Self-Inflicted Wounds: Heartwarming Tales of Epic Humiliation

by Aisha Tyler

  The other thing rich people like to do is make sure that a couple of poor people get thrown into the mix, so that the rich people can feel better about themselves because their kids get to interact with one or two select, articulate, and very hygienic poor people. Meanwhile, the poor people get to go around all day being hyperaware of how lucky they are to be around all these lovely, special rich people in a school where no one is shooting at each other and you can call the teachers by their first names and there are actual books to read and when kids are mean to you, it’s only because you make them feel uncomfortable culturally and not because they’re going to stab you in the parking lot later. Boy, are those poor kids lucky!

  Hey, wait! I mean me!

  The kids at this school were not particularly nicer than other kids I had known. Kids everywhere are pretty mean, regardless whether they are attending school at a run-down urban cesspool or a fancy liberal hugfest. But they were weirder than other kids I had known. And so it was here that I met some of my first really interesting, creative friends, and got to be a little more of a creative kid myself.

  There were kids at this school who were into Goth, and the Smiths, and Bauhaus, and eyeliner, and for a black kid who had been living in Oakland,2 this was akin to worshipping the devil. Also, for that selfsame black kid, this was an opportunity to throw everyone into a serious tailspin by acting even more off-stereotype than I had previously. I mean, how the hell do you grok a 5’10” black girl dressed like Siouxsie Sioux? You cannot. It cannot be grokked, my friend. It is ungrokkable.

  And so it was that among all the condescending rich kids I made a couple of cool, offbeat friends, who were into weird music and liked lying around all day being melancholy and diagramming Talking Heads lyrics. This was also at the time when underground dance clubs were all the rage in San Francisco, and so naturally, being full of youth and our own importance, as well as fully convinced that we were smarter and more interesting than all other teens, we decided to infiltrate.

  Despite our being underage, this was not that difficult. Two of my friends and I were scratching six feet, and the third was adorable on the order of a Pikachu. We were in.

  Underground clubbing, at least the kind that was going on in San Francisco in the mid-eighties went like this: somehow, someone you kinda knew told someone else you kinda knew that there was going to be a club on Saturday night at a certain address. They knew, and you knew, that the party wasn’t actually going to be at that address. That was a dummy address. But you would get all dressed up, in your torn tee and your lace gloves and your eyeliner and your ennui, and you would splash on Poison, and go with your friends to this spot, whereupon some weird skinny creep wearing super tight jeans with meticulously rolled cuffs would wander out of the shadows and give you another address to go to, where hopefully this fucking thing was actually going down.

  On occasion this bait-and-switch would occur two, or even three, times, after which you would arrive at the actual club location—usually in an empty airplane hangar or abandoned factory or burned-out school bus in an overgrown lot—sometime after midnight, dance to two or three songs,3 get perilously thirsty, realize there was nowhere on-site to get a beverage, these things being makeshift, haphazard, and completely illegal, and leave to get giant burritos at two in the morning.

  This was how I spent my weekends my freshman year of high school.

  This quickly started to get frustrating. We were teenagers, and so had limited resources, limited time, and limited patience. We did not have cars, and so were generally forced to do all this running hither and yon on the bus. The bus! Granted, San Francisco had a kickass public transportation system, and does to this day, but anyone can lose their party shine jumping back on a hot-lit bus for another ride across town when they realize their last transfer is about to expire and they are out of money. We needed a more reliable place to go pretend as if we were older, cooler, and more bored than we really were. We needed a sure thing.

  We found it in a club in North Beach called the Palladium. Looking back, I can’t believe I ever hung out there, because in retrospect it was a dump, and probably crawling with sexual predators. But these were the eighties, and Dead or Alive’s “You Spin Me Right Round (Like a Record)” had just come out, and all I wanted to do was dance. And because I was unnaturally tall, the security guards were kind enough to look the other way whenever we came in. The club was 18 and over, so we couldn’t buy alcohol, which was just fine by me, because it was usually all I could do to afford the cover charge and buy a soda to nurse for the evening, despite a recent allowance increase. I slowly ingratiated myself with the staff until the guards would keep an eye on me and the bartenders would refill my drinks for free, and I thought to myself, “Self, this is much better than being parched and dancing on a burned-out, unstable school bus perched precariously on marshy land at the edge of the Bay. You have it made.”

  I spent a bunch of gleeful and strangely wholesome Fridays and Saturdays at this club, until city crackdowns started to make it harder for them to let in underage kids,4 so the club started encouraging some of us to come on weekdays, when things were quieter. This worked for me, as my father often worked late, and was occasionally on dates, and I could manage to get out and jump around wildly to Onyx’s “Slam” and still make it home before anyone was the wiser.

  Of course, my father started to smell a rat. My grades weren’t slipping, and I was as well behaved as ever, but he knew something was up. What normal black kid wears an entire armful of rubber bracelets? It was unnatural. Like most fathers, he had no idea exactly what was going on with his teenage daughter, but he knew he didn’t like it, and he was going to put a stop to it. Immediately.

  So he put me on “punishment.”

  Mind you, my father and I had a very good working arrangement at this point. It was simple, it was transparent, and it was highly functional.

  A bit about his parenting approach: my father was a single parent. As single parents and the children of single parents know, that shit is hard. Like inexpressibly, soul-crushingly, universe-closing-in-on-you hard. You don’t sleep, you don’t always eat, you are in constant low-level panic, you bargain, cajole, wheedle, manipulate, anything and everything to keep your child alive, in school, and generally facing forward, without neck tattoos or an addiction to aerosolized glue.

  And, for the most part, you do it alone.

  This requires some creativity. Some single parents keep their children with them constantly, dragging them to work like bedraggled attachés or tiny bodyguards, leaving them in the corner to brood or nap or make a terrible mess of cracker crumbs and peanut butter on the office leather couch. Others, in desperation, are forced to leave their children to their own devices completely, hoping that they will be somewhat self-guiding, and that adulthood will get them before boredom, the lure of the streets, or a freak lightning strike.5

  My father chose a middle path: neither total freedom nor total encumbrance. This was accomplished through clear-cut boundaries and expectations, enforced by rigorous psychological intimidation, and punctuated by intermediate threats of total loss of freedom and/or threatened (but never delivered) violence.

  Here was the deal: as long as I did my homework, kept the apartment neat, didn’t get in knife fights, smoke PCP, or come home pregnant by a guy named Crank who lived in the science lab of an abandoned high school (or any other guy for that matter), essentially everything else was up for grabs.

  But if the man got even a whiff of an inkling that I was veering off course, even a smidge, I was immediately slammed back to a sunset curfew and long periods of academic drills, followed by a diet of lukewarm tap water and sawdust.6 This resulted in some knee-jerk groundings, especially as I got older and tried to game the system a bit more.7 In retrospect, his disciplinary responses were perfectly reasonable and totally commensurate with my typically reckless behavior. At the time, however, it felt as if my entire world was crashing down around my ears in tiny, crumbling morsels.


  At the time of the dance club fiasco, I had been working a good angle for a pretty long run. Good grades, no run-ins with the law, my room was immaculate, and I was generally pleasant to be around.8 So I felt like I had built up some equity here, and this grounding was completely unfounded, unfair, and without justification. You can’t just ground someone preemptively because you think they might be up to no good!9 It’s akin to fascism. Plus it was going to totally ruin my plans to go dancing. So, I thought, I would do what any normal teenager would do when faced with a great injustice: completely blow off my dad’s wishes and do exactly what I wanted to do.

  What could possibly go wrong?

  Fortunately, on this fateful day, my dad was exhausted from working late, and, in my opinion, in a prime mental state to have the wool pulled over his eyes—eyes that, while shut, he claimed, were “not sleeping, just resting.” And in my defense, my plan was perfectly conceived and even more perfectly executed. I made dinner. I did my homework. I did the dishes. I made sure the apartment was immaculate. I dusted.10 I then turned out the lights, went into my room, and waited until my dad was asleep.

  In the dark of night, night being about 9:30, I made up my bed to look like I was still sleeping in it,11 tiptoed to my window, eased it open, and climbed through the window and into the freedom of the night, to dance my life away, or at least the portion of my life between then and midnight, when I needed to get home, because I had a major dissection in biology class the next day and really needed to focus.

  It is instructive to point out here that this was not an original idea. Teenagers have been trying this parlor trick on their parents for centuries.12 I was not original. I was not innovative. What made this particular effort so unique (or uniquely stupid), was that my father and I lived in a postage-stamp-sized apartment, one so small that the turning of a book page in my room rattled window frames in the kitchen.13 The idea that I could have snuck out of my apartment was beyond ludicrous. I couldn’t sneak into the bathroom to pee.

  My father told me later he heard the window the minute it opened, and immediately knew what I was up to. By then I was skipping down the street to meet my friends, confident in my own genius and the obliviousness of my sweet, yet gullible, sleeping paterfamilias.

  My father played it cool. He followed behind, slipping in and out of traffic like a two-wheeled wraith, completely undetected by me. He let me get all the way to the club. He let me get inside. He let me dance to exactly seventy percent of “Master and Servant.”

  And then he dropped the hammer.

  When the security guard came to get me from the floor, the look on his face said it all. He did not speak, but the look in his eyes spoke volumes. A very angry, very intimidating black man dressed head to toe in leather and rage was waiting outside to take me away, very likely to a place where I would never be seen again. I had seen my fate in this man’s eyes, and my fate was doom. I could do nothing but comply.

  When I walked outside, he was at the curb. He just looked at me. No command. No admonishment. Nothing but a silent flick of the head that indicated “put on your helmet. I don’t want a motorcycle accident to kill you before I get a chance to.”

  And that was the last time I ever went dancing at the Palladium.14

  It was also the last time I ever tried to pull something over on my father. He was too smart, too fast, too good to fool. I was but a young Padawan to his Obi-Wan. I was hopelessly outclassed.

  I do think back fondly on how eager, how optimistic I was to think that a strategy for sneaking out of the house that I had only seen work previously on crappy afternoon television would work on my ninja-like father. This was a tough, no-nonsense man reared on the mean streets of Pittsburgh, living through the heart-gripping agony of raising a daughter alone. To think I could pull one over on him was fresh-faced, pure, and totally naïve. I have never been that blindly optimistic since.

  I miss that bright-eyed young girl. She had no idea what she was in for.

  ( 13 )

  The Time I Got Drunk the Night Before Taking the SAT

  “Words are like weapons; they wound sometimes.”—CHER

  “I don’t even know if I’m still speaking English right now.”—AISHA TYLER

  The phrase “youth is wasted on the young” is a complete and total fallacy.

  The implication is that when young people are young, they don’t know how good they have it; that if they knew then what old people know now, they would spend their time more wisely, live more fully, love more wildly.1 They would fully experience everything life has to offer before age and infirmity cruelly whisk it all away.

  But I would offer that this is exactly what young people do. They take this strong, pristine vessel, with its soft unscarred knees; pink, unmarred liver, unbridled optimism and unmatched recovery time; and they drive that fucking thing into the ground. Young people know what to do with a fast car. You drive it. You drive it until you can’t drive anymore.

  Youth is not wasted on the young. The young are busy wasting youth as hard and fast as they possibly can, so that not one single drop of it is left over for later. They are getting while the getting is freaking good. Guileless and stupid as they are, young people know this whole invincibility thing is utterly temporary, and they are hell-bent on testing it, pulling at it, running it ragged until it breaks, until there is nothing left but retained fluid, osteoarthritis, and a faint ringing in their ears.

  Young people get it: youth is transient. Youth is fleeting. Youth will abandon you without warning or remorse. Youth does not love you.

  Burn that shit to the ground.

  After a dizzying freshman year spent rubbing elbows with the offspring of the rich and ambivalent, I left my private school idyll for the warmer and more terrifying climes of public school. Specifically, my father couldn’t afford to send me there anymore, which was good, because I was starting to chafe at my golden restraints anyway. The private school was small and cloistered, and didn’t find my consistent tardiness and sarcastic asides in class amusing. I needed a place where I could be myself, among others who were as weird and bewildered and, well, poor as I was. And after years of avoiding it, in my public high school I finally found a social home.

  High school was when I truly stopped being a loner and made a solid group of friends. Misfits, oddballs, loudmouths, and weirdos, yes, but a group of friends nonetheless, some of whom are still my friends to this day.2 And now that I finally had a group of friends, I was going to make up for everything I had missed until that point. I was still a nerd, still obsessed with grades and hell-bent for college, but I finally had a social life, and I was highly aware that it might disappear at any moment.

  I became obsessed with counting how many times I had spoken on the phone the night before, and for how long, and with whom. Any opportunity to go out, to party or interact with others, I took, because up until this point most of my teenage socializing had been between me, a bowl of instant pudding, and a certain private investigator with a rocking mustache, hot pants, and the professional credential of P.I. I don’t know that I cared about being cool, but I definitely cared about having friends, and being included, and if there was going to be some fun had somewhere, I was sure as shit not going to miss it.

  But oh, for the strength and resilience of my youth! For the ability to stay up all night drinking malt liquor out of a wide-mouthed bottle sheathed in brown paper, in the poorly lit parking lot of a middle school without a care in the world, to eat two-thirds of a monster burrito at two in the morning, sleep for forty minutes, eat the other third, and then go to class and not miss a beat! I am at a point now where if I have a second glass of wine at dinner I wake in the middle of the night hearing voices and wondering if the deep vein thrombosis I acquired over years of cross-continental air travel has finally come home to roost.

  My friendships and my true self were often at odds. Even though I had a little circle now, I was still an inveterate nerd, still driven by a desire for excellence
and an abject fear of my father’s disapproval. I still needed to get good grades and get into a good school. My life was a swirl of keg parties and study groups, beach bonfires and flash cards. I was living two lives, shuttling between identities, juggling lies and falsehoods and façades, and sometimes I didn’t even know who I was anymore.

  Like Channing Tatum in Step Up, I tried desperately to keep my worlds separate.3 And like Channing Tatum in 21 Jump Street, I would deny that I cared about school, and make fun of people who tried. But I could not keep these worlds separate forever. It was inevitable they would collide, and with disastrous results. I could only hope to emerge from the wreckage relatively unscathed.

  Alas, this was not to be.

  It all came to a head on the night before I was scheduled to take the SATs for the second time. Everyone who does this, and everyone in the family of someone who does this, knows that you take the SATs twice, because one stomach-churning anxiety-ridden morning full of tears and puke is simply not enough. You do it twice because you are allowed to take the better of the two scores, and sometimes after you have suffered through this four-hour morning of abjection, the agony of it deadens somewhat. You do better the second time around not because you have the answers figured out—you don’t. The morning has been a blur and the most you will remember about what you were asked is that some of the answers began with the letter C. And not because you have figured a way to game the system—you haven’t. Even the most confident of students stumble away from the test proctor feeling as if they have urinated on themselves during the test. Many of them have.

  No, the reason some people do better a second time is that they don’t care as much. That is the reason. The first attempt killed something deep inside, and they just don’t give a shit anymore.

  Or at least, that is what I told myself when I decided, the Friday before I had to take the SATs, to go on a road trip with my friends to Santa Cruz and hang out on the beach all night instead of getting some sleep and focusing on my shaky and increasingly uncertain future. I was excited just to have a group of friends, let alone a group cool enough to come up with an activity as awesome as taking a road trip to the beach at night. Plus, there was a good chance someone might start making out. Whether participating or watching, there was no way I was missing out on that shit.