Fine, no problem, I just cycled down 7:30 towards the Esplanade, immersed in the stream of pedalers and pedestrians heading mostly for the Friday night burn. I’d find my people, or I wouldn’t, it made no real difference.
Eight blocks of temporary city later – dark dusty trailers, camp-fronts with their couches and tapestries and lanterns, sixty-foot towers hung with illuminated signs – I crossed the Esplanade – cyclists going in every direction, the warning whoosh of an art car throwing flames to the sky, dubstep booming and fading, parties of friends chattering as they hurried in their blinking glowing costumery -- and pedaled hard across the hard pan towards the Cradle of Mir.
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| Attribution: mr.nightshade / theblight.net |
Every major burn draws crowds of people and an encirclement of art cars ranging from customized golf carts to the size of small houses. A temporary village had taken form around the structure, full of revelers and clumps of parked bicycles. I quickly estimated it at ten thousand -- twenty plus or minus ten might be more accurate – and decided I wasn’t going to find my friends.
It was on fire when I got there. I watched over the heads of spectators as the flames grew, and walked around watching people. People drank, people laughed, people held their digital devices aloft so they would all have the same images and video, and people stared at the flames and cheered when the big pieces fell.
I stopped to help guide an art car back out from amongst a tangle of bicycles. Some little chick ran up to them and I couldn’t resist taking a picture.
“I need water!” She was telling everyone. “Water!”
“I have plenty,” I said. She grabbed at my beer can. I pulled it away. “Back at my bike.”
She followed. It wasn’t far, and she guzzled about half my Nalgene.
“Come!” She grabbed my arm, and we went.
She interacted with just about everyone we ran into. She pushed her face into someone else’s, fascinated with a faux-fur cowl. Grabbed a guy’s neck and dashed off with his desert goggles. (“I’ll get them back,” I said. “Don’t worry about it,” he said, smiling as she tripped away.) Insulted someone who rode into her path and then smiled sweetly when they stopped for her.
“I am trippin’ balls!” she said, and it was clearly so. She also said, “I’m not wearing any underwear!” This was evident. “See?” I wondered briefly about guys in general, predators, opportunists, or just randomly nice ones like me, what they do, or did, or should do, or should have—
“Give me your underwear!”
This wasn’t directed at me. It wouldn’t have been a problem: I was wearing a kilt. But she had another man in her clutches, her nose two inches from his. “I need underwear. Give me yours.”
He was bemused but also compliant. People go to Burning Man in order to say Yes. He was given a direct order, and he followed it. He set his staff aside, took off his pants, took off a pair of gray boxer briefs, and handed them to her, his cock arching out slightly as a young man’s will when looking for trouble. But none was to be found. She put them on and dashed away. What was he to do anyway? She was apparently accompanied by a big old guy in a kilt (that, by the way, does not stop everyone – more on that later, maybe, or maybe not).
El Pulpo Mecanico was blazing away nearby and she found a golf-cart-based art car to climb into, crawled across people’s laps, and took some long pulls off someone’s Camelback as they blurted things like, “Hey, princess!” and What ... ?” Suddenly she calmed down and lay back with her eyes closed.
I went around to the side she was on and said, “It looks like you’re in good company now so—“
“No!” Her eyes fixed on mine. “You’re my guardian angel! Stay!”
We all looked at each other and shrugged. I said, “Okay.” She jumped out and pulled me further through the crowd, touching fabrics, pulling hair, pointing at blinking lights that reflected off the stolen goggles on her forehead. The post-burn crowd milled and surged and dissipated in all directions, art cars big and small creating cacophonies of competing beats, firelight flashing from arbitrary directions. Suddenly she let go my hand and vectored towards a really shiny thing and crawled under its little crowd fence and sat down.
I considered briefly. I could remain her guardian angel. It was fun and unpredictable. It also occurred to me that I could drive things a certain way, as some people do. But she was stoned out of her mind and that pretty much undermined any idea of real consent. It also meant the potential existed for a radical mood change. In all, the situation didn’t call out to be drawn out. I decided to take my leave while she was distracted, and walked away as she sat cross-legged on the ground, swaying slightly, staring up at the spinning colors.
7 comments:
This sounds a lot like a frat party. Maybe Burning Man is like a big gigantic frat except minus the hazing and the raping.
Well written !
Yes. Well written and I applaud your decision to leave her be. Also, your decision to take leave. Good keeping your wits about.
Teacake: It does take on a sort of frat party energy late in the week and a lot of people don't like that, and some leave by then. But that's just from the weekenders / partiers, and there is a who-o-ole lot more going on than that. And no hazing. Unfortunately the raping is not down to zero, and the cops are far more diligent pursuing pot smokers because of the money / expense difference.
Cheri: Thank you very much! Such a compliment from you is particularly appreciated.
Asha: An earlier version revealed a little too much the thoughts that pass though a drunken male's brain at such times, but I didn't like the way it read, so let me acknowledge here that walking away from the situation was not my very first impulse. Unfortunately I know some men who would not have, and it was not just basic decency but their counterexample that inspired me to think twice and thrice.
Been there, done that. Not the exact circumstance, obviously, but...
...well, no, those would be other stories for other days.
But I wanted to assure you that the struggle you DIDN'T write, the struggle that's the true story you remember in sweating dreams, wasn't any failing of yours, but is common enough to some of us. I'm guessing I could write it to within a micrometer measurement of your experience.
Because, whatever the background story, it's yet another time the White Knight rose up out of us and grabbed us by the guts and throat, (and I'm right sick of the self-righteous, sorry bastard, too, while we're on the subject) and drove us to stand between the helpless, the innocent, the willfully stupid, and the terminally naive, shielding them from the animals who would consume them.
The White Knight whips us like snarling sled-dogs into the traces of Doing The Right Thing, and the harness chafes more than others would believe.
A pain in the ass, it is, and no doubt.
Yep. And I am in a life that calls his sorry ass out fairly often. The worst, though, is when he and I are not there, and the female taken advantage of seems not to mind. The world spins a little sideways then, and my inner Puritan swordsman a la Solomon Kane considers abandoning the field to the demons completely. But that never lasts. It is women I am trying to understand, after all.
" It is women I am trying to understand, after all.
Oh, well, there's your problem.
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