Spanking Bike

The raging, dreaded hippie kids, swirled in by a technicolored tornado of glee, glitter and hallucinogens, sent by the hippie Goddess to anoint the unblessed with ointments and doses and liquor belted straight from the bottle…

“…Chris…Christopher DOY-le…”

Chris’ Subaru was slapped on the side of dusty street running along warehouses in the SOMA district of San Francisco. Chris was not visible as we approached the car.

“I hope he’s still there…”

“We found him completely, just…baking when we went to get breakfast…he was completely red and passed out and there was literally a POOL of sweat on his stomach.”

We craned our neck around and saw that Chris had mashed himself against the passenger-side door to avoid the sun. Thankfully, he had NOT baked to death like some poor, neglected dog in a super-market parking lot. He groaned to wakefulness.

“How’dsh…how did I get in my car?”

“I dunno.”

The hippie kids…I had come upon rest of the group passed out in Omar and Ninette’s apartment, strewn across the sofas and chairs and floors like they had out-fucked themselves in an orgy.  There was my New Paltz friend Josh, Chris Doyle’s boyfriend Johnny, who I had met with Chris in Central America, as well as the unknown-to-me Mikey and Carolyn…

The goal of the day was to get to Decompression before 4 o’clock, when they started charging. Decompression was the after-party to Burning Man. Burning Man was the fabled festie of all festies, held out on the desert Playa, where a small city sprung up in September dedicated to the Gods of Arts and Tripping, where conventionality was the devil, the member of the party that was left back in civilization.

Carolyn and I roused everyone at three. They all leapt to drunken action, bumbling about while donning candy-striped vests, wedding veils, multi-colored corded pants, slippers, sandals, hiking boots, sheer scarfs, jangling bells, studded belts…everyone was strung out from last night, and weren’t making much sense. I laughed in glee as they knocked their silly heads together—it had been a boring couple weeks.

We left the apartment at 3:28, but confusion reigned to the extent that we kept recrossing the same crosswalks outside the apartment, our path nicely making a geometric square, but little progress…directions were found and discarded, people ran back inside or to Chris’ car to grab wallets, garments, weed…

At 3:42, wanting to make the cut-off, I elected to sprint the two miles to the event. As I approached, the dress of everyone became more zany and promiscuous. I passed women baring cleavage and ass-cheek.  I dodged around a guy wearing a line of cloth that looped over his shoulders, disappeared into his butt and came around to barely cover his package.

There was a line for entrance, so I missed the cut-off. I was worried that the bombastic, blitzed group behind me would become distracted, but they arrived just as I was calling Ninette for the second time.

The party started in the queue. I saw Johnny receive a small squeezer-bottle of potion from an epically tall man dressed in drag. He dropped four doses of acid on his wrist and licked them up.

…oh the raging hippie-kids, eyes tie-dyed with colors past the rainbow’s spectrum, limbs tweaking like Gumbee’s (out and in), wrapping others in hugs…

The beers were cheap. Johnny bought me a Lagunita’s IPA for a past slight, and we bumped into one of the groups’ friends from the Playa. She was an engineer who had built an infinity sign for Burning Man that was large enough for people to run on, joggers on a perfect, closed loop. Another hippie-pal was met. She materialized a bottle of cinnamon whiskey from under her cape and we all took a belt.

I walked lit, twisted. I felt drunker than I should’ve.

“That’s the spirit of the Burn. It’ll get you FUCKED up.”

The group split, bumped back together, reformed. Chris I and were asked by a random girl to walk her back to her car. Chris claimed that she was on meth. I found out he was just fucking with me, but not before I had asked her about it. Johnny was on another planet, giggling, wrestling with Chris. We puffed a spliff with the engineer. The sun went down and cleavage was covered. I danced with Ninette and Carolyn to trap. Night came with wafting winds.

…the hippie kids rage, broken bottles and cashed bowls, come down from the mountains to bless this soiled city…

The lot of them were farming 4 hours north of the city. They were supposed to leave the next day, but chose to keep the party going, renting a hotel room in the Mission District. I was exhausted after Decompression and elected not to go.

I was a hippie kid for the day, anyway.