Future Sex (22 page)

After the show, I wandered around. The loft gave way to a second large room
with a couch and two king-size beds made up with satin sheets. I walked into the massive slate-gray bathroom with its Jacuzzi and had a conversation with a couple about the dream of one day living in a backyard casita in Oakland with a composting toilet. I wandered back outside to the loft, where couples and threesomes had begun to pair off on couches. The party was vaguely food themed, so there
were chocolate-covered strawberries in one corner. Nearby was a wheel of fortune that could be spun for different instructions. After several conversations with other single people, conversations that felt like job interviews, I ended up taking turns spinning the wheel of fortune with a man. I did so with a slightly exhausted determination to get the show on the road. He was a bit younger. We spun
the wheel, awkwardly obeying the instructions to feed each other chocolate-covered strawberries and kiss. Then we went into the second room to do whip-its. I had never done a whip-it.

My new friend explained how it worked: screw on a small canister of nitrous oxide to the stainless-steel whipped-cream maker. Exhale deeply, then inhale while depressing the handle of the machine, filling your lungs
with nitrous oxide instead of oxygen. This produces a short, one- or two-minute high. Deprived of oxygen, the mind dissolves; physical sensation becomes acute, a goofy giddiness and bubbliness sets in. Whip-its are good for a sex party because they do not impair sexual function and can heighten physical sensation, although I was advised not to do too many because, said Elizabeth, “it starts to
become difficult to come back.”

On my first whip-it, the man I had met lightly touched my arm while I lay back, the feeling of his hands producing warmth and electricity while my vision broke into geometric patterns. During his turn, he asked that I kiss him. We made out for a while, doing the occasional whip-it, the cold, cheerfully colored canisters accumulating in the folds of the sheets we
lay on. I felt airy and happy. We stood up with our hands against the wall and took turns doing whip-its and smacking each other with a riding crop. Around us, groups of people lay together on beds and couches, stood making out in corners. On a couch, a man lay across the laps of his friends, who formed a spanking train. The room filled with the pneumatic sound of whip-its and of the metal canisters
rolling across the floor. I sat with Elizabeth and took a whip-it, after which she massaged my head while a man lightly shocked me with an electrified wand.

The after party was at the apartment of one of Elizabeth’s partners, a man with whom she had exchanged I-love-yous. I had overheard a conversation between her and Wes before she left, where she had asked Wes if he would let her go on her
own. It was a conversation that was difficult to listen to. I believed Wes when he cheerfully assented, but I also knew my own feelings would have been hurt. Chris was there, too, with his now-steady girlfriend.

The after party was held in the penthouse of a new building. Its windows looked over the LED light installation on the Bay Bridge, the cars speeding back to Oakland for the night under
icicles of white light, fewer coming to San Francisco from the other direction. The apartment felt unlived in, all glossy surfaces and wood, the refrigerators in drawers, a bowl of small apples that were uniform in shape and color. The master bedroom had the impractical bathroom of an overdesigned hotel, with no door, just an open alcove off to one side. On the whiteboard of the office, an app had
been carefully diagrammed, like a stage set, and what books there were on the shelves were ordered by height. Elizabeth had slyly slipped me a condom but I didn’t have sex. I had a boyfriend in New York, and he had not wanted me to attend the party at all. Elizabeth said she knew people who were good at counseling about how to open a relationship if both people did not share the same interest in
it, but I was still thinking of myself as just a visitor, or rather neither here nor there, someone undertaking an abstract inquiry but not yet with true intention. I regretted having been shy in my making out earlier at the sex party, that I had spent the night with one person instead of joining the cuddle puddle that had coalesced on the satin-sheeted bed opposite. I wished I had other chances
for this degree of experimentation, and wondered what it would feel like not to be a visitor to this scene, but a part of it. It had been easier for me to relax because most of the people in the room had been strangers. Had they been my friends, I would have been self-conscious. Now I sat in the office with a group of sleepy partygoers. We chatted and looked at the view of the bridge and the unceasing
exchange of cars. In the background was the sound of whip-its, of orgasms, of water falling from a shower into a porcelain tub.

BURNING MAN

I wanted to go to Burning Man because I saw the great festival in the desert as the epicenter of the three things that interested me most in 2013: sexual experimentation, psychedelic drugs, and futurism. But everyone said Burning Man was over, that it was spoiled. It was inundated with rich tech people who defied the festival’s precious tenet of radical self-reliance by their overreliance
on paid staff. Burning Man, which started in 1986 when twenty people burned an effigy on the beach, was turning into a dusty version of Davos. It was the kind of thing Ashton Kutcher went to, and the wife of the Aga Khan, and they came only to gawk, not to participate. Old-timers lamented the rise of “plug and play” culture. The community had gotten mainstream. There were too many LEDs
now, too many RVs, too many generators, tech executives, and too much EDM. There were TED talks. There were technolibertarians.

I would decide for myself. I rented an RV with six other people, a group organized by a friend in San Francisco. I think if someone were to draw a portrait of the people who were “ruining Burning Man” it would have looked like us. With one exception the six all worked
in the tech industry. The exception was a corporate lawyer. None of us had been to Burning Man before. We paid a company from San Diego to drive our RV to Nevada and pack out our trash afterward.

I ordered all the things online: dust goggles, sunscreen, sun hat, headlamp, some LED lights, animal print leggings. I arranged delivery of a bicycle. My friends would bring the food and water from San
Francisco. I wondered about how to get drugs to Nevada, and decided it was safest to show up and hope someone would provide.

Meanwhile, my fellow RV crowd delayed their planning with the last-minute flexibility of people who don’t worry about money. They bought plane tickets at the last minute, and then changed their flights. One of them still had not gotten a ticket two days before he was supposed
to go. One of them ordered a bicycle from eBay Now and had it delivered to his San Francisco office within an hour, like a taco. One of them ended up flying the hundred miles from Reno to Black Rock City in a chartered Cessna.

I flew to Reno using frequent-flyer miles and stood by a folding table at the airport until someone offered me a ride. He was a dad from Greenwich, Connecticut, who worked
in finance. He also gave a ride to a medieval literature scholar from Chicago. The finance guy had once had another job, engineering teledildonics at the turn of the new century. On the way through the empty desert landscape, speeding toward the prehistoric lakebed where Burning Man is held each year, we smoked concentrate of weed through an electronic vaporizer shaped like an elegant black kazoo.
We talked about teledildonics and hexayurts.

We arrived at the gate to Black Rock City just after sunset. We listened to a dedicated radio station, which ordered us in a stern voice to drive ten miles an hour. We waited in line for two hours. Outside, people got in and out of their cars. They drank beers. Caravans communicated with each other by walkie-talkie under the floodlights. On the horizon
we could see the festival, multicolored and twinkling. This year 68,000 people had come to Burning Man. Thirteen years ago, when the finance guy from Greenwich had come for the first time, there had been 15,000 attendees. One of my car mates, who was from Mexico, observed that the scene was just like the U.S.-Mexico border, especially when, at the entrance, our car was searched for stowaways.
We handed over our tickets. We hugged the greeters, lay on our backs and made snow angels in the dust, and rang a bell. We had arrived.

*   *   *

Burning Man is organized in circles, like Dante’s Inferno. The circles, letters A through L, are intersected by minutes, like a clock. Most people stay at theme camps, which combine collective infrastructure—kitchen, sun showers, shade, water tanks—with
individual dwellings. These range from high-end operations with a full catering service to groups of friends from California and Nevada with common sexual, political, musical, or professional interests camping in tents. The themes could be creative—one camp, Animal Control, was dedicated to trapping and tagging Burning Man attendees in animal costumes. Others served coffee every morning, or
played only music by the Grateful Dead.

Because we were radically reliant on some people from San Diego to provide us with an RV and had waited until the last minute to plan our attendance, we were not with a camp. Instead we were placed on the outermost circle, at L and 7:00, next to the guy who had driven fifteen RVs from San Diego to Burning Man. His name was Jesus. He showed me around the
RV. He was very drunk. Speaking English with a Spanish accent, he talked about his homesickness, how he was tired of being here and excited to go home, to Minnesota, where he lived. We talked about Minnesota, where I had grown up. He showed me various stowaway beds in which the seven of us could sleep, then pressed a button to expand the RV in width. In the process, an open medicine-cabinet door
was ripped off its hinges. Its mirror shattered on the floor. “I’ll clean it up,” said Jesus, scooping piles of broken glass with his bare hands.

I biked out to the playa, the central area where things happen at night. I passed awesome structures, orbited by glowing people on other bikes. I biked back around the outer streets of Black Rock City, which were deserted and dark. I was lonely. I did
not yet understand how to interact with this place. I returned to the RV, found it still empty, and went out again. I watched an animatronic octopus spit fire from its articulated metal limbs to the rhythm of electronic dance music. I climbed the spaceship with the Burning Man on top. I returned to the RV. I hoped my friends would arrive soon.

They arrived after three a.m. I say “my friends”
but I knew only one of them, Adam, and him I barely knew. Earlier in the summer we had spent a week together in Portugal after hooking up at a wedding. The last time I saw him had been at seven a.m. in Lisbon, when he left my bed to catch an airplane to a bachelor party in Austin, Texas. Now we reunited in the middle of the night in the Nevada desert. Other than sex we had little in common. “We have
nothing in common!” we would marvel.

He lived in San Francisco and worked in tech. He was always “slammed” at work. Judging from his social media feeds he attended lots of conferences with “thought leaders,” destination weddings, ski trips, holidays with groups of friends in beautiful houses, and he was frequently launching new initiatives with his rapidly expanding company. He had subscribed
to a DNA mapping service that predicts how you might die, the results of which are posted to an iPhone app, so that your iPhone knows how likely you are to get heart disease. When the subject of Burning Man first came up, we both talked about how we wanted to go, how we knew people made fun of it but that we were drawn to it. He said he saw it as a good networking opportunity, but we also saw it
as a thing that was happening right now and only right now, and we were both interested in things that were specific to the present.

Now he put on a reflective jumpsuit and a fedora. We ate some caramel-corn marijuana purchased from a California medical dispensary, went out until dawn, then came back to the RV and had sex, despite the other occupants of the RV. “I want to have sex with this person
forever,” I thought afterward.

It took me thirty-six hours to get adjusted to Burning Man. During that time I was aware that something was happening around me, in which I could partake, but I did not know how to begin. The greeters at the gate had given us a guidebook, called “What Where When,” which listed events that read like mini prose poems in futurist jargon. “NEW TECH CITY SOCIAL INNOVATION
FUTURES,” read one. “Creative autonomous zones & cities of the future … resiliency, thrivability, open data, mixing genomes and biometrics with our passwords and cryptocurrencies. What’s your future look like? Social entrepreneurs and free culture makers, hack the system and mash the sectors.” For someone interested in sexual experimentation, the opportunities for self-education here were endless:
there were lectures on orgasmic meditation, “shamanic auto-asphyxiation,” eco-sexuality, “femtheogens,” “tantra of our menses,” “sex drugs and electronic music,” and the opportunity to visit the orgy dome.

I biked around, accepted offers of lemonade and drinks, and had some conversations. I attended a lecture on new research about treating illnesses with psychedelic drugs. I listened to someone
describe her dissertation, “Transpersonal Phenomena Induced by Electronic Dance Music.” The weed made Adam excitable and inattentive. Next to his bed, a small landfill of plastic water bottles had accumulated. I wasn’t sure if he wanted to hang out with me, or share his life-hacked body with the naked free spirits of Burning Man. I wasn’t sure what I wanted. The second night, to give everyone space,
I biked over to the outer playa, where it was silent, empty, and very cold. I went to bed early.

The next day I woke up around nine a.m. I went out alone and walked past a plywood booth painted yellow. Its sign advertised “Non-Monogamy Advice.” A rainbow flag blew taut in the wind, the words “Yes Please” printed on it in white. Beneath that was a black flag with a pirate’s skull and crossbones.
Signs hung on the booth said the doctor was “curious” and “available,” but I didn’t see anyone. I went closer to read the articles taped to the booth, which claimed humans had not evolved to be monogamous.