Self-Inflicted Wounds: Heartwarming Tales of Epic Humiliation (12 page)

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.

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.”
—
R
OCKY
B
ALBOA

“I can’t breathe. Is this what a ruptured spleen feels like?”
—
A
ISHA
T
YLER

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.