His doctor recently noticed sulfurous halos around my father's pupils, inspiring worries that he may someday soon go blind. His mouth has lately broken out in ulcers, part of a painful accumulation of signals that this year's trip could be our last one together.

And yet, while I love my father, these trips with him are not always enjoyable for me. It is not just that he likes to dry his sink-scrubbed underclothes by flying them from the antenna of the rental car. It is also the sleeping arrangements. My father is the sort of thrifty traveler who stays at hotels with hourly rates. Once, in a jungle in New Zealand, we got drunk and passed out on the corpse of a decomposed rat. My father insists on sleeping nude, even when we share a room, sometimes even when we share a bed, and this sort of closeness can be difficult to bear.

And so it's probably wise that this year we have included two auxiliary homeboys in our party: my father's first cousin Cam Crane, and a grad-school buddy of my father's, a Canadian professor of economics in his emeritus years whose actual name is James Dean.

Cam is fifty-seven years old and is among the kindest and most capable people I know. He is the sort of person who, on camping trips, always brings two of everything in case somebody else needs his spare. Both of Cam's parents were dead of alcoholism before Cam was twenty-three, and he has lived his life in an underparented, not-all-who-wander-are-lost sort of way. Cam is widely loved among members of our family, but we are sometimes confused by the life choices he makes. For example, Cam spent this past year staying in the spare room at the house of his ex-girlfriend and her husband to care for their quadriplegic dog as it died of Lou Gehrig's disease. His duties involved manually voiding the dog's bladder and bowels and “walking” the creature by means of a little cart built for this use. The dog, whose name was Sierra, was at last put down the week before Cam set out for Burning Man, to Cam's mixed relief. Cam acknowledges that his life probably needs to tack in a new direction. “I really think Burning Man could change my life,” he said to me on the phone a few weeks back. How? “Well, to be around these people all getting together for a common reason—it might help me focus on my own path.”

Then there's my father's old friend James Dean, who views the week a bit less ingenuously. Dean, seventy-one, is famous among his friends for a lifetime of resounding successes with women, if not wives. He plays the saxophone and rides a big motorcycle, and if he didn't you would say, “That guy ought to play the saxophone and ride a big motorcycle.” He does not expect Burning Man to change his life: “I think it's probably just a sexed-up art party” is his take on the week ahead.

 

Black Rock City—temporary home this year to nearly 60,000 souls—comes into view. It spans more than two miles, with concentric “streets” laid out around an open expanse of desert or “playa” where stands the eponymous Man (a sort of neon stick figure atop a plywood mansion). The city is breathtaking, especially if your thing is tarps and ropes and improvised shade structures. The dominant aesthetic is hardcore post-apocalyptic sun-retardant functionality: PVC-and-Tyvek Quonset huts, moon-base yurts made of foil-faced foam core, army-surplus wall tents—all lashed to rebar pilings sledgehammered deep into the hardpan. No camp seems to lack a soundly anchored shade structure, an appurtenance that we've heard constitutes the difference between having a good time at Burning Man and roasting miserably in your RV. Winds here crest at sixty miles an hour. Thanks to Cam's foresight, we've at least got masks and goggles against the frequent dust storms, but shadewise, all we've brought is a crappy little steel-and-nylon awning from Walmart. Roving past the pro-grade battenings of the other campers, Cam, our logistics man, says, “I think we might be fucked.”

And the genuinely sort of scary thing about Burning Man is that if you've fucked yourself in the food, water, or shade-structure departments, you are quite fucked indeed. According to the principles set down by Larry Harvey, who inaugurated the festival twenty-six years back by torching some art on San Francisco's Baker Beach, nothing may be bought or sold at Burning Man. (After the festival outgrew California and relocated to the desert, an amendment was made for coffee and ice.) “Gifting,” as you've probably heard, is the soul of the Burning Man economy, which is helpful if you're in the market for some ecstasy or a chakra balancing, but stuff like rebar, rope, and triple-gusseted tarps is too heavy and precious to hand out for free.

But what really distinguishes Burning Man from Bonnaroo or any other festivals on the indie-bohemioid trail is that there's no main attraction: no famous bands or beer tents or dreamcatcher salesfolk. At Burning Man the attraction is the mass of fellow campers, each of whom is doing his bit by, say, hosting the Slut Olympics, or giving a lecture on Foucault, or knitting a Buddhist stupa out of pubic hair and setting it on fire. And the art (if that's the word for a flaming neon hoagie on wheels) has gotten a good deal more elaborate since the first beach bonfire. Among the hundreds of visual extravagances in store this year: an actual-size replica of an eighteenth-century shipwreck, a diesel-powered cast-iron dinosaur, a snowstorm in the desert, plus a menagerie of flammable installations (a plywood cathedral, a multistory effigy of Wall Street) to be torched in celebration of life's transience and other arty ideals. The whole thing defies expectations pretty spectacularly, especially if what you expected, as I did, was a Grateful Dead parking lot with no bands and more intense personal filth.

It is, in short, worth the lamentably expensive ticket price ($240 to $420, depending on when you buy). The ticketing system's supposed to accommodate veteran Burners, but somehow things got screwed up this year, and a full third went to people like me and my dad—here, the old-timers fear, to party and gawk and score free shit but not to “contribute” to the festival in any real way.

We pick a campsite in a quiet neighborhood on an outer ring of the city. To one side of us, some rather abject fraternity gentlemen cower in the lee of their Subaru having Heineken brews. Our closest neighbors are several women in their thirties whom James Dean promptly diagnoses as “horny” by means of divination lost on the rest of us.