The Ishmael Gradsdovic Papers, part thirty-two


Part thirty-two of the Ishmael Gradsdovic papers takes place on the playa...


I am walking toward the center of camp when suddenly a man comes running by, alternately yelling "Help!" and "Run away!" Shortly after he passes, a man dressed in a postman's uniform runs along the same path, carrying a rifle.

I enter the Camera Obscura, a pyramid with a rotating lens at the top reminiscent of the pyramid on the back of the dollar bill. That lens collects light and casts it down on a table in the dark interior of the pyramid, so that a picture of the camp is visible on the table in vivid technicolor for those who crawl in through the darkening corridor.

B----- & C----- are camped somewhat nearby, but I hardly see them all weekend. They don't even come by to tap our keg of Red Nectar Ale. I understand; I'm too busy doing other weird stuff to drop in on random campgrounds and tell my Alaska story as I had planned.

I ask D----- what her favorite color is. She tells me and I squirt a healthy dollop of florescent tempera paint a few inches above her left nipple, covering that quadrant of her torso with my hand. Soon she's partitioned like a psychedelic harlequin in Eden, but the paint itches as it dries so she removes it as best she can.

At the movies, F----- is snuggling with her new mohican boy (how quickly I vanish from her to-do list!), I'm coming down from my first X trip, we've just come back from searching in vain for the rave supposedly happening out there somewhere. On screen a man is filled with angst because he cannot get laid. He's desperate and he'll try anything. His friend sets him up with a woman on a blind date. I think it went something like this. He goes over to her house. She says, "So and so told me you looked like Gomer Pyle. I don't think you look like Gomer Pyle at all." He beams, or is supposed to. They sit on separate furniture and engage in small talk. She says, "I'm cold." He offers her his coat. She looks hurt and takes his arm to place around her shoulders, the light dims. The next morning we're walking out to his car, a strangely-painted and knick-knack-salted bug that reminds me, of course, of my own beloved B210. She is upset, hoping that someone of his obvious talents would at least have a porsche. She reluctantly gets in, but starts tearing things down from their hanging places, to his dismay. Now we're entering his apartment, a place of bizarre things, much like the car. She is similarly disgusted, and they have an encounter where she is pissed at him but comes on to him, he turns up the heat slightly and she says something to the effect of "all you can think of is sex," at which point he shows her the door and she says, "but don't you want to make love; don't you know how many people want my body?" I am entertained. He picks up some disgusting thing spelled much like an object d'art, waving it in her face and describing how it rotted into the beloved shape it holds today. She is finally scared off. Next scene, we're at a party, our hero, stressed out by the evangelism of the woman he chose to pick up on, starts imitating a chicken. He was raised with chickens, and sometimes reverts to this behavior as a defense mechanism. He leaves the party in shame. Next scene, he paints himself green so as to reflect with his countenance his inner feeling of alienation. Other, more typical people of color, greet him as brother. One person asks his planet of origin. He is wandering somewhere and hears a chicken cackling, follows the noise into the wilderness to an abandoned camp. He looks around and the resident returns, surprising him. She is a woman of wild face and matted hair, but they communicate well. He asks if she would like to stand on top of a tree and she smiles broadly. I think I'm leaving something out. He met someone else who had a painted car, but that didn't work out for some reason. How does this end? I don't remember. I don't think things worked out between the green man and the wild woman. Why don't I remember?

G----- arrives, back from L.A. and what was hopefully going to be a massive acid buy, for us anyway, several sheets worth. The dealer was short so he comes back empty-handed, but at least the money isn't lost. He'll go back in a couple of weeks and try again.

I dash off to the warm "Butt Crack Hotsprings" with a few others to fill my buckets for the mortar mix. I don't know the first thing about mixing concrete and the bags don't give any hint as to proportions, so I just guess and hope it works out alright. The next morning the mortar is hard and the poles are within a few degrees of vertical.

On our way to the springs we get lost and trek up the butt crack itself, finding no water but a crashed plane. G----- grabs a smashed up engine and insists that we haul it back to camp.

The Monk Magazine van arrives, with two people who travel all over the country on little to no money, producing a nice-looking magazine in the Mondo or Wired sort of æsthetic that concentrates, each issue, on a different area of the country, trying to find the mood of that area and the underground weirdness usually not uncovered by the casual visitor or the mainstream visitors' guides. Next issue: Nevada. I ask if they'll hire me and take me away from my meaningless job.

There is a postcard on the noteboard in the middle of camp. It is addressed to the "Brothel Baptist Church" and reads, in toto, "BUS!" It is our first non-four-letter postcard.

Someone paints on our side mirror: "Objects in this mirror are not real."

A dust devil starts sweeping across the playa. It is perhaps 100 feet tall, at least the part that is opaque with dust so we can see it, and is two to three feet in diameter, swirling tightly and rapidly, but moving slowly toward and through camp. There is very little wind otherwise. H----- grabs a helium balloon and runs to the base of it, placing the balloon inside. The dust devil holds the balloon tightly, spinning it around as it slowly rises inside the cylindrical body.

At the Butt Crack Hotsprings, J----- is bouncing on the trampoline. I'm happy, because he's been kind of solemn otherwise. It's nice to see him having fun. He attempts a flip and lands on the back of his neck. Ouch. That can't have felt very good. Turns out he's fractured something, and messed up something else. He's walking, but he's in a lot of pain. He eventually has to be coptered off the playa to Reno at great expense. Also made the cover of the Black Rock Gazette. His insurance doesn't cover coptering, we later find. H----- drives K----- out to Reno to join him. No serious damage, but he'll have to take it easy for a couple of months, and he's going to hurt hurt hurt for a while.

We're out in the middle of nowhere, it's me and L----- and M----- and D----- and N-----. Its night and there is no moon so the stars are amazing unless someone shoots up a signal flare and everything turns red. M----- is tripping and gets paranoid when he hears an engine or sees headlights, since many of these drivers are loaded, and there's no way they can see us until they're right on top of us. That's good. That means the rest of us don't have to be paranoid about it. "I bet you could run forever with your eyes closed" M----- says, and L----- starts running, and M----- starts running and the rest of us start running, and there's nothing to run into but each other and we're all running basically the same direction so it's okay. It reminds me of the feeling of a dream, that dream feeling sometimes that your body is in motion but you don't have your senses, it's a feeling I've never had while awake before.

We stop and gather and share anecdotes about P----- the hickhiker. They tell me the Moses one; I tell them about the rabbit catching. After the man burned down, I came back to camp briefly and chatted with P-----. He pointed to the remaining flames and dancers, where a great deal of trance-inducing percussion had been going on for probably an hour and asked "don't they know any other songs?" I forget what I answered. Before he told me about the rabbit catching he pointed out in the direction of all the drumming and such and told me that what they really ought to do is put in a big cement pond out there and stock it with fish, "that'd be perfect." P----- loves to fish. I told him I love to fish too, but mostly like to just sit on a pier or in a boat and hold a pole. He sympathized. Actually, I haven't been fishing since I turned vegetarian and I miss it, but I didn't go into all the details. Then he told me about rabbit catching. I said, "living off the land, huh?" He said, "You gots to. When you're broke."

R----- and F----- vanish to Gerlach or beyond and come back with a cooler full of ice cream. Titles denoting deity are distributed.

P----- tells us he's coming back next year. We tell him we'll look for him.

Someone says, "hey, Ishmael and R----- are sitting next to each other." I say, "pretty soon cats and dogs will be sharing living quarters. It'll be anarchy." N----- suggests that we kiss and make up. R----- and I look at each other. Nope. Not gonna happen any time soon. Not even at Burning Man.

Just about everybody but me threw up after taking X. I'd taken some Pepto as a precaution and didn't feel sick at all. The X felt a bit like that last few hours of acid after the peak when you just feel at peace with the world and everything seems brighter and more interesting. Awfully expensive for what amounts to the last third of an acid trip. But the closed-eye visuals are dramatically different. On acid, I see brightly-colored abstract geometric patterns. On X, there were very brief but very vivid complete scenarios, including people, objects, motion. Sometimes trivial and realistic, sometimes surreal. Often erotic. Like dreams in a way, but not really.

S----- puts on his toga and joins the forces of Good who are battling the hoardes of Evil in a wrestling match in mid camp. Later he is awarded the ten commandments in appreciation for his role in the battle (it ended in a draw, for those of you ethics fans out there).

V----- continues to tinker with electronics, having blown out two amps with his antics, but with the row of blinking red lights around his sleeping bag lasting pretty much the whole weekend. "V-----'ll rewire it" is frequently heard whenever any sort of electronic or mechanical difficulty is exposed. V-----'s rewirings are often pyrotechnic displays, whether or not that was their original intention.

Funny thing, with the air thick with sex and with the number of people who had their hands on my penis through the weekend, the only person I ever ended up having sex with was myself. It was awfully good, though, so I won't complain.

Q----- is running the radio station -- one of four on the playa, and quite probably the most powerful and well-stocked of them. He plays Buddy Guy & Junior Wells' "Alone and Acoustic," one of my all-time favorites. You wouldn't think acoustic blues would translate well to an open flat space full of naked pagan caucasians, but you could play "Alone and Acoustic" in a busy slaughterhouse and it would still sound beautiful.

I've been walking around the perimeter of the camps with L-----, shooting the shit, not looking for anything unusual but getting distracted anyway by fireworks shooting by or people being dragged through the playa on boards pulled by trucks, or crowds of strange types hurrying on their way to some sort of mischief. We wind up back at the Burning Man as crowds start to gather for the burning. I'm absolutely sober. What a surprise. I've hardly had a chance to get loaded this weekend and I haven't really missed it much. The X was nice. Smoked some good dope Friday night which I guess was Saturday morning by that time. It's almost like taking drugs in Babylon the rest of the year has prepared me for being sober on the playa tonight. Burning the Man is sort of anticlimactic this year considering the high madness of the previous days and the natural disaster accompanying last years rites. It falls before really going completely up in flames and this worries me because some of the fireworks that were supposed to shoot from one of the arms haven't ignited yet and are now aimed out into the crowd. I stay well back.

F----- is pissed at me. Earlier in the week I had told her my Alaska story, but just as I was getting to the very end, the part about how we didn't need grant money for our research because of this neat thing the Germans had discovered; did you know that you can make hypoallergenic soap out of cremated human remains? Yeah. It's made out of human bodies, so it's completely free of allergens. Went over really well with the health set in California. Well, what, did you expect us to bury them? Graves are only good for one thing in this land-starved, over-populated world, and that is to serve as a place for grieving relatives to congregate. These kids were orphans, after all - they didn't HAVE any grieving relatives. Anyway, I didn't want to give away that it was all bullshit until I had at least told the whole story, so I'd left her hanging. So she was trying hard to reconcile the sensitive man she'd been batting eyelashes at on the bus with the baby harp seal beater and orphan torturer from the story. She finally determined that she felt truly sorry for me that I had to live with those awful memories and the guilt I must feel deep inside for having caused that pain. Then T----- comes into camp and says hi and we get to talking and he says something like "I can't believe how many people believed that Alaska story you posted" and F----- is in earshot. She wanted to wring my neck.




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