Self-Inflicted Wounds: Heartwarming Tales of Epic Humiliation

by Aisha Tyler

  As for my dad, I had been on my best behavior for a while, so he was off high alert. Furthermore, as he had established with utter clarity, my academic success was my own responsibility. It was his job to feed, house, and clothe me. It was my job to get good grades. He was not going to chase after me about tests, homework, or anything. If I got into a good college, he would pay. If I flunked out, he would silently fling me into the street at eighteen. I knew where I stood.

  And where I stood was I wanted to go party with my friends.

  It seemed like a good idea at the time. I had done pretty well on the test the first time around. I hadn’t really done anything in the interim to increase my score, other than tell myself that I had suffered through this god-awful thing once and what was the worst that could happen? I had good grades, great citizenship marks, a position in student government, excellent extracurriculars.4 And if all that failed, I had a sob story about being the daughter of a single father who was forced to drive me around on motorcycles because he couldn’t afford the two extra wheels.5 Who needed a killer SAT score when I could go drink warm and very inexpensive beer in the backseat of a 1983 puke green Chevy Nova on the beach with a boy I had a crippling crush on?6

  The math on this was too clear. Too definitive. That test didn’t stand a chance.

  My friends did nothing to dissuade this cockeyed plan, regaling me with stories about people they knew who had stayed up all night or overslept or not studied or taken the test drunk and gotten a perfect score. They assured me that these were scientifically provable cases, neither conjecture nor anecdote, but science. This had really happened to a guy that knew a guy that knew my friend’s cousin. And that was proof enough for me.

  The whole way down, and the whole way back, I kept telling myself I was doing exactly what I should be doing—not taking the test too seriously. Letting myself relax. Mental excellence required rest and hard work in equal measure. If I didn’t know that now, I wouldn’t ever really know it, right? Best to take it easy and let the parts of my brain associated with math and reading (and, apparently, intelligent decisions of any kind) lie fallow for a while so they would be rested and ready for the test in the morning.

  We had fun. We engaged in hijinks common to the typical American teen with access to a car, a beach, and cheap beer. We yelled the words “road trip” at the top of our lungs as many times as our vocal strength would allow. It was a good night.

  Was it worth it? Well.

  My friends dropped me off at the test site with ample time to take the test. Somehow, I had remembered to bring my number two pencils, which was impressive, because I was still wearing the same clothes from the day before and smelled suspiciously of Miller High Life and boxed donuts. I walked into that classroom, running my own flimsy internal pep talk about how I was smart and prepared and the answer was almost always “C,” and I sat down to ace that test.

  When I awoke from my nap four hours later, it struck me that a different strategy might have served me better. It also struck me that wooden high school desks are the single most uncomfortable place to sleep off a hangover.

  My SAT score did not go up.

  And also, the answer is almost never C.

  Thank god for those deaf whitewater rafters.

  ( 14 )

  The Time I Puked All Over the Car of a Boy I Liked in Broad Daylight

  “It ain’t how hard you hit; it’s about how hard you can get hit, and keep moving forward.”—ROCKY BALBOA

  “I can’t breathe. Is this what a ruptured spleen feels like?”—AISHA TYLER

  I do not miss any part of being a teenage girl.

  Not the confusion, the awkward gait, the emotional instability, the lack of income, the righteous indignation, the fact that my hands and feet were insanely large for my frame, that I had the same haircut as Morris Day of The Time, or that after my mod phase I started dressing like Boys II Men had gotten in a fight with an angry thrift store, all fifties-era letter cardigans and Z-Cavaricci parachute pants.1

  People romanticize high school. Hollywood likes to portray it as a time when everyone is cute, twirling their ponytails, and meeting up at the Peach Pit for a chocolate malted and a quick handjob from Slater behind the dumpster before glee club practice. This is a pile of utter steaming bullshit, concocted by people who never got a handjob in high school and would like to “re-create” that experience for themselves as adults. This version of high school is a fallacy for all but the very rich, the very slutty, or very rich sluts.

  I was not a cute teenager. I was not graceful, bubbly, or precocious. I did not cheerlead, work on the yearbook, organize spirit rallies, or plan dance-offs between opposing gangs of sexy brooding outsiders. I was large, clumsy, constantly lovelorn, snerked when I laughed, and ate yellow mustard on my microwave burritos,2 which made me smell like a one-woman AV club. I was one slim behavioral quirk away from being Booger Dawson in Revenge of the Nerds.

  The duck sauce on this tragedy dumpling was that I was a hopeless romantic. This trait did not make me different in any way from every other teenage girl on the planet, or, indeed, in the galaxy. If your enemy formed a massive and invincible force of superhuman teenage girls, all of whom could shoot rays from their eyeballs, fly, lift super heavy shit, and generally kick massive intergalactic ass, you would not need to raise an interstellar navy or arm your arsenal of nuclear weapons. You would just need to organize a small group of cute, brooding, emotionally remote teenage boys, and then send them out into the light of day to lay waste to the oncoming army.

  Those boys would kill them all dead and return before lunch, thus proving an axiom, true and immutable, which has held fast since the beginning of time:

  Girls are powerless against boys.3

  I was a living example of this axiom in action.

  I didn’t crush very often when I was a teenager. There weren’t very many guys who were as weird as I was and also not either cripplingly socially inhibited, or gay. Even way back then—far before Sex and the City, Will and Grace, or that turd The Object of My Affection—I knew what a self-brutalizing exercise in futility it was to crush on my hot gay friends. I sensed it would only end with them making out with some boy way cuter than me while I ate a gallon of Rocky Road ice cream beside them on the couch and tried not to watch.4

  And after the crushing defeat of the Great Chinese Food Date Incident way back in grade school, I knew better than to give my heart away recklessly. Sure, I had crushes in the interim, but so many were unrequited that I had pretty much given up on ever liking a person at the same time that they liked me. I figured two people crushing on each other simultaneously was akin to finding a pearl in a live oyster, or winning the Nobel Prize—something that only happened to white people. I had relinquished hope.

  So I kept my feelings bottled up, preferring to write bad poetry and eat Häagen Dazs in bed whenever anything resembling a feeling for a boy reared its horned and repulsive head.

  Then I fell, and fell hard. And my dignity was never quite the same again.

  I developed a crush on a boy my sophomore year so deep-rooted, so epically sweeping, that it lasted almost the rest of my high school career. It was like an emotional tumor, worming its way into every part of my thoughts and affecting all of my behaviors, turning me from a bookish artsy weirdo into a bookish artsy weirdo who stared at points mid-distance for hours and generally acted one thousand times weirder than she ever had prior. This crush was so big and all-consuming that almost immediately, everyone I knew, and shortly after that, everyone in my school,5 knew about this humiliating and totally debilitating crush. It was tragic on an operatic scale, and there was nothing I could do to stop it. I had taken my elementary school crush, multiplied it by my now much larger bra size, and given it fangs.

  When you are a teenager, and you like someone, it takes over everything. It is all you can think about when you wake up, and the last thing you reflect on when you fall asleep. Everything reminds you of them: your schoolbooks. Your favo
rite television show. Walking. Food. Air. Being.

  If there was a way to bottle the chemicals produced by a teenager’s brain when they have a crush on someone, and we could weaponize it, turn it into some kind of aerosol of want, we could end world war, eliminate poverty, and create a race of super-dedicated athletes focused on world domination. If we could distill and control the unfathomable focus with which teenage girls obsess about the boy they like, turn it into a pill, and give it to everyone, we could solve all of humanity’s problems in a matter of days.

  Teenagers, however, would never, ever, finish their homework.

  I could not think. I could not function. I could not sit still in class or hold a conversation. I could not eat (and, as previously noted, I love to eat). I couldn’t be a person. I was, for all intents and purposes, very, very sick.6 And the more I realized that I was embarrassing myself, oddly, the less I cared. That is the thing about humiliation; if you eat enough of it, it starts to taste like normal. Once you have endured the worst embarrassment you can think of, and you have lived, the next sling or arrow is nothing. You have formed a psychic callus over your soul, and now nothing can touch you. The world is your oyster.

  Your aloof, humiliating, affection-rejecting oyster.

  This boy was not requiting my crush in any way. He did not like me in the way that I liked him. We had mutual friends, and so he was serviceably polite to me, and, at his best moments, tolerated me, which to a teenage girl is tantamount to a marriage proposal,7 but that was cold and fleeting comfort. Based on a few well-placed and workmanlike interactions over time, I was able to fan the flame of this emotional tragedy for a couple of years, as my friends, acquaintances, and the general population of my high school marveled at both my infinite stamina, and my infinite sadness.

  I can’t say exactly why I was crushing so hard, and honestly, it’s irrelevant. It does not matter what was wonderful about the boy. When we are crushing on someone, they are a swirling blur of dimples and crooked smiles, hair flips and skateboard tricks. They make us feel drunk, confused, outside of our bodies. They are a small planet, drawing us in with invisible gravitational force. But when we look back, we can’t figure out what specifically made them so alluring. Sometimes we can’t even remember why we thought they were awesome in the first place. That’s the thing about crushes. They are magic. Terrible, dark, evil magic.

  Eventually the crush faded, as it had to. The heart can only take so much rejection, or, in my case, total indifference. Plus I had shit to do. I couldn’t just sit around pulling petals out of flowers and making cootie-catchers for the rest of my life. I had to move on. And I did. Slowly, with a lot of effort and focus, the help of my friends, and a few well-placed make-out sessions with other guys. And just when I thought I had gotten my shit together . . . the boy liked me back.

  What the fuck!!!

  Not okay.

  Instantaneously, all the hysteria and internal emotional damage of the previous two years came rushing back, and I was incapacitated again. Like, in seconds. This was not fair. Deep down, I knew I was at the top of a very long, very perilous emotional slide, one made of jagged edges and razor blades and cut lemons and really bad germs that were going to get inside me and render me a weepy, sloppy, oozing mess. I didn’t care. It was like I had been standing at the top of a high dive for two years and now I finally had a chance to jump. It didn’t matter that when I looked down I saw the pool had been drained and was now full of broken glass and silverfish. I had climbed up here, and I was going to fucking do this thing.

  So me and this boy hung out one night, and when it was clear we were going to hook up, it made me crazy nervous, so I drank.8 I definitely drank too much. At this point, I was just trying not to have a nervous breakdown. I would have drunk diesel fuel if it had been on hand and someone told me it would take the edge off and make me not feel like a great ugly babbling idiot. And it was a fun night, at least in the beginning, because after a bit, I was more buzzed than nervous, and that was good. And then I was just more drunk than buzzed.

  And then I was just fucking drunk.

  And then we did hook up. And it was awesome, or as awesome as it could be considering I’d been fantasizing about it for half of my high school career,9 the kind of awesome where you want a burger all day, and then when you eat it, it’s good, sure, but it’s just a freaking burger, not heavenly ambrosia or Green Lantern’s ring. Just a burger.

  The next day, however, I remained stoked. Very stoked. Hungover, and sick as blazes, but very, very, very stoked.10 And it was a Saturday, sunny and perfect, and the boy and I decided to take a drive to the beach, but first we decided to get something to eat. Which I thought was a perfect idea, because I was the kind of hungover that makes people dig out their own eardrums with a broken pencil. So a nice cold soda and a giant hot falafel, full of garlic and tahini and a bunch of other gloppy shit that is hard to pronounce and even harder to keep down when you are hungover, seemed like the perfect idea at the time. In fact, anything the boy said seemed like a perfect idea to me.

  I was still very, very lovesick.

  We got the food. I ate the falafel. I smiled at the boy. Falafel. Boy. Falafel. Boy. All my dreams were coming true. I turned to look out the open window, thrilled to be with this boy I had been obsessing over since the beginning of time, the cool breeze on my face, blowing my hair back, making me feel happy to be alive, my eyes full of sunshine, my soul full of bubble gum, my heart full of . . .

  Puke. My lovesick heart, replete with puke.

  Which was now flying out of my mouth at Mach Five like demons expelling from the pit of my being, propelled outward by the incantations of a wild-eyed priest. And then it was being blown right back into my happy face by that cool breeze, and into my hair, and my face, and my falafel, and the car.

  And all over the boy.

  And that was the beginning, and the end, of the first great romance of my young life. I had finally found my threshold of humiliation. And the boy had found his threshold of having vomit shot around the interior of his car by a human Gatling gun.

  So we had both found our limits. Which was something.

  I got over him very, very soon after that. And I learned two things. One, it is a waste of time to love someone who does not love you.

  And two, never eat a falafel when you are hungover. Seriously.

  Both will end quite badly for you.

  ( 15 )

  The Hot Wasabi and the Infinite Sadness

  “Our vanity is most difficult to wound just when our pride has been wounded.”—FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

  “I can never set foot in this place again.”—AISHA TYLER

  It may be difficult to imagine, but there was a time in this country, before the Internet, and Gawker, and Pinkberry, and ringtones and Spanx and indeed, civilization, when you could not purchase sushi at every corner store, mini-mall food court, and supermarket in the country.

  And stick with me here, as I know this is hard to comprehend: there was a time when Americans, gulp . . . did not eat sushi at all.

  Years ago, barely anyone even knew what sushi was. The word conjured images of slabs of raw, unmasticable flesh, when it conjured any image at all. More often, if you said the word sushi, people would blank out as if they had just remembered they had left their iron on at home. There was no dynamite roll, or firecracker sauce, or crispy rice, and you certainly could not get your crab creamy and spicy. Sushi was exotic, unpronounceable, and very other.

  And it was raw. Fish. What the fuck is wrong with you?

  At the risk of dating myself, this dark age of dining coincided with my junior year in high school. And in keeping with my lifelong philosophy of running headlong and blind into things that I was neither familiar with nor completely understood, I had somehow found a sushi restaurant near my house and set about trying to become an expert in Japanese cuisine. This being San Francisco, we had a higher than normal percentage of Asian restaurants, but the really authentic ones were ensconced
deeply in parts of town where most non-Asians did not dare venture out of xenophobia or bewilderment. But there were some Asian restaurants outside San Francisco’s Chinatown or Japantown that catered to the uninitiated (read: white people), and it was in one of these that I began my soft initiation into the world of adventurous eating. Which was not very adventurous at all.

  The restaurant was called something innocuous and welcoming, like “Sushi Fun Time,” or “Rock ’n’ Roll Sushi” or “Come On In, White People, Almost Everything is Cooked,” and it was perched on Church Street near my favorite bakery, just in case I pussied out at dinner and needed to fill up on more familiar foods afterwards. Nothing got the taste of oddities like eel out of your mouth better than seven or eight carrot cupcakes.

  I was determined to master this cuisine, and quickly, because I wanted to impress others with my internationalism and modernity, and because I had seen Molly Ringwald eat sushi in The Breakfast Club, and if that waif could do it without gagging, so could I. So I would go, sometimes with friends, sometimes alone, and try everything on the menu, or at least everything that had been cooked first, which, because it was a non-Asian-friendly restaurant, was almost everything. If you wanted shrimp or egg or something called “sea legs,” along with copious piles of gut-impacting white rice, this was the place for you. I have no doubt that the sushi chefs there laughed their asses off as they counted their money on the way home each night—they were serving the Japanese equivalent of Spam and eggs.1