Burning Man (1994)

Lamb ♣ 09 | LGBTQ+ Serial Fiction

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Burning Man (1994)

♣ ♣ ♣ 09 ♣ ♣ ♣

I want to say that something sort of shifted in Lamb after he went up to Burning Man in 1994. I got the story afterward, of course, but I could tell the experience affected him more than he let on. I asked him what’s the big deal, why did he care so much what the people he hung out with up there thought? He didn’t really have an answer, and got all embarrassed and shamefaced. 

I found this in his journal:

“I’m just lonely, honestly. D— isn’t always around, I mean, often enough to be my best friend and all that, but I’m on my own a lot on the weekends, and I can’t rely on just one friend. So I guess I was just hoping to make some new friends where I didn’t have to start from scratch, just plug in—maybe that’s cynical, not getting to know people but just sliding into their lives without the hard work—but…well I just find it really hard. People are always wanting something from me that I don’t have. I just want it to be easy, for once in my life. 

So please, please, please, 
let me, let me, let me, 
let me get what I want this time… haha” 

(That’s a quote from The Smiths, obv—ugh, he loved them. Fucking Morrissey.)

This was about a year or so after we both moved to the City. Lamb moved first, summer of 1993—it was a shorter hop for him from the East Bay to SF than for me coming up from SoCal. But. Even after a year, he still hadn’t made any real connections in the City, and like I said, I was working weekends so I wasn’t much of a wingman for the first couple of years.

He started temping downtown, and moved into a flat with three gay guys down in the Mission on South Van Ness. For whatever reason he just wasn’t getting along with them. There was a vibe almost from the beginning, he told me—he thought one or two of them might have voted to let him move in because they thought he was cute and wanted to date him. 

One guy was in a relationship, and one afternoon the boyfriend started sniffing around Lamb when the roommate wasn’t there, even invited himself into Lamb’s room asking if he wanted to smoke some weed, and although nothing happened, the roommate got wind of it and things got more tense if not outright hostile. Lamb moved into a studio on Valencia by himself pretty quick after that, and didn’t stay in touch with any of them, so there was that opportunity wasted—roommates are usually a good way to meet people in a new town.

Anyway, it’s clear Lamb was hoping to make some friends at Burning Man. Lindsey—his friend from Cal that I sublet from later on—she was the one who mentioned it. She worked with this guy named George, and he had a boyfriend and a bunch of gay friends who were all going up to Burning Man, and she should come, yada yada. What’s Burning Man? Big party in the desert up north past Reno, anything goes: clothing optional, drugs, music, drag, whatever you want, get your freak on. I had to work so I couldn’t go.

Lamb got super excited—not even so much about the craziness of it but the fact that there was this ready-made group of gay guys that he was going to meet through Lindsey’s friend. “This is it!” he wrote in his journal. “I’ve been waiting so long for SF to split open for me—finally a pinata!!” So, Burning Man was supposed to be his chance to meet some new people, have some fun, maybe find a boyfriend.

They drove all night after work on a Friday—Lindsey couldn’t pick him up until almost 9 p.m., it’s a seven or eight hour drive from SF, and they stopped in Reno to eat—by the time they arrived early Saturday morning and found where George and his friends were camped, they had been up for 24 hours.

Meanwhile, George and his boyfriend were hunkered down in their tent because they had taken opium the night before and got so sick they couldn’t move—some of the BM marshals even came by to check on them and see if they needed medical attention. By the time Lindsey and Lamb got their tent up and unpacked a few things from her car, they were ready to collapse, and just at that moment, the whole rest of the group of friends decided they wanted to go to the hot springs for a morning bath. I guess there were these natural mineral springs on the edge of the playa—that’s what they called the big dried up lake bed the whole thing was staged on. (“Like landing on the moon,” he wrote, “only flatter.”)

Up toddles the cutest cherub of a boy, all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, and says to Lamb before any other introductions, “Hey big boy, I’m Nathan—wanna go to the hot springs with us?”

But that, apparently, was when Lamb made his fatal mistake, or at least he thought so, like he flubbed the first line of his audition—dismissed and never given another chance; Lamb said, “No.” 

“We were driving all night! I was so fucking tired. I had to take a nap. Fucking STUPID! None of that mattered—that NO was poison. He changed right before my eyes from adorable-open-bright to shocked-irritated-cold.”

Apparently, for the rest of the weekend, Nathan wouldn’t even look at him, much less talk to him, and neither would any of the other guys in the group except for George once he recovered from the opium overdose later that day, and Stan the old college dorm mate, because they were both already friends with Lindsey.

He found out much later that Nathan was the humpy party bottom of the group, the bait for the inner circle. Blond, very cute—several of the friends had first been introduced to the group by way of first meeting and fucking Nathan. Their little boy tribe was on the prowl for new tops, and if Nathan gave the thumbs up, an invitation to join the group was extended.

For a month afterward, Lamb berated himself on paper for not sucking it up, for not saying yes when he had the chance. 

Yes, yes, yes!—let’s go to the hot springs together, let’s be playful puppies all of us, let’s frolic and fuck and be friends and lovers forever and ever.

Even when he did ecstasy that night, and offered the extra hit Lindsey didn’t want to Stan, and tried to be friendly and flirty with Nathan, and with Gabriel, the other hot new recruit everyone was panting after—“I caught him looking at me but he looked away when I tried to make eye contact”—that first impression had been ruined and he was officially invisible.

There’s a picture of Lamb, only one actually, from that whole trip. Lindsey dragged him out for another visit with the gang to the hot springs. I think she’s the one who took the picture.

There’s the group in the background—he knew all their names, wrote them on the back of the picture, and a couple of them stand out from his journals—off a little ways, chatting, laughing, painting each other’s backs and faces with the mud from the hot springs. And then there’s Lamb, in the foreground, and he just looks so…Isolated? Removed? Apart, anyway, not one of them. Hard to tell what he was feeling, looking off at the horizon, Wayfarers on—nearby, but miles away.

It just seems so Lamb to me, this picture, and the strange sort of resignation that came over him after that.

Had he not been so disappointed, Lamb probably wouldn’t have been such easy prey for the character that loomed large out of the rave later that night: Count Crunchula.

About a year or so later, Lamb told me that Lindsey caught him up on the Burning Man guys: George had always felt pressured to have sex with all of them, and broke up with the boyfriend, who was verbally abusive toward him. Gabriel died of a GHB overdose at a New Year’s Eve sex party—no one noticed until some dude tried to climb on top of him and realized he wasn’t breathing.

Stan got really into leather and uniforms, and wouldn’t even acknowledge Lamb the few times we went to Sunday Beer Bust at the Eagle.

And not long before I moved to Austin, me and Lamb were walking by Dolores Park, and all of a sudden he stops dead in his tracks and looks back at this guy who had just passed us. I kinda noticed him because he was one of those young dudes who looks like an old man, his boyish looks ravaged by the early HIV drugs—lipodystophy had distended his stomach, and his face had that gaunt, wasted, almost skeletal look. It was Nathan.

♣ ♣ ♣

Episode 10: Count Crunchula

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Esteemed Readers:

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