The Best American Essays 2014 (30 page)

The professors mix up a batch of gin and tonics while Cam and I lash our miserable little Walmart gazebo to the chassis of the RV. I am tempted to nap in its washcloth-sized patch of shade, but my father has other plans. My father is dressed in adventure sandals, cargo shorts, a muslin tunic he bought in Thailand, and a nouveau legionnaire's chapeau complete with trapezius snood. Through a pair of dime-store spectacles ($4.99 price tag still on the lens) he is reading today's schedule of events. We have a happy range of activities from which to choose. Something called the Adult Diaper Brigade is welcoming participants. There is also “Make a Genital Necklace,” “Fisting With Foxy,” “3rd Annual Healthy Friction Circle Jerk,” and “Naked Barista.” Not all the offerings are lascivious. Some are educational (“Geology of the Black Rock Desert”), creative-anachro-geeky (“Excalibur Initiation and Dragon Naming Ceremony”), culinary (“FREE FUCKIN' ICE CREAM!!”), and spiritual (“Past Life Regression Meditation”). None of these options are seriously entertained.

“I think I'll go to the Naked Barista and have a naked cup of coffee,” says my father.

“I'm coming with you, Ed,” says James. “Are you going to get naked?”

“I think that's the arrangement,” he says. “You have to get naked to get your cup of coffee.”

“You don't think you're going native a bit prematurely?” I say.

“I don't see what the big deal is,” he says. “I'm quite confident no one will look at me.”

We set off. We have brought bicycles. Black Rock City contains miles of byways, and to travel on foot would be a sure way to turn yourself into a Slim Jim. Only when we leave the camp does it begin to register how very astounding this whole thing is. The sun is setting, and the dusty avenues teem with weird life. A golf cart made to resemble a bluefin-sized sperm crosses our path (this year's theme is Fertility 2.0), followed by a hay wagon belching fire. Men cycle past wearing destroyed tuxedos, monkey outfits, suits of armor made of gold lamé, or T-shirts beneath whose belly hem bare genitals wag. (This is known as “shirtcocking” in the local argot.) Women wear, uniformly, their underwear. Or the vast majority do. In real life these women are bankers, substitute teachers, receptionists at gravel quarries, but here they have all entered into a common sisterhood of underpants in a collective mission to make the playa a place of beauty and terrible longing. God bless them.

I am now feeling the onset of an unpleasant sort of tourist panic. As one of the people who siphoned off tickets from the regular Burners, I'm gone in this guilty little fugue:
Wow, you know, I thought this was going to be a half-assed and risible demon-sticks-and-reefer-and-Himalayan-salts dipshit convention, but afoot is a pageant of trippy ingenuity and gorgeousness that must have taken a hell of a lot of work and money and gymnasium hours to bring off and that can only be diminished by the gawking presence of guys like us—whom the etiquettician Amy Vanderbilt once described as “decrepit extra males.”

We creak along. The Naked Barista occupies a shanty alongside a jungle gym under which people are applying henna tattoos to one another. Under the shanty a hairy man is foaming a latte. In line is a naked older guy who I know is from Southern California because his buttocks exactly resemble a sun-dried seal's corpse I once saw on a Santa Barbara beach.

This is not my father's scene. “I may have seen enough of this,” he says. “Only the men seem to be naked.”

It is happy hour in Black Rock City, and I, for one, think that some sort of very stiff, inhibition-destroying cocktail is in order. Nearby, something called Homojito is going on, which Cam rejects.

“No one is giving away blowjobs,” laments James Dean. “There ought to be a barter station.”

I explain that there is no bartering in Black Rock City, only gifting.

“Yeah, but there's always an implicit barter, or I guess it depends on whether you belong to the Chicago School or not,” says James Dean, professor of economics.

Onward through the shifting dust to a camp where a woman in a wedding dress is pumping on a swing. Behind her a shirtless Chippendales guy in a gold harlequin mask appears to be handing out free booze. Uncertain of proper mooching etiquette, we grin and cringe around the premises for a quarter of an hour before the Chippendales guy waves us over for a dose. He's not just giving it away, though. He explains that I have to first spin an arrow on a little cardboard dial listing a menu of chores and humiliations. The card commands me to bare my breasts, which I do. The bartender grimaces. “What's second prize?” he says.

In return for this degradation, I am treated to the vilest cocktail in all of Christendom: a crimson sludge consisting of gummy bears deliquesced in vodka. Okay, so having now logged my first transaction in the Burning Man economy, it seems pretty clear that the festival's utopian, pan-inclusive rhetoric doesn't extend much past the promotional literature. I mean,
What's second prize?
I thought this whole thing was about Larry Harvey's Principle No. 5, radical self-expression, i.e., showing people your tits and stuff. Which I guess applies if you're a sexy underpant woman or a Nautilus-hewn Los Angeles–based life form. But if you're a schlubby white dude with a pale belly and sort of sucky tits, then it's junior high school redux:
What's second prize?

This private tantrum is halted by the sound of my father's laughter. He is being spanked by a Cleopatra in a stressed bikini. He knocks back his shot and then heads to an après-ski-theme party across the way. Folk in toboggans and little else dance beneath a shower of synthetic snow. Where is my father? He is roving the crowd, dispensing tiny little key-chain flashlights, our meager yet handy contributions to the gift economy. And here he is now, clinking cups with a topless woman in white faux-fur chaps, having a splendid time. He gives her a flashlight. “That was a rather unusual toast,” he says. “She said, ‘Here's to your hemorrhaging anus.' And then I gave her a light, and I said, ‘The better to see it with.'”

My father, repartee king. In five minutes with the anus woman, he has uttered more words than I have in the past two hours.

Cranky. Why am I in despair among these fluffy pals? I suppose because this is supposed to be it, this is supposed to be Xanadu, miles and miles from the uptight squares and cultural toxins of late capitalism, free to make weird remarks to strangers about their anuses, free to shirtcock or to don a pair of underpants with the words
Permission to Come Aboard
blazoned on the ass. But what if you do not care to don such a pair of underpants? What if you do not care to reveal your genitals to strangers? Well, my friend, then you are part of the problem, a cultural toxin, a dreary spy from what is known in Black Rock City as “the default world.” You should not have come here. You should be at home, buying consumer durables on the World Wide Web.

And now the sun is going down, tinting the sky and the brown hills with Easter-egg hues. My father takes a great portion of desert air into his lungs and lets it out in a staticky, bronchitic sigh. “I think this is spectacular,” he says. “This works. People are pleasant. They like having their picture taken. This is wonderful. It's absolutely wonderful! What is it that motivates it all? The urge to be unique!”

 

We awake to the sound of the RV's tin hide—
tick-tick-tick
—deforming in the sun. Sleeping arrangements are these: Cam and I split the big rubber mattress in the RV's master bedroom. James Dean sleeps in the little roost over the cockpit. (Dean's body philosophies are not far from my father's. To retract suddenly the curtains to Dean's roost is a good way to get an eyeful of scrotum.) My father, Ed the Uncomplaining, Ed the Jolly Receiver of the Short End of the Stick, sleeps very happily on the RV's hard and sticky floor.

The professors rose early and are just now returning from a trip to the plaza of portable toilets a couple of blocks away. But isn't there a toilet in the RV? Yes, there is, but as the uptight captain of this vessel, I have levied an edict against deucing in the vehicle for fear of cumulative odors. The Burning Man organizers have done a fair job of placing toilet villages at convenient intervals throughout the city, but the toilets are not pleasant. They radiate a smell that registers in the nose not as merely bad but dangerous, like a shipwrecked supertanker of tainted smelling salts. Step inside one of these Porta-Johns and flashbulbs explode behind your eyes.

James Dean returns from the toilet in his underpants, carrying his shorts at arm's length. An unexplained misadventure took place at the commode. Still, it sounds like the fellows enjoyed themselves at the latrine plaza.

“Your father is very good at walking up to bare-breasted women and asking if he can take their photograph,” Dean tells me.

“They're extremely gracious,” my father confirms. “Even when they desperately have to poop.”

“You just walk up and ask them?” I say, quite astonished.

“I just ask them, yeah. My first thought was to do it surreptitiously, but then I discovered that tattooed naked boobs like to be photographed.”

Now the team reviews the program of events to plot a course for the day. Other than Saturday, when the Man goes up in flames, there aren't really any marquee events. You basically find your way through offerings of individual camps listed in the program.

“This might be worth going to: Critical Dicks,” says Dean. “I think it's a dick contest. It starts at noon, and it lasts for two hours.”

“You're going to compete, James?” I ask.

“No, but perhaps your father would.”

Dad is pondering other possibilities. “There's the Romp of the Tranny Goddesses. There's the Human Playapede: ‘Now join playapede friends ass to mouth to ass.' I'm not sure I want to participate in that one. There's also Anal Probe.”

“That wouldn't be my first choice,” says Dean. “Here's one we should go to: How to Drive a Vulva. Pussy ninja tricks at Camp Beaverton.”

Agreed. We make for Camp Beaverton. But seconds after mounting his bike, my father realizes he has forgotten a seat cushion he bought at the Las Vegas Walmart. Executing a slow turn in the lane, he falls hard into the dirt, his bare legs tangled in his bike frame. He gazes up at me with a dazed expression of embarrassment and mild shock.

“Are you okay?”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah. I tripped.”

He rights his bike and moves along.

Cam and I watch him go. “My mom used to do a lot of stuff like that, falling down or whatever,” he said. “It was usually alcohol-related, but still, it's sort of a weird wake-up call. You know they're not going to be around that long. But Ed's been doing okay. He's keeping up all right. I hope he's going to be with us a while.”

“I hope so too,” I say.

Bicycle caravans are a challenge at Burning Man. By the time Cam and I get to Camp Beaverton, my father and Dean are nowhere to be seen. How to Drive a Vulva isn't all it's cracked up to be anyway, just some nervous lesbians saying stuff like “Talk to your partner” to a crowd too vast for the tent they've got. We get bored and move on. The afternoon's a bit of a drag. I am so peevish and abstracted that three times people approach me wanting to be high-fived and three times, assuming they've got their hands up for someone behind me, I leave them hanging and they go, “Awww, man!”

I return to the safety of the RV after several hours roving the playa. My father is MIA. I picture him on a gurney, succumbing to a bronchial attack. Maybe lost in a dust storm, pedaling out into the desert's lethal infinitude. Close to dinnertime, he returns, and in the manner of some nagging spouse, I commence to chew his ass. “Where the hell did you go?”

He shoots me a blank and rather guilty look. “James and I went to the Naked Tiki Bar,” he says.

“You got naked?”

“I certainly did,” he says. “It was a remarkably friendly place. And I actually found it very liberating to see these enormously fat women being perfectly willing to bare everything. It was fun to see all of that voluptuality. What did you discover?”

“We waited for you at How to Drive a Vulva, and then when you didn't turn up, I came back and waited for you here.”

“I'm sorry.”

“You ditched me.”

“I didn't mean to. I'm really, really sorry.”

My little nag sesh is mercifully cut short by a visit from an old friend of mine. He is a fellow known as Mur-Dog, an actor and voice-over man who has been coming to Burning Man for some number of years. He is a believer. My project of writing about it is, in the opinion of Mur-Dog, doomed. “You can't explain this experience in words,” says Mur-Dog. “This is about getting outside yourself, giving up your fears, giving yourself over to the impermanence of everything. We've got so much of society in us: trying to impress people, worrying about what our friends think. Then here it's total freedom. Give up the fear. The fear of death, the fear of whatever's limiting you. Why
not
fuck that girl? Why
not
take your pants off and run around screaming? You come into this thinking it's gonna be this hippie rave party, but it goes so much deeper. It goes to the base of some deep human stuff. It's for everybody. I mean, I motorboated some huge-titted woman last night. It was so magical.”

“You did what?” my father asks.

“When you put your face between a woman's breasts and go
brbb-brbb-brbb.
”

“It really is a remarkably friendly place,” says Dad.

“You will be transformed here,” says Mur-Dog. “Ed, by Saturday you'll be wearing a dress. No, you'll be walking around buck naked with a sock over your dick.”

“Actually, I was naked very recently at the Naked Tiki Bar. I enjoyed myself.”

I acknowledge to Mur-Dog that while my father has more or less gone native, I have yet to surrender to the experience.