Self-Inflicted Wounds: Heartwarming Tales of Epic Humiliation (2 page)

Sometimes the self-inflicted wound is entirely of your own making, and sometimes others
empower or hasten it along, as if adding accelerant to your fast growing pyre of self-immolation.
Everyone enjoys a spectacular meltdown, which is why we are so addicted to shows about
people who extreme coupon, dress their children up like hookers, or live in a hoarder’s
paradise of vintage magazines and Ziploc bags of cat poop. It is supremely fun to
point and laugh at the foibles of others, and if we can stick out a foot to trip someone
into a murky puddle of their own damp mistakes, all the better.

But in the aftermath of a self-inflicted wound, when you sift through the embers for
the arsonist’s tool, the propane canister or half-burned lighter, much like the nameless
narrator in
Fight Club
, you discover that Tyler Durden is just a figment of your fractured imagination,
that you blew up your own apartment and burned your life to the ground, and you’ve
been punching yourself in the face like an idiot the entire time.

Don’t fight it. Accept it for what it is. You screwed the pooch. All you can do now
is try to turn it into a learning experience.

Or, at the very least, into a killer story you can tell your friends.

Prologue: Why Am I Doing This? Why?

“I’m a little wounded, but I’m not slain; I will lay me down for to bleed awhile,
Then I’ll rise and fight again.”
—
J
OHN
D
RYDEN

“Just give me a second to get my wind back. Who the hell put that pole there?”
—
A
ISHA
T
YLER

Comedians
love a good story. Unnaturally so. So much so, in fact, that we will subject ourselves
to any amount of self-torture and humiliation to get it.

I have often heard a comedian tell a story of such abjection, such pure and unadulterated
shame, that any normal person with even a modicum of self-respect would do everything
in his or her power to first forget, then make others forget, it had ever happened.

Burn every photo. Kill off witnesses. Bribe law enforcement. Change names, addresses,
phone numbers, entire lives, to make sure no one will ever,
ever
repeat that story to others.

A comedian, however, cannot
wait
to belt that story out in front of strangers, replete with sound effects and wild
gesticulations. The most crushing and humiliating of these stories will send a comedian
barreling into a party with sweaty palms and a jelly jar full of bourbon, screaming,
“Holy shit, you are not gonna believe what happened to me Saturday night! I am such
an asshole!”

It is a sickness.

Why are comedians like this? Being a comedian requires an extremely high threshold
of psychic pain. You must be able to tolerate humiliation, learn to resist it, defy
it, crave it even. You must make love to embarrassment, tongue kiss abjection, clasp
emotional injury close to your heaving breast. You cannot fear the mocking of others;
you must face it as a brave, if utterly doomed, Roman soldier. Because the truth is
that sometimes the audience may actually be laughing
at
you and not with you. And that needs to be okay. For the comedian, laughs are
much
more important than one’s own psychic comfort—the goal is to entertain, not cultivate
a prayer circle. You must be immune to bloodshed, even—no
especially—
when the bloodshed is your own.

You must give the people what they want.

Pursuant to this, you will find, almost universally, that we comedians have no shame.
This critical internal trigger, one that makes others behave in discreet and proper
ways in the company of others, just does not work in us. We do not have it. We do
not need it. Much like people born without a spleen or tibia, this is just the way
we are built.

Do not pity us, however. Much like Daredevil, who turned his blindness into a crime-fighting
tool, we have turned a shortcoming into our greatest weapon. Lack of shame is our
superpower. Comedians feel nothing when dumped, snubbed, fired, or told off. Or if
we do, we shove those feelings deep inside, down by where we keep the memories of
that time we peed ourselves at show and tell, right alongside our big burlap sack
of lifelong rejection. Every terrible experience is fodder for discussion, subject
to dissection and examination, foundation for a joke, a rant, or other exploitation,
whether it is on stage or in the corner at your brother-in-law’s barbecue, when you
would
really
rather us shut the hell up.

I suppose a more accurate description would be that we
do
feel, but not in the way a normal person does. When shamed, we actually feel two
things: the feelings we should be feeling at the moment—sadness, rage, disgust, dull
ambivalence—and a second, stranger and more singular feeling, which is:
man, this is going to make a killer story.
¹

Humiliation is fuel for art, and there is nothing more strangely satisfying than exploiting
our own cringe-worthy experiences for others’ enjoyment and our own itchy brand of
self-satisfaction. Much like picking at a scab or pulling a hangnail to the quick,
there is a prickly pleasure in telling others that you urinated on yourself just steps
from your front door due to an overindulgence in German wheat beer, or that you screwed
up the courage to feebly punch a guy you believed to be sleeping with your ex-girlfriend,
only to find out that not only did you punch the wrong guy, but the “Taylor” your
girlfriend left you for was a girl.

It hurts at the moment.
Man
, does it hurt. It burns like a mouthful of napalm on an empty stomach. But then,
doesn’t hurt also taste just a tiny bit like winning?

This book is about those moments. Those massive failures that are yours, and yours
alone, to claim. No one made you do it. No one cheated you, tricked you, forced you
to be a dunce, a chump, a klutz, a butthead, an asshole. You did that shit
all
to yourself.

And by
you
, of course, I mean me. And by
yourself
, I also, of course, mean me. This is not a collection of my triumphs, my best moments,
my gilded seconds atop the winner’s podium, my halcyon days in the metaphorical sun.
No.

This is a collection of stories about all the times I shit the bed.

I can’t wait to tell you all about them.

( 1 )

The Time I Cut Myself in Half

“The wound is the place where the Light enters you.”
—
R
UMI

“This is gonna need ointment.”
—
A
ISHA
T
YLER

When
I was about five years old, I stabbed myself in the chest.

Well, not exactly
stabbed
. More like sliced. Yes. I sliced myself nose to navel, as if conducting a frog dissection
in science class. Only without the relatively sanitary tools, face protection, or
pursuit of scientific truth.

And, also, on
myself
.

I could say it wasn’t my fault. I could protest that it was an accident—unforeseen,
unpredictable, unkind, unfair. None of that would be true. I did this on purpose.
I knew exactly what I was getting into. The entire debacle was calculated, focused,
and gleefully headlong.

Before you gasp in horror and thinly disguised pity, this was no suicide attempt.
¹
I was not
trying
to gut myself. At the same time, I can blame no one else for the bloody vertical
striping that occurred.

I courted that stabbing, poked at it with a metaphorical stick, taunted it like a
rangy pit bull behind a wobbly storm fence, mocking and laughing as it slavered in
captivity—right up to the moment the dog leapt, snarling against the wire, knocking
the fence to the ground like a structure of drinking straws and me face-first into
the dirt. Or, more accurately, face-first into the hot, abrasive summer pavement.

Some might call such behavior stupid. They would be one hundred percent right.

Here’s the thing. I am uniquely, and occasionally quite stupidly, fearless. I have
never been afraid. Well, not
truly
afraid. I have had moments of trepidation, acted tentatively on occasion. Tiptoed
toward my fate timorously, doubts creeping, internal alarms blaring. Occasionally,
I exercise a bit of caution. But more often, and to my sustained chagrin, I run sprinting
toward my own demise, without consideration or forethought. I like to shoot first
and ask questions about why there is a bullet lodged deeply in my own foot much, much
later.

So on this golden August day in my fifth year, I had been playing outside in my Oakland
neighborhood with a dusty scrum of local kids in a completely unsupervised group,
the way we used to in the good old days, before the Internet told parents that this
was a terrible idea
²
and likely to result in your child being abducted by aliens or devoured by wolves.
We were all in various states of typically dirty late-summer disarray: faces sticky
with rivulets of many-hours-dried melted Popsicle and festooned liberally with dirt,
most shoeless and many shirtless, including (inappropriately I suppose in hindsight)
me.

Yes, I was running around a city neighborhood unchaperoned, on hot pavement with bare
feet, and worse still, a bare chest.
³
Now, before you jump into your time machine and call Child Protective Services, get
over your prissy self. It was the seventies. Kids ran around unsupervised. This is
before people felt the need to meticulously curate every minute of their child’s day.
In the morning during the summer, parents opened the front door and forcibly ejected
their children into the street with five dollars and a firm admonition to come home
when the streetlights came on and not to run into oncoming traffic. This is just how
things were done. I suppose if we were rich, the nanny could have followed behind
us in the family’s second minivan, but we weren’t, and she didn’t, and that, my dear
friends, is that.

So we were running around barefoot, narrowly avoiding puncture wounds from the abundance
of rusted nails and broken bottles strewn liberally about the streets, fleeing rabid
dogs and hissing cats and the occasional loitering ne’er-do-well, and having the time
of our fucking lives. We climbed some trees, chased an ice cream truck, terrorized
a squirrel, picked up dried dog poop, threw rocks at things that break when they are
hit with rocks, and were generally on raging kindergarten fire, when we found an alley.
Sweet.

Naturally, it being an absolutely terrifying place, and me being feckless and wild,
⁴
I decided to go into that alley. And why the hell not? After you’ve touched dried
dog feces with your bare hands, nothing much else troubles you. And in that alley,
among empty fruit crates and mosquito-infested puddles, we found . . . an abandoned
hobbyhorse.

Abandoned! Who the hell leaves a perfectly good hobbyhorse just lying around?
I announced to the group.
Heathens! Profligates! Godless people, that’s who!

I was a dramatic child.

We dragged this hobbyhorse from its dank hiding place and into the street, the better
to surround it with hard surfaces that might embrace a small person’s tumble. We surveyed
it briefly from all sides to confirm that it was, indeed, in functioning order. And
then, in turn, we each hopped on board and rode that thing like a Hapsburg prince
on a Lipizzaner stallion. Springs have never clung to life so dearly, nor groaned
in protest so loudly. We played quite orderly, waiting politely in line for our turn,
which may seem surprising considering all the tree climbing and poo flinging we had
engaged in prior, but this was the seventies, and pre-Internet, and the unique self-involvement
of the YouTube era had not been invented yet. We were relatively well-behaved, and
when appropriate we shared, and I’m sure most of us brushed twice a day because that
Yuck Mouth guy on TV had admonished us to, and who were we to disobey?

And because I had found the horse and was feeling particularly magnanimous, I went
last.

Oh. I forgot to mention. This magical hobbyhorse had one flaw. Just a
tiny
one. The horse was old, and its fragile plastic body had begun to decay, revealing
its metallic skeleton. Bits of metal poked through the horse’s sides and hind flanks,
and a massive rusted metal bar protruded violently from its head, like some jagged,
ferrous horn.
⁵
This toy was a little plastic unicorn just built for destruction. I couldn’t wait
to climb aboard.

Please, try to reserve your judgment for the end of the story, where it will be truly
well placed.

So we are riding, and we are whooping, and we are feeling the kind of warm self-satisfaction
that comes only from courting danger in a pair of sticky Underoos in the afternoon
sunshine, and life is good. And I hop on this thing, and I am full of joy.

Now, as I was easily a foot taller and fifteen pounds heavier than all of the previous
riders, this horse was taxed beyond capacity. If it had been a real horse, its tongue
would have been lolling pendulously from its froth-framed mouth as its eyes rolled
wildly in socket, whites exposed to the blue summer sky. But I am happily oblivious
to the strain I am placing on this decaying plastic toy, and I rock away, springs
groaning, frame creaking ominously, and I ride, ride, back and forth, farther and
faster now, until the tail and nose scrape the sidewalk, leaving chips of brown and
white in their wake, little plastic button horse nose skittering now across the pavement.
And I ride on, dipping farther back now, laughing, eyes closed, face toward the heavens,
the sun on my sticky little-kid face, and forward now, so far forward, like I am on
a
real
horse, a real true life horse . . . and I am
flying
.