|
The Great Burn of 03 Part Two: Once We Were Pirates Changed out the tire at the gate. Tom meanwhile gives it the old nod and smile to some skinny freak programmed drone who came up to extend an apology to Flash, now absent. Will we tell Flash sorry for him? "It's just that we get so many people at the gate claiming to be so-n-so or Larry Harvey's nephew or Marian's maid and whatnot and I just didn't know." Tom at his Dr. Diplomacy best says sure, Flash will understand. And there's me, down cranking on the lug nuts, my face a big smirk at that one, hidden as I am in the wheel-well. It took a good 20 minutes to unwrap the tailpipe from the axle, check for brake line damage, and extract the most mutilated and fucked up tire I've ever seen. And all the while Mr. Skinney Gate Guy gives us the skinny on the latest in Black Rock Homeland Security. "And the BLM rangers, see, they got infrared this year and they're out there on the perimeter (where there are no stars, right Jim?) hunkered down in these little portable surveillance sheds, you know like them ice fishing houses on Minnesota lakes? Yeah, well so they're in there scanning the playa with their night vision goggles and busting people trying to sneak in without tickets." Back in the Chevy, spare tire installed, the shredded tire and heavily-torqued tailpipe perched atop the roof like some kinda Bumfuck, Arkansas junkyard art, Tom and I crack another coupla Hamm's and toast to our relatively dogma-free minds. "Jesus, did you hear that Big Brother shit? That guys messed up. What the hell is Larry feeding those dogs?" I don't know which of us said what, but that's the gist of our dialogue. And having said that, let me add that we know perfectly well that Larry Harvey isn't the one disseminating this kind of twisted propaganda to burning volunteers. No. It takes squinty-eyed, paranoid, highly-caffeinated & oftentimes mean-spirited Napoleonic management types to run a monster endeavor such as Burning Man has become. If left to the synaptically-scrambled organizational skills and propane blast attention spans of the kind of hardcore radical self-expressionists that are rumored to have started this gig, Burning Man would have burned out a long time ago. It doesn't take a month's research into news clippings from the past decade of the event to figure this one out. Every year in late September I bounce through the giddy How Berkeley Can You Be? parade with another Burning Man forefather, John Law. I don't see John's name anywhere in the growing mythology of the event. Why not? Probably because John got out while it was still a venue for his own radical self-expression and not a gigantor bore-o-cratic clusterfuck guaranteed to eat most artists alive in managerial stress. That, and not what the true blue gun-toting, propane shooting founders now no doubt regard as a giant KOA trailer park and training camp for anarchy-dabblers. Whoa!! There I go getting all cynical! Hear me now: Burning Man is the best goddamn gathering of its kind on the Planet today, the best environment I know of for getting freaky and reinventing yourself for a week with relatively little intrusion from commercial society. I love it. I really do. But I can see how the originators, either by their own accord or by the ax, have had to go. Last I heard from John Law, he was on his way to New York or Chicago to rappel into and scuba dive down a flooded underground building of some kind, a totally illegal, thoroughly dangerous and undoubtedly un-"recorded act of radical self-expression," as is the catch phrase of the new burning mythology. Man, what fun! Somehow I can't picture any of the current Burning Management doing anything like that, anymore. Where would they find the time? I could be wrong. But I doubt it. Our first morning on the playa, our team made the trip in to the commissary to eat. Dana had been told that her crew, because they would be working on the construction of the Man directly, would be fed. We weren't there two minutes when the now-infamous Lady B caught wind of our presence and turned us away like dogs. We got word later that day that we could get meals, but only if we got them "at the back door." A short time later, this was revised to no meals at all for the scurvy scum cohorts of Captain Flash. Flash the thorn in the B-side of Burning Man. I don't know how Lady B weaseled her big britches into the Burning Hierarchy, but she's in there and boy does she have a hard-on for Flash. So we became outlaws. If Lady B and Company were playing the British Empire, we would be pirates. It was a role that suited me just fine. Sharktooth Tommy had quit the contemporary corporate equivalent of the East India Company a decade before because his conscience couldn't abide their unethical tack. So, in an ironic way, he was well-suited for piracy, too. And Flash, well, he even dressed the part. A couple of the girls in our crew called themselves The Dirty Little Wenches: perfect. Then of course we had the Whale, clocked by the cops on its maiden voyage across the playa last year at 45 mph: a born outlaw. Throughout the week more old guard outlaws would seek us out and, by proxy, become one with Camp Flash. Flash Mutiny on the Burning Bounty. And oh yeah. If the words rogue and pirate can be considered synonymous, I had sealed my own fate in a K-Mart parking lot hours before coming through the front gate that first blown-tire night. It was one of those moments in life which immediately set you scrambling for the rewind button, of course to no avail. It started with me breaking away from the caravan at the Super K in Reno. Tom said that every year without fail this last minute K-Mart supply mission took one hour. Great, I thought. That should be just enough time for me to find a copy store and bang out a coupla dozen copies of my recently completed poetry chapbook, giving me something with which to barter in the trade-only playa art society. In the Burning Man world where no cash exchange is allowed, it is imperative, I believe, to have either breasts, hand-made medallions bearing the burning man symbol, ten gallons of margarita mix, or be a walking ice machine. Without one or all of these, you're likely better off never leaving your own camp because cocktails will be damn hard to come by. I had none of the above. McGiver rule of thumb in such cases: work with what you have. I had poetry. I made poetic lemonade. But beware: metaphors can come back to bite you in the ass. A lemon is a lemon is a lemon. It took me exactly 80 minutes to get lost in the suburbs of Reno, locate a copy store, fall in love with the young copy girl, and get back with 50 copies. My instructions to Tom before I left him at the K-Mart: "Don't make the caravan wait on me if I'm late! Go without me, I'll catch up." I knew better. NEVER make a dozen people wait on YOU. The sight upon my return to the Super K lot made my balls drop. There they stood in the warm light of the northern Nevada K-Mart parking lot sunset, arms folded across chests, everyone of them focused on my belated arrival. I was mortified. Driving up, my sheepish grin was greeted by something other than straight-out irritation. They were smiling. It seems a plan had been hatched. Tom, feeling responsible for me, his friend, had placated the would-be lynch mob with a promise: when Duke returns, we'll make him give us a reading. And so it went. Eager to please, I followed their gestures and jeers up onto the chunk of temple lashed to Flash's trailer and began thumbing through my book for the right poem. I couldn't have chosen more inappropriately. To my defense, I am a man who lives very much in the present. Consequently, or perhaps just additionally, memory is not one of my strong points. From over 600 pages of poetry, at least as many pages of prose, and probably twice as many of non-fiction journalistic work, I can't recite jack shit, not a goddamn line. I'm too busy trying to capture the current moment, and the next and the next, to ever stop and commit to memory anything written yesterday. The poem I chose began innocuously enough. Something about drinking a Pabst Blue Ribbon at sunset. Then it took a turn into intensely personal territory. Why didn't I stop? Pressure. I was anything but relaxed up there on the K-Mart parking lot alter, and when the poem went awry, I was too busy making up for being late to even think of stopping. Later, on the playa, I would explain to new friend Carey that the poem was written two or three years ago as a lament of memories lost to narcotics, but also as an observation that my inability to recollect physical aspects of past loves might just be because I was so very much in love with my lover at the time. Fat lot of good that post-script did me in Reno. Later in a casino, my admiration for Flash compelled me to explain. Pulling the handle on a slot machine, he said only half to me, "Yeah, good one. `Hey girls! I'm gonna fuck you and then forget your name!' Real smooth, Dukey." And that is how I began my Lucky 7th Burning Man. [Tune in tomorrow or Thursday for Part Three, as I work this coming week to tell the tale in full.] -RSM The Duke of Words To Burn
 |
