The Driving Force

The sights and sounds of Burning Man are overwhelming. It is a decentralized moon carnival full of stuff that you have never imagined. I saw a three-story marionette walking across the Playa guided by crane. I saw a similarly massive tesla coil shoot electricity across a distance of at least 20 feet, in tempo with music. I saw people groped in a grope box, and fondled in an 300 person shower. I rode a yacht across the desert and lavished in a colossal womb of pink fuzz. I drank at bars that wheeled up to me and danced at clubs that I had to chase. Every piece of art on the Playa was, in my opinion, more fascinating and worthwhile than any piece of art I have seen in a museum, with perhaps the sole exception of the 2012 Damien Hirst retrospective at the Tate in London.

The spectacle is so beautiful and stimulating that it made me curious about the reason it exists. None of the artists and camp-builders are paid to build what they build, and all have to fund their projects themselves, with the exception of a small handful who receive grants. Not even the rockstar DJs on the famous art cars Robot Heart and Mayan Warrior get paid.

We are raised to think transactionally. All our motions are tied to the exchange of currency. This is an incredibly obvious observation, but when the reality of it is suddenly removed, it’s striking. When I approached my first bar on the Playa, as I waived over the bartender I was struck with a sudden pang of fear. I had absolutely nothing to give her. My drinking, something that I rely on quite heavily in high stress situations like my first night at Burning Man, existed entirely at her whim. It was a slightly terrifying feeling, this loss of control, one that took some real getting used to. Burning Man is not, as is often cited, a “barter economy.” It’s not like you go around trading furs for spices and sandwiches for beers. It’s a gift economy. Everything is free. You just have to make people want to give it to you.

Photo by Ivan Cremer

I don’t believe, however, that Burners give out of altruism or even a sense of beneficence. People want to give you what they want to give you, not the things you need (just try asking around one of the more crowded bars for a cup of water). Remember, Radical Self Reliance is written into the burn’s DNA.

My theory, crass and banal as it may be, is that the currencies of Burning Man are desire, pleasure, sex, and status. In the real world, we have money, which acts as an indicator of status and thus desirability. At Burning Man, this middleman is cut out. Your value in the sexual marketplace is not dictated by what you’ve earned, but by what you’ve built.

One morning after Robot Heart, my campmates and I took the land yacht art car back to Bubbles and Beats. We caught it moving, running alongside and throwing our bikes up on the hooks. The sun rose softly. My brain was crystal clear. Acid generally makes me see things with a kind of stripped away purity.

At Bubbles and Beats, a young blonde woman wearing a sort of off the rack version of the white bathing suit from Fifth Element approached me and said I looked familiar. She found ways to subtly ask me for drugs. She introduced me to her friends. One of them had a DMT pen, but he wouldn’t let me try it.

On a nearby couch, two young women with glazed over eyes were kissing and rubbing each other’s thongs. A Persian girl in a see through white body suit, one of the blonde’s friends, gave me some water because I was dry. I sucked on her high end camel back for sixty seconds.

They invited me to a camp known for hosting one of the oldest bars at the burn. They were serving Bloody Marys, but very weak, watery attempts at them. It was a shoddy, run down set up run by shoddy, run down men, thick with drug fever.

Behind the bar was a scraggly man, probably late-50s or early 60s. He wasn’t interested in talking to me, or any of the men there, and he was barely able to make eye contact with us he was so focused on the girls, distractedly filling me up with awful bloodies whenever I rattled my cup. With great energy, though, he questioned the women and made dirty jokes to them, which they laughed at generously.

After awhile of this, he pulled something out of his pocket and showed it to them, but I couldn’t quite see what it was. They made excited sounds and then disappeared into the back with him before I could ask what was happening. Bars at Burning Man are always connected to the camps of the proprietors, so by “back” I mean behind the bar, into the array of RVs, tents, and shade structures that made up the camp.

After awhile, I asked another bartender if I could go back there and at least tell the girls that I was leaving.

“Uh yeah this is _____’s camp and it’s his call, but yeah it’s private back there.”

Blocking entry to a part of Playa, any part, is roughly against the rules—a violation of the principle of Radical Inclusion—but it’s the rule I saw broken most often. The notorious Plug and Play camps, essentially elaborate hotels set up for rich people who pay upwards of $10,000 for the week, all find ways to separate the wheat from the chaff.

But I pressured and, like most veteran Burners would, the gatekeeper acquiesced and allowed me to walk back into the camp area. The camp was low slung and segmented. There was a long, flat shade structure with a tent city underneath it. Searching the tent city, I heard cackles coming from a small blue tent in a corner. I walked over and knelt down to look inside.

In the corner of the tent the girls were lying, red eyed, laughing hysterically. The zippered front flap hung half open. Also inside was the old bartender, apparently the owner of the camp, and an even older man, probably in his mid-60s. This second man gave me a stern, unhappy look, disgusted that I may have arrived to break up his party. The owner was partying.

“Oh hello!” the owner said. “We’re doing dissociatives!”

They were sucking whippets out of an industrial whipped cream canister. The blonde made eye contact with me, her sky blue eyes excited but totally vacant, almost written over with red. I asked what was up. They responded with incoherent peeps and giggles. Then there was awkward silence. I felt like a father barging into a party I wasn’t invited to. The owner’s attitude suddenly changed to one of great irritation.

“You know what,” he said. “I don’t know about you, but it’s getting pretty hot in here.” He raised his eyes at me, hinting strongly that I should get the fuck out of there. I told girls that if they wanted to go, now was the time. They didn’t budge.

I wound my way back to the bar and waited for a few minutes, staring angrily into the camp, but the girls never reappeared.