10: Tales

By the time we got back to Curvas Peligrosas the sun was well on its way towards the horizon, and the bike parking lot out front with thick with two-wheeled madness. The DJ was pumping tunes we could hear up the street, and the dance area was starting to get some of its shake on. Everyone was decked out in their playa best. Wigs, fur, glittery gold shirts and crazy pants. Sunglasses, horns, hats, costumes, dresses on men, topless women, bathrobes, booty shakin', shots, tossed beers, stealthy bowls and through it all an excitement building as the party grew, the day dimmed and the sexy shadows began to take hold.

"Hard to believe we've only been here less than 24 hours."

"I know, I feel like it's been so much longer," I replied as we made our way through the throng.

Once in the kitchen we started getting the food ready to make guac and we got to know our camp-mates better. Besides G, Wags, J-Bird, Darren and Max we knew none of the other twenty plus people. But right from the start, everyone was so nice.

Skeeter was in the kitchen grilling up food, and I got caught up in a conversation with him about the situation in New Orleans. He had been at camp since early in the week and hadn't heard that the levees had broken and shit was going bad. It was tough to tell him and others about the watery destruction of a city we all had been to and loved. And it was especially odd and awful to think about what the people throughout the Gulf region were going through, even as we were there in the dry, dusty Black Rock City, having the times of our lives.

The level of destruction we compared, on a much smaller scale, to the imagery of the devestation from the earthquake and tsunami near Banda Aceh. Turned out Skeeter was on an island right by there. On the day of the wave, he was one of the few people that knew what it meant when the ground shook hard, and then the waters receded far out of sight. It took a great deal of convincing, but eventually the other tourists and the villagers listened to his warnings, and just in time, they ran for high ground. The account of his trip back from that deathly edge through the destruction of the wave, to the piles of debris, and the finally back to some sembalance of civilization, well, even out there in the sun, in the shadeless kitchen of the desert, I was chilled. He was lucky to be alive. And man the guy knew how to cook steak.

"It's all in the marinade," he said with a nod.

Munching on a strip, I made my way to the bar.

J-Bird was on the job. "Bones! Whadayaneed?"

"Beer please!" I replied.

"Yergetting a shot, too, buddy."

"Bring it on," I replied with a grin.

From stories of watery deaths elsewhere and at other times, we moved to tragedies out here on the playa. How Wags had been right there last year when a woman had fallen from an art car and was run over. Someone else mentioned poi dancers returning to civilization with second degree burns up and down their arms. All week there were new tales, new stories, new rumors that would flicker across my mind and the people around me.

At one point in the week I heard about a theme camp that offered massages, but they weren't the typical massages of the regular world. When you went in, you were handed a checklist. On the checklist were a serious of options you could include as part of your treatment. According to this guy with the pink tutu telling the story, the options went something like this: I want my masseuse to be: male/female, one of each, or two of either. I want there to be: rubbing, tickling, biting, sucking, fucking, orgasms. I would like used: silk, rope, chains, paddles. Hard medium soft. Slippery or rough. And so on.

I knew that kinda stuff was out there, but it was crazy to hear just how specific one could get. What he never got to that I really wanted to know, is what was the gift the person getting the massage gave in return? 'Cause that's how these things worked there. You couldn't use money, instead you simply gave away, and then the grateful gave back in return. Maybe they wanted beers. Maybe a meal was the return gift. Probably it was something far more naughtly than beer or food, or maybe it was nothing at all. Maybe it truly was a gift, after all.

Then he went on to talk about their friend who had come up for the first time a few years ago, and he had mostly stayed around the camp. Then the night of the Burn, they lost him. Hours later he returned, mostly out of his head on some incredible acid he didn't even mean to take. But the one thing that they did manage to get out of him was that he'd rode in an art car, Malicious and Delicious had been on it with him. One of the girls had given him a blowjob, and then did a transfer to the other.

"What's a transfer?" someone else at the bar asked, but insteading of waiting for the answer I knew but really didn't want to hear out loud, I just slipped away.

On the last day we went into center camp for a while with some friends and sat there chilling out, drinking coffee when an annoucement was made about the fate of New Orleans, what we could do to help and what the Black Rock Rangers were going to do as soon as Burning Man was over. We sat in Center Camp and cried while we listened to that sad tale of a city we loved.

All week there were rumors of duststorms, some of which appeared. There was a story told to me of eight hundred boobies that would be painted and marched proudly through the streets of BRC. On the night I lost Lulu, I heard lots and lots about her as I found friends here and there. We heard about fights, about a Hookah Dome, that if you parachuted onto the playa you didn't have to buy a ticket. That there were people on a mission to Save The Man. That they wouldn't have Burning Man next year. That they definitely would. That this was the largest one yet. That it wasn't. That if you always took a left in the Maze you'd find your way out fast.

On that first day, though, as I sat at the bar reveling in the fun, only a few of the stories had come to pass. There were tales in the making all around me, within the watching brain of every single human under that tent, under every tent, under the infinite sky all over the globe. There were tales told and passed on, whole and complete. There were tales in the making we didn't even know we were bit players in. There were the details of life given freely from one to another as all of us learned who each of us were.

The story that we tell to our self, about our self, is the coherent soul, the focused force that ties us to the world. That ties us to each other. Without our personal stories, we are but husks of lifeless meat. But with them, shared, together, we are a party. And on Thursday night of Burning Man, we raged.