I have no idea what her name was, but I will never forget the chick I fucked unconscious at Burning Man.
I was something of a legend in our camp after that. On the Playa, the hallowed ground where Burning Man is held, there is a much despised phenomenon known as “shirt cocking” in which a (usually older) man wears nothing but his shoes and a dress shirt. This means that their man parts dangle about in full view. Some camps find this so unappealing that they have banned shirt cockers from their areas. I felt I had earned the right to shirt cock, so for most of the week, I wore nothing but my boots and a white linen dress shirt … and my big black cock of course. People fucking loved it. I can just about guarantee that my cock got more attention than any other on the Playa that year. We didn’t have to go looking for trouble. Trouble found us.
We were invited by one of my cock’s many adoring fans to attend an orgy in the Roman Orgy Camp, and we were intrigued. We had all been to many play parties that could probably be deemed orgies, but none of us had ever been to a more classical vanilla orgy.
I walked over with Wes, Vanessa, Dominic, Raven, Minx, and our camp leader, Captain Killjoy. We didn’t know what to expect as we all stripped naked in the entryway where all clothing was required to be left. I was used to knowing exactly what protocol to follow, but I was a little in the dark on this one. Were we supposed to interact with other people or just observe? If we wanted to interact, what was the proper way to engage another party?
It ended up being irrelevant. Apparently, the vanilla interpretation of an orgy was simply to be in a large room in which other people are having sex while you are having sex with your partner. All around the tent, everyone was coupled off, and not doing any more interacting than stealing the occasional surreptitious glance at other couples. It was just a little innocent exhibitionism by our standards.
We were disappointed that there was nothing new here for us, but decided to make the best of it by at least playing as a group and seeing if maybe we could instigate something. Vanessa and Minx started to alternately deep throat Dominic, which left Raven and me to top Captain Killjoy. CKJ was into small-penis humiliation, so we made him sit against the wall and play with himself while we hurled insults at him.
“You call that a dick?” I snapped at him. “That looks more like a pussy to me. I’ve seen clits bigger than that pathetic excuse for manhood!”
“Aw, is the little sissy man going to cry because he doesn’t have a real penis?” Raven prodded.
The tone of the orgy had shifted. The rest of the couples could definitely hear us, and with the exception of Dominic, every guy in the room seemed to be struggling to block out what we were saying. A few of them seemed to suddenly be having performance issues.
I lowered my voice a little, but it was so quiet in there that I’m sure they could still hear me.
We hissed insults until Killjoy came with a grunt. I looked around and noticed a few couples had left. I wondered whether they had finished or we had scared them off.
Raven jumped in on Dom’s scene and spanked both of the subs while they continued to service Dominic. I mounted Wes in reverse cowgirl, fucking him and punching him in the balls at the same time. I punched him harder the closer he got to coming, until he threw his head back and yelled in a mix of agony and bliss.
The remaining couples weren’t even pretending not to stare anymore. I was pretty sure they had never seen a guy get punched in the balls before. Seeing a guy get off while it was happening must have been melting their minds.
I pulled on my big black cock. Raven bent Minx over for me, and I thrust into her hard. I would normally have been driven wild by the experience but I couldn’t seem to get out of my own head. I had suddenly realized that I had become what I set out on this journey to be: a woman who knew exactly what she wanted and was comfortable getting it. We were too fucking wild for the Burning Man orgy, and it felt good. But something still felt hollow. I couldn’t shake the sense that something was still missing. I had what I thought I wanted … and it wasn’t enough.
I met Dominic’s eyes, and I think he may have guessed how I was feeling. He and Vanessa had something different from what Wes and I had, and I think they had gotten there by being their authentic selves. I had come a long way, but I wasn’t quite there yet.
46. THE TEMPLE
So far, my Burn had only been filled with the wilder elements of the festival: drugs, partying, and nudity. I had been overlooking the spiritual side, a side that I was skeptical about going in. Every year there is a temple constructed on the Playa that is burned the day after the Man burns. It had been described to me before I went, and it sounded like it fell somewhere between hippie-dippie and hipster.
The temple had primarily become the space where Burners grieved those they had lost. Small shrines filled every shelf and nook of the place. The wooden walls, beams, and decorations were covered with deeply meaningful messages. The quiet at the temple stood in stark contrast to the continuous cacophony on the rest of the Playa. Sometimes people were playing strange instruments that sounded as if they belonged in a Buddhist temple, but the rest of the time only whispers and quiet sobs could be heard. It was nearly the end of the week before I decided to check it out. I expected to be an observer, a tourist witnessing something that didn’t touch me.
I parked my bike just outside the grounds and walked through the entrance. I was immediately uncomfortable around the people who were leaving. They all looked like they were coming from a funeral. It was obvious most had been crying and many were holding one another. I wasn’t comfortable displaying extreme emotion in front of others and didn’t really know how to handle it when others displayed theirs around me. I avoided eye contact and kept walking.
Once my eyes adjusted to the dim light of the main room of the temple, I began to take in the messages and shrines all around me. The power of the place was like a punch to the gut. I was unprepared for the impact it had on me and almost immediately felt tears stinging my eyes that I couldn’t rationalize.
I came across a shrine to someone’s young son who had died of cancer and couldn’t help thinking of my half brother, Danny. I had only seen a few pictures of him, but I held his face in my mind and did the closest thing to praying I had ever done. I sent him the love I had never been allowed to give him and acknowledged that even though his life had been short, he mattered.
Then I thought of Eleanor and couldn’t find the rage that I had been burying for so long. I did, however, find the tears I had been repressing. I didn’t even try to prevent the inevitable.
There, on my knees in the hot sand, I released the flood of tears that I had been holding back for months. The silent sobs shook my whole body and I surrendered to the power of the grief. I don’t know how long I knelt there before the crying stopped and I felt empty of everything. I was empty of the grief, but also of the anger and resentment that I had been clinging to for years. An old man in a cloak handed me a Sharpie without saying a word, simply bowing his head and leaving me to my grief. I took a moment to consider how to translate what I was feeling into something that could be written. On the wall of the temple I scrawled the words that would release me from the pain:
Danny, I love you.
Eleanor, I forgive you.
There was so much I would never understand about what had happened and a thousand whys that would never be answered, but my epiphany that day was that it didn’t matter. The tragedy was unspeakable. But in the depths of my soul, I understood that it wasn’t really her fault either. The brain can be beautiful, but it can also be terrible when something goes wrong. If everyone we encounter is fighting a battle we know nothing about, then hers was a far scarier conflict than most of us can even imagine. Medication can help with some things but it can also make the person a shell of who they once were, a prospect almost as terrifying as the alternative. My years of exposure to people who truly can’t help who they are and what they are into had given me new perspective into her ordeal. When she was telling stories ab
out the things I was doing—breaking into their house, trying to poison her, playing mind games with her—she truly believed I was doing those things. To have to live in a world like that must have been frightening and isolating.
I don’t know what happened in the intervening years, whether she started behaving more erratically or exhibiting clear symptoms of her disease. I suspect those closest to her knew that something wasn’t right but never in their wildest imaginings thought that she would end her own life and take her child with her. Dwelling on it wouldn’t help anyone, but acknowledging it might. After it happened, absolutely everyone who was connected to my family remained silent when it came to the media. There was the initial story and then no more information, so the story died long before it might have in other situations. I was so grateful for that at the time that I’ve had to think seriously about whether to open up about all of this publicly. My conclusion has been that there are more people out there struggling with mental illness than anyone realizes and I want them and the people who love them to know that they’re not alone. I don’t know what the answer is, but it is clear that what we’re doing now isn’t working. Perhaps in speaking up, I can help someone find the strength to get help or to support a loved one who is in a dark place. Maybe next time when the old man on the corner is raving, someone will see him as the man he is and not the disease that now possesses him.
I felt curiously light as I walked my bike back to camp to buy some more time to get my thoughts in order. I had made my peace with the dead. Now I just needed to find a way to do the same with the man they had left behind. As I watched the temple burn, I decided that I had been given a gift: another chance with my dad, and I wasn’t going to squander it. I considered that he could have been taken too, but he was still here, and we still had a chance to heal together.
Just before I had left the temple, I caught sight of a line that someone had written over the doorway: “The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.” I was determined to find such joy to fill what the tears had seared away that I would overflow with it, bathing everyone I cared about with love. I didn’t have any anger left, but love I had in abundance.
I had come to Burning Man expecting to be fulfilled by the sex and partying, and instead it had made me feel jaded and hollow. I never expected to be moved by the place, but had experienced the spiritual release that would allow me to lay to rest the ghosts that haunted me. One of those ghosts was the specter of the woman I had once been: the woman who didn’t demand respect from her partners or value herself.
I had plans to spend a weekend with my dad, and there was something I needed to do first to be able to build the kind of future that I now knew I deserved. It was time to end my relationship with Wes. He was still a dear friend, and we had been through so much together, but this was not the partner I wanted to walk through life with.
As far as breakups go, it was the most polite and civilized I had ever heard of. We parted with words of love and support in acknowledgment of all that we had experienced together.
47. KRIS
In one of my favorite ancient Greek works, Plato attempts to explain how love came about. He tells us that long ago, people were not the beings we know today, but were two people fused together into creatures with four arms, four legs, and two heads who moved in a spinning cartwheel of blissful happiness. These beings made the mistake of siding with the Titans in a failed uprising against the gods of Olympus, so Zeus was forced to punish them. He was faced with a conundrum: if he destroyed mankind, there would be no one to pay homage to the gods, so that punishment would backfire … but he couldn’t very well have the humans getting off easy and thinking they could revolt ever again. He decided to punish them by splitting them all from their mates and scattering them about the Earth, left forever searching for their other halves.
I found mine.
Kris had been right in front of me for a long time, but I was too busy looking in a hundred other directions to notice. He ran the job for the general contractor, which meant he was the man in charge on the site where I worked. We had spoken a few times, generally when I had to go to his office and explain something that our team had fucked up. He usually didn’t say much, preferring to listen, but when he did it was always worth hearing. I got nervous when I had to go and talk to him. The guy intimidated me. After everything I had been through, I didn’t think it was possible, but he just seemed so impossibly centered. After years of navigating people’s insecurities, I could tell that he was a man who knew who he was and was completely comfortable with it.
He was six foot five with dark hair and brilliant blue eyes.
It wasn’t love at first sight. But once we opened our eyes to the possibility, we fell fast and hard.
At the end of the job celebration, we finally took notice of each other.
Free drinks meant that almost everyone in our corner of the restaurant where the celebration was taking place was hammered within about an hour. Our company had paid for our team to have hotel rooms a few blocks away so that we could enjoy ourselves and no one would drive home drunk. I had driven my teammates over to the restaurant in a coworker named Ron’s SUV since it could fit more people than my truck. I was confident that I would be sober enough to give them a ride back to the hotel at the end of the night.
As usual, I was one of only a few women, and as the night went on, the others slowly left until it was just me and the boys. Calls to move the party to a strip club had me musing over who would be working nearby that night and whether I should send the drunken boys in their direction. As they threw back another round of tequila, I decided Minx was more than capable of handling them, and pulled out my phone to give her a heads-up.
Cliff, one of the architects, knocked it from my hand as he wrapped his arm around me and pressed me against his sweaty flesh. His hot breath on my face smelled like he had already puked and was now replacing the lost booze. Cliff spent too much time at the gym and clearly felt that his bulk made him irresistible.
“I have a hotel room across the street,” he yelled over the noise with awkward emphasis and a look in his eyes that made it clear he thought I was a sure thing.
“That’s good, Cliff! You definitely don’t need to be driving home,” I replied, being deliberately obtuse.
“You should go with me,” he slurred as his hand slid its way down to my ass.
I slithered from his grasp, and laughed it off, deciding to be merciful instead of shredding his ego with my sharp tongue.
“You’re not going to get anywhere behaving like that with me, but maybe you should join the strip-club group and give that a shot there!” Minx wouldn’t be as gentle, but she didn’t have to work with him the next day.
Cliff took the hint and moved on to talk to someone else. Kris appeared and stood next to me, his proximity making me suddenly very conscious of his broad shoulders and towering height. I was aware of his closeness, and it felt electric. Kris was manly in a way that Cliff, with his overblown muscles and swagger, would never achieve.
I noticed that his beer looked as warm as mine, and he didn’t seem at all drunk. I found a man who stayed in control of himself intriguing.
“I was just about to come over here and save you,” he said, “but it looks like you handled it yourself.”
Within me, Scarlett bristled.
“I’m not really the damsel-in-distress type. But thanks anyway,” I said brusquely.
He ignored my dismissal and asked, “How long do you think before Bruce gets himself kicked out?”
He gestured to behind the bar. Bruce, who was from the hospital’s purchasing department, was in the process of hoisting his considerable weight over the bar, where he proceeded to pour his own beer.
“Good Lord! Should we intercede?” I asked, already moving toward him.
“Let it play out,” he said with mischief in his eyes, lightly putting his hand on my arm to stop me.
He had broken the barrier of touch
, and instead of being pissed about it, I was surprised to find I wanted more.
It didn’t take long for security to appear, and kick our entire group out instead of just Bruce. For some unfathomable reason, two of the guys I was supposed to be driving back to the hotel were insistent that we also give wasted Bruce, who was still trying to persuade a hospital executive to take him to a strip club, a ride back to his house instead of just putting him in a taxi. As Bruce lived about half an hour away, this was a nonsensical idea, but there is no reasoning with drunks. Ron insisted that if I wasn’t going to drive Bruce as well, then I needed to give him his keys back so he could do it. He swore he was sober enough to drive, and despite my doubts, I couldn’t prove otherwise since he wasn’t acting as inebriated as the others. I kept arguing until Ron compromised and said they would wait a little while at the bar next door until he sobered up enough to drive. I gave him his keys feeling irresponsible, but accepting that he was an adult. I wasn’t going to wait and drive all the way to Bruce’s house with them, though, so I stepped away and started looking up the number of a cab in my phone.
“Why don’t you let me give you a ride?” Kris asked, appearing at my side once again.
I eyed him skeptically, wondering if this counted as him “saving” me, but swallowed my pride and said, “Thanks, that would be great. I’m just at the DoubleTree down the street.”
“Cool, I’m parked over here,” Kris said, steering me with a gentle touch on my bare shoulder.
What the fuck is it about this guy?
I was irritated because I wanted him, and it didn’t make sense. He seemed as vanilla and straightlaced as they came, and yet all he had to do was touch me and I wanted to drop my panties in the middle of the parking lot. It was an enigma, and I didn’t like it.
“This is me,” he said, indicating his company car.
“I always wonder who ‘that guy’ who backs his car into the parking spot is, and now I have my answer: you’re that guy! Always struck me as pretentious,” I said it teasingly, but I was baiting him, trying to see how he would react.
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