Burning Man 2008: SO MANY BARS, SO LITTLE TIME!

September 5, 2008 by PT Rothschild.

A PLACE WHERE EVERYBODY KNOWS YOU’RE GAME

Black Rock City, Nevada – Two guys walk into a bar called Whiskey & Whores. One guy says to the female barkeep, “We already got some whiskey,” flashing his full cup at her, “We want two whores to go.”

Without missing a beat the barkeep fires back, “Whores are always ready to go!”

Reeling from that come-back knock-out, I put my mouth in my back pocket, and Mongoose and I left the bar without another word.

Mongoose and I were out exploring a street in BRC and walked into this bar upon seeing the name out front. Bars are plentiful in Black Rock City and every one is different. Unlike in my Default World where there is a church on every corner and cheap repetition is valued over unbridled creativity, the Burning Man bar scene is diverse and appealing. But not every bar has a ‘Cheers’ style bar-mouth either.

A funny thing happened one day when I was on the way to the Post Office. It was a day after I had been up till daybreak and I had to make a decision to go out either before the heat of the day or after. I needed to send some postcards off from the event. With a Midwest work ethic, I decided on ‘before’. The PO pretty much was ‘downtown’ from where I lived in a ‘poppin’ residential/commercial zone, so by the time I got to the ‘Wheel’ district of town, a couple of miles away, I was ready to stop and take a breather. I pulled up to a halt on Esplanade amidst the slow moving but hectic traffic and looked to my right. There stood a bar. This bar was peopled with folks more my age than at the TTL so I ambled on in.

It looked like a cool little tavern. Inside as I made friends with the bartender, a woman in a yellow top and crazy color pants noticed my rapidly deteriorating straw hat that I always wore during the sunny daytime hours. As I sat there quenching my thirst with some liquid libation, this lady stitched up my hat with thin wire, not thread. After that she took me over to her tent out back and offered me a costume for that night. All this was for no charge and to a perfect stranger who had just wandered through the ‘front door’ of the bar a few brief minutes before. I left there with my hat fixed, a full cup of cold drink, and my own pair of crazy color pants with a coordinated costume to boot.

(An aside here, Folks. Just as I left Coffee Camp that morning, I had casually wondered about putting together a costume and what just such a costume would entail. Now I had one put together for me by a pro. It wouldn’t be the first time the ‘magic’ of BRC made itself known in my life.)

Just down the street toward 8:00 & E(dsel) is a camp called Tone Age.

“It started out last year with just 12 people, a simple shade tent and a keg. It grew (Ooo, a grower!) exponentially to 50 people here this year from communication on MySpace. We got this German DJ that just walked up and asked if he could work our bar,” said Angela, a dark-haired 23 year-old beauty as her friend Colin, a musician with a buzzed blond head looked on.

We had met at, yes, you guessed it, the porta-potties. The conversation was light and when I knew there was a cold beer waiting, I walked on back to their camp with them. Such is just one way you find a bar in BRC. Another way is to hitch a ride aboard a large art car, though they usually have liquid refreshments aboard themselves. This is a way that I found the best Bloody Mary I’ve ever tasted, thanks to Dan and his lovely companion.

It was made at a place called Vomiting Sparrows and was a bar just around the corner of 8:00 and C(orvair) down around 8:15 along C. Placed along the bar was a mix of ingredients that might have been used in a William S. Burroughs novel. I waited my turn and then tasted something that worked wonders on my slightly fatigued bod that was left over from hitting a huge rave with Carl Cox, the British DJ, the night before out at the Opulent Temple, the site of IPod’s full Monty the night before that (“Psssst! I did a naughty last night”).

However, finding bars is on a time constraint because in a city that only lasts a week, you know the weekend has to be intense, and you’re not going to be sitting in a bar at that time. But there was one bar, the Tree Top Lounge (see yesterday’s story), that fit the bill for me. Perhaps it was the fact that about 15 guys built the whole thing in a day. Perhaps it was finding a new ‘secret menu’ entrée for Mr. Pete’s Breakfast Burrito Extravaganza. Or perhaps it was the crazy things you might have to do to get a drink (burning-man095.AVI) if you threw a bum number.

Take for instance this one day. I’m standing there with my elbow on the bar as the usual crowd wonders in. Among them is a mature woman and her husband. She is topless with the chest you would expect to see on an older woman that doesn’t live in So Cali, and has on an interestingly savage looking short rawhide skirt covering two well-shaped legs wrapped in long lace-up boots. He is dressed like someone from ‘Tank Girl’. She rolls a ‘4’.

B.A., the young bartender with a TV hero’s features, looks at her numbers, reads the dice menu, and says, “You have to be spanked, four times, before you can get a drink,” very matter-of-factly.  

Then with a sly smile he looks toward my direction and asked, “Who wants to spank this woman?”

Without hesitation or a moment’s care about hubby, I raise my hand in the air. B.A. nodded his affirmation of my request and the woman put her elbows on the bar and stuck out her bottom like a ‘secretary’. I smoothed her skirt down over her amazingly firm rear end and gave her four sharp licks of the hand that yielded no pain to me. When finished, she straightened up, looked at me and smiled.

I smiled back and replied, “It’s all in the wrist!” I then turned to B.A. and said, “Well, my work here is done.”

I tipped my hat to the freshly spanked woman, strolled over to the back stairs, and slowly walked back to the camp just on the other side of the potties. IPod noticed that the glazed look in my eye wasn’t the usual cross-faded one and inquired as to what happened.

I said, “I have a new favorite bar and a new favorite bartender. In this crazy city I found a place where everybody knows you’re game (and your ‘game’, I thought to myself).”

To be continued on Monday.

Next: Sex & The City, A Jedi’s Mettle vs. The 3 Temptations of Poonanny

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