Self-Inflicted Wounds: Heartwarming Tales of Epic Humiliation (11 page)

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.”
—
C
HER

“I don’t even know if I’m still speaking English right now.”
—
A
ISHA
T
YLER

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.