The Ishmael Gradsdovic Papers, part thirty-one


In part thirty-one of the Ishmael Gradsdovic papers, we again are on the road to Burning Man...


6 September 1994

Our group starts arriving at Earth Orbit a little after five. The official departure time is 5:30pm, but that's a pipe dream and everyone knows it. It's nice and dark before we actually pull away.

The enthusiasm of the group has overcome caution. The bus logo is now "Brothel Baptist Church," and allusions to Douglas Adams, Star Trek, Dante, the Illuminati, the Beatles, and others I'm not privy to are popping up all over the outside. The back of the bus is devoid of seats and is being filled with boxes and bags of camping stuff which are then covered by mattresses, blankets and pillows to make a lumpy bed for half-a-dozen.

The "EVEN Furthur" painted on the inside of the bus above the driver has been respelled in a different color by A-----, who apparently has a difficult time tolerating alternate versions of common words.

The first day out is a blur to me. I only remember bits and pieces, and these are almost certainly mixed with events from the following day and are out of order and out of context. B----- hates long car trips with a passion, and has been drugged with some sleeping pill and is preparing to zonk. The mattress area degenerates rapidly into flirtation which further degenerates into innuendo and then into fairly overt sexual behavior. One passenger writes on our whiteboard "Please ignore the breasts" and places it in one window. C-----, who flirts shamelessly and serially, is currently flirting with me, although she is officially, albeit loosely, attached to D-----, who is also with us. E----- waves and jiggles her unslung gazebos at passing semis, hoping for a wave or a honk. She is notorious for the audio volume of her orgasms, and in fact, I am regularly awakened just in time to get ready for work by her and F----- in the apartment next door. At one point, I am teasingly rubbing my foot against her crotch under the blankets and notice to some surprise that she is becoming visibly entranced and aroused. Before long she is screaming bloody murder and thrusting against my heel as her amused/disgruntled (it's hard to read his facial expressions) S.O. sits next to her. People look at him accusingly, but soon the word is out, and I make a pun later that I made her come to heel. The hormones are so thick as to almost block sunlight. I am wearing a skirt, and under that Goofy (the Disney character, not the adjective) boxers. At one point the boxers find their way up the bus to C-----, without me attached. The look on her face upon receipt is precious, and she is back in the maelstrom in a flash. L----- is flirting with me, E----- is flirting with me, C----- is mauling me -- she expresses with delight that I have a large penis and the rumor spreads, with E-----'s jaw going slack when she grabs my erection through my skirt. I've never really known one way or another where my penis stood in the bell curve, speculating idly that while flaccid it was slightly on the small end of the scale and while erect slightly on the large end, and have always thought that men who base even a small part of their self image on their penis size are dupes, fools, and idiots. In a fit of unwelcome hypocrisy, I blush broadly and feel proud, happy, and a bit the Alpha Male. I am ashamed at how much delight I am taking in the spread of the rumor through the group. Over the week I was told on three separate occasions by three separate women that it would turn them on to a great degree just to have the privilege to see me masturbate. I am unsure just how this is supposed to make me feel but am comfortable seeing it in a complementary light.

We only have to pull over infrequently to get the bus back in gear when a downshift (more often) or an upshift (less often) fails. I move up to the seats to avoid blue balls but end up fingering C----- in the seat in front of me. She's telling me very nice things about my personality, complements I'm less ashamed to enjoy receiving. I'm not sure why she's telling me these things. I have a tendency to make damp puppydog eyes at just about anyone who gives me a gentle caress, and I've been in a mood to listen to people who want to talk about their problems and offer my favorite collection of platitudes with sincerity but probably without much wisdom. It's comforting in the short term, though, and makes a good impression. She doesn't know me well enough to be saying these nice things about me with such urgency. She asks me if I consistently use safe sex techniques. I tell her the truth, which disappoints her. She scolds me.

------, from the first time I met her, registered high in my internal tease-o-meter. Every man runs across a tease eventually, and every man falls for it the first time. A lot of men never stop falling for it, and I'm not yet sure I'm not going to be one of them. They feed you a lot of line and wait until you start trusting the line instead of the footholds and then all of a sudden the line gives out and the new line is "I didn't make any promises." A lot of time it's women who have felt very powerless next to the men in their lives and find their source of power and the weapon of their anger and use it like a blackbelt. ------ passes the audition. So I'm trying to monitor myself, trying to have fun with this sexy woman without letting down my guard. So she's upping the ante, telling me how much she likes me and thinks I'm a sensitive man et cetera, bait surrounding the "oh, I didn't mean it that way" hook I still have marks from in my cheek. She's not about to stop now, though, Moby Dick won't get away.

A smell arises from the front of the bus, we pull over, the generator (they didn't use alternators back then, I guess) is smoldering. We make a move to disconnect it and drive on remaining battery to the next inhabited area, but can't figure out how to do so without doing more harm, so we just keep going, hoping the damage won't spread, until we park just off the highway in front of a closed Napa auto parts store in Kettleman City, about 15% into our trip up to the Black Rock desert, to spend the night.

The morning comes, and with it trips down to the fast food and gas station carnival a mile or so down the highway, where C----- has bought me the Carl's Jr. equivalent of an Egg McMuffin with sausage. I'm a vegetarian, but I've been meaning to get less doctrinaire about it, and figure the shredded and warmed pig carcass on the muffin isn't going to come back to life if I spend five minutes to denude it of melted cheese and slap it uneaten on the plastic tray, so I eat it, much to my digestive tract's later distress.

We pick up a new generator, which is quickly installed, and we're on the road again, not to stop again for mechanical difficulties except for one false alarm when the amp that G----- wired up for our überstereo blows a fuse, filling the back of the bus with that delicious ozone scent.

At some point we're refueling and pick up a hitch-hiker who is on his way back to Nebraska but is happy to go along with us as far as Reno. We watch him from the back. His name is H----- and he's not just a bit of a hunk, kind of a Dukes of Hazard type who would look just perfect on the cover of FirstHand magazine with his shirt off and a come-hither look on his face. Very much the down home farm boy, and as we're pretty much all college- track white suburbanites, the unsavory jokes about the poorer classes and the early sexual experiences of young livestock monitors start to trickle forth. It doesn't help that this fellow is a bit on the slow side. One story has I----- and J----- having a philosophical discussion about whether such historical figures as Jesus, Moses, etc. actually existed in real life whereupon H----- pipes up and says, "I know Moses was real; I saw the movie."

F----- learns that H----- wants to get a tattoo of a cobra on his arm with his initials below because his father has a tattoo of a cobra on his arm with his initials below, and his oldest brother has a tattoo of a cobra on his arm with his initials below and his second oldest brother is similarly tattooed.

I give him a lot of credit. He's hitching half way across the country with nothing more than what he's carrying, which isn't much (he tells me at one point that he catches his own food. He catches rabbits with his bare hands, "then I rip `em apart and burn `em."). He boards our bus without any of the fear and apprehension appropriate to the situation. He tolerates our displays of poor shifting, loud computer geek in-jokes, and flagrant nudity without batting an eyelash. Turns out he's in his late twenties and has something like six children. All of this is making him look less sexy to the lust-crazed back-of-the-bus types, but if you squint your eyes you still see a lovely muscled Adonis with mouth slightly ajar.

We encourage him to come along with us to Burning Man and he agrees, figuring he might be able to hitch a ride to Nebraska with one of the other caravans meeting there, and that in the worst case we can drop him off in Reno after the weekend and he can move on from there after an interesting vacation. I bet they don't have parties like this in Nebraska.




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