by Brad Listi
“Keep me in mind,” he said. “Always keep me in mind.”
“Okay,” I said.
I walked out.
Instead of heading back to the beach, I stuck around Hollywood all afternoon. Drove around awhile. Looked at people. Looked at things. I learned the streets—Fairfax, Sunset, Fountain, La Brea. I had my Thomas Guide laid out on the passenger seat. I drove past Grauman’s Chinese Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard, observing the hordes of tourists, sweaty and pink, baking in the sun, taking pictures of inanimate objects, looking at the names of famous dead people on the sidewalks. I thought about getting out of my truck and walking around, but ultimately, walking amid the tourists in the heat didn’t really appeal to me. It seemed better in my Jeep.
Later that afternoon, I wound up going to see the latest Woody Allen movie, Small Time Crooks. It was playing in the theater at the corner of Crescent Heights and Sunset. I bought a ticket and went inside and sat down in the back row, in the cool, conditioned air. The movie was nothing special. In truth, I hadn’t liked a Woody Allen movie in years. Back in the day, they’d been great, but nowadays, the comedy seemed flat. The films functioned as monuments to graceless aging. Woody’s character was somehow always hooking up with someone one-third his age. It was pathetic. It made no sense.
What made Small Time Crooks even worse was the fact that everyone in the theater was there alone. There were six of us scattered throughout the theater. From the back, I had a view of the entire scene. There was a lady down in the front row, and she was completely off her beam. The Queen Nut. She talked to the screen. She interacted with the story. She laughed hysterically at even the faintest whiff of a joke.
“Oh!” she said, laughing. “Oh my God! Oh, please!”
When she laughed, she sounded like a dying hyena. It sounded like she was in pain. I wound up paying more attention to her than I did to the movie. I walked out of the theater feeling pretty uneasy.
From there, I drove over to the Whole Foods Market on Santa Monica Boulevard to do some grocery shopping. Whole Foods was a health food store that specialized in food products that hadn’t been sprayed with noxious chemicals. It was filling a void in the grocery store marketplace.
I wandered the store for a while, filling my basket with groceries, before venturing over to the cash registers to pay. I looked for the prettiest checkout girl, found her, and walked over to her line. This was common practice for me. I tended to select restaurant tables and checkout lines based on my level of attraction to the waitress or the cashier.
My checkout girl was small and oddly attractive. She had light gray eyes, a little waist, and a big chest. Her hair was short and brown, adorned with barrettes. I was watching her ring up the older gentleman standing in front of me. The older gentleman was tall, thin, and stoop-shouldered, and he appeared to be in his seventies. He was wearing a brown plaid shirt and mustard-colored polyester pants, and for some reason, there was a sheet of floral-print paper towel hanging out of one of his front pockets. In addition, he appeared to be completely incapable of speech. He kept motioning with his hands, pointing at the items on the conveyor belt, trying to communicate with the girl, devoid of all sound. I decided he was probably a mute. Had he been a foreigner, unable to speak English, I figured he would have been mumbling to himself in his native tongue. He would have at least attempted some kind of hybrid brand of communication. But the guy didn’t utter a word.
From there the gears of my mind started turning. I started imagining scenarios. I told myself that it might be funny if I pretended to be mute when it was my turn to check out. I imagined that it would cause the cute cashier to laugh. Perhaps it would charm her. Perhaps she would be flabbergasted by my wit. If I could do it with a completely straight face, the joke would almost certainly work. The girl would giggle, astonished by the savage nature of my understated humor.
Ultimately, though, I opted against it. Couldn’t bring myself to do it. Couldn’t pretend to be a mute. Didn’t have it in me. The thought of the cashier’s reaction was simply too much for me. I wouldn’t have been able to maintain my composure in the face of it. I wasn’t capable of that kind of deadpan performance. I lacked the self-control. I was too enamored of my own joke, and whenever that happened, I was doomed. And so too was the joke itself.
Furthermore, there was always the chance that the young girl at the register wouldn’t respond to my brand of humor. There was always the chance that she was politically correct and would therefore find my light mockery of the mute old man to be cruel and offensive. I was aware of the fact that my sense of humor was fairly specific. It didn’t seem right to chance it. It was an inappropriate audience at an inappropriate venue.
I watched as the mute old man signed his credit card slip and wandered out of the grocery store and into the streets of Los Angeles. I stepped up to the register, smiled, and said hello to the cashier, trying to keep things ordinary, trying to keep things simple and straightforward. The cashier smiled back at me. Her name tag read ASIA.
“Is your name really Asia?” I said.
“It really is,” she said.
By the tone of her voice, I could tell that she had answered this question countless times. By the tone of her voice, I could tell that she didn’t really appreciate my choice of phrasing. I feared I had insulted her.
“That’s a nice name,” I said, trying to recover.
“Thank you,” she said.
And that was the most I was able to say. I didn’t know what else to say to the girl. I was thinking too hard about what to say to the girl. What I needed to do was to stop thinking about what to say to her and just let the conversation happen—or not—in an organic manner. But I couldn’t do that at the moment. I wasn’t capable of organic exchanges. My mind was a tangle. And she was too damn cute. And I was feeling too strange.
I was mute.
As I stood there looking at her in silence, it occurred to me that I probably needed to go out on a date. I figured that going out on a date would probably be healthy. I figured that nine out of ten mental health experts would probably advise me to ask this cashier on a date, just to see what would happen.
I figured that Anthony Robbins would probably advise me to be an active dater, to take chances, to wear my heart on my sleeve, to wring life dry of every possible positive experience.
I didn’t have the balls to ask the girl out on a date.
balls n. (vulgar slang)
1.)
a. The testicles.
b. Courage, especially when reckless.
c. Great presumptuousness
Asia ran the last of my groceries across the scanner, punched a few keys on the register, and came up with a total of $74.07. I removed my Visa card from my wallet and swiped it through the scanner.
“Credit or debit?” she said.
“Credit,” I said.
She pushed a few more buttons. The computer whirred and clicked, and the printer started printing. My groceries were in a chaotic pile at the end of the conveyor belt. It occurred to me that I should have bagged them. I should have helped out. That would have been the nice thing to do, the chivalrous thing, the gentlemanly thing. But I blew it. I was too busy thinking. My imagination had run away with me.
Asia ripped the credit card slip from the printer and slid it my way. I picked up the pen and signed. Yawning, she asked me what kind of bags I would like. Inexplicably, I didn’t respond right away. I finished signing, put the pen down, and looked at her. We made eye contact. Her face was expressionless and beautiful.
“What kind of bags?” she said again, pointing at my groceries.
I grinned at her awkwardly and said the word “plastic.”
5.
I got a job the next day. Did it on a whim. I think I was bored. Plus, my financial situation wasn’t what it once had been. I wasn’t broke, but I was well on my way. Somewhere along the line, I had decided that I didn’t want to bottom out completely. As fun as it sounded, I didn’t want to blow through
every last dime. I figured it was a good idea to keep some cash on hand, in case of an emergency. That seemed like the sensible thing to do.
With this in mind, I returned to delivering pizzas, despite the daily protests of my ailing Jeep. I took a job at a place called Gino’s, a high-end pizzeria over on Abbot Kinney Boulevard. I’d spotted a Help Wanted sign while driving around that morning and went in later that afternoon. The night manager, Gavin, took one look at my résumé and hired me on the spot. He skimmed a short letter of reference written for me by Jim Hogan, my boss at Fatty Jay’s, and that was that. I started the very next night.
Gavin turned out to be a pretty good guy. He’d gotten his master’s degree in creative writing a couple of years earlier, hoping to be an avant-garde poet, but then things had changed suddenly, and now he wanted to be an avant-garde movie star, a poet of the silver screen. He had a pencil-thin mustache and medium-long hair. His girlfriend was an actress too. Crystal was her name. I never got the chance to meet her, but Gavin was convinced that she was wildly talented. He talked about her constantly, called her a cross between Chrissie Hynde, Rita Hayworth, and Jennifer Jason Leigh. I had no idea what that meant, but I went along with it anyway in the name of professional decorum.
Gino’s was a pretty nice place, by far and away the nicest restaurant I’d ever driven for. The food was outstanding. It had even won a few “Best of L.A.” awards. Overall, I felt pretty good about the gig. In a lot of ways, it seemed like a natural progression, a logical step into the world of gourmet. My schedule was sane, my customer base tended to be flush with cash, and they usually tipped handsomely for a job well done. As far as I was concerned, it was a fine arrangement for the time being. It would make me profitable, albeit meagerly. It would put me in contact with people. And it would give me something to do.
A couple of days after my hiring, I ran the four-to-ten shift on a Friday night. Business was thriving. I was making my way around all right, and the sunset on the water was spectacular. I was feeling pretty good about things.
After my shift, I drove around awhile. I wheeled through Santa Monica, past the Third Street Promenade, and then I wound my way back down to Venice, watching the people on the sidewalks coming in and out of the bars. A couple of times, I thought about parking and going inside for a drink, but I never did it. Didn’t have the guts.
When I got home later that night, there was a message on my answering machine. I pressed the button and listened. It was Lynch.
“Fencer,” he said. “It’s Lynch. Call me back right away, the second you get this message, doesn’t matter what time it is. I’ve got a golden proposition for you, and we’ve got to talk about it as soon as possible.”
I picked up the phone immediately and called him back, anxious to hear the news. It rang four times, maddeningly, before sending me into voice mail.
6.
First thing the next morning, the phone rang. It was Lynch. He informed me that he had just experienced a major career breakthrough. The Bomb had assigned him to cover the Burning Man festival in Nevada. His editor was going to fly him out West, all expenses paid, to get a firsthand look at the festivities for a feature article slated to appear in the December issue. He wanted me to come along “to help collect data on the periphery.” The party was due to start in four days. If I could get myself to Nevada, the rest of the trip would be free of charge, covered entirely by the magazine. Naturally, I felt it was an offer I couldn’t refuse.
After hanging up with Lynch, I got on the phone with Gavin, my boss at Gino’s, and told him I needed the week off of work. As luck would have it, Gavin was a pushover, completely sympathetic to my cause. I informed him that I had a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to go to Burning Man and write for a national publication. That was all it really took. Gavin was a fan of Burning Man, and he was vaguely familiar with The Bomb. He even asked me if the magazine published any poetry. I told him I wasn’t sure. He said he couldn’t guarantee that my job would be there when I returned but that it probably would. I told him I’d take my chances.
That afternoon, an overnight FedEx parcel arrived from New York, compliments of Lynch. It contained a voluminous stack of articles about Burning Man, all of which had been accumulated and photocopied by one of the magazine’s trusty interns. “Background research,” Lynch called it. Part of our necessary preparations.
I sat on my front porch reading the stuff for the better part of three hours, trying to wrap my head around the impending adventure. Depictions of the event varied from piece to piece. Burning Man was a survival exercise, it was an arts festival, it was an experiment in civic planning. It was an experiment. By nature, it defied definition and description. Ultimately, it was something you had to see for yourself.
What happened, essentially, was this: Every year, tens of thousands of human beings converged on the Black Rock Desert for one week near the end of the summer. There they erected a temporary metropolis called Black Rock City. The city was set amid a vast and otherworldly desert landscape notorious for its harsh and unpredictable climate. Temperatures were liable to soar into the triple digits during the day and just as liable to plunge below freezing at night. Rainstorms, violent dust storms, and blistering winds were regular occurrences. In spite of all this, Black Rock City managed to be both modern and cosmopolitan, complete with streets, nightclubs, restaurants, cafés, sporting events, parades, installations, sculptures, lasers, concerts, radio stations, an airport, newspapers, and so on. It included all of the trappings of a modern metropolis while at the same time functioning as a wholly original and wildly untamed organism, unique unto itself.
At the heart of the enterprise was a man named Larry Harvey, Burning Man’s main creator and, for many years, its principal spokesman and figurehead. Several of the articles Lynch sent me were centered on him. The guy was enormously compelling.
Now in his early fifties, Harvey was a product of the baby boom, born in 1948 and raised on the outskirts of Portland, Oregon. His childhood had been difficult. His mother was a distant woman, unable to show her children the warmth and affection they craved. His father was a cowboy type, semiliterate and fiercely independent, a Freemason who earned his living as a carpenter. He was a decent and honest man with a detectable inner passion, but like his wife, he had great difficulty expressing his deeper feelings. Larry’s older brother, Stewart, was a pious boy who had more in common with his parents than he did with his younger brother. As a result, Larry spent much of his youth in a state of profound isolation, taking great solace in the wilderness and spending untold hours locked away in his bedroom, reading books and magazines and cultivating a rich inner fantasy life.
In the late sixties, Larry left home for good. He served briefly in the army and endured some unfulfilling college experiences on the GI bill. A few years later, he settled in the small town of Coquille, Oregon, where he lived with a woman named Janet Lohr. Supported entirely by Janet’s elementary school teaching salary, Larry spent much of his time immersed in books, finding refuge in the works of Freud and post-Freudians like Kohut, as well as in the literary offerings of such writers as Shakespeare, Dickens, and Forster.
In the late seventies, Larry and Janet moved south to San Francisco, and their romance faded soon after. Larry, now in his thirties, was suddenly faced with the task of trying to support himself—the first time in his life he had ever done so. A series of odd jobs would follow. He grilled hot dogs at the Farm, San Francisco’s legendary punk-rock club. He was a bicycle messenger. He drove a cab.
He paid his rent sometimes.
“I never really wanted a normal job,” he once said. “I never could do it very well. The only thing I ever wanted to do was what I absolutely had to do. I wanted to realize some kind of vision—I just wasn’t sure what it was.”
During this period of time, Larry sometimes attended parties thrown by a local sculptor named Mary Graubarger. The parties took place on San Francisco’s Baker Beach, a beautiful cove located near the foot of the
Golden Gate Bridge, long a favorite spot for Bay Area nudists. Mary and her friends built sculptures using materials that had washed ashore. A giant bonfire was lit and dinner was served. And at the end of the night, the revelers often torched their creations.
At one such gathering in the mid-1980s, Mary and her friends put an old car seat in a hole in the sand. Then they burned it, along with a pile of old clothes. The resulting scene was surreal and cruelly beautiful, reminiscent of a terrible accident. Larry Harvey happened to be standing there at the time, watching it burn with great interest.
The experience made an impression on him.
7.