“Look at this shit, Darren. They’ve got this girl posed, passed out in the gutter with her panties around her ankles. You want to tell me what this has to do with selling pumps? Seriously.”
I could say something in response, about rape fantasy as a commodity and the saturation of shoe-fetishism in American porn, but it’s boring preaching to the choir. She and I both read the same AdBusters, go to the same town hall meetings, use the same compost pile, get the same e-mails from lefty groups pretending they aren’t socialists. So I say nothing, just shake my head from left to right and purse my lips and huff a breath out through my nose to let her know that I’m with her in her parade of constant disgust.
I can’t let her know, ever, that I jerked off to the ad before we packed the car up this morning. Sleaze presses my monkey-brain buttons. The cerebellum doesn’t always offer a counter-move. Let her think I’m enlightened.
Sage slurps up the last of her 32 oz. iced cappuccino through a red plastic straw and turns to me with unexpected urgency.
“I have to use the bathroom.”
“What? We just stopped back at the top of the pass, and you’d already drank most of your coffee by then.”
“I’m not arguing with you about the size of my bladder. I just need to go. Bad. Whatever the next stop is.”
“Shit, Sage, that’s in about forty miles, outside of South Barker.”
“What about one of the stores up ahead?”
“No. Remember, we don’t stop here. Ever.”
“We’re going to have to, Darren. My bladder infection isn’t all the way gone yet and I seriously need to go. Don’t be a control freak.”
“I don’t stop at the rez.”
“Why? Are you a racist? You afraid you’re going to get scalped? Whatever your hang-up is, you need to can it and find me a bathroom.”
I don’t tell her my reasons. Never have before. Never needed to. She might peg me for the scared little white guy I am. Besides, not even counting today we’ve got about nine hours of driving tomorrow before we make it out to the Burning Man festival, and I want to keep this car clean of tension.
“Okay, I’ll stop at the next restroom.”
That earns me a series of soft kisses on the spot next to my right ear and a hand sliding up and down my thigh.
“Thank you, baby,” she says. “Find it quick.”
State park facilities. Sunny day. Lots of traffic passing by. Ramp for fisherman to slip their boats into the Sheenetz River. Two outhouses, one for men, the other, women. Looks clean enough. Why not?
My compact blue Ford sedan stirs up dust as I pull a quick right turn in to the rest-stop. My bladder’s starting to feel a bit full, too, and this stop will let me make the rest of today’s drive in one haul.
Hop out and stretch. Let the slight, warm wind blow across my lower back and dry some of the sweat puddled there. When the lower half of my shirt touches my back again it feels cool and wet. Goosebumps, and the hairs on my arms are up.
Sage is putting make-up back into her purse, and then bringing it with her as she steps out of the car. She also stretches, giving me a good look at her long legs, barely encumbered by a short black skirt. The wind must have caught her, too, because now I can see her nipples through the thin white fabric of her tank top. I’m starting to wish that this little rest-stop had more trees so we could hide away for a moment and have a nice travel-fuck. She smiles at me like she’s thinking the same thing, then ducks her head like she’s shy. Too cute. The girl can press my buttons.
She starts to walk towards the bathroom and I finish my stretching with a wide, open-mouth yawn and look down at the river. The sun is bright off the water, white-silver, and the area downstream from the dock is dotted with dried brush. The opposite side of the river is walled in by a sheer, tan stretch of rock, high enough that a jump from it would guarantee shattered legs. At the far right border of the park I see an old, leafless tree with a trunk wide enough to cast a few feet of shade.
There’s motion from inside that shade, then a voice, loud and deep across the park.
“Hey, girl! I want your ass! Now!” Then laughter. More shapes moving. Five shapes, all visibly in motion now, as if they’d been invisible in their stillness before, sitting beneath that tree. Waiting.
We should get back in the car. Now. Right fucking now.
I hear the women’s bathroom door close behind Sage. Too late; the girl’s on a mission. Not going to let a catcall bother her.
Focus on the dark space by the tree. There are five of them. All men. All seated or resting on the ground. Still laughing, watching me. Two are shirtless and wearing old blue jeans. One guy, lying on the ground towards the back of the shade, is morbidly obese. When he laughs his girth barely moves. His lungs and diaphragm must be so small under all that fat.
One of the shirtless guys stands up. He’s looking right at me. This can’t be sustained. This will lead to something. Act casual. Move your feet. Soon the men’s bathroom door is behind me and I’ve latched it and there are enough flies buzzing around in here to block out the noise of the men laughing outside. I try to stay in motion. I piss quick through a fear-shrunken dick and then squirt a couple drips of anti-bacterial cleanser onto my hands and rub them together. Even in this heat, my fingertips have gone cold. My head feels like there’s a wool hat of electricity over my skull and I can sense my heart is kicking double-time. You couldn’t find a drop of spit in my mouth with a microscope.
There are men outside this small bathroom yelling that they want my gorgeous girlfriend’s ass. The best odds say that they are Indians, and I’m a skinny white kid with a red mohawk. This is like being a Nazi and wearing a yarmulke into the heart of Israel.
The world has just gone real. The pleasant harmonic fuzz of daily life has been stomped to the concrete with atomic bomb speed. I’m fucked.
I hear Sage stand up in her bathroom and buckle her belt. Shit.
We’re fucked.
I unlock the bathroom door and grab the handle. For a split second I can’t seem to push it open and at that moment I know that one of them, one of the men from the shade, is going to keep my door held tight and not let me out and the others are going to step into my girlfriend’s stall when she opens her door and then they’ll have her and they can lock themselves in with her and rape her and beat her down and cum on her and piss on her and I’ll have to listen from inside this shitty bathroom, surrounded by a legion of flies, and I’ll hear everything, every last moment, separated from her by a thin wall, and when they’re done…
But then the door does open, as if the wind across its surface had given it a moment’s extra weight, and I’m thanking God until I see that the man that was looking at me earlier is now headed my direction.
I stand in front of Sage’s bathroom door. Five of them. Goddamnit. How can I stop five of them? Only one is headed towards me. I’m shaking but trying not to let it show. Things are moving so fast that it seems my brain is a second behind, disconnected, not altogether worth having. Hard to think. Fight or flight? Never fought a day in my life and I can’t run and leave sweet, delicate Sage here. What other options?
He’s ten feet away now. The other four men in the shade are standing, expectant. Can I take this one guy if he starts swinging? Would the other four leave me be if I beat this guy? Right. The guy’s definitely an Indian, dark skin marked in all directions by inch thick scars. Oily black hair smattered with dust. Lip scar from a cleft restructure. Moon-surface pock marks from cystic acne. The booze on his breath hits me at five feet away. This guy’s a wreck, and he’s not wearing shoes. The sight of his bare feet pulls the breath from my chest. Something about seeing his feet caked in dust.
At three feet away he speaks up. “Hey, man, I need to talk to you.” He’s talking loud enough for his friends to hear. I’m their entertainment.
“Okay, yeah.” Say as little as possible. Don’t puff your chest out. Don’t let this escalate. Be ready if he swings.
“
Sorry, man, but you can’t have that here.” His right hand points up at my head. His left hand hovers near a slim shape in his pocket. “People ‘round here are crazy. They see you with that hair, you could get hurt.” He’s smiling a three-tooth smile, happy as hell to watch me twitch. “Not everybody’s like me, man. People ‘round here get crazy. You know that’s a tribal haircut, right?”
“Right.” I don’t think telling him that I’m trying to go for a Mad Max/Travis Bickle look is going to mean shit to this guy. I’m a target, regardless of hairstyle. I could have stopped in here with a fully shaved head and he would have asked me if I was a Nazi. He’s looking at me with one eye, his other floating slightly to the left, un-focused.
“You Scottish? You sound Scottish.”
I must sound Scottish when I’m about to piss my pants, or maybe it’s the red hair. For just a second I’m thinking that this is my way out, that I’ll tell him I’m Scottish and we’ll kick back with some beers and joke about how the English fucked both of us over and that’ll be that. Brothers-in-arms. But what if I can’t sustain an accent?
“No. I’m not Scottish.” This response leads him to step closer towards me. His left hand slides into his pocket, towards the thin rectangular shape. His breath is heavy and thick in my nose now, like dumpster breeze on the wind. Old eggs, gallons of cheap, pissy lager. His focused eye is locked on mine.
“I’m not scared of you, man. I just left Reno, with the Paiutes there. Proud people. We made sacred shirts so I wasn’t never afraid. We did the Ghost Dance. Got into some trouble, though, knowhatImean?” He gestures to the inch thick scars on his body, what appear to be stab wounds interspersed among faded prison tats. A crucifix with the word “Wokova” across its horizontal arm. Another on his left shoulder reads “FBI” and beneath it “Full Blooded Indian.” Doesn’t he know Full Blooded Native American would be more PC?
He’s covered in these marks, black ink and flesh wounds. He knows what it’s like to fight. If something starts, I’m decimated.
The door clicks open behind me. Sage steps out, her make-up refreshed. Her innocence makes my heart ache. She’s been dolling up for what could be our last day on Earth. The look she gives me says she’s been listening to our conversation, though, and now she’s ready to get the hell out of here. I slip her the car keys and am waiting for the guys to come rushing towards us.
The men in the shade whistle at her. Mr. FBI in front of me doesn’t even look at her. All his attention’s on me. He smiles again. “Pretty girl. What’s she doing with a guy like you?”
I hear the passenger door close behind me and knowing that Sage is in the car gives me a moment’s relief. She isn’t locking the doors though. Doesn’t she know she’s in danger? Or is she being brave and leaving it open for me? Shouldn’t someone else be pulling into this rest stop soon?
“Cat got your tongue? Rude, man. Rude. Listen, don’t stop here again. My friends are about to go crazy on you. But I told them I wanted to talk to you first. I got this watch I need to sell.”
Should I reach for my wallet? Could be my quickest shot at getting out of here. I tell him I could use a new watch, and he tells me that he’ll have to give it to me later but I can buy it right now. I don’t ask him the price. I know what it is.
I hand him all the cash in my wallet, three hundred in twenties.
As he takes the money with his right hand his left slides from his pocket. Before I can retract my arm he’s grabbed my hand and he’s slashing across the top of my forearm with a dull silver box opener. The pain is sharp and immediate and the sensation of the blade touching bone turns my stomach.
He’s still got my hand and he pulls me in close and spits on my face. His saliva is hot and it’s in my right eye and trickling to the corner of my mouth. He’s whispering to me in my left ear and in my right I can hear the men in the shade laughing and shouting.
His breath feels damp on my face. “You NEVER come back through here. Ever. This is our land, stupid white bitch. This is our place.”
Blood is running in a steady stream from my arm to the dust below. Muddy spatter is hitting the front of my sneakers. Sage, thank God, is still in the car. I can hear her screams through the glass.
Mr. FBI’s hands are on my chest now, pushing me back and down and I’m turning even as I hit the dirt, to scramble back to the car and get in and lock it and bail out of this place we never should have been.
Sage has already got the key in the ignition, and she hits the auto-lock just as my door closes. I start the engine and begin to pull out of the lot in reverse. Going forward would steer me by the shade tree and that’s not a chance I can take.
Mr. FBI is standing behind my car now, box opener in one hand and my cash wadded in the other. Sage sees the gash in my arm and her screams gain volume. I can’t take her freaking out right now. I yell back, “Quiet! I’ve got to get out of here!” Mr. FBI is smiling at me, laughing. I start to back up and he kicks my bumper. I feel the kick through the seat of my car.
I start to back up again and now he’s dancing.
We did the Ghost Dance.
He’s chanting something and inscribing small circles in the dirt with his feet. As quickly as the dance began, he’s done and steps to the side. He’s letting me go.
The exit to the place is on a slight incline and my right tire catches the soft shoulder, almost spinning my car into a drop that would pull us end over end to the river below. Back to where they are.
Sage is crying now. OhmyGod, ohmyGod, ohmyGod…
My arm is still dripping, and I can see dust in the wound. The dust of that place.
This is the beginning of our vacation.
When you lose your friends here, at the Burning Man festival, you lose them for days. The desert shifts time around you. The dust storms, the wind, the drugs, the sense of having drifted into a separate reality, all of these things break down the way your brain used to function. By the end of your first night you’ve seen an all-male gangbang, watched two dwarves get married at the foot of a giant temple, snorted enough Charlie to make Scarface jealous, fondled a theremin dressed as an alien, and fallen asleep at the foot of a door to nowhere. This all before you see your first sunrise.
No surprise that the place is tough on relationships.
Sage was pretty shaken up in the first place, and no matter how much I tried to get her to relax, the Kah-Tah-Nee rez scenario keeps her freaked out. Paranoid. I’m the one with seventeen stitches. I’m the one who can still feel the spit on my face (Looks like he’s got Phantom Saliva Syndrome, Doc). I’m the one who had to ask his parents to wire extra travel cash. But Sage is the one making this into her deal. Her trauma.
And we did not come here for trauma. We came to party. But she could barely party anyway, with her “friend of Bill W.” bullshit and her twelve steps and her insistence that we stop and meditate every hour and absorb the peace of the desert. I’m not here to get centered. I’m here to escape into the chaos.
So that’s what I bought. One big fistful of chaos.
I’ve never seen mushrooms like this. The guy that sold them to me said his name was Scheme. I told him that was a tragically dodgy name for a drug dealer. He told me $30 bucks could buy me a ticket to outer space. Said the ‘shrooms came from the Moapa reservation and were used mainly for religious ceremonies. The idea of my drug money eventually trickling back to the Indian population pissed me off, but I’ve seriously never seen mushrooms like this, so small with such a bright purple tint. Besides, they burn The Man down tonight, and there’s no way I’m going to be within shouting distance of sober for that social call.
It’s about three hours till the big wooden Man gets blazed and I want to be peaking when he topples over into his own funeral pyre. I’ve got no girlfriend obligations, no friends to slow me down, a CamelBak full of filtered water, a dust mask, and warm clothes on.
Sage put clean bandages on my arm tonight, moments before she decided to take off with her new yoga friends, Dale
and Kristin. She was getting ready to leave our tent and I leaned in to kiss her. She pulled away.
“What?” She’s been hyper-hesitant towards me since our bad time at the rest stop. I can’t figure her out.
She speaks, carefully, like she’s been thinking about this for our whole vacation. “Well… I’m having a strange feeling about you now, like something changed since you got hurt. You looked so scared. You just didn’t look like the guy I thought I knew. And I feel like luck or God or whatever is all that got us out of that place. I don’t think you could have protected me.” She breathed out heavily like she was about to tell me I had terminal cancer. “I just don’t feel safe with you anymore.”
Sage kissed me on the forehead like I was some lost puppy about to get the gas chamber treatment, and then she stepped out of the tent and zipped it up behind her. If she would have stayed I’d have told her that I don’t feel safe anymore either.
I’ll try and find her at the center of The Burn tonight. We can straighten things out.
But first, I’ve got some mushrooms just dying to be ingested. I dig into the Ziploc bag and pull them all out, all the little bright purple stems and caps. Best to eat them quickly, the whole batch at once. They tend to taste like the shit they’re grown on.
I’m chewing, and they’ve definitely got an earthy taste, but it’s one I can’t quite place, or at least I don’t want to, because the flavor most reminds me of the dust I huffed down when Mr. FBI cut me and pushed me to the ground.
Stranger still, the wound in my arm begins to throb as I swallow the last bite of fungus. But the throb isn’t my heartbeat. The rhythm is not my own.
The drums can eat your blood. The drums can eat your blood. They move in circles. Sing words I can’t understand. Try to melt into the dirt. Try to crawl inside. We are swallowing everything. This whole desert runs on gasoline. We are not separate. All plunder. All rape. We are reptiles. We will eat your children. Keep your drums. Keep them away. Have a blanket, let it soak into you, join the stitches and I’ll skin you alive. Unravel. Consume. Swallow.
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