The Best American Essays 2014 (32 page)

“I don't know that it's religious,” says my father, gazing contemplatively at the Temple's gold-lit steeple. “It's just amazing the lengths people go to, to be thought of as special. I never imagined that a crew of folks could build a temple as elegant as this, only to burn it down.”

“I'm just trying to find the common theme, and the only common theme, I think, is that this could only happen in the United States,” says Dean the Canadian. “Both in its excesses and its excellence. Some people look at America as a nation of vulgarity and excess, and others think it's the most creative country in the world. I think it's both. Who else would burn a sculpture that took a year to build? But Ed, you and I know you can't run an economy this way.”

“I don't think it's about running an economy,” says Cam. “It's about freedom. It's about celebrating creativity, the human spirit.”

“Yes,” says Dean. “But for most of us, we've channeled our creativity into purchasing excessive camping supplies at Walmart.”

But Dean's diegesis is halted by a sudden explosion. A fleur-de-lis of fireworks erupts across the playa, where one can see the sperm car chasing a vagina barge.

 

Saturday night. Tonight the Man burns. A little after dusk, we make our way to the playa. The city, already, is beginning to decay, with spots of bare ground between camps. The festival's commandment to “leave no trace” is losing out to the selfish pragmatism of the default world. Several folks have left unpleasant traces in the form of water jugs topped up with dark amber tinkle.

Down, down across the playa, the hordes are gathering around the Man, who stands above a multistory plywood mansion shaped much like a drill chuck. We take our seats. I very quickly hand out a hundred or so of our camp's tiny flashlights. Even in this, I fall short. My manner is efficient, peremptory. “Would you like a tiny flashlight? Of course you would. They're extremely convenient.”

When I return, Cam seems to be maybe making time with a hippie matron in a leopard-print halter and rainbow-glo ligatures about her neck and chest. Good man.

My father, somehow, appears to be in animated grinning rapport with a young woman in minuscule shorts, brassiere, and pierced tongue. “I'm nineteen,” I think I hear her say.

Out before the Man, a gang of tribal majorettes brandish flaming batons. My father and his young friend take note, but it does not halt the flow of language between these two. What are they saying? Something naughty? Is my father—horrible! miraculous to imagine!—getting some sort of
angle
going here? I draw near to them. She is telling my father that she is interested in doing something to do with environmentalism. My father is getting the opposite of an angle going. He is saying, “Yeah, but I worry that all that environmental stuff is going to inhibit trade.” She is saying that she would like to go to Africa someday. “I once calculated fertilizer subsidies in Malawi” is his reply.

This is why I love my father. Probably ninety-nine out of a hundred men in the vicinity would be trying to persuade this girl out into the dark of the evening with talk of “Baby, let's bump uglies. Let me fly my freak flag with you.” But of course that particular flag, the lecherous-septuagenarian-horndog flag, is not freaky at all. Much freakier, much more radically self-expressive, when you are down in the dust with some winsome young lady, is to ply her instead with talk of fertilizer subsidies and not take it there at all.

The fire dancers retreat. The drill-chuck-mansion pedestal goes up in a great pumping beefheart of flame. My father sits in a rain of cinders big as playing cards, more than sufficient to ignite the infant wisps of his remaining hair. Unconcerned, he gawps at the flames. The danger is unreal to him, or not as important as the splendid inferno before him. In childhood, I knew my father as a man to cringe at loud noises, to wince, cower, shield his precious carcass when you raised your fists to him, as I did at least once in my teenage years. That man is not this man, to whom the risk of minor incineration is worth an extra instant of beauty. The transformation dates, I think, to the cancer treatment. There is likely some best-selling wisdom here, à la
Everything I Need to Know I Learned from My Christ-Bitten Kindergartner.
If not a bankable bathroom title, the inferno begs at least some modest, affirming revelation.
Don't fear the reaper. Regret not the past. Stand in the flames. Hide not your genitalia. Naked boobs like to be photographed.

But my mind, unfortunately, is dwelling not on life's precious evanescence but on the eight-hour traffic jam we've been told to expect in the postburn exodus. Instead of getting into a soul communion with my father, I am screaming at him, “Move! Move! Move!”

We speed back to the RV and beat the traffic handily.

“Well, I thought that was extraordinary,” says my father. We are riding south through the Great Basin Desert in the small hours of the night. “A fine capstone to our adventures. I hope not, but perhaps.”

He is returning to the real world, to thoughts of his faltering immune system, his racking cough, the sores in his mouth, the rings around his pupils.

As it turns out, these troubling symptoms are unlikely to kill him. The pupil halos turn out to be benign. His lung infection proves treatable. The doctor doubles his transfusions of immunoglobulin, and when I see him next, he's looking healthy and feeling fine. We ponder a trip next year to Myanmar.

And Cam. I almost forgot about Cam. Cam stayed at Burning Man, still on the lookout for a new community, a desert sweetheart, a sense of clarity and closure to his curious year. On Sunday evening the Temple burned, and Cam had a good, exhausting cry over the decline and death of Sierra the dog. By the pulsing light of the embers, Cam met a lovely young woman, a “playa goddess,” in his description. By gosh, he and the playa goddess hit it off, and by his own account he got to third base with her. One Californian wrinkle was that two other people were also getting to third or some other base with her at the time Cam stepped onto the field. But that was okay, that was cool. The only truly disappointing thing about the evening was that when the playa goddess started trying to get to third base with Cam, that project got derailed because Cam was wearing some high-concept outdoorsman's trousers that had no zipper access. Still, no regrets. He got more out of the week than he'd honestly expected. He's going back next year. He will be wearing different pants.

FROM
Southern Humanities Review

 

G
ATHER SCISSORS, CONSTRUCTION
paper, crayons, popsicle sticks, and glue. Take them to the den, where your thirteen-year-old sister sits at the table thumbing through your schoolbook on black history. Smile when she notices you and turns to the premarked page with a photo of Frederick Douglass. It's one from his later years, when his Afro was white. Realize you need cotton balls. Leave and return with them a moment later to see that your sister has already cut from the construction paper a circle that will serve as Douglass's head. Start gluing popsicle sticks together to make his body. As you work silently, your sister tells you basic facts about slavery and abolition that you will present to your class. You'll end the presentation by saying with passion that Frederick Douglass is your hero, which will not be true because you are only ten and the things you are learning about black history make it difficult to feel good about his life, and sometimes yours.

But feel good about the beating he gave his master. Your classmates feel good about it too. They cheer when you describe it, as they cheered seconds earlier when you recited Douglass's famous line:
You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man.
“I wouldn't have taken that stuff either,” one of your classmates says after school. Forget his name in a few years but remember his skin was so dark that you and your friends had no choice but to call him Congo. Congo explains how he would have gouged out his master's eyes, and then other boys break their masters' legs and amputate their arms, and when someone curls his fingers into a claw and twists off his master's balls everyone cups his crotch in agony before laughing. Enjoy how wonderful it feels to laugh at that moment, and as you walk home, with Douglass staring somberly out of your back pocket, wish black history had some funny parts.

Find a funny part. One has been captured on an FBI wiretap of Martin Luther King, Jr., in which he's in a hotel having sex and at the right moment yells, “I'm fucking for God!” The funniness is not immediately apparent, though, because you are twenty-five now and King
is
your hero and the woman with whom he is performing God's work is not his wife. Wonder with indignation how he could do such a thing, but while smoking the second of three bongs come to terms with the complexity of humankind and the idea of moral subjectivism. Now it is clear that the important thing here is not the messenger but rather the message. It is also clear that the message bears repeating.

After you repeat it, your girlfriend looks confused. She opens her mouth as if to respond but all she does is stare up at you, not even blinking when a bead of sweat falls from your forehead onto hers. Try to explain that you are only quoting some black history but be overtaken by the giggles and conclude that this is a conversation for a different time, when you have not smoked three bongs and are not doing God's work. And maybe it is a conversation for a different person too, because this one is white and does not like to talk about race. She does not even
see
race, she has said, having taught herself to judge individuals solely by their character and deeds. She is postracial, the first postracial person you have ever known, but because the term has not yet been invented you just think she's stupid. And because you are the first person she has ever known who has taught himself to see race in everything, she thinks you are stupid too. In time, you both seek and find smarter companions.

Yours, like Frederick Douglass, is, to use a phrase from that earlier era, a mulatto. This appeals to you a great deal because you know mulattos give race a lot of thought, and so this girlfriend probably will not mind helping you see it in places you might have missed. And maybe she can understand it in ways you cannot, since her perspective was not shaped by a stereotypical ghetto experience, like yours, but by a stereotypical suburban experience, like the Fonz's.

“It wasn't quite like his,” she says.

The schools she attended were excellent; her neighborhood was safe; the parks and streets were pristine; racial diversity was negligible; the community had its own Fourth of July parade. As you remind her of these facts, sense her getting uptight, and diffuse her discomfort with a wide grin and a bad joke, something along the lines of her only run-in with the police being with an officer named Friendly.

She nearly smiles.

Give her two thumbs up at the hip and say,
“Aeyyyyyyy!”

She does smile as she calls you a moron. “But seriously,” she continues, and do not interrupt when she relates some of the challenges she faced as one of the few black kids in high school. You have been disappointed by how little she talks about race, to say nothing of her inability to see it everywhere, so her self-pity is a rare treat. Nod sympathetically when she broadens her grievances to include her family; the stares and snickers her parents faced in restaurants; how her brother was routinely followed by mall security; how her sister had trouble getting a date for the prom. Say that while these are excellent blemishes on her community, they are relatively benign. Some people, like you, for instance, lived in communities with drugs, gangs, crime, bad schools, police brutality, and the collective view that white people were and would always be racists. Let the conversation end as she concedes that, should you have children, her stereotype is preferable to yours.

Have children, two boys, two years apart, and decide that neither stereotype will do. The ghetto was never an option, but do not be thrilled about raising your sons to be Fonzies. Want a racially diverse, progressive, urban community, but instead move to one that is 96 percent white, conservative, and rural. It is in a college town near Boston where you and your wife land professorships, the primary appeal being that your house is only a block from campus. It is also, the realtor tells you, on the parade route. Buy four lawn chairs. Sit in one next to your wife and sons on the Fourth of July and wave American flags at the procession. Enjoy this. Your boys are happy.

Later that evening, wrestle with this question: How long will your boys be happy in a 96 percent white, conservative, rural town near Boston?

The answer for your older son, now five, is sixty-eight more days.

That is when you come home from teaching one afternoon and your wife informs you that one of his classmates told him that people with his skin color are stinky. Your son reported this incident while crying, but that night he appears to be fine, based on your observations of him, conducted from his bedroom closet. For the twenty minutes you have been in there, he and his little brother have lain in their adjacent beds chatting about cartoon characters and imaginary friends and a new fire truck they wish to own. When they finally fall asleep you sneak out and report the good news to your wife, though you caution that more observations will be necessary. In the meantime, you say, that classmate of his should be disciplined. Curl your fingers into a claw and tell your wife you are twisting off his tiny, five-year-old balls.

“First of all,” your wife responds, “the person who said it is a girl. Second, let's not make a big deal out of this. I've already told him that she was just being silly. I'm sure he's already forgotten the whole incident.”

Dispute this. Tell her that kids remember these sorts of things, sometimes for decades. Tell her about Congo. Imagine Congo's father learning of his son's nickname and later that night hiding in his closet, watching to see if he cries.