|
The Great Burn of 03 Part Three: Big Tool Cracker Camp Slept atop the Chevy first night out. Always a pleasure. Took Tomcat and me over an hour to find the currently unlighted Great White Whale out on the pre-event, near-vacant "city streets," wandering, wandering in endless night, seeking bearings in the blackest of Black Rock nights, no moon, only Mars out there. Mars is out there, creeping ever closer, reaching, reaching, clutching out with one long Einstein wormhole taffy-stretched Martian arm to grab hold of Manhattan to shake down all those fatcat ad agency mutants making billions in its name with zero recompense: Mars Candy, Mars Attacks the movie, Marzipan, you know what I'm talking about. We owe Mars big time and they're coming to collect. Be here on the 27th, or so the spacemen say. Awoke to tiny pissing drips from the sky. Probably Martian women trying out their new "pee funnels," showing up the Martian men as they draw their names in the Milky Way sky and dot their "I"s on ours. Cloudy skies over Black Rock. Kinda scary to old shell-shocked BRC vets like me and Tomcat. Well, I'll speak for myself. I was scared. Five years ago we stayed one day too many and Mother Nature screwed us good. After a night of solid rain, the playa turned to soup. Not only did the mud spell mandatory inertia for every vehicle left stranded on the playa. It also meant pure misery on a step by step, microcosmic level. A twenty-pace trip from my art car Duke to Tomcat Kennedy's bus or worse, fifty or so paces to the john, became a kind of hypothetical ha-ha this-is-what-it's-like-to-be-crippled, you heretofore, lazy pompous for-granted-taking biped. Suffer! Walk on elevator shoes of ever-increasing solid playa mud weight until you can't take another step. Welcome to the Blue Race! (as my curmudgeonly paraplegic pal Ken called himself and fellow members of the handicapped populous). Suffice to say we spent daze out there on the muddy playa of '98. Nothing moved. And every night it drizzled more to seal our go-nowhere fate. I finally resorted to paying a Gerlach local named Mustang to tow my 5000 lb. rolling museum to the safety of higher ground. For my $50, I got a bent frame that no mechanic has been able to align since.. but I got off the playa, and at the time that was all that mattered. And I had the honor of a night of dust and mud-encrusted l'amour with a long-haired lovely (who shall remain nameless) in a trailer in Mama Lola's driveway in Gerlach. I won't even risk giving her a pseudonym in this story for fear of further, unwarranted animosity. For some reason the girl didn't take kindly to the audacity of a one-night stand, and she's had a chunk-o-playa mud in her cowgirl hat about it ever since. Jesus, I think I try harder than any guy I know to please women, but you just can't please em all. Especially not in the rain and the claustrophobic mud bog conditions at the end of the end of the end of the burn, all burned out of sanity, sanctity, solemnity, and did I mention sanity? So, to make a short story long, I don't like seeing gray skies over Black Rock. Gives me the fear. Then along came a spider and crept up beside.. our gang, and the spider spoke and said NO FOOD, NO JOKE get out of my kitchen you plebian scum, you Flash-loving freaks, be gone! But I already told you about the whole commissary meal debacle. So there we were, first morning on the playa.. what was it? Friday? Yes, Friday. Gray. A little drizzly. But help was on the way. For whatever reason, we'd rallied around the Whale, right where Marty the miscreant whale joy-rider had left it far out on the northern end of things. But then along came Snook with his funked-out watertruck with hot tub atop which functionality alas never came to pass. That and his military-issue monster truck ex-mobile-operations-lab complete with armor-plated siding and scuba tubes rising high outa the carburetor, ya know, for those time when you wanna roll up the windows tight and take her for a drive across a lake.. that is, along the bottom of the lake. Snook. Now here's a guy you wanna have on your all-terrain high tech operations team. Good guy. And knowledgeable, too. But best of all for a sketch-case like me, unpretentious, earthy, just plain gracious. I never got real deep with Snook, but I knew real quick that if I got in a bind, here was a guy who'd lend a hand. Now as I said in an earlier, pre-event entry here on Jigglebox, Flash is so well known and beloved in Burning Man circles that in the history books (if I have anything to say about it) his name will likely be second in recognition value only to founder Larry Harvey. Knowing this, I knew I was in for a particularly unique experience this year. I sensed that all the people who hold this man in such high regard would be dropping by, and I was right. They came, and for the most part, they stayed. One of the first to come roaring across the playa in a sight I'll never forget (having never seen a forklift move that fast) was Snook behind the wheel of a megaforklift bringing his favorite band of buccaneers a shipping container. As I later understood it, it was a gift "borrowed" from the Burning Bureaucracy and delivered by Snook as a kindof bomb-shelter-esque playa nest for Dana & Flash. Several beers and repeated squats in the Chevy waiting out brief rain showers later, I found myself helping the crew pack everything we'd just unloaded from trailers and cars to make camp, now loading it all into the container to be whisked away to our new home somewhere to the south. In the words of Snook, "You guys are on the wrong side of the playa. This side gets all the wind, terrible. We gotta move you." There are times when it's nice to just play follow-the-leader, to be as it were playa-putty in the capable hands of someone who SOUNDS like they know their shit, because after weeks on the road and ever-decreasing snatches of sleep and blurred days of omnipresent beer and frantic creative activity and over-stimulus, well, I'd be the last one to claim to have my shit together. I am the playa. The playa is me. I am the 12-ounce can of Hamm's in my hand. I am Tecate with lime and salt twang. I am the slurred, blurred line between the burning world and the outside, the living freaking proof that my stepmother couldn't have been more wrong when she corrected me long ago saying, "Rick, there is ONLY one reality, so you better get used to it." I am here just a few hours yet I have been here for weeks, really. Years in fact. I've a tattooed man-in-flames on my outside right ankle to prove it, there since 1995. But that's just a token. The real fire dwells deep within me. It is the burn of this man's drive to live, the burn of the road, the burn of the unquenchable dream. I am the burn. I am burning man. It's early afternoon as our gypsy troupe, now several pieces of heavy machinery strong, makes its way across the playa, far across the watch-face layout that is Black Rock City from the air, from ten o'clock inward to the Man now straight out to 3:30 on the dial, to the intersection of Serious & Vision. All the streets this year are named for various religious nomenclature, Dogma, Creed, etc, and related adjectives Serious, Absurd, and so on. The Whale at Serious & Vision. Now that's appropriate, I think, watching the Whale roll into camp, turn and with its tail knock said street sign on its ass. I've got a belly fulla beer and a heart of gold (despite what you've been told by certain members of my poetry audience). And Camp Flash is burgeoning and blossoming in big tires and hard steel. Now added to Snook's big rigs, we've got Pogo and the crane that'll place the Man high atop his incendiary alter. Snook roars down Serious Street in his forklift dragster and "Thwump!" down comes the brown boxcar-like container that will, for better or worse, shape the general back alley big tool cracker camp ambience of so-called Whale Camp. Round about this point in the story, many of you are likely wondering: when the hell is he gonna get to the part about the nekked women and the all-night raves and the mushroom-gorging feasts followed by free love and sunrise wanderings on the open playa with a head fulla colors and joy? Answer: soon. I ain't gonna have much to say about raves, but I got a few tales to tell that oughta tickle your mushroom-horking horndog fancies. There is this girl, name of Sam. Lovely tall, recently back from China where no doubt her height and long blonde Shirley Temple curls no doubt had men falling all of their rickshaws wherever she went. (I'm sure I've just revealed a great ignorance of modern China with that analogy, but who fucking cares? What do YOU know about China?) Sam knows about China. Went there to live and work and wham! Fell smack into the SARS epidemic scare. Lucky to have lived from the sounds of it. Sam, aka Solar, no doubt for the brilliance of her hair but also because she's a Cyberbuss girl, an obvious moniker conflict with the one and only CyberSam, silver-painted Bay Area freak bus driving legend and, for my money, future history's torch-carrier for the Sixties likes of Ken Kesey and Further, the famed psychedelic bus immortalized in Wolfe's memoir-esque novel The Electric Coolaid Acid Test. So Solar Sam, her good looks notwithstanding, won me over real quick by being supportive in the wake of my ghastly poetry fumble in Reno. She claimed to have actually liked my poem, a claim I found difficult to believe but which I embraced with great relief nonetheless. Hell, I'm easy. A writer's no different than an actor, I suppose, and I've heard it said many times that the best thing you can say to an actor is, "I love your work." It could be Joe Nobody or Robert Deniro, duzn't matta. Compliment their life's work and you're IN. So, Solar and her sidekick Mel were IN with me from the get-go. They could have asked anything of me and gotten it. They called themselves the Dirty Little Bitches, and I was more than willing to serve their dirty desires. As it happened, neither ever asked. An intense sexual attraction, however, call it pheromones, whatever, made some kind of collision between Solar and me imminent. It happened that first Friday night . It. What can I say about it? It was a burning man moment, a hot little sexual encounter filmed in 16millisecond Playavision. It was a Solar flare, Solar in a silk slip and overcoat, slipping away from the crowd hand-in-hand with the Rogue Poet, just outside the sphere of light and action there beneath the big green parachute shade structure in Big Tool Cracker Camp. Brief Larry Harvey sighting there at the mouth of the whale. Others milling about in the dark. And Solar and me hot against the grill of the Chevy, hands groping, lips locked, reaching round, reaching down, sliding, diving, lower now, lower... "Go down." And that's all I'm gonna say about that, this being as it is a true story, the names NOT changed to protect anyone, least of all me. Suffice to say that Solar Sam and I shared a moment of sweetness. To her credit, she tried to make it mutual, but I, perhaps in some insane throwback moment to those first Pepperdine days when I still thought my destiny lay with God and the ministry, I declined, said I was fine. After all, was it not somewhat miraculous that any woman within earshot of my ill-fated poetry reading would want me in this way? No, Dumbass! But I thought so at the time. In retrospect, I realized my embarrassment over my "all the girls I've loved and forgotten" poem was largely due to Flash's perception, and that I, because I looked up to Flash, had swallowed his view of it hook, line and sinker. I now think otherwise. And had I known that night in my tent that Solar was to be my first and LAST sexual encounter at Burning Man 03, I would most certainly have "detained" her longer. But I didn't know this. And away went Solar off into the night. My shortest-lived affair, a fair & lovely flare, bursting and receding as though never.. even.. there. Don't be pitying me. I was feeling juuuust fine. And it was just Day One of what would unfold into one weeklong protracted orgasm of art, fire, friendship, booze, drugs, music, mayhem & madness, drumming & drag dress, hammers & nails, wheat grass & whales, mushroom-painted star-bellied skies and sunset shag-carpet art car rides. Besides, I already had my eye on another lovely, this one in our camp. This one was more the keeper kind, and her name was Carey. [Tune in tomorrow or Friday for Part Four, as I work this coming week to tell the tale in full.] Until then, check out the Jigglebox photo gallery from Burning Man `02! -RSM The Duke of Words To Burn
 |
