The elephant is in the room

August 31, 007
Black Rock City

Rich people are weird.

Now that the non-disclosure agreement has come through and they’ve arrived on-playa, I can tell some of it. Not all of it, but some.

I’ve got pet celebrities now. They’re from Hollywood and they’re in all these movies some of us love very much. I’m not allowed to say how many of them there are, but it’s less than half a dozen. One of the “pets” (as I call them) discovered Burning Man through a producer or agent or somesuch friend of theirs, and went to the Website, and ravenously read through the whole thing, and came upon some stuff I wrote when I was working for the DPW a few years ago. He Googled my name and researched my Cyclecide stuff and the blog I started back up this summer, and he decided I’d be the perfect person to employ as his group’s Burning Man planner.

Yes, I said Burning Man planner. Yes, I got paid. A lot. And you know what? It was fun. Not all rich and famous people are douchebags, as it turns out.

I took multiple trips to LA this summer, and stayed at a big fancy house with air conditioning and such expensive stuff it made me nervous to walk around. I ate nice food their chef made and played with their kids and practiced Spanish with the nanny and got kind of pampered by their small but friendly staff. I swam in a big pretty pool and watched inspirational movies (The Wild One, the Mad Max series, Bladerunner, Waterworld, etc) with people who are in the movies (not those ones though). I observed them as they dealt with the paparazzi — not a pretty thing. And I got to tell some rich and famous people what to do.

First rule: I could be as bitchy and up-front as I wanted to be. Other than that, my orders were to make sure, above and beyond everything, that they blended in. They gave me checks and I went shopping for appropriate food and drinks, dietary supplements, supplies, and clothing. I talked to them about the different kinds of camps they could set up (of course I’m not telling which model they went with) and we drew the layout together. They insisted on bringing the chef and the nanny for the kids, and I advised them to hire a handyman as well. They commissioned one of my mechanic friends in Oakland to make them a Road Warrior-style art car, which we trailered up to the desert early and dusted up and broke in for them. The star-camp’s staff have been here on the desert already for a few days, and I’ve been trotting over to see how setup has progressed. The celebs themselves flew in Thursday morning.

Luckily for them, a massive dust storm blew in that afternoon, and immediately gave them the plebeian whited-out look which screams “I’ve been here for ages.” If the pets truly wanted to go all out in “our” style, as they told me they did — to lean toward the appearance of desert-rat utilitarian workers rather than blinky furry E-tards — they had to dirty up. They’re all so clean and perfect and sculpted and well-taken-care-of in the default world, it gave me quite a rush to make them lay down on the playa and do dust angels. Sort of like if you really did get to push the bitchy high-school prom queen into the mud. No — if she laid in it because you told her to.

We talked a lot about how I’m accidentally racist against rich people, even though I plan on being one someday. The pets are (mostly) not all that spoiled — pampered, and used to the high life, and entitled at times, but not tantrumish. They care about the Earth, and the Green Man theme drew them in. They put their money where their mouth is and donate a large portion of their incomes to charity. In short, they don’t suck. If it were some blond bolt-on-boob-job pop star asking me, there’s no way I would’ve said yes.

Needless to say, they adore the car my friend made. It plays loud-ass music so nobody can talk to us, and the mechanic (who sometimes doubles as the driver) fiddles with the kill switches and turns on the beepers and and shines bright spotlights out in front of us. Basically, the car was designed to drown out everything but the immediate experience of riding the car itself. All while back-lighting us dirtbags — and now incognito celebrities posing as dirtbags, ironically — with stark white bulbs and flashing siren lights.

The view from the car, pre-Paul Addis burn night

We rolled around together all Thursday night after the Gate Pride parade. Bedecked in welding goggles and hats and dust masks, my pets passed with flying colors. I wouldn’t let them come with me to the Gate Pride party. Not only because I was certain the pets couldn’t quite yet hang with getting kicked during an impromptu wrestling match with weapons, or being razzed by my drunk new-family members, or having to listen to Little Matt’s car blare “Sexy Back” 300 times in a row. Everyone in Gatestapo / Perimeter would’ve been weirded out by their presence, even if they don’t watch TV or know who the pets are. Gate Pride was a private party. No pictures, even. We’re sort of aboriginal about that stuff.

My mechanic and a couple other friends and I swiped the petses from camp in the wee hours of the morning. The girls had showered that night in their giant castle of an RV — even though they’re tough chicks, they’re still Hollywood — so we made them wallow around on the playa and do dust angels again. (They wouldn’t wrestle each other — not the face!) We rolled to all the sculptures and they marveled at stuff and we marveled at them marveling at stuff.

Sometimes one or two of the pets would sneak up on a raver and remove their own dust masks and goggles in a dome and smile all big until the look on the raver’s face had run the gamut from surprise to confusion to eureka. Then they’d fade away into the pulsing throngs and come giggling back to the safety of the pointy tetanus car. They only got kind of freaked out twice: once when my mechanic accidentally pushed me onto the barbed wire hanging from the side of the car when he fed me a Whip-It from his mouth, and I was bleeding and didn’t care — and once when he stopped by his camp to pick up a sledgehammer … just because.

It was one of the most surreal experiences of my life. And the petses’ lives, too. A dirtbag exchange program, as it were. The pets were quite horrified by the violently rude manner in which we interact with each other, but they stayed with me, and got into it, and didn’t run screaming, and actually caught on to the vibe fairly quickly. Most of them are actors, after all.

Do I feel bad about accepting money to sculpt and fashion a group of people’s Burning Man experience like a wedding or a bar mitzvah?

Does the LLC feel bad about accepting money?