Wally Glenn is at least as different from his alter ego as Clark Kent is from Superman. Not lesser, mind you, but other, a stout, boyish 40 year old with a floppy shock of wheat colored hair and blue eyes set in the face of a man who likes to laugh. When he’s too busy to shave, his beard stubble comes in red.

 

Wally Glenn is a prankster, a sometime standup comic, a website developer, a performance artist, a loyal friend and a cantankerous employee. Women with troubles sense his galahad complex, a compulsion to be chivalrous even when there’s no romantic upside involved. Friends count on him to share software or solve their IT problems or just make them laugh, usually for the price of a good meal.

 

There’s a yiddish word for guys like Wally. He’s a mensch.

 

Pyro Boy is an adrenaline junkie who works at the meeting place of

chemistry and aesthetics, a combustible performance artist who in the last twelve years or so has probably set himself on fire and blown himself up in public more than any other living human. He’s done it internationally, on major television shows, at Pinewood Studios in London, at theme parks and fire arts events and, of course, at Burning Man. 

 

With flaming fountains strapped to his back, 80-foot gouts of fire shooting from his hips and thousands upon thousands of firecrackers exploding on torso and extremities, Pyro Boy dances wildly and turns cartwheels while he burns. As a finale, he rips off his flaming safety helmet and casts it away. It explodes spectacularly when it hits the ground.

 

Even at the farthest outposts of the audience, the impact is dramatic—sharp intakes of breath, racing pulses, sighs of relief when Pyro Boy improbably survives self-immolation one more time.

 

“The whole thing takes from 60 seconds to two minutes,” Glenn says. “I can’t always see clearly because of the helmet and the respirator, but I’m hyper-aware of what’s going on, the sequence of ignition. Once the fuses are lit, time actually slows way down for me.” He grins.  “Curiously enough, your adrenaline level shoots way up.”

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Every Pyro Boy performance is different, and every one requires about five hours of getting ready, which doesn’t count the days and weeks spent testing burn rates and color changes, collecting the fireworks and choreographing the 90-second show. “We put a lot of research into everything to make sure it’s gong to look good,“ Glenn says. “Safety’s important, too. I need to know my way around the space even if I can’t see very well. If there’s a propane line over here and I stumble and set it on fire, it’s all over.”

 

For this year’s Burning Man performance piece—The Raygun Gothic Rocket--a collaboration of Crucible fire artists, who built a beautiful blue simulacrum of a 50s sci-fi B-movie rocketship and Glenn, who recast Pyro Boy as doomed test pilot Gus Gristle—the complexities were even greater than usual, with more moving pieces to coordinate and more and bigger fireworks than ever before.

Apart from Glenn’s 5-hour suitup, the act itself took twelve hours to prepare.

 

Test pilot Gristle’s ordnance was a tour de force, about forty pounds of fireworks strapped to Glenn inside his sixteen ounce Kevlar and Nomex body suit, taped in place to hold firm during the cartwheels and carefully counter-weighted in front to keep him from falling backwards. Normally Glenn spends about ten minutes in the suit before he gets lit. This year at Burning Man, the show was delayed for almost two hours.

 

It was hellishly hot inside the suit and hard to stay limber enough to do the gymnastic parts of the show. It was hard to stay amped up and metabolize the prolonged adrenaline rush. “Of course I had to pee,” Glenn says. “It’s hard to find a way to pee discreetly in front of 30,000 people.” 

 

Finally, it was showtime, those two slow-motion minutes of danger and delight. 

 

Not used to having such big fountains behind him, Glenn let his arms swing backward. They caught fire. He had to calculate his own burn rate, to find a subtle way to let his assistants know he needed to be extinguished without scaring the audience or spoiling the show. By the time it was over, “I was happy as heck, but I also felt sick. I was wiped out. I was kicking back energy drinks just so I’d be able to help strike the set.”

 

This year, his 13^th at Burning Man, Glenn got scorched but not burned.

 

So, how dangerous is it to be Pyro Boy?

 

Glenn laughs. “The truth is, everything I’m wearing on my body, if you held a flaming fountain to it, it would burn right through.”

 

Is he afraid of fire?

 

“Nope. I never have been. But fear is an important element of fire art. It’s what makes it different from say, painting. Nobody’s afraid of canvas. For me, it’s about calibrating an acceptable level of risk.”

 

Is there something, well, mystical about fire?

At first, Glenn hesitates.  “Well, there are certainly a lot of dieties involved with fire. And it has a primal role in human history—keeping people warm at night, holding wild animals at bay, and I suppose it’s an evolutionary marker. Monkeys aren’t playing around with it,” Glenn says.

 

“But I also see fire for what it is. Rust. Think about it. Fire is rapidly oxidizing material. Rusted steel is oxidized steel. When you see steel with a thick coat of rust, there’s a flame there. You just can’t see it.”

 

He’s talking faster now, his eyes are shining. “The human body produces uric acid, which is flammable. We produce fire. Water contains two fuels fire loves, hydrogen and oxygen. They’re bonded in water. Split apart, they’re quite flammable.”

 

What I’m seeing right now, I think, is Wally Glenn and Pyro Boy, daredevil and mensch, joined into one grinning guy.

 

What binds them together is a sense of wonder.

 

 Learn more about Pyro Boy