Self-Inflicted Wounds: Heartwarming Tales of Epic Humiliation

by Aisha Tyler

  Eating at this restaurant was part of my larger plan to become more cosmopolitan. And during the execution of this plan, which also included shopping at consignment shops, smoking unfiltered cigarettes, writing terrible poetry, and eating Wor Won Ton soup—way cooler than regular Won Ton soup, of course, because of the “Wor” part—I met a boy.2

  This was a boy I liked, one I wanted to impress. So naturally the next step was to take him on a date to the Japanese restaurant and dazzle him with my extensive knowledge of foreign cultures and their cuisines.

  So I asked him to come with me to this restaurant. Naturally, because he was a regular old American, and not of Asian descent, he had never heard of sushi, let alone eaten it, so I was already batting a thousand in terms of mysterious woman-of-the-world points. The restaurant was unusual, it felt cool and fancy, they gave you wet towels when you sat down, and it reeked of pickled ginger and danger. I was on fire.

  I ordered for the both of us, which felt dazzlingly modern.3 If I had broken out a cellular phone at the time, I would have taken some kind of world record for forward-leaning behavior. I showed the boy how to mix his soy sauce with his wasabi, and how to scrape the chopsticks against each other to remove any wayward splinters.4 And when the food came, I explained the strange green substance on the plate as “wah-sah-bee,” a “kind of Japanese hot sauce.” I knew the boy liked hot sauce, and I wanted the boy to like me, so I wanted to show him that we were alike. That I could take it. That I liked it hot.

  With a flourish, I took a nice, generous gob of wasabi on my piece of shrimp sushi, popped it into my mouth, and chewed with a look of sly confidence, mixed with a judicious amount of world-weary boredom—just enough to show him that I was happy to be there with him, but not too happy. I mean, I liked him and all, but I did this kind of shit all the time. Who knows? Maybe after this I would go skydiving. That was the kind of thing sushi eaters just did. We defied death, and we ate our sushi spicy.

  I chewed. I smirked. And then, I exploded.

  A masticated combination of shrimp, rice, wasabi, snot, saliva, tears, and shame sprayed across the restaurant like pea soup from a possessed child. There was no table, no corner, no patron untouched by the spray of fluids shot outwards by the combination of truncated sneeze and deep belch of despair that erupted violently from the floor of my being.

  And the boy. Dear god in heaven, the boy.

  The boy took the full force of the explosion at dead center mass. The boy was at ground zero of the explosive device that was my head. If I had been entertaining any fantasy about making out with this boy, about us ever swapping spit, well, that fantasy had come fully and horribly true. His face was full of it. He had gotten plenty of my spit without any of the sweaty, groping, dry humping fun that usually accompanies it.

  As we sat there frozen, me with my hand over my face, trying to hold in the last bits of sushi and my dignity, him trying not to hurl a little bit into his own mouth, the rest of the restaurant poised in that heady electric moment between surprise and gales of shaking, involuntary laughter, I thought to myself, “This is why Americans eat bland food. You can’t injure yourself or others with a nice, soft bowl of Spaghetti-Os. A Rice Krispies treat never made anyone explode.”

  I gathered myself. I took that damp towel (thank god for that damp towel) and handed it sheepishly to the boy with a head tilt that indicated “for your face.” There were no words, no need for protestation or explanation. This thing had happened. There was no coming back. My fluids were all over the interior and patrons of a fine dining establishment, and there was nothing to do but hold my head high and plow ahead, sinking the experience deep into my subconscious like a hastily buried corpse.

  We finished the dinner with diminished enthusiasm and a marked reduction in eye contact. But despite my humiliation, I didn’t die. I made it through the meal, and it was delicious, even if I did eat demurely and with a bit less gusto after my eruption.

  And against all odds, the boy and I did go on another date, and there was nothing for me to do but screw up my bravery again, because I had set the bar for experimentation (and failure) so high that all I could do was keep running at things or admit defeat. And I was far too young and reckless to let a tiny bite of something spicy turn me into a food pussy. So we ate other exciting foods together—Thai and Ethiopian and palate-searing Hunan—and the boy and I dated for quite a bit of time after that, although we never ate sushi together again.

  Since then I’ve become an even more adventurous eater. I have eaten spicy things and raw things, smelly things and moldy things, animal guts sautéed in butter and set before me with a flourish. Some have been delicious, some confusing, and some have been downright disgusting. But I have never lost my love of culinary adventure, because life is too short to be afraid to bite something on a plate that cannot possibly bite you back.

  Well. Not literally, anyway.

  ( 16 )

  The Time I Was in an A Cappella Group

  “A knife-wound heals, but a tongue wound festers.”—TURKISH PROVERB

  “Could someone lick the salt out of this?”—AISHA TYLER

  When I struck out from home, I struck out big.1

  I had this idea rattling around in my soft and delusional teenage head that I was going to do something great and unconventional in life. The group of colleges I chose to apply to fit my cockeyed grandiose vision. They were all institutions I could barely afford—elite, expensive, culturally and geographically remote—places where I would be financially panicked, academically stressed, and socially isolated. I had realized, after twelve years of teetering on the fringes, excelling academically but struggling socially, until finally finding my home among a group of like-minded weirdos, that I excelled most under adversity; a bit of stress kicked my survival instincts into gear. I had suffered through high school, and academically, at least, things had gone well, so why should college be a breeze? I equated challenge with excellence. And I can see now, looking back, that my unspoken goal was to make my college experience as discomfiting and miserable as possible.

  Just to see if I could take it.

  There is a strong possibility I had some kind of undiagnosed psychological problem. That problem may persist to this day.

  Based on this self-abusive criterion—essentially “where will I be the most uncomfortable?”—I formulated my college choices. It was a canonical list of oddballs: Bard College, a school as diverse as the front row at an Ani DiFranco concert; Reed College, most famous for its extremely high rate of academic-related suicides; UC Santa Cruz, which eschewed traditional grades in favor of pass/fail grades, accompanied by gold stars and “good job!” hemp cookies; Oberlin College, a school somewhere in fuck-all northeast Ohio, a place I could not have located with Google Maps’ assistance, if Google Maps had existed back then; Marlboro College, a Vermont liberal arts school where for all I knew they ate their own composted feces; and Dartmouth College, about which I knew only two things: that it was an Ivy League school, and that they had their own ski mountain, which was highly important to me, as I had recently taken up snowboarding.

  None of these schools, with the exception of UC Santa Cruz, was anywhere near my home, and all of them were in remote locations where I would not know anyone, nothing would be familiar, and the weather would be bewilderingly frigid for a good part of the year. Up until this point, I had lived my entire life in California. The warmest coat I owned was a Members Only jacket.2 I had no idea why I wanted to go somewhere remote and cold. I just knew that every time I told someone I was thinking of going to school in New Hampshire or Ohio they had a million reasons why it was a bad idea. This only made me want it more.

  I could say that I was being rebellious, but the fact is that to rebel you need something to rebel against. Perhaps I was rebelling against what I thought others thought I should do: go to the safe school, the one close to home, where I would feel most comfortable, with a culture most similar to the one I had experienced thus far. Of course, I
would miss my parents, the things and places and people I knew. But like my parents, who moved across the country, far from their families, when they were young and in love, to start a new life, I wasn’t afraid of change. I wanted to make a bold gesture, to do something expansive, frightening, life changing. I wanted to go to the metaphorical ends of the earth, to flirt with the unknown.

  Or at least get to wear some really cool sweaters.

  My years of apple polishing and obsessive-compulsive academic fastidiousness had paid off, along with that summer of guiding the hearing impaired precariously along the razor’s edge of near drowning. I got into every college to which I applied. I had a surfeit of options. Of course, the obvious choice was Dartmouth. It was the only Ivy League school in the bunch, it was the farthest away from my home, it was in the mountains of New Hampshire and so guaranteed to rest comfortably in frigid temperatures for a good portion of the year, and it had a reputation for being unapologetically, even threateningly, conservative.3

  It also had two other very critical things going for it. It was a huge party school, and it had way more guys than girls in attendance.

  Copious quantities of beer and dudes? And all I had to deal with was a few supercilious assholes in crested blazers? Sold.

  I arrived on campus in the blazing heat of a late New England summer, sporting Birkenstocks (so as to more clearly define myself as From California, I thought) and dragging all my shit in a couple of suitcases: one full of clothes, the other full of terror. This place was the opposite of everything I had known previously: East Coast, old, wealthy, full of kids who had come from privilege, few of whom had ever worried about where they would live, or how they would pay the bills. And none of them, I was sure, had ever lived through the horror of watching a chicken peck a litter of baby bunnies to death.

  These kids had not experienced adversity. They were loping about in well-worn boat shoes and crisp new L.L. Bean sweaters, laughing about the staff at the country club and their time on the Vineyard, and wondering what kind of cookies their maid would be baking and sending to them in a care package labeled to look as if their alcoholic mother and emotionally remote father “cared” about them. They all spoke the same language, thought the same thoughts, were cut from the same cloth. They were a school of very confident, very well-dressed, yet casually offhanded fish. For the millionth time in my life, I felt completely out of my depth. But this time, I was thousands of miles from home.

  This time, I was on my own.

  There are two ways to go when you find yourself on the outside looking in. One is to walk firmly in the other direction, embrace your isolation, and celebrate your outsiderhood. I had taken this path my entire life. For the most part, it had worked, if for no other reason than that I didn’t have to worry about rejection if I never sought acceptance. Also, over in the corner alone, no one would notice me talking back to the voices in my head.

  The other strategy is to walk boldly toward the center of the crowd and embrace what everyone else is doing and, if you’re lucky, beat them at their own game. I had been on the outside for most of my life. College was a fresh start. I figured now was the time to see what it was like on the inside.

  Not everyone else was on board with this strategy.

  One of the things that embodies the Ivy League experience, something that is most archetypically Ivy, is the a cappella singing group. This bastard child of the collegiate Glee club and barbershop quartet has been around since the late 1800s, proliferating at a time when the Ivies were the sole domain of men.4 Every Ivy League college has one (or more) of these precious groups, with such sickeningly confectionery names as the Princeton Nassoons, the Brown Jabberwocks, the Yale Whiffenpoofs, and the Dartmouth Aires. They are a blast to see perform, generating a combination of feelings akin to eating chocolate-covered bacon: it tastes strangely delicious, but you can’t divine exactly how you feel about it. Is it a brilliant stroke of genius or an abominable chimera that defies the laws of nature?5 Are you in on some great joke? Are they? Is there a visionary puppet master pulling the strings, or are we all riding in a horseless cart, bobbing our heads blissfully to a marginal arrangement of an even more marginal Boston song?

  Not that it mattered. If you wanted to live at the epicenter of Ivy life, to be most quintessentially collegiate, the a cappella group was the way to go. The only way to be more fully Ivy would have been for me to get a trust fund and a coke habit and start sleeping with sorority girls. I figured I couldn’t get to the third thing on that list without slogging through the first two, and, as far as I knew, my family wasn’t concealing some secret fortune I could use to fuel a drug habit.6 So, a cappella it was.

  The problem is, the established a cappella groups didn’t want me. I don’t blame them. My voice was okay, but I still hadn’t outgrown my gawkiness, and I had stubbornly spent most of my freshman year wearing my Birkenstocks around campus in a hideous act of fashion defiance.7 Birkenstocks did not go with the overweeningly preppy style of a cappella groups. They were bright-eyed and fresh-faced and sang like angels and knew lots of things about white wine and would all work on Wall Street when they graduated. I was sleep deprived and my hair was a mess and my voice was untrained and I would be lucky to get a job as a receptionist at a medicinal pot dispensary if I kept rocking those ridiculous shoes.

  I was not a fit.

  So I continued with my freshman year as best I could, considering I was trying to navigate an icy campus with an armful of textbooks and unsuitable footwear. I soldiered on. And then halfway through the year, something miraculous happened. All the girls that had been rejected from the other a cappella groups decided to form their own group, and they asked me to audition. This was my shot! I imagined myself vacationing with Muffy on the Cape, sipping minted iced tea, and wondering what the riffraff down at Princeton were up to. I auditioned, I got in, and I was thrilled. My nefarious plans for infiltration were finally coming together.

  Unfortunately, this group was brand new, and so had none of the gravitas, elegance, or fashion sense that over a hundred years of elite East Coast Ivy League snobbery had conferred so delicately on the other groups. We were earnest, we loved to sing, we adored ironic arrangements of mid-eighties New Wave songs, but other than that, we were making it up as we went along. And because we were outsiders and had no history to respect or traditions to hew to, we decided to reject the conventions that defined the other groups and go our own way. We would blaze a new creative path.

  Honestly, we just had no freaking idea what we were doing.

  We struggled. We had a few music majors, but no one who could actually arrange music. We had a few people with rhythm, but no one who had ever conducted a musical group. We had some people who could sing, but no one who knew enough about vocal theory to help develop their voices. Rehearsals were an orgy of confusion, punctuated by brief, satisfying moments of harmony, followed by more delirium, and ending in chicken sandwiches. We knew where we wanted to go, but we had no idea how to get there.

  We were all Idol contestants, no Randy Jackson.

  But we were determined. Motivated. Obstinate even. Willing to feel our way in the dark. To suck terribly in the pursuit of excellence.

  And let me tell you, we fucking sucked.

  Because we were so rough around the edges, early on we decided we needed a gimmick, a special look. Our singing was still quavering and unsure, so we figured if we had a flashy presentation, people might not notice dropped lyrics and wobbly key migrations. We also figured this would set us apart from everyone else and make us seem more professional.

  Sure.

  We kicked this around for a while—how to come up with a look that was casual yet polished, accessible yet refined.8 We struggled with every thematic idea, every visual trick, our brainstorming hampered severely by the fact that we were college kids whose daily uniform involved a college sweatshirt and jeans that smelled of Bic pens and taco salad. We couldn’t afford uniforms, eveningwear seemed pretentious, and just
showing up in whatever we were wearing that day would make us look like an assemblage of slovenly singing street urchins. We got tired, then bored, then quietly annoyed.

  We finally settled on an idea that was simple, affordable, and easy to execute: a set of variations on the mock turtleneck.9 Why? Because this was the nineties, the United States was completely devoid of any style whatsoever, and the mock turtle was the height of sartorial edge. Functional yet fun. Business at the collarbone, party at the neck. We had settled on the mullet of clothing items.

  But how to make this special? Indeed, how do you make a group of college women in mock turtlenecks look like anything but a team of foodservice workers or a large modern jazz collective?

  The answer was in one of our first songs, a maudlin and forgettable piece by the group Yaz called “Mr. Blue.”10 The name said it all. We would all wear different tops, of different colors, and we could introduce ourselves to the audience according to the color of our shirts. As in—and I am not exaggerating here—“Hi! My name is Aisha, and I’m Mr. Green.”

  I am Mr. Shattered Pride.

  This weirdly non sequitur and socially self-destructive performance bit continued the entire first year of our group’s existence, and into the second. We were earnest, we were determined, and we were undeterred. There was a wholesomeness to our ham-fisted approach, a sweetness that balanced out the off-putting peculiarity of it all. We were adorable, the way a yipping puppy is adorable right before it scoots its filthy bottom on your heirloom rug.

  But we kept at it. And we practiced, and squawked, and blew on those infernal pitch pipes, and we eventually got better. And then, we actually got good.

  The big badge of acceptance at Dartmouth was being invited to “Spring Sing,” an a cappella concert that was held—yes, each spring—and involved some rotating segment of all the on-campus groups. Not all of the groups were invited, mind you. This was not a democracy, and every year the group that got to plan the Spring Sing and invite the other groups let us know it.