“People are strange when you’re a stranger. Faces look ugly when you’re alone. Women seem wicked when you’re unwanted. Streets are uneven when you’re down”
Jim Morrison
“What the hell is the point of all this fucking insanity?”
The words hang in the air unsure of their genesis.
Along the horizon are black mountains, stone sentinels of the past. Three camels stand in the foreground eating hay. Their lips smacking thunder I run by with my hands cupped over my ears. The camels must have been brought here by another techno-junkie getting high on just how different he is. I guess that’s the whole point; showing just how weird you are. I’ve never felt so normal. The stench of the camels rises on air currents along the dessert floor for miles. Flies and mosquitoes play tag on the pungent breeze.
To my right are the communal showers. Clay statues of people, or maybe they’re actually people coated from head to toe with mud and grime, are growling at those too inhibited to walk around naked or bathe in the cooling mud. “No Spectators,” they yell in between their growls, the ivory enamel of teeth a stark contrast to the dark wet earth.
Cars circle the playa like sharks honing in on the distinct scent of new prey. Tents stand in rows all around forming pseudo-walls around a city built of scratched steel, chunks of rotting wood, canvas sheets for shade, all held together by polished nuts and bolts. Hippies dance from tent to tent offering ecstasy and LSD.
Reaching towards the turquoise sky stands the Burning Man, fifty feet high, wooden crosses connected by a magenta florescent light exo-skeleton. His entire body is peppered with firecrackers of various sizes. Hands raised towards heaven dare God to come down and curse this modern day Babylon, this Sodom, this Gomorrah, but I don’t see Lot’s chick turning into a pillar of salt. If she did, would anyone even notice? The Burning Man’s feet are anchored firmly to the ground, perhaps to remind God of just who currently runs thing down here on the mortal world.
White sand. Black Rock. Red Skin.
Sitting on a weathered Bacardi Light Rum beach chair next to my best friend Tom I bask in the many levels of delusion the psychedelic mushrooms bring. My brother Aaron watches from the beige Winnebago trailer we’ve rented for the occasion. I wonder what kind of kick he gets in seeing me, his little brother, so belligerent that I’m drooling on my board shorts.
The canvas sheets above, pulled taught between four beams of oak does little more than offer sweating shade, not the cool relief we were promised.
Robbie Krieger from the Doors is playing some eerie bottlenecked guitar on a dusty JVC boom box as a soundtrack to the chaos. I wish he were here. He could tell me about Jim, about the Doors, about the trips they took, the shit they saw. Maybe he could understand the shit I’m seeing.
Midgets ride by on unicycles.
A curly haired woman dressed as a belly dancer gyrates by, steadily clicking her castanets. She is wearing these lavender silk kerchiefs tied around her waist, and white ones under her breasts pushing the nipples towards the sun, and I can’t help but wonder who she’s trying to impress. The bald black guy with glasses doing some obscure variation of the funky chicken to “Moonlight Drive”? The retired housewife who just can’t get over how hot the dessert is? The thirteen year old prick running around with a super soaker drenching those women not already topless? The fifty-something year old man who insists on being called Hawkeye even though he exhibits none of Alan Alda’s looks or grace? The man we affectionately refer to as the space cowboy in his silver painted Stetson and Don’t Mess With Texas belt buckle?
I thought the Burning Man festival would be some kind of modern Woodstock without the rioting, an art festival in the middle of the black rock desert with a plethora of naked people looking for a good time. But I never knew what I was getting into. Seeing delusional fuck-up after fuck-up wandering in the sweltering heat just reinforces what a fuck-up I am swimming in this sea of salty sweat. How did I get talked into this?
Overweight-drug-dealer-man, the amazing specimen that has no shoulders to speak of, is running a pencil thin paintbrush over the curves of another body. A white towel covers her face. I wonder if she’s a stripper. She is so comfortable and confident having indigo latex paint spread over her body in a childish weave of curves and circles. She’s definitely a welcome change from all the fruits shaving their bodies and painting their penis’s. There is nothing more disturbing than a purple painted prick pointing at you when you’re tripping balls. Sometimes I just want to go into the trailer and cry.
A double-seater bike appears: one rider dressed in the loose flowing robes of a desert nomad, the second has red died hair with sharp horns sculpted to a fine edge. “No Spectators”, is written in black gothic letters across devil boy’s shoulders.
The clouds fly by at an impossible rate. I swear I’m almost a part of the breeze; I feel it blowing through my veins. A woman dressed in the khaki shirt and short combo of a Burning Man Ranger rides by on an old, pink, Shwinn. She is screaming, her face the color of a roma tomato.
“Dust storm coming!”
She looks familiar. Must be something about those chiseled legs, or the way her mahogany hair whips around in the wind. She looks so familiar. But right now everything looks familiar. I can swear I’m a part of everyone, and they are a part of me.
“Dust storm coming!”
She looks so familiar. Did I love her, hate her, or revile her in a past life? Am I going to immortalize her one day in a novel? Will her face be locked up on the shelves in old, musty, poetry texts at City Lights Bookstore? Was she the woman who shot candy corn out of her pussy last night for free drinks?
“Did you hear that?”
Tom’s eyes are really fucked-up. Scary fucked up. The pupils are enormous and they are shinning like two fresh-cut diamonds.
“Well, did you?”
Words are thick molasses on my tongue. The dragon; green, red, and yellow on Tom’s shoulder… it’s moving. It’s never done that before. The flames dance up his shoulder blade and lick his neck. And the teeth… the teeth…
“You too fucked up to talk?”
“Nah. I heard. Do we know her?” I reply. The words sound like they come from the stereo. Robbie, is that you?
“Who?”
“The chick on the bike?”
Tom is looking at me now like I’m the one who’s scary fucked up.
“What chick?”
“That one!” I point to where I can just see her long thin legs pounding, the Schwinn hardly advancing in the stiff breeze.
“What’s that?” he replies pointing where I’m pointing.
I look beyond her, past her short lacy white socks painted brown by the dust. I wish I were wearing socks. Maybe some clean white cotton sweat socks with Nike tattooed in green letters across the ankle. Or maybe some of those cushioned-foot black socks Dad used to wear to work. But socks would be awfully hot. Maybe I’m better off without.
The horizon is gray. The sky is the color of cold steel. Tom is looking at me like I might have some kind of answer. If so, I can’t remember the question. I’m still wondering where Robbie is and did that mother-fucker steal my socks? I don’t know I say to Tom with my eyes. Tom shrugs back.
“Looks like it’s getting closer.”
I nod in agreement. It looks like the world has been flooded by gray.
“That’s definitely getting closer.”
I nod again. Or maybe I don’t. Maybe I never stopped nodding. The Burning Man is swallowed by the gray. One moment he was standing so proud, tall, majestic, a neon Jesus, now he is gone. I can swear he is smiling at me from the gray, with sharp aluminum teeth.
“Maybe we should go into the trailer.”
I keep nodding. Tom duplicates my action. We sit.
“Damn that looks pretty fucking close.”
I nod. I feel like a goddamn chicken clucking away. But what else could I possibly do?
“Oh shiiiii”
My mouth is filled with sand. My eyes shut but not before tiny coarse grains reach the fragile flesh, making my sandy smile a grimace. The force pushes at me and I can swear it’s Jesus and the Burning Man fighting over me, ripping at my skin. I pull the thin cotton of my tank top around my face. There is a roar, a whisper, a snap. I feel a shadow fly by. I hear the smack as one of the thick poles holding up the shade structure lands on Tom’s back.
“Get in here stupid!”
A hand reaches from the gray. The hand is gray. I expect to see a scar in the palm, maybe a little blood, maybe even a nail, but my savior isn’t Jesus; he’d never risk coming anywhere near this whacked out bunch of lunatics. My savior is only my brother Aaron. The hand rips me into the Winnebago. I stumble through the hallway blind in search of the elusive kitchen sink. The coolness of the water soothes the burning of my eyes for a moment.
“Oh my God! Aaron! The the the shade structure… it it.”
“Don’t worry. Tom’s o.k. He’s in the bathroom washing up. You should really see this.”
I walk to the window. People are leaning into the force of the incredible gray. Overweight-drug-dealer-man rips off his shirt to wrap it around his already dusty mouth. I feel so sorry for him, but not because he’s caught in the storm; he’s kind of an asshole so he deserves a little sand in his face. But his girl is gone. He never had a chance to finish his masterpiece on that firm little body. What if that Mona Lisa chick had gone to take a shit and never came back to let that guy finish his painting? Where would we be then?
One guy has ski goggles and a doctor’s mask on. I wonder if he’s a doctor. Maybe he just plays one on TV, General Hospital or something.
A tiny form, I think it’s the Chinese girl who can’t speak Chinese is leaning against the skiing doctor.
One of the naked fruits is hunched over against the force of the wind with his hands cupped over his banana. I guess he had to make a rather tough decision on whether to save his eyes or his penis; to see or to fuck? What a dilemma!
Lawn chairs, portable barbeques, flowers, and other assorted debris that have no right to be in the desert hurtle by, smacking into the tents and the hunched forms.
“What a bunch of fucking idiots!”
All eyes on the trailer are now on me. Aaron laughs. Tom shrugs and lights a joint with hands coated with a second skin of dust. I look at my hands and I can hardly recognize the gnarled gray forms.
peterottwriter 