DPW Recruitment Manual

Chapter 13

The Art of Darkness

or: Apocalypse? You're a Manager... You Figure It Out!

as told by BillyBob *

Frisco... shit. I'm still only in Frisco. Every time, I think I'm going to wake up back in the desert. When I was home after my first year it was worse: I'd wake up and there'd be nothing. I hardly said a word to my wife until I said yes to a divorce. When I was here, I wanted to be there. When I was there, all I could think of was getting back into the desert. Everyone gets everything they want. I wanted a mission. A Project. And for my sins they gave me one. Brought it up to me like room service.

The year was 1997. Put in for a second tour, and got my marching orders in a barely-decipherable San Francisco Crackpot Society newsletter: meet your contacts at the "Balloon Saloon"; show your dossier to the elite command group, "The Organizers"; provide classified services-as-needed at some Shangri-La in the desert on Memorial Day. Here was my chance to escape the white noise of everyday life that had crowded me since my first tour, when I paid my dues carrying water and washing people's backsides, ankle-deep in the caustic mud of the body shop that was Free Chowder Camp.

As if ordained by voodoo, within weeks of tossing my company business card in the fire during the Burn that fateful first year, I was laid off. Knocked around from assignment to assignment, not one of them involving Art, Fire, or even Mud. The Burning Man experience had drained my soul. Washed me clean. Gutted me like a fish. And I craved more. God, I was such a hippie. Ripe for recruitment.

The rickety south-of-the-slot firetrap was cloaked in gothic shades of dark. Angling along dim Balloon Saloon hallways decorated with exotic exponents of the nether-culture, I overheard two intensely demeanored people hashing over recruiting a team together to "fix" the buildings on a remote Nevada cattle ranch. The mission dangled in front of me like a carrot root before a tunneling gopher and, much like that voracious half-blind subterranean rodent, I could only sense this golden goal with raw, hungry instinct. My first contact with The Organizers was the square-jawed Frau Campingplatz, whom my associates had negotiated the year before. The other, the man now powerfully framed in the shadows of the hall, was Mr. Kurtz.

My barefaced offer to "fix" whatever needed to be "fixed" was met with incredulous looks from the pair, but perhaps it was my glaring lack of body modifications that made me stand out from other recruits. They explained the mission: establishing a base for a proposed colony, beyond the reach of the opposing forces of the BLM, with running water and plenty of space to mount the Project for years to come. Obviously in need of "volunteers" for such a mission, they gave me directions to the ranch. Mr. Kurtz would be waiting.

I was going to the best place in the world, and I didn't even know it yet. Hours away and hundreds of miles up the asphalt river that snakes over the spine of California and into the desolation of Nevada like an electro-luminescent cable plugged straight into Kurtz. I took my hastily scribbled directions and guided my boat from Frisco to Spider Ranch.

Spider Ranch revealed more than portentous tangles of reptiles and vermin strewn amid desiccated mounds of dung; more than the abandoned buildings of a once-hopeful ranch family, now pried apart by the hardhearted heat and wind. We discovered who could cook without poisoning us for days. Who could avoid smashing their hand with a hammer or post driver. Who could work sunup to sundown on a ration of fermented cactus. Who we had to hide the keys to the bulldozer from. Who could execute a recipe for wholly blackened pork with extreme prejudice.

We penetrated deeper and deeper into the art of darkness. It was very quiet there... too quiet. At night sometimes the roll of drums would run along the sagebrush and remain sustained faintly, as if hovering in the air high over our heads on the playa till the first break of day. Whether the beating signified peace, love, or a bent generator rod, we could not tell. The dawns were heralded by the descent of a chill stillness; the volunteers slept, their fires burned low; the snapping of a twig would make you start. We were wanderers on a prehistoric earth, on an earth that wore the aspect of an unknown planet. We could have fancied ourselves pilgrims taking possession of an accursed inheritance, to be subdued at the cost of profound anguish and of excessive toil. In the end, we couldn't secure a decent lease on the place, but we made our stand.

In reverse temporal decomposition, days turned into weeks, weeks into months, all the while getting closer to Kurtz and his battle-hardened band of dropouts. We didn't get much USO, aside from the multi-lingual vocal stylings of a bald Bulgarian contralto, and our idea of R&R was cold rice and a little rooster stew.

We had only three ways home: death, victory, or pissing off Kurtz.

Toiling in the sweltering heat, rumors filtered down that Kurtz had gone native, and was skirting dangerously close to insanity in his dealings with the cagey clan of natives squatting on the ranch. Their matron, Annibustabuckel, counted timber both coming and going from the stockpiles, so that they were tallied at least twice. Her consort, Fattiarbuckel, a Brobdingnagian mystery of the wilderness who still stinks in my nostrils, performed amphibious morning ablutions splashing ponderously in our only water source.

Then there was Kurtz' distracted lieutenant, Flinstone.

Once, when he stopped working long enough to talk, he rambled, "We do a lot of shootin' here. I like to finish operations early. Let me tell you such-and-suches -- Charley don't shoot worth a lick! We'll come in low in the Bucket, out of the rising sun, and a few clicks out, we'll put on the music. Yeah, I use Master P -- scares the hell out of the Rangers! My home-boys love it!"

As volunteers, we knew what depending on the kindness of strangers meant. The hard desert conditions tested each one of us, and each of us tested each other, until we were pretty damned testy. But who could forget people like Kokopelli, who unrolled and set miles of wire. Or Happy Dank, who always managed to find a local meat source in the cross-hairs of his flintlock. Sherman Tank, who knew the military importance of a dumpling. Calico Cheese, Johnny Honor, Johnny Taller, and the rest of the Piddle Camp crew. And Germ Meson, an atomic force all by himself.

One full-moon night, I made the mistake of exchanging pleasantries with the grizzled, bony apparition called Flesh, who mounted a bulldozer every day for weeks to cut clearings in the coarse brush, and still found the vigor to mount the ladies. "Hey, Flesh, sure didn't sound like you needed Viagra pills last night." He returned a wild glare. One bushy eyebrow pulsed, then the other, and then both of them were doing a hula dance on his forehead. He moved toward me and growled, "Viagra pills! Viagra pills! Slowly I turned. Step by step. Inch by fucking useless inch..."

I beat hell out of there, and made note: stay out of the way of Flesh, and don't mention Stella.

Kurtz would lumber out of his shadowy tent-trailer, rub his ivory head, and deliver apocalyptic speeches in a voice hoarse from swallowing dust. "I love the smell of diesel in the morning! You know, one time we had a hill bulldozed for twelve hours, and when it was all over I walked up. We didn't find one of them, not one stinking greasewood or sagebrush. The smell -- you know, that diesel smell -- the whole hill -- it smelled like victory."

Boy howdy, this got us fired up to finish the roads, clear firebreaks, and string fences. Frankly, we could have used some napalm, but we learned to make do with crude tools made from the rib bones sticking out of the sides of the "livestock" on the ranch.

The horror... the horror...

But that was not the end, my friend.

That was the beginning of DPW, and the rest is her story.

* With profound apologies to Joseph Conrad, John Milius, and Francis Ford Coppola.

© Bob Stahl | Home