Self-Inflicted Wounds: Heartwarming Tales of Epic Humiliation

by Aisha Tyler

  Oh, and while you were sleeping, someone wrote on your face. In Magic Marker.

  Childhood—it is not for the meek.

  Since childhood is so punishing, such a hazing gauntlet writ large, it only makes sense that one should make as many grand gestures as possible—to “go huge,” if I may coin a lame and not particularly compelling phrase.

  So that is what kids do. They throw tantrums, explode into screams, hurl and squeal, cry and giggle, until they near asphyxiation. Everything is the “best thing evarrr” or “the end of the world” or “if I don’t get this I will die.” There are no half measures in childhood. Everything is cataclysmic.

  For me, this extreme expression took many forms, but none so painful as the year I decided to dress like a ballerina. All the freaking time.

  Not at a cute age, either. This was long after the age of three, when I would have looked totally adorbs in a tiny pink leotard, ballet shoes, and a tutu dusted with chocolaty fingerprints that could either be a dancer’s skirt or a princess dress depending on what struck me over my Wheatena that morning.

  No, I was the hoary age of ten when I decided I wanted to dress like a prima ballerina (or perhaps a weird old SoHo hippie who made her own granola and never wore pants because “they interrupted the flow of my chi, man”). I wanted people to know that I was serious, not about ballet necessarily, but about art. Somehow I had decided that the best way to showcase my seriousness was to wear a ballerina outfit at all times, and to all places.

  Why did I fixate acutely on such a specific fashion choice? I have no idea. Kids seize upon things. Favorite shoes. Special dolls. Compulsive hand washing. Eating paste. Who knows why? The juvenile mind is a mystery. I may have watched a PBS special on dancers one afternoon. It might have come to me in a fever dream. But one thing was sure—despite the total impracticality of this concept, I could not be swayed. I was hell-bent on my own slow and very soft destruction.

  I wonder, looking back, if perhaps I needed to order my life, to control it in some way, because so much of it had changed so dramatically. My parents’ divorce had finalized, and I was living full-time with my father. Before you nod your head in wistful understanding, it wasn’t that traumatic. There was no mayhem, no blowups or Kramer vs. Kramer dramatics. I went with my dad, my sister went with my mom, and we all still saw each other as much as possible. Life went on. But there may have been a part of me that needed to control what I could control. And wearing the same outfit, or a variation on that outfit, every single day, certainly qualified as controlling.

  First, I needed the outfit. I went to my mom for this. I wanted a series of coordinated ensembles: leotards and tights, with a matching ankle-length wrap skirt that tied at one side. These all had to match perfectly in color, which meant we had to buy the leotards and tights, find matching fabric, purchase a skirt pattern, and have the wrap skirts built from scratch.1

  We then had to find a seamstress with the skills, ability, and patience to sew these things up for me. My mother had long ago tapped out of being my bespoke couturier, as I was never satisfied, and she had things to do, like go to work so we could eat and shit. So we found a seamstress in Oakland’s Chinatown. I will not say any more on this subject, because no matter what I do, you will find a way to make it racist.

  My parents were kind enough not to stand in the way of my weirdo dreams, and ponied up the money for this exercise in sartorial suicide. And so I had five of these outfits constructed in a variety of colors, all of them various shades of dun, none of them flattering. Somehow, I believed brown tones made me seem more serious, but in reality, they made me look like a tiny dancing version of Hanky the Poo.

  I began to wear these outfits everywhere, regardless of place, time of day, or contextual appropriateness of my attire. I wanted to make a statement. I was going to be like Thomas Wolfe or Christopher Hitchens, universally known for my distinct sartorial style and my utter lack of concern for others’ feelings or happiness. I was more than a ballerina, I was a tastemaker, and I was going to make myself known.2

  This crazed approach immediately posed problems. For instance, it is very difficult to play dodge ball in a wrap skirt. You may cut a fine figure in the beginning, skirts flapping elegantly as the ball handler picks off the weak and the slow, but the minute you need to engage in any type of evasive action, that fabric will wrap around your tights-clad legs like a lasso around a rodeo calf, and you will fall to the ground, there to be pelted about the face and chest violently and repeatedly by the stinging slap of red rubber.

  This is also not a practical outfit for: sleeping, walking, running, swimming, digging in the dirt, climbing trees, picking blackberries, riding a bicycle, swinging on a swing, playing jacks, or anything requiring dexterity or practicality—pretty much anything one might do as a kid.

  It was pretty awesome when I played violin. I looked like a Russian tsarina in afro puffs. The outfit would also have worked in ballet class, but I had quit that shitshow months before. Pulling my hair into a tight bun every weekend was giving me headaches, as was all the random and poorly pronounced French. So I became an impostor, a poseur in Lycra, waltzing around looking for all the world like a ballerina when the best I could deliver on that front was a crooked second position and a few wild gesticulations. But man, did I look good.

  This extended piece of performance art came to a spectacular halt when my grand ballerina fantasy ran face-first into my father’s dude-on-a-fast-bike fantasy.

  One was bound to get creamed.

  My father loved motorcycles, and had always wanted to ride them. And nothing, not propriety or social norms or the oppressive yoke of fatherhood would defer his halcyon dream. He had been working toward this fantasy for years, as having kids required a slow and measured approach. When my sister and I were very young, my parents had Italian scooters: Vespas, to be exact. This made them the coolest parents ever; even now they’d be awash in hipster points. They had a custom cart built that attached to the back of their scooters so my sister and I could ride along with (or actually behind) them. We sat backwards, facing traffic, strapped in with seat belts, shielded from the sun by a custom canopy and shielded from auto exhaust and potential impact by shiny optimism. We loved riding in this cart, and would sit happily side by side, laughing, playing games, and giving as many passing cars the finger as we possibly could.3 Sometimes we went for the double finger for extra impact—this could be compounded by aiming all four fingers at one driver, or spread out among several motorists for maximum efficiency. We were a rolling two-kid wrecking crew.

  We loved riding with my parents on their Vespas, and when my dad graduated to first a small, and then bigger and bigger motorcycles,4 I was no less enthusiastic. It was insanely cool to walk to the curb after school and watch your classmates crawl into their boring old Volvo wagons or VW buses, then pull on your helmet and jump on to the back of a revving crotch rocket. Add to that the fact that my dad was an insanely handsome black man with more than a passing resemblance to Action Jackson, who wore a brown leather jacket and motorcycle boots with no sense of irony and had a mustache so thick he needed to comb it with an afro pick, and you can see how this was really working for me. I might have been a weird kid, culturally off-piste and socially isolated, but at least my dad looked like Dolemite and rocked a badass ride.5

  Despite my love of riding motorcycles, I was only average at being a motorcycle passenger. I held on with passable surety, my gaze often drifting toward cars alongside or distant passersby. I would use my father’s back as a podium, placing The Lord of the Rings or The Phantom Tollbooth atop his capacious lats. More than once, I fell asleep on the back of my father’s motorcycle, listing frighteningly to one side or the other before being elbowed violently in the ribs by my terrified dad. This led him to have a custom harness constructed, one that strapped me to his back so that even in full coma state, I would not tumble from the bike to the pavement at high speeds.6 I ended up liking this very much, as it allowed me to use b
oth hands to read—one to hold the book and one to turn the pages—whereas before I was reduced to turning pages with my nose. So his solution to my somnolence worked out quite well for both of us.

  It wasn’t my drowsiness that ended up being the problem.

  Despite his almost daily admonitions to watch the exhaust pipe, the temperature of which went from ambient to Earth’s molten core in about sixty seconds upon ignition of the engine, I was always dallying perilously close to hot metal. This was not intentional. I was a kid, distractible and preoccupied with important things, like whether peanut butter and olives would make a good sandwich. So I would hop on the bike, arms full of books and peanut butter dreams, and almost always touch my leg to the exhaust pipe, letting out a startled yelp, after which my father would roll his eyes and erupt, “I told you to watch out for that pipe! I don’t say this shit for my health!”7 I would nod and agree, and we’d be on our way, Daddy Dolemite and L’il Ballerina, off to fight crimes in the ghetto and stick it to the man, or at least make a whole wheat peanut butter and honey sandwich and watch the Sugar Ray Leonard–Floyd Mayweather fight.

  At this time in our lives, I was acutely focused on my artist phase, and rocking my ballerina outfits daily. With all the work it took to swirl my skirts while maintaining a haughty air of culture and refinement, taking time to avoid the exhaust pipe was simply not on my very full agenda. So on this day, I climbed on to the bike in my brick-brown ensemble, thinking about how elegant I looked, and how after I did my homework I was going to rip through some Ray Bradbury, when I smelled smoke. Interesting, I thought. Just thinking about Fahrenheit 451 made me smell fire. My imagination is like, magic or something.

  At that moment, I looked down to see that the right hem (and, well, most of my skirt) had melded itself with the exhaust pipe of the motorcycle, and was aflame. Aflame in that kind of way where the burning spreads quickly, turning a small hole into a very big one, and making you question how much longer you will be on this earth. A thoughtful person would have remained calm, stepped from the bike, and as those 1970s preparedness commercials admonished, stopped, dropped, and rolled. A less thoughtful person, say, a dream-addled ten-year-old, would have lost their shit.

  This is what I did.

  Which made my dad lose his shit.

  Which was not a good thing.

  Dads are big. This is one of their most awesome qualities. No matter what their size in relation to the rest of the world, when you are a kid, dads are huge, imposing, and highly effective. They block out the sun, have unlimited supplies of quarters in their large and bottomless pockets, and can eat your entire plate of spaghetti in the time it takes you to reach down and tie your sneaker. Dads are leviathans. They are magnificent. They are not to be fucked with.

  Mine, in particular.

  In one move, he put the bike kickstand down, leapt from the seat, ripped me from the moorings of gravity, and threw me to the grass, in a fashion that was at once caring, gentle, and insanely terrifying. He patted out the flames with the sleeve of his jacket in what would surely have won the world record for patting out flames on one’s burning daughter, should there have ever been such an event. And then he stood me up and gave me the kind of scolding that nowadays would have earned him a viral video on YouTube, and perhaps a public scolding from Nancy Grace.

  This all happened in about fifteen seconds flat.

  Coincidentally, this was also the last fifteen seconds of my ballerina phase.

  Luckily, I was not burned. There was no physical damage. I did have to spend the rest of the day looking like the chimney sweep from Mary Poppins (my father would not take me home to change, as he was not my chauffeur, he was fond of telling me), but I was not burned. Psychological damage is harder to measure, but I can say with confidence that the delicate part of my brain related to pretentious artiness died a fiery death that day. I went back to dressing like a normal grade-schooler instead of an affected Manhattan art dealer that trades only in experimental oils. I had learned my lesson.

  Watch that fucking pipe.

  And I learned the futility of stylistic rigidity. I mean, come on. Even Thomas Wolfe wears sweatpants once in a while.

  ( 7 )

  The Time I Peed on Myself and My Surroundings

  “Dogs are wise. They crawl away into a quiet corner and lick their wounds and do not rejoin the world until they are whole once more.”—AGATHA CHRISTIE

  “When you gotta go, you gotta go.”—AISHA TYLER

  I have always wanted to be hardcore. Incredibly disciplined, immovably resolute, unrelentingly focused. I have wanted to be one of those people whose mind was always one hundred percent in control of their body, someone who could jump out of a moving train without flinching, scale a skyscraper without rope, walk barefoot across a room strewn with broken glass, should the situation arise.

  I have always dreamed of being a badass.

  Like most human hopes, this desire is incongruous, unrealistic, and completely inexplicable. That does not make it any less real.

  From the time I was little, I have wanted to be tougher, meaner, less vulnerable, more disciplined than others. I don’t know why this is. Maybe it is because I am a firstborn kid and thus, true to all stereotypes, an A-type personality haunted by fears of failure and inadequacy. Maybe it is because I have always been an outsider, and so have fantasized about “showing them”1 with my athletic feats of prowess, dazzling intelligence, and triumphant victories as a billionaire playgirl superhero.

  I have also always loved action movies. I think people who love action movies have a very specific personality trait—or flaw, more accurately—which is that whenever we watch an action film, we immediately put ourselves in the place of the hero. With each one-on-seventeen bar brawl, each reckless leap down a burning elevator shaft or hairline escape from a listing helicopter leaking fuel, we remove Bruce or Jet Li or that kung-fu Belgian with the loads of plastic surgery, and put ourselves at the center of the action. The more Hollywood action we consume, the more we fantasize, until every moment is pregnant with the possibility of ninjas dropping from the skylight, or an armored car loaded with bank robbers and stolen bearer bonds smashing through plate glass directly in our line of sight, and we will have to grab loose paper clips and hastily construct a fistful of makeshift caltrops. We are always ready for whatever may come, even though what usually comes is traffic, homework, bills, dirty dishes, and lukewarm macaroni and cheese.

  But we are ready, my friends. We are fucking ready.

  Maintaining this constant state of heightened readiness requires unwavering focus, self-denial, and sacrifice. Things must be learned. Other things must be renounced. Skills must be mastered. And many, many things must be endured. Because one never knows when one may be called up for service by relentless destiny.

  When I was a kid, this preparedness took several behavioral forms. I was precise, obsessive and very peculiar. For long periods I would only eat cereal, or grapes, or scrambled eggs with ketchup for breakfast.2 I would pack my backpack for a quick getaway, secreting away snacks, juice, Band-Aids, a warm sweater, and perhaps Popsicle sticks and glue in case I had to construct a weapon or shelter of some kind. I would hoard food, keeping cans underneath my bed, along with sleeping bags, Mylar blankets, and, of course, copious reading material. Who knew—I might have to bivouac in some remote place without entertainment for several hours or even days—a Bradbury compilation or Little Men would keep me occupied while I waited for rescue and planned my next move. Even a heroine needs a little diversion.

  What was crystal clear to me, even then, was that being a hero was a 24-hour-a-day job. One never knew what kind of obstacles life, or an evil international league of villains, might throw my way. The eventual test of my mettle could be anything, so I needed to be ready for everything.3

  This knowledge pushed me to put myself in terrifying or difficult situations with the goal of trying to endure them mentally. I don’t know why I was so hell-bent on pockmarking my chil
dhood with potentially psychologically and even physically damaging episodes, but I liked the idea of mental toughness as well as physical toughness. It was one thing to be able to take a punch. It was another entirely to be able to withstand crushing disappointment or emotional devastation and still push forward. Did David Lightman in WarGames freak out when adorable Joshua turned out to be the sinister yet earnest WOPR, wanting to play Global Thermonuclear War for real?

  No. He grew a pair and hightailed it to some island in the Puget Sound looking for Professor Falken, a guy he believed to be dead. And then he went to NORAD. Fucking NORAD. If Lightman could try to get into the most defended military bunker on the globe to save the world, I could put up with being a little chilly, or wet, or hot, or hungry. And I could certainly deal with a bit of physical discomfort, say for example, having to pee.

  What did I care for bodily functions? Peeing was for humans and weaklings. I was an action hero. John McClane. Sarah Connor. Storm. Starfire.

  And so it went, deep in my young survivalist phase, that I often found myself on the long bus ride from school to my home high in the Oakland hills,4 a trip that required three bus rides and a punishingly long walk up a very steep hill. Usually on this half-mile crawl, I engaged in elaborate fantasies about summiting Kilimanjaro or bisecting the Mongolian steppe. Every experience was an opportunity for personal growth.

  Yes. I am as disgusted as you are.

  The walk was long but beautiful, passing blackberry patches and plum trees as it wound into the hills, and I would usually bookmark whatever sci-fi I was reading to forage, filling my backpack or lunch bag with fistfuls of sticky, smashed fruit that I could use later should the Bay Area power grid go offline, or the food delivery systems be disabled by pestilence or wildfire. In reality, I wasn’t going to be saving any lives or feeding hungry masses. However, I would be wiping streaks of moldy fruit juice and furious ant populations out of my Trapper Keeper for weeks to come.