Rental Man

We were somewhere around Reno on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to wear off.

I remember saying something like "We're all falling asleep... maybe we should put the radio on."

So we switched the heavy trance for soft rock, and started to wake up.  Started too, the creeping, gnawing, prickling realisation that we were going to have to return the hire car.  Or I should say, the rental. 

The car rental firms of Reno seem to have some kind of downer on lending their cars to people going to the Burning Man Festival.  Can't think why. 

Not that it matters; because the little shiny baby-bubble minivan that Mr Avis, the Rental Man, is renting us isn't going anywhere Black Rock City.  A few gentle ambles between Reno's casinos, the rest of the week being gently valleted in the cool fortress of a hotel basement. 

What we are not, absolutely not going to do, is load that fucker up to the back axle with twenty man-days of camping equipment, food, water and above all, booze, and scream it across the desert for the heat and dust and amped-up weirdness of the Burning Man festival.

There's no chance we're going to spend all week living from the tailigate, until finding anything becomes a half-hour rummage through a jumble of clean and dirty packaging, bottles, clothes, dust and detritus.  So we accidentally smash the box of eggs while hunting for the chipotle sauce, soaking them nicely into the warm rear carpet. 

And we are not, for example, going to inadvertantly leave a window about an inch during a dust storm, so that when we return to the car everything inside is covered in a perfect, Christmas-morning layer a fine white dust - like sitting inside a giant snowglobe.  And if any rain were to follow, it certainly wouldn't pass through the dust so that what landed was not water, but mud.  Nor the bag of steaks we brought leak blood.

No.  Nor are we going to leave the car sat, beetle-black, in 40-degree heat all day then watch as some bikini'd girl-georgeous perches herself on the hood for a chat.  Then leaps like a tasered cat - about three metres into air, leaving two flattened ovals of seared-off buttock skin printed onto the paintwork.  Not that.

Neither would we sit in a three-hour playa tailback leaving the site, falling asleep to dubstep, scrounging waste water from the girl at the checkpoint and US-Army-Surplus Meals Ready to Eat from the guy in the Brand-New-If-Now-Largely-Fucked Audi in front.

No.  None of those things happened.  And none of them ever can, in the mind of the man, the Rental Man.  Or... Bad Things.  So - we need to clean this shit up if our not-been-to-Burning-Man story is going to hold.  Time is short; we reach Reno with about 45 minutes before our flight back to LA.

Burning man is leave-no-trace, so what rubbish we couldn't give away, we've brought with us.  Back of the poor minivan stacked to the ceiling with rubbish bags.  We roar up to the rumoured recycling center in the Albertsons car park.  But that, of course, would need us to have sorted our trash into paper, plastic etc. which, of course, we haven't.  Scratch that.  Are there no fucking bins in this country? 

You see it?  I see it.  Big green dumpster in the car park of a nearby office.  Screech up and burst open the back door.  No, we don't have an appointment.  Human chain throwing sacks from the minivan - thirty seconds and we're nowhere but the CCTV.  Have a nice day.

We're on the iPhone - carwashes in the region.  We call - none open.  In the desert's dislocation we've forgotten it's Sunday night.  Airport periphery now.  Flight time looming.  If this was Heathrow we'd have already missed it but US internal flights you can cut finer.

There - a garage with an autowash.  Go.  We sit in silence as the cool water brushes and sloshes against the glass, inches from our faces.  I try to remember my last proper shower.  My finger is on the electric window.  No -  think about the rental man. 

The interior?  There is no vacuum.  We grab dirty t-shirts and start wiping down the inside of the van.  Guys in the front are wiping frantically at the dash - I bundle over the back seat and start on the upholstery.  More dust into mud.

Sleep deprivation is causing me to hallucinate, dark shapes leering and looming from the side of the road.  Who is driving?  How?  I am still in the back as we roll up the rental park ramp.  Fuck it.  Done it.  Burn it.  And what do we care - We've just come back from the p4rty for the 3nd of the W0rld.

Rental Man; smilier than I imagined.  Red shirt and name badge.  Here's your sweet darling little car.   You can see how we've looked after it.  And we clearly, obviously, definitely haven't taken it to Burning Man.

He takes one look at us, one look at the car...  and writes BURNING MAN diagonally across the chit.

Comments

[Ani]

Ed, you're like the Hunter S. Thompson of the blog world. :) Thanks for transporting me from my drab grey office to the golden hallucinatory desert for a bit. I think you may have induced a flashback or three...

[isabelle]

yes, I saw that too ani, and he did say , something like 'the truth is never told during the nine-to-five hours', which fits OE perfectly. ( I was wondering hoping too, if there might be an easter egg in the pictures ?)

[oe]

Ani - the nod was deliberate... HST's shadow hangs over Burning man.

Isabelle - No... although now you say it, I wish I'd thought of it!

[TSP]

Fear and Loathing in Nevada :)

I know it well. Even managed to get married there. Welcome back.

[Camille]

I've heard tales from Burning Man but none so evocatively put.

The day I finally get there, I will be expecting alot, perhaps even the reincarnation of HST himself, thanks to you mr oe.

[Lillipilli]

So evocative I could smell you, which was a bit unfortunate.

[pocketpunk]

its going to be dead easy to return to work after that little sabbatical

[clarissa]

Were all the men burning? Were the women painted (and treated like) floral goddesses? Glad you're back.

[bohémienne]

Thank you muchly for sharing the experience (and the flashbacks), and the wisdom of the rental man. They always know.