Self-Inflicted Wounds: Heartwarming Tales of Epic Humiliation

by Aisha Tyler

  Whenever I went to stay with my mom, I actually kind of liked having all of these animals around. As discussed, I had a lot of survivalist fantasies, and one of them involved homesteading (of course), so I thought it would be good to study these animals and figure out how they worked, in case I had to steal a few in the dead of night and strike out on my own to make a life for myself in the post-apocalyptic wasteland. So I observed the animals closely, to learn what I could about their care and feeding. What I learned is that bunnies don’t do much but shit and fuck, chickens will eat absolutely anything you feed them, including cigarette butts and small coins, and geese are total assholes.4

  Don’t feel sorry for the goose. That goose would chase me around the yard without relent every single time I stepped outside. He was like a fowl model of the T-2000—resembling an ordinary bird but without fear, remorse or mercy, seemingly tireless and hell-bent on the destruction of the human ankle. Eventually we had to keep a broom by the back door so we could make it to the car. You can see how this would be frustrating, especially since this wasn’t our goose. Trust me, if it had been, my mother would have broken her vow of vegetarianism and we’d have eaten Rusty Pete for dinner with some fava beans and a glass of grape juice. Alas, he was the pet of another, and so to be feared and avoided, and occasionally pelted with shoes.

  While we were doing all of this goose evading, the bunnies did what bunnies do, and had bunny babies. And I quickly realized that geese are not the only assholes in the animal kingdom. Geese may be the most aggressive, but chickens have their own brand of lazy evil.

  Soon after the baby bunnies were born, the chickens starting eating the baby bunnies alive.

  They pecked at them through the wire of their cage, which was pushed perilously close to the walls of the chicken coop. And they were terribly, heinously, ghoulishly effective. In about a day, they had pecked all the baby bunnies to death.

  All but one.

  Of course, upon discovering this ghoulish tableau, I immediately tried to save that baby bunny. Separated from its mother, who had rejected it due to what I can only imagine was some deep and irreparable psychological trauma involving murderous chickens pecking her family to death, the baby bunny was alone in the world. So I set about saving that bunny, knowing nothing about rabbits, babies, or living things in general.5

  The neighbors were nowhere in sight, which I took as tacit permission to take possession of their infant rabbit. I lifted the bunny from the bunny cage and placed it gently in a shoe box lined with blankets. I do not know whether this was what the bunny needed, but it did sure make the bunny look cuter. I tried to feed the bunny milk. Why? Because babies drink milk. Don’t they? I had no idea. I took that baby bunny everywhere, because from what I could tell, you didn’t just leave babies lying around to fend for themselves, no matter what their species or phylum. I didn’t know what you did with babies when you had them, but I know you didn’t just prop their shoebox in front of the television and let them watch the soaps while you were away.

  I took the box to school, and carried it from class to class. I tried to conceal the box from the prying eyes of teachers and other kids by holding it inside the flap of my jacket, pretending it was an art project or a diorama for some imagined homework assignment. But the halls of a middle school between classes are a hectic and treacherous place. I, and my delicate bunny, were pushed, jostled, and occasionally smashed violently against the wall as we navigated the corridors. The box and its precious contents were dropped. More than once. I am not proud of this. I was eleven. I was an idiot. An idiot with good intentions, but an idiot nonetheless. That bunny was on a slow inevitable slide toward darkness that started when chickens attacked, and accelerated when a well-intentioned but entirely bewildered preteen took the reins. That bunny never stood a chance.6

  It did not take long for that last bunny to die. It wriggled slower and slower, every leg twitch or head turn a silent protest against the world that had forsaken it, little eyes blinking in mute judgment of my failures. When at last the tiny bunny lay still, we buried it in my dad’s backyard, under some marigolds, and I cried for at least a day at how unjust the world was, and how cruel, and how chickens fucking sucked.

  But somehow, even though my act of compassion had failed mightily, and my heart had been broken by cruel fate and fowl, I never lost my desire to be kind. I had tried to save something. I had tried to do good, and the fact that one light had been snuffed out didn’t mean that others couldn’t be kept burning. I might have failed this bunny terribly, but I knew somehow, someday, I would not fail the world.

  Because out of the young and hopelessly stupid, much like baby bunnies from the womb of a willing and fertile rabbit, hope springs constantly anew.

  ( 10 )

  The Time I Desperately Wanted to Get My Period

  “It is usually the imagination that is wounded first, rather than the heart; it being much more sensitive.”—HENRY DAVID THOREAU

  “If wishing makes it so, I should start wishing for better stuff.”—AISHA TYLER

  I had a lot of time on my hands as a preteen. My dad worked crazy hours, long and punishing, sometimes at more than one job. He was in constant need of a break. The minute my overworked, overwhelmed, overtired single father got the faintest whiff of the idea that I could take care of myself and stay home without supervision, the cat was out of the bag. Or, more specifically, the dad was out of the apartment. Like a shot.1

  This was not abandonment. I was sufficiently stocked up. There was food and water, and a tiny door to crawl out of in case I needed to escape. I had homework. Phone numbers. Emergency plans. I had come to understood that fire burned. I knew that strangers were evil. I would be fine.

  And I was fine. I didn’t mind the solitude. I had always been a solitary kid, first forced to, and then electing to, play with myself (stop it) so this was nothing new, nor particularly daunting. By this point I was on nerd autopilot; the idea of not doing what was expected of me never even crossed my mind. Ever the apple polisher, I would come right home after school each day and immediately do my homework, read recreationally, and, if I was feeling a bit rebellious, nap.

  By this time, it would only be four-thirty. I was a little too effective at time management. My dad wouldn’t be home for hours. I needed to formulate a game plan or descend into a swirling eddy of crushing boredom.

  I started to devise all kinds of time-killing activities. I crafted. Did puzzles. One of my favorite pastimes was to save my allowance until I had enough money amassed to afford an impressive assortment of frozen dinners, which I would then purchase, carry home, prepare and eat.2 This, if augmented by a lengthy selection process at the supermarket freezer wall, could easily kill several hours. My favorite was the deluxe turkey dinner, because digging into that cranberry dessert made it feel like Thanksgiving no matter what day it was. And the associated feeling of danger involved with secretively eating so much meat felt akin to getting wildly drunk.

  Or maybe that was the tryptophan.

  I was a big kid for my age, so when I did put my latch key around my neck and venture out into the world, I was generally left alone. The supermarket was directly across from our flat—I could practically run there and back without encountering one single adult—and the neighbors and vendors in the neighborhood all knew my father. And from what they knew, he was a large man with an intimidating mustache who rode a motorcycle, wore leather for function rather than style, and for all they knew could kill a person with a set of nunchakus or several silently thrown ninja stars.3 As a result, they gave me a wary yet protective eye, along with a wide and generous berth. No one wanted to wake up with a mouthful of shuriken.4

  So for the most part I was left to my own devices, which included reading a lot of speculative fiction, eating an ungodly amount of frozen “delicacies,” doing my homework far in advance of its deadline, and hanging out at the stereo store next door to our apartment building, where they had huge televisions, an entire wall of kille
r Pioneer stereo amps, a soundproof speaker room, a languid staff of twenty-year-old salespeople slowly dying inside from acute boredom and low wages, and a big leather chair that reclined when you pulled a lever on the side. Because I was a kid, no one dared ask me to leave; either they feared my dad irrationally or they were sure I was a street-faring waif who could use a few hours in a warm place. I lived in that chair, and every time I pulled that lever, I pretended my own personal Enterprise was hitting warp speed.5

  I spent most of the seventh grade, and the following summer, like this: reading, hanging out at the stereo store, eating unsafe amounts of processed turkey, and imagining I was the captivating yet resolute captain of an intergalactic space vessel. And then somewhere in there, with all that free time to ruminate, I decided I was officially a teenager, and it was time to get my period.

  As I also believed in mental power, having just finished a book on telekinesis,6 I thought the best way to get my period was to start acting as if I already had it. But as I was living with my father, who would as soon discuss menstruation as gouge his own eye out with his shuriken, I had no freaking idea how to do that. I didn’t know what a period felt like, what it did, how long it lasted, its point of origin, none of it. All I knew was that it heralded the onset of womanhood, and doggone it, I was done with being a kid. I had eaten all the potpies I could stomach. It was time to kick this shit up a notch.

  I stopped buying frozen dinners and started buying Jean Naté, mainly because there were one thousand ads for it on television all day long, and that was all I saw at the stereo store. I would splash it on like the lady in the ad, liberally, as if I was trying to exterminate skin mites or drown a small rodent, and then jump immediately back under running water to rinse away the extraordinary feeling of burning skin.7 I would then mist myself liberally with Love’s Baby Soft, because I was weak-willed and any kind of targeted advertising had an immediate and propulsive effect on my impressionable preteen mind. I would finally grab my bag of sunflower seeds and neon sour candies, toss in my dog-eared copy of John Christopher’s The City of Gold and Lead, and head over to the stereo store to loiter like a street urchin.

  I spent most of my seventh grade summer dehydrated, green-tongued, and smelling like a Malaysian whorehouse.

  But I was hell-bent on becoming a woman, and if not a woman, at least less of a girl than I had been thus far. I was propelled forward by recklessness and the insuppressible impatience cultivated by a summer without the distracting influence of camp. I decided that the best way to kick this whole thing off was to just go and get some sanitary pads and start wearing them around. I was already wearing grownup cologne. Why not rock the undergarments as well?

  I went to the drugstore across the street and purchased the most imposing menstrual pads I could find, because I was going to be a real woman, and real women needed maxi pads. Not mini-pads, or slim liners, but maxi pads. For the maximum woman. Which I was. And I took them home, along with six turkey potpies and a bag of Sno Balls, and opened up the box.

  Holy shit.

  I inspected the pads as if I was an alien life-form who stumbled upon a pepperoni Hot Pocket and was trying to use it to make a phone call. I had no idea what these things were. They looked like a tiny hammock for a bird, or an upholstered slingshot, or insulation material for a nuclear submarine. There was no adhesive, no instructions, and definitely no signage indicating “this way up.” And because my father was at work and my mother was at work and I shouldn’t have been spending my money on sanitary products I didn’t need anyway, I had no one to ask. I was on my own. I delicately placed one of these salami-sized zeppelins into my undergarment, zipped up my pants, and prayed for my period.

  After a while, when nothing happened, I decided it might be a good idea to take this thing out for a spin. People walked around while they were getting their periods, right? You always saw people doing things and being surprised when their period arrived, like Brooke Shields in The Blue Lagoon. She wasn’t just sitting on a kitchen chair in her overheated apartment waiting for something to happen. She was out there living when her little visitor showed up. Besides, I was freshly Jean Natéd and ready for the world. I ventured down the stairs and out onto the street.

  It became clear to me in that first sunlit moment, and remains crystal clear to me now, why (aside from systemic sexism and the attendant glass ceiling) it has taken so long for women to achieve social equality. It is fucking impossible to do anything when you are wearing a maxi pad. Anything. It is like trying to hold a wet soda bottle or a flopping adult mackerel between your legs. As you walk, you look like a circus performer executing a highly challenging contortionist’s trick. You can think of nothing else, and your facial expression betrays it.

  I walked up and down my block a couple of times, taking my new installation out for a spin. The more I walked, the more it migrated, downward then backward, slowly creeping out of the rear of my pants until it looked like I had shoved a roll of toilet paper down my jeans. I surreptitiously reached down to adjust it as I walked, before slamming smack-dab into a million-year-old lady rolling her rickety wire cart to the supermarket. She was annoyed, then disgusted, then confused, then alarmed, as she looked down to see my entire forearm down the front of my pants. And then she ran. As much as a million-year-old lady can, anyway.

  I couldn’t blame her.

  It was hot outside, and the pad was getting damp. I was sweating, maybe from the heat, maybe from anxiety, maybe from the tension of trying to hold this floppy rolled up newspaper at the center of my burgundy corduroys. It had started out annoying and then moved to truly uncomfortable. No wonder the woman in the commercial was splashing herself with Jean Naté like it was made of gold; these pad things held on to every bit of moisture, every drop of sweat—condensed, concentrated, magnified it—and sent it booming back upwards like a cotton-filled version of a smell megaphone. They were uncomfortable, impractical, totally detectable, and much like having a wedgie or something green and cruciferous lodged between your teeth, made you feel unbearably self-conscious. I was beginning to rethink the whole “I can’t wait to get my period” thing.

  I took the pad for a few more laps before half-skipping, half-limping back to my apartment to fling it, and the entire box, into the trash in a huff. This period stuff was no fun, and what’s worse, it had cost me the value of four Salisbury Steak repasts. I could have been sticky with brown gravy listening to Steely Dan on the Ankyo next door, and instead I was lying in a pool of sweat, my face pressed against the cold linoleum, wondering how I was ever going to handle womanhood if I couldn’t manage a simple test stroll to the bus stop. Apparently becoming a woman required more than cheap cologne and some bulky sanitary apparati. It seemed easy when you looked at it, but it was clear I was going to need more time to figure this shit out.

  After a while, I pulled the box of pads back out of the trash. I then stuffed them one by one inside an empty TV dinner box, and took it out to the garbage can by the curb. My father had enough to worry about without thinking his daughter had gotten her period.

  Or worse—that she was walking around for an entire afternoon wearing a sanitary pad in the summer heat for no apparent reason.

  A girl that bored should really be in summer camp.

  ( 11 )

  The Time I Actually Got My Period

  Well, this just sucked.

  ( 12 )

  The Time I Snuck Out of My Home in the Night Like a CBS After-School Special

  “Better to die ten thousand deaths than wound my honor.”—JOSEPH ADDISON

  “I literally want to die.”—AISHA TYLER

  The summer before my freshman year in high school, my father and I moved to the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco. You may know this area, because it was made famous by the hippie movement of the 1960s, and was canonized in many of their songs, manifestos, and hysterical scrawlings in poo on the walls of LSD dens.

  The Grateful Dead lived there. The Human Be-In happene
d there. Hippies converged upon it during the infamous 1967 Summer of Love. And now my father and I were living there.

  Things were about to get decidedly less interesting.

  An atmosphere of daring and creativity still permeated that neighborhood, even decades after that infamous summer. Maybe it was the murals, or the street artists, or the buskers, or the head shops. Or maybe it was the roving gangs of pot-smoking hippies who refused to accept that it was 1984 and time to put on some pants and get a permanent street address. But there was an excitement and a danger to the place, and it soon began to infuse my life in a variety of ways.

  Even though we didn’t have a lot of money, I had good grades, and I was able to attend a progressive high school that year, one that was full of the children of rich people who felt guilty about being rich and so sent their children to an alternative learning environment where grades and evaluation ran secondary to personal growth and achievement, and where everyone was encouraged to express their ideas freely without fear of judgment or censure. It was also a school where a bunch of dirtbag rich kids drove European convertibles and did unholy amounts of cocaine. I don’t think things were going exactly as those parents had planned.

  But hey, they were rich, and rich people like to throw money at their problems,1 then throw money at the problems their money causes, then get their kid a BMW. This is just the way of things.