Self-Inflicted Wounds: Heartwarming Tales of Epic Humiliation (4 page)

BOOK: Self-Inflicted Wounds: Heartwarming Tales of Epic Humiliation
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In my head, this makes sense—medium heat, fun soon; maximum heat, fun
now
. So there I stood, hair in tiny afro-puffs, barefoot in gauchos and chiffon, perched
daintily atop a perilously wobbly chair, waiting for a large pot dangerously full
of grease to reach the proper temperature, which in my murky child mind was “volcanic.”

When smoke started to rise from the pan,
10
I figured it was time to add the potatoes. Nice, wet, freshly sliced potatoes, cut
in jagged hunks with a dull blade, and dropped into the oil in big, grubby, first-grader
handfuls. Wet potatoes hit the hot grease, and did the thing that physics and chemistry
demand. Sizzling droplets of grease sprayed angrily outward—onto stove, chiffon, and
open flame.

Hooray! And also Yikes!

The fire flared up immediately. In seconds, it went from a tiny fire on the stove
to a huge fire in the pot, and young as I was, I still knew this was a big fucking
deal. Even then, I had the composure to think to myself, “You little asshole, you
knew this could happen.” But I clung to confidence as I yanked the pot off the burner
to the cold side of the stove, certain the fire would go out. Instead, it flared up
higher. “Hm,” I thought. “That kills that theory.”

Then I jumped back in fear, and freaked the fuck out.

Now, I
did
know something like this could happen. I shouldn’t have been cooking when my mom
was out. I definitely shouldn’t have been cooking food in scalding-hot oil. Indeed,
as I suspected, I
was
a little asshole. But I had done it like a hundred times before, and nothing had
ever gone wrong. I had a flawless track record up to that point.

As a result, all I had learned about little kids, shoestring-cut potatoes, and scalding-hot
oil was that if you put them all together, you got a French-fry filled, happy little
kid. As far as I was concerned, the voice in my head—along with my mom’s admonishments
and that idiotic bear on Saturday morning TV blathering about lit matches and forest
fires—was totally full of shit. I was careful, and even more than that, I was smart,
and I was special. I could break the rules, because I was better than everyone else.

This would be the first time I learned that this was not true. It would not be the
last.

The fact that the stove was on fire was a shock. Stuff like this was supposed to happen
to other people. Dumber people. People not dressed up so fancy, or so hellbent on
their own satisfaction. But it
was
happening to me, and it forced me (after climbing down off the chair to frantically
get some water, throw it on the fire, learn irrefutably that water does nothing to
grease fires but aggravate them and terrify you, get out the fire extinguisher from
under the stove, put out the grease fire, and cover half of the kitchen in a fine
white layer of regret) to confront my heretofore deeply held faith in my own superiority.

Reality is a bitter, bitter pill.

One thing was certain. I was not going to get away with doing the dishes and hiding
the evidence this time. Unless I could sift through the Yellow Pages
11
and find a house painter who could cover the damage before my mom came home for the
low, low fee of my weekly allowance, I was screwed. There were burn marks on the stove
hood. There was a discharged fire extinguisher lying limp on the grease-spattered
kitchen linoleum. Worst of all, there were oil splatters on my mom’s favorite chiffon
shirt. I was more than screwed. I was dead.

And in it crept. The sneaking suspicion that maybe I didn’t have it
all
figured out. Maybe others had something to teach me. Maybe . . . just maybe . . .
I still had a few things to learn. It seemed farfetched, but possible.

I got in a hellstorm of trouble that night. An early (and painfully brief) moment
of tearful relief on my mother’s part was followed by a reckoning not seen since in
that household. Grounding. Restriction of television. General elimination of fun.
There may have been cold gruel. It was a long time ago, and hazy, but I distinctly
remember some kind of manual labor. And I took it all without complaint, because I
had brought this on myself, and for once, I had learned my lesson. Never, ever, prepare
fried foods in chiffon.
12

My kitchen fire era came to a close that day. I never made that unique set of mistakes
in that precise order again. And from that experience grew the first silvered glimmer
of an overarching axiom that I have come to embrace lustily, after having proved it
to myself (and others) hundreds—no thousands—of times in my life. Stark and egregious
errors, the truly epic failures, forge character. They burnish your edges and make
you the person you are.

Not
burning your hand 100 times in a row teaches you nothing but self-satisfaction, smugness,
and wild-eyed arrogance.

But burn your fingers terribly just one time, and you will stay the fuck away from
that stove.

Winning is awesome. Winning is the goal. Winning is what you should pursue unfailingly,
unflinchingly, without pause or compromise. But to truly win, to become the kind of
person who both knows how to pursue excellence and can recognize it once achieved,
you
must
fail. You mustn’t just be able to
deal
with failure, you must
embrace
it, wrap your arms around its shoulders like a frigid bedmate who rejects your every
sexual advance, yet lashes out in rage and knuckle-punches you in the nuts the minute
you turn away.

Failure doesn’t want you. It wants you to want it. And only when you can look it in
the eye and stare it down like a gladiator in the blood-soaked arena with a mix of
both contempt and bemusement, can you truly win.

Winning doesn’t teach. Winning
rewards
. You can only really
learn
from failure. And in the end, after you have taken a prolonged physical and psychological
beating that would destroy a lesser man or woman, you will understand that success
is not the absence of failure, but rather the presence of not quitting when you do
fail. To win, you need to fail, and fail hard.

Pursue failure, and you will trip over success along the way.
13
That, or you’ll trip over the dangling train of your stained chiffon tunic.

Either way, you’re going down.

( 3 )

The Time I Was a Human Maypole

 

“Do not show your wounded finger, for everything will knock up against it.”

B
ALTASAR
G
RACIAN

“I probably shouldn’t have said that out loud.”

A
ISHA
T
YLER

I was
a weird kid.

Not entirely by my own choosing, either. Movies always like to portray weird kids
as “quirky” or “offbeat,” marching to the beat of a different drummer, listening to
emo-dubstep through duct-taped headphones and screaming into a ravine in the rain
with their oddly attractive yet adorably quirky friends.
1

Unfortunately, my life was not a Wes Anderson movie, so I was just weird.
Weird
weird. A fucking weirdo. Unnaturally tall, tragically bookish, gawky, horsey, slouchy,
loud. I interrupted conversations. I snorted when I laughed. I bit my cuticles obsessively.
2
I loved reading so much that daylight hours could not contain my love of literature,
and I would take a flashlight under the covers and read far into the night, usually
some very dense and impenetrable science fiction that invariably involved time travel.
I played the
violin
, for chrissakes.

I was also a loner. And I didn’t just play alone by default. I
liked
it. One of my favorite things to do was to go to the library on a Saturday and spend
the entire afternoon looking at pathology books. If you don’t know what a pathology
book is, it is a reference book for doctors who need to see pictures of what diseases
look like. Some of these books are so large that you cannot hold them in one hand,
or even two, but instead must ask assistance from a librarian to lift them onto one
of those large and dusty podia in the corner of the reading room,
3
so you can stand atop a footstool and turn pages gingerly as you gawk at the incredible,
and often nausea-inducing, misfortune of others. I would look at everything. Infectious
compendia. Venereal disease anthologies. My favorites were the ones that showed startling
growths, tumors, and goiters in vivid detail.
Goiters
. No idea why I was into this; I just was.

I was the oddest child.

Compounding my oddity was the fact that my parents were kind of weird, too. Not in
the tragically complex way that I was, but they had their moments. My parents were
of that generation that migrated west in the seventies, in search of personal freedom,
patchwork corduroy, free love, and joints the size of babies’ forearms.

They had grown up very differently. My father lost his own dad during World War II
and was raised by a single mother, engulfed by four sisters in the hardscrabble streets
of Pittsburgh. He eventually fled all that estrogen for the relative calm of Washington,
D.C., where he met my mother, a Howard University homecoming queen and civil rights
activist. They were young, beautiful, and politically aware, which meant, of course,
they needed to pack all their crap into a puke-green Chevy and move to California.

And they did just that, driving west from D.C., meticulously avoiding the South, which
at the time was not the most hospitable place for two young brown people with devastatingly
fierce afros, and landing eventually in the San Francisco Bay area. It was progressive,
it was culturally vibrant, and, most of all, it didn’t snow there, which was a major
attraction for my parents, as they both hated cold weather and vowed never to shiver
through another East Coast winter again.

They also decided, once fully committed to California as a choice, to just push this
hippie thing all the way to the wall—why not?—and burn incense, study meditation,
put pictures of dead Hindu guys around the house, and stop eating meat. I have to
applaud their commitment—there’s a reason you never saw many black Hari Krishnas
4
—but this was not a recipe for popularity. Coming to school each day smelling like
carob and Nag Champa incense is not a mark of normalcy. I didn’t have much to work
with from the start.

The icing on the honey-sweetened carrot cake was that when I started first grade,
my parents sent me to a private school. This was commendable on their part. They wanted
a better life for their daughter, to provide a safe learning environment where their
kid could play a string instrument, enjoy opera, and speak with white people in their
native accent. There is nothing wrong with these dreams. They are utterly valid. But
to be not just the one black kid, but also the one tall kid, the one vegetarian, the
one kid railroaded into Transcendental Meditation, the one kid most likely to show
up at school with a bag of date rolls and a copy of the
Baghavad Gita
under her arm, well, this was just straining the capacity of human comprehension.
When you’re a kid, you may be able to get away with being one kind of weird. But being
seven kinds of weird is putting gravy on your ice cream sundae. It’s just. Not. Allowed.

Don’t feel sorry for me. I got very good at playing alone. I loved to read, and to
build sand castles, and erect little villages made out of sticks and mud, where the
cowboys and the Indians would live together peacefully, and the Indians would give
the cowboys tobacco and maize, and the cowboys would give the Indians blankets infected
with a virus that would make their descendants many generations hence impervious to
alcoholism and fluent in their ancient tongue. I was a happy kid. I needed no one.

There is a funny thing that happens when you reject the social hierarchy and go off
on your own. People start to resent you. They don’t know why, they just do. When you
are a weird kid, people think you should want to be like them. Why wouldn’t you? They
are popular and awesome, and you are offbeat and struggle with eye contact. When it
becomes apparent that you don’t
want
to be like them, they start to wonder. “What the hell does she know that we don’t
know?” “Why doesn’t she like us when we are so very enamored of ourselves?” And, “What’s
so interesting about that pile of sticks and sand shaped like a teepee?” And rather
than ask you about your rigorously authentic, well-constructed sand structure, they
smash it, because that is just what kids do.

Kids are assholes.

Once I got on the radar of the other kids at school, who didn’t know
why
they didn’t like what I was up to, they just
didn’t
, my reverie was shattered. Long periods of nattering harassment were punctuated by
intense bursts of physical taunting that bordered on operatic. It culminated (for
the first time, anyway) one day when one enterprising young child, who had no doubt
seen this done on an ABC after-school special the week prior, decided it would be
satisfying to mount a more concentrated effort at my ridicule—something more organized,
collaborative, and with more, I dunno . . .
oomph.

He gathered the others, who up until this point had been coming at me erratic and
scattershot, and together they concocted a coordinated attack. These kids got me alone,
during a rare moment of reflection,
5
joined hands, and started (I kid you not) to taunt me while dancing around me in
a circle. Very quickly, as they gathered speed and intensity, it began to resemble
a May Day dance, with my classmates in the roles of the towheaded Nordic cherubs celebrating
the abundance of burgeoning spring, and me the confused and sullen maypole, who wished
this discomfiting jubilation would end so she could get back to reading about life
in an alien society in the year 4870.

BOOK: Self-Inflicted Wounds: Heartwarming Tales of Epic Humiliation
2.65Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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