The Best American Essays 2014 (31 page)

“All right,” says Mur-Dog. “Tonight you're coming out with me. We're going dancing.”

I inform Mur-Dog that in my late teens, after serially disgracing myself to the strains of “Groove Is in the Heart,” for the good of all mankind I incinerated my dancing shoes.

“Fuck that,” says Mur-Dog. “Tonight you're going to dance until your legs hurt, then you're gonna dance some more. We're gonna see the sun rise. You've gotta liberate yourself. Leave the notebook at home.”

Very well. I resolve to accept the teachings of Mur-Dog. That evening, when the professors are readying themselves for bed, Cam and I rendezvous with Mur-Dog on the open playa. The playa at night is a vision unlike anything else in the known world, and it is impossible to describe without resorting to psychedelic clichés. It is like being in a malarial brain. It is like a synapse-level view of an acid trip. It is like a voyage through a violently bioluminescent deep-sea-scape designed by Peter Max and Wavy Gravy and ravers and dragons and gay Martians. The playa is a mile expanse of indigo blackness across which traverse such things as pirate ships, a car disguised as windup teeth, an octopus blasting huge jets of flame, a bunch of other unrecognizable things blasting even huger jets of flame. The soundtrack is screams and diesel engines and propane detonations and several hundred really good sound systems going full blast. Thousands of cyclists and pedestrians, beribboned in traceries of incandescent technology, float and course through the distance. Some people, to their own peril, have disdained to wear lights. These people are known in the local idiom as “darktards.”

As per Mur-Dog's instructions, I left the notebook at home, so I'm reconstructing here, but this is what basically went down: Mur-Dog led us across the playa to something called Opulent Temple, which was a great arena of seething humanity where confusing music blared and green lasers gridded the sky and the ecstatic sweat of dancing underpant people glowed orange in intermittent blorps of propane flame. Mur-Dog wore a trucker hat and a red blazer and no shirt and a tie, and he danced like a madly romping puppet. I wore, I dunno, some bunny ears or some shit and tried to dance like some teenagers I saw, I think, in a TV ad for breath mints. Cam and I drank of Mur-Dog's champagne. We drank of his bourbon and apple juice. I was offered and accepted three different illicit substances—including a drug called molly that I'd never heard of before—and though I more or less swore off recreational drugs back in high school, in the interests of achieving immediacy (Principle No. 10) and psychological surrender I ingested them all.

The group's experience was mixed. A tribe of the nearly nude hauled Mur-Dog onto some scaffolding to dance with them. Cam wandered around, smiling and shrugging. I danced my breath-mint dance with a tiny Asian woman dressed as a butterfly, by which I mean I stepped on her several times. And how was my dope journey? It never left the driveway. Or if it did, it didn't carry me into transcendent mortal-fear-abandoning head spaces. It carried me into a head space whose inner monologue was this:

“Is there not something deeply embarrassing and sad about a man on the verge of forty doing a breath-mint dance, moving his unexcellent body to tuneless, lyricless, thudding music he finds both baffling and bad? If this music is not about robots fucking, then what in God's name
is
it about? Well, it seems to express a kind of high-tech erotic vehemence, which the crowd reflects via complex dance maneuvers that are sort of lonely in their virtuosic self-orientation.
‘Oh, if only someone were as good a dancer as me, then I might have sex with that person, but it shall never be'
would be a fine subtitle for most of the dancers in the observable vicinity. And what does it mean when the beat breaks and, prefatory to an intensification of the pounding, the music goes silent save for this rising tone akin to the noise of a bottle being filled, and the flames spurt high, and everyone pumps their fists as though to say,
‘Oh yes, oh yes, the bottle-filling noise has come again, this bottle-filling noise, a most profound and excellent thing with which I am very much of a piece'
? And now here is Mur-Dog, making a hoisty-hoisty pump-up-the-volume gesture at me with his palms, an exhortation to dance like no one's watching. Oh, but Mur-Dog, don't you see? If no one were watching, I would not dance at all.”

At last, when the champagne was gone, we left. “Was that a rave?” Cam asked me.

“I think so, more or less,” I said.

“I'd always wondered what one was.”

Shortly after 4
A.M.
we made it back to the RV, whose farting, snoring squalor was a comforting familiarity, a relief.

“So how'd it go last night?” James Dean asks in the morning.

I give him a synopsis. “Sounds as though you had your first middle-aged experience,” he says.

“I did,” I say. “It was sort of upsetting.”

Professor Dean offers these words of condolence: “Get used to it.”

 

By day three our filthiness is profound. There is no part of my body I cannot rub with my thumb to raise a gray cigar of silt. On the recommendation of James Dean, I proceed with my father and Cam to PolyParadise, an encampment of polyamorists whose gift to the community is something called the Human Carcass Wash. It is an open tent with a tarp floor, where perhaps fifty nudists have queued. Until now, if given the choice, I'd have preferred to have a hole of large diameter drilled in my foot rather than be naked among strangers. But I am trying here, friends, so there is nothing to be done but to remove one's clothes. I disrobe brusquely, a little angrily.

My hope is for a simple shower. This thing is not that. Before the wash begins, we are broken into little cadres to receive instruction from the (also naked) administrators of the Carcass Wash. A very genial blond man with an air of ecclesiastical gentility and a somehow angelic blond pubic bush delivers the disappointing news that we are not here merely to be scrubbed by polyamorists and sent on our way. We will first wash others, dozens of them, before we are washed ourselves. The washing of the carcasses will happen not with hose or sponge. We will mist bodies with spritz bottles and squeegee carcasses dry with cupped palms. It is a ritual, we are told, that has its roots in cultures other than our own, where, when a visitor arrives, his hosts will honor his body by stripping him nude and manually laving his sweaty creases. Which cultures? I think he said
Persian.
Really? And here I'd thought Tehran was more the sort of place where trying to loofah a stranger's taint would get you a scimitar in the neck. Is that how they kill people there? Let's puzzle this out. Pay no attention to the devastatingly lovely young woman next to you, whose flawless left gazonga is bulging a little bit against your right triceps. All thoughts on the ayatollah.

After the briefing, we are dispatched to the lavage gauntlet. So, you ask, did I touch the penises of other men for the first time in my life? I did. And did I also touch the vaginas and breasts and buttocks of women, and was that experience erotic? Well, sort of I did, and no, it was not, so scrupulous was I to be a good scrubber and not a lecherous busyfingers impersonating a good-faith body honorer. But did I not also lay hands on drastic cases of keratosis like burnt raisins sprouting from people's hides and weird patches of wiry hair and surgically crafted transgenitalia that haunt my imagination even still? Excuse me, but the Human Carcass Wash is a privileged space where people come to have their bodies honored, not to be judged in print by a sneaky media poisoner, so I will not answer that.

So, you ask, did I wash my father's body? And in light of his doctor's recent concerns, did I feel as though I were washing his living corpse and murmur lines from Ecclesiastes:
As he came forth from his mother's womb, naked shall he return to go as he came.
And did my father take my naked body into his arms? And was he teleported back to 1973, when he held for the first time a child he was not sure he was ready for or necessarily wanted? And, most importantly, did my father rinse my pecker? For some reason I was afraid of that. Not that my father would, as a going concern, want to rinse it. But I'm saying that if he found himself in a squad of strangers, all of whom were rinsing my pecker in a totally body-honoring Californian manner, my father is such a sweet guy that he might start to worry that he was being a bad dad by not getting in on the body honoring. Well, the answer to all of that is no. To sidestep that whole problem, I made sure I got into a different corral of nudists, and I didn't see my father until we got out the other side.

By the time I emerge from the gauntlet, my father is already clothed. He stands tentside in his Thai tunic and his legionnaire's cap with the trapezius snood, tucking into a rusty half-eaten apple he stowed in his backpack. And the gorgeous woman whose breast I drew nigh to, and whom I spent my entire HCW experience trying hard not to look at? My father is regarding her as a sixteenth-century pilgrim to the Vatican must have admired his first stained-glass window. Chomping and watching. Full-fed in body and soul.

“Botticelli-esque,” he murmurs. “Remarkable how some of us have let ourselves go and others of us have taken very good care of our bodies.”

“How was your carcass-wash experience?” I ask.

“I thought it was quite wonderful,” he says in a faraway voice.

We step out into the boulevard, still damp. The wind blows up, and in an instant we are battered like fish sticks in alkaline dust.

 

On the north side of the playa, at a remote remove from the lasers and fire leapers and bare-flesh frolics and booths where you can receive a cookie after having your ass struck with a paddle, stands a structure known as the Temple. The Temple is a splendid simulacrum of a Siamese palace made of plywood laser-cut to lacework that would shame a doilymaker. Large enough to accommodate many dozens, it is a structure of such intricacy and beauty that I am glad I will not be here to see it incinerated on Sunday night, the evening after the Man burns.

At the Temple's gate, you're checked by a silence that seems to thicken the air and halt the wind. And inside, you see people asquat under the central spire with tears runneling the dust on their cheeks. You see a young woman lying in the lap of her friend, her spine bucking with the force of her sobs. You see a guy trying for some reason to snug a latex glove onto a piece of driftwood and to lay the gloved driftwood onto a shrine, which is one of perhaps thousands of little shrines—feathers, bandannas, booze bottles, Nalgene tankards, cheesy studio portraits, snapshots—lashed and propped and taped and stapled to the Temple's ornate walls.

Letters to dead parents: “Beautiful dreams, mummy and daddy.”

“Goodbye, Dad, you are a great father. I love you.”

“Fuck you dad, suicide . . . isn't [obscured].”

“Love you, dad.” (This in a mini-coffin containing also a dildo and a photo of a man in a leather vest blowing someone and also, it looks like, being penetrated.)

Letters to dead infants.

Lots of letters to dead pets:

“To the world you were just a dog, but to us you were the world.”

A general outpouring of emotion that would, in the default world, strike an East Coast media poisoner as cloying, sentimental, and precious. But here it affects you as you are sometimes affected upon entering a church, when an emo wad thickens in your throat, not because you believe, necessarily, in God but because it is forcefully heartbreaking to witness our strange species trying to reckon with its curse, its knowledge of death. You are in no way tempted to laugh at the hippie guy who is standing amid the crouched and huddled crowd, weeping and saying, “I'm here today because my cat died. He liked drinking rainwater, and he liked drinking tuna water. I miss my small, furry, gentle friend. I miss my pookie. What can I give to have him purr in my ear one more time?”

What happens is something weird, a new sensation coalescing this week in some not wholly conscious part of your brain. Perhaps it's an effect of being here with your elderly father, or your late-breaking awareness of your arrival at middle age, but you become abruptly, terrifiedly conscious of the terrible velocity of time, of life, a kindred sensation to the instant you sometimes experience during a commuter jet's descent, when your nervous system suddenly alerts itself to the preposterous number of MPHs at which the ground is hurtling up at you and you begin to twitch and shudder under a fusillade of thoughts like these:

“I do not do volunteer work. I am a poor carpenter. I give very little money to charity. My hair is thinning. I am a miserly Captain Bligh of an RV skipper, having forbidden the men from deucing, or even showering, in the RV out of fear of depleting the battery and water reserves. I am bad about returning e-mails. I love my father. My father is dying and will leave no worthy successor. My life is at least half over. Out of cowardice masquerading as prudence, I have sired no children and nourished no lifelong commitment to a member of the opposite sex. My dog's halitosis is noxious and incurable. The ivory-billed woodpecker is almost certainly extinct. Super-PACs are destroying American democracy. The Milky Way is whorling into a huge black hole. They eat dolphins in Japan. I'm getting muffin tops.”

And in the shadow of this splendid monument to cut-rate sentiment, you go somewhat to bits. A mortifying brine gouts from your eyes and pools in your dust-retardant goggles.

It takes a moment to collect yourself, to prepare a face to rejoin your group over by the gate, where James Dean is saying, “I don't know what to make of all that. One minute we're dwelling on anal hygiene and sexual fetishes, and then there's this temple and this air of quiet spirituality. Where does religion come into all this?”

“I thought it was intense,” says Cam, whose own eyes are damp (he tells me later) with remembrance of Sierra, his ex's hospice-patient dog.