Burnt
By Jaylynn Bailey
10.16.05
Well, it's 7 am in the morning here in LA and it's been
two days since I've come home from my first Burning Man experience.
It's taken me that long to catch up on my sleep and to brush out the
tangle-knot (the size of a coconut) from the back of my hair. No one
bothered to tell me to braid it and by the second day on the Playa,
it was hopeless. I will never forget the feeling I had driving into LA on
the trip back, exhaustion sighing from every fiber, every pore. Every
hippie I'd befriended at Burning Man piled leg over ass in the RV.
Sleeping in humps, snuggled head-first like wooly mammoths on some
bitter, prehistoric night. Snorting. Coffee-less. Spent and blissfully
unaware. As if the long Pleistocene winter were fading fast, and the
hard, hot summer of their Paleolithic extinction would be soon upon
them. The lights of the city rising up like a circus tent in the
distance. I was giddy on Pepsi and gossip from Rachael, one of my
new friends. Though I'd been in Black Rock City for a mere ten days,
I felt like I'd been gone a year. It's difficult to articulate what I experienced during those
terrible and glorious days on the godless, dust-filled Playa. Especially
in light of what happened while I was gone. Everything that seemed to
matter then, everything that seemed so important, every salient insight,
everything that seemed to have so much weight and significance as I
hurried my way home through Reno then Sacramento and on into the flat,
dumb-eyed steer country of central California, everything I rehearsed
in my head that I might write or talk about, everything I felt then,
seems now to pale in comparison to the horror of one of the greatest
cities in the world having been wiped clean from the planet by wind and
rain, lack of city planning and federal dollars. New Orleans. Fuck me. Gone. Well, shit. So am I. The desert is a hard and terrible place, an unforgiving
mecca for the weird and displaced. The Playa at Black Rock, even more so.
The wind blows at 40 mph on a good day. On a bad day, the dust blows
so fiercely that you can't even see your hand in front of your face.
A total white-out. For a 35-year-old, out of shape, white girl like
myself, the Playa was, at best, an adversarial environment. At worst,
a premature grave. A place to make jerky-Jay. A last stand. An Alamo.
A Fallujah-fuck. It was bad. But when it wasn't indescribably bad, it was awesome. It
was incredible. It was Herculean. While I was in Black Rock City,
there were three perfect days (before I got locked out the RV for 20
hours). The wind died. The dust stalled. And the sky opened up. For
the first time in my life, I saw the Milky Way. The Great Milky Way.
Uncurling like a stripper's finger. Hip-sway. C'mon. Why don't you?
Oh, c'mon. You know you want to. Wow. And the Pleiades. All clustered
together like school girls giggling into their hands. The red tint
of Mars. I never knew Mars was actually red. Like, you can see that
from earth, all that way. Oh, the cool blue of Venus. Or was it
Jupiter? I had never seen so many stars in my whole life. Ever. I
felt insignificant. On the lip of the abyss. Speechless. If there had
been a sliver of grass to grab hold of out there, I would have held
on for dear life. I was terrified I might float away. Disappear into
infinity. I have never seen such a sky. If that was all that I had
experienced and nothing else, the trip and the hardship would have
been worth it. But it wasn't. I met this couple who are devout Catholics.
They don't believe in pre-marital sex, but, at the same time, they're
nudists. So, the man dipped his pecker in day-glo blue and the girl
painted smiley-faces on her nipples and they cruised around Black Rock
all day, day after day, on their scooter. I met a gypsy girl from San
Francisco. Well, sort of from San Francisco. She's not really from
anywhere. But then, that's kind of the point of being a gypsy, yes?
She took pity on a poor, Playa virgin like myself out there in the midst
of the Mardi Gras atmosphere and lent me some costumes to wear. She was
wonderful. By the time she'd finished with me, I looked like Tank Girl.
I was outfitted for anything, even the worst dust storm the Playa could
throw at me. All the folks I met out there, new friends, have been calling
me. And I've been calling them. I had a few of them over for dinner last
night. It's like, we don't really want to see each other, but we don't
really know how to let go of the pace of life at Burning Man. We need
to spend time together and talk to decompress. But at the same time, I
hate them. I hate them in the way one hates their best friend after
having driven cross country with them. I hate their stink. I hate the
way they eat a burrito. I hate the way they cross their legs. But I love
them, too. In the way that one loves their best friend with whom having
driven cross country. It's like family. You know you can change nothing about them,
all their little irritating quirks. You've seen them naked. Happy. Sad.
Depressed. Scared. Enraged. Heart-broken. High. Drunk. Hung-over. Sick.
Unhinged. Ecstatic. I went to Burning Man expecting an experience. Like going to
Europe. Or college. I came away from it a reluctant member of a new family.
In ten days, I lived a lifetime with those people. I will never again be
the person I was when I left LA. It's true, I will never again look at a
can of Beanie Weenies in the same way, either. But it wasn't the canned
goods that changed me, or the insufferable dust or the hardship. See, after the third day, the booze stopped working. I thought
I could get through the unbelievable heat and wind and dust and all the
other unpleasantries I knew were waiting before me by drinking. What did
I know? Booze had never let me down before. But when my piss turned the
color of Coke, I knew I had to cleanse. So I started drinking water.
Gallons of it. By the fifth day, I'd stopped eating. The heat just simply
takes your appetite away. There's no other way to explain it. It's just too
damn hot to chew. Or digest. Anything more than a morsel or two makes you
nauseated. I'd open a can of Beanie Weenies at noon and I'd have to force
myself to finish it by sundown. I lost 15 pounds in 9 days. Despite the conventional wisdom that anticipated some magical
psychological transformation, my Burning Man experience didn't consist of
a spiritual cleansing. It was a physical one. My body was simply unprepared
for the harshness of that climate. Once I was no longer able to eat, I
deteriorated quite rapidly. My feet, my hands, my lungs, my vision. I
don't know. Maybe it was spiritual in spite of that, or even as a direct
result. Careening into day 8, 3 days without food and still trying
desperately to keep myself hydrated, I must have looked like some desert
mystic, hollow-eyed and savage hair. Babbling about my former life's
miseries as if they were a novel I'd read by Toni Morrison. Rambling on
to anyone who'd listen about how silly I'd been to fret and worry over
love and heartache and the impenetrable loneliness of being alive and
knowing your life has a "best if used by" stamp on it. How silly. How
silly. You're alive now and that's all that matters. Cough, cough. Spoon
up another bite of cold Spaghetti-Ohs, just enough fuel to get you out
on the Playa to see the life-size Mousetrap game or the merry-go-round
made out of boulders and rope. The tribal drum circle. The fire dancers.
The pirate ship called The Contessa, built to sail on sand. When I got back, I walked into my apartment expecting a
sense of homecoming. There's my cat. There's my toilet. There's my
shower and faucet and running water kicks ass, oh yeah! But instead,
I found a place that seemed abandoned. My home. I really did feel like
I'd been gone for years. My bed seemed new to me. My phone. My television.
It was weird. Like I'd walked in on someone else's life. Like I'd
interrupted someone else in the midst of carrying on their daily
activities. There were dishes in my sink. I must have left them there.
But I didn't recognize them. Burning Man changed me, yes. But not in any way that I would
have been able to anticipate. The experience of Burning Man itself
defies generalization. There were some folks who went out there to get
naked for a week. That was their experience. There were others who went
out there to get drunk and dance to techno-trance for a week. That was
their experience. There were others, there were 50,000 others, who went
out there to do whatever it was their hearts and minds compelled them
to do. And that was their experience. We camped next to a guy who had
brought an entire rollerskating rink with him. In pieces he'd trucked
it in. For 10 days, 24 hours a day, he played Old School music like Prince
and MC Hammer and all that 80's shit. Like some messianic DJ, he held
court for anyone and everyone who dared to put on a pair of his skates.
I myself, I must confess, took a turn or two. Burning Man. I know now why they call it that. It's not
because it's so fucking hot out there it takes your breath away. It's
not because the people there are incandescent with something genuine
and inarticulate. It's not because you stay up all night and dance to
the light of diesel-fueled break-beats. It's not because the Playa dust
sets your tender pink lungs on fire like lava. It's not all the art the
size of small buildings doomed to the match. And it's not because, on
the last day, they burn the Wicker Man. It's not any of that. It's called
Burning Man because, when you commit, when you really and truly commit to
the Playa and to the people there, you throw yourself on the pyre. All your preconceived notions, all the baggage you've
shouldered along unknowingly, all that shit-stinking, sub-cutaneous,
toxic, Twinkie-filled you. When you throw yourself on the pyre, when
you really and truly do that, when you are emptied of everything except
water, when you haven't shit for a week (and you begin to realize, "Oh.
THAT'S why they don't have more Port-O-Lets."), when you've had your
freak-out because someone took your Baby Wipes and didn't bring them back,
when you've had your second freak-out and your third because there's no
more ice and it's not your turn, goddammit, to walk the 5 blocks into
camp and you've already done it like, 7 times, and you're hungry and tired
and more empty than you've ever been in your life and you're sick to death
of trying to talk logistics to your campmates because they're all fucked up
and you stink, you really and truly stink, and you know it because you can
smell yourself and everything you own is covered in that white Playa dust
that clings like clay and you've stood in line for hours to eat a good, hot
meal because your friend said this camp has a good spread but by the time
you get up there all they have left is hummus and saltines and you haven't
slept more than 3 hours a night for days and days and the guy spitting fire
on the Mutant Vehicle just a few feet away looks like the devil himself and
all your deep buried, so deep you thought they were fossils buried, prejudices
about other people come surging to the surface all of the sudden and now
you're absolutely convinced that everything black and horrible you've always
suspected in the dark of night about your fellow man is true and you're
sure, you're absolutely sure, that you cannot take another minute of it...
just then... something truly magical happens. You see it. Like an open-handed smack in the face. Like
something that happens on daytime television, but it's happening to you.
You feel it. That shock. The hot sting. The smart, undeniable burn that
rises on your own cheek. You realize all of the sudden that this is you.
You've done this. You've made this happen. It's been you. All along. And
nobody but you. There's nobody else to blame. And you turn then to see
your limp body already blistering on somebody else's Zen fire. Nothing
means nothing. You see your own vacant eyes staring back at you. Your
slack jaw. And somebody is chanting for you. Somebody is beating a drum
to you. Somebody is dancing barefoot in the bitter black of the Playa
night. For you. Just for you. And you realize, oh my. I brought a body here. I did. Not
knowing it. I did. I really did. A body I've carried for too long. That
weighs more than anyone can shoulder. A body so heavy it sends my back
into spasms from the burden. A body that won't stay buried. A body that
must, that absolutely must, be burned. To set the fucker free. To set
the goddamn, withering bag of monkey-piss and shit and guts and worms
and halleljah cunt-puss free. And, like the Phoenix, to be allowed to rise again. Clean
and pure and free. Singing it's glorious song. It was breathtaking, that moment. My heart skipped on up
to the Pleiades. I wouldn't go back and turn down my Burning Man invite
for all the oil in Saudi Arabia. The hungry writer stumbling in the
desert holding hands with her new-found friends. The accidental mystic.
The fool. The blubbering fool. The heat on her face from somebody's
ridiculous fire. Knowing she dragged her slumbering and reluctant self
there by the heels. And somehow managed to leave that sad bitch there.
That sad, all-knowing, ugly fucking bitch. Knowing she didn't have to
laugh when she realized it. Knowing she shouldn't. Knowing no one would
fault her for it. But laughing anyway. Laughing because she knows that
she doesn't have to. Laughing. From deep down. Until it hurts laughing.
Laughing. Silly, stupid laughing. Knowing she could cry, but laughing
anyway. Goddamn it. She was laughing. I went to Burning Man hoping to escape all the feeble
insecurities that I had allowed into my life, all the doubts and
questions about my talent and trajectory that I'd opened the door for
in the last year. Hell, I'd cooked dinner for them. I'd opened a bottle
of wine and settled in for a good, long conversation about all the
reasons why I shouldn't, why I couldn't. Why my white-trash background
precludes my ability. Why it doesn't make any difference how much I
want it, or how much talent I have. All that matters is that nobody
in my family has ever done shit except rut and squeeze out litters of
kids and keep Wal-Mart in business. Why the family I'd grown up with
knew me best. Why I, of all people, don't deserve to make it. Why I,
of all people, shouldn't make it. All those voices of childhood. All
those years of either fuck-you or indifference. I went to Burning Man hoping to forget that girl for awhile,
just a little while, that snickering, sure voice. (We camped on Amnesia,
ironically). I never dreamed I wouldn't have to go back to her eventually.
I never in a million years dreamed I might actually be able to leave her
there, sad and spent, a charred husk, a vacant mockery. Her ugly buck-teeth
glistening in the moonlight, her limbs curled up like a blackened shrimp
on the grill. But something more happened. Beyond my control. I burned
that girl. I did. Like a fucking rag. Like incense. When it came time to
hurl her in, she was, unbelievably, light as air. I picked her up and
threw her on the pyre and I watched her go up in smoke to the sound of
drumbeats, like 50,000 vital hearts pulsing in defiance of the cold,
bitter night. I listened and watched as she writhed and screamed and
begged for her life. I watched her curl up like a tuft of hair and blow
away. I showed no mercy. I didn't even blink. Afterwards, I ventured into the still hot embers, poking at
them with a long stick. Just to be sure. There were other voices there,
unknown to me. Despondent voices. Angry ones. Lonely and bitter ones.
But among the din, I heard my girl, my sad, sub-cutaneous girl. She
whimpered. Defeated. Weak. Feeble and undone. And she said to me finally,
"You win." She said, "You are strong, you bitch. You are." And then, on a gust of hot Playa wind, she was gone. "Good riddance," I said, looking up at the god-almighty stars
that night, my breath catching on the great, collective song just beginning
to take shape. One of my new friends called out to me in the dark. "Good
fucking riddance," I said, as he led me away. You sad, inbred trailer-fuck. You cheap breeder. You black,
inconsolable reptile that gulps down hope with dead eyes and teeth like
a smile. You mouth. You eating machine. You unapologetic gullet. You
insatiable thirst. You monstrous liar. You scraper. You sniveling nibbler.
Burn, you motherfucker. Burn.
