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.
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 ban
kers, 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?”
&nb
sp; “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?”
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