Self-Inflicted Wounds: Heartwarming Tales of Epic Humiliation (6 page)

And so it is that when I was a child I believed blindly, hopelessly, that someday
I would be able to convince one of my classmates to trade their lunch for mine.

This would prove to be utterly naïve.

As previously lamented, for as long as I could remember, my family had been vegetarian.
My earliest memories are of vegetables. And fruit. And carob. And tears.

We were vegetarian at a time when vegetarianism was neither cute, nor fun, nor hip,
nor even particularly nutritious. There were no gourmet veggie restaurants, no hipster
gluten-free bakeries, no meatless patties that tasted eerily like industrial hamburgers,
not even a single celebrity vegan with a come-hither smugness and a fancy cookbook.
Soy was something you used to feed cattle or thicken industrial adhesives. Almond
milk was just a glimmer in some infant hippie’s lactose-intolerant eye. We were early
adopters, trailblazers; we were completely on our own.

My parents weren’t even particularly meticulous vegetarians. We still ate eggs, milk,
and cheese, but refused dairy butter.
¹
We ate a lot of vegetable casseroles and buttered toast, but would then voraciously
devour the occasional twenty-pound ling cod my father would bring home from his deep-sea
fishing trips (including the eyeballs, a favorite move of my father’s that never failed
to gross out my mother and completely delight my sister and me). Their approach managed
to be inconsistent yet draconian at the same time; I was denied meat, but also fruit
juice and processed foods. I could order a Filet-O-Fish at McDonalds, but the rest
of the menu was completely off-limits, as if the fish sandwiches took some circuitous
and altogether more virtuous path toward their paper-wrapped end. And I was not allowed
to have sugar, which as far as I could tell, was just plain mean.

To top it all off, at this time, my father worked as a meatcutter at a massive beef
plant in Oakland. This irony wasn’t lost on even
my
young, developing brain. I may not have understood cognitive dissonance yet, but
I did understand
unfair
.
²
My dad had access to an unlimited supply of delicious steaks, and yet was making
me eat bricks of tofu and fermented wheat gluten. This was injustice on a high order.
This outrage would not stand.
³

There was no reason for me to lust after meat so badly, other than the fact that it
was forbidden. Kids always want what they can’t have, and in my case, meat represented
something more than just a foodstuff. It symbolized my intense desire to fit in. All
the other kids at school were eating bologna and American slices on white bread, softly
slicked with neon smears of yellow mustard, a sandwich that embodied everything that
was mainstream and wholesome and normal in the world, while I was picking alfalfa
sprouts from between my teeth. Meat meant normalcy. Meat meant
belonging
.

I was vaguely aware of the fact that meat was bad for you, but the whole “meat is
murder” meme had yet to be coined, and no one had thrown blood on a creepy old fur-festooned
rich lady yet. There was not much known in the mainstream about vegetarianism, and
it certainly was not
cool
in any way. Whenever I would have furtive access to a television,
⁴
they would flash that nutrition pyramid during
Schoolhouse Rock
, taunting me with that tantalizing block of meats and proteins. The entire world
was aligned against me.

Making things worse, I couldn’t think of one good reason for us to be vegetarians,
other than to make my life a living hell. As far as I could tell, we didn’t eat meat
because meat tasted delicious and gave me happiness, and my parents’ goal in life
was to deny me all human joy. This was the motivation for our abstemious lifestyle:
to ruin Aisha’s life and destroy whatever modicum of normalcy remained to me.

And so I was a vegetarian along with my parents, but with a deep and abiding reluctance.
And since I did not make money, purchase groceries, or prepare meals, I really had
no choice.

There were meals my mother made that I really did love: big piles of spaghetti (what
we called it back then, before the heady days of
pasta
), blanketed in that chemist’s excuse for cheese shaken from a big green canister;
omelets filled with sautéed peaches and strawberries at the height of summer and doused
in maple syrup (I was a fan of the savory-sweet trend long before it became hip);
grilled cheese sandwiches broiled to bubbling and stuffed with thick slices of juicy
tomato; carrot cakes packed with raisins and walnuts and piled high with real, homemade
cream cheese frosting. It wasn’t that my mother couldn’t cook—she was a fantastic
cook. It was just that I felt I was being put through a childhood-long test of some
kind, training to prepare me for a long adult life of discipline and deprivation,
perhaps as a missile silo operator, an international spy, an Antarctic research scientist,
or (I still clung to hope) the first black astronaut to make Mars landfall.
⁵

This training extended to my time away from home, when I was forced to enter groups
of normal, carnivorous kids, and act as if I was one of them. I approached this like
an ongoing sociology project, a series of experiments in early espionage and infiltration.
Could I act like them? Could I persuade them I was one of them, blend in and fade
away, like the last living soul in a world of flesh-eating zombies? I assigned myself
this task each morning, like a tiny agent of a vegetarian sleeper cell, or an alien
occupying a freshly body-snatched human.
Act normal
.

This worked for most of the morning. But as soon as the lunch bell rang, the tofu
salad hit the fan.

You remember what a big part of socialization trading lunches is when you’re a kid—exchanging
the food you don’t want in your lunch for the stuff in your buddy’s lunch, of which
he or she is equally disdainful, but which to you looks like ambrosia sent from Mount
Olympus in a tiny golden chariot. This is a big part of making friends, keeping friends,
and, if you refuse to trade, sending friends into a shame spiral of self-hate and
dejection. You can imagine how desperately I wanted to be included in this sacred
ritual. You can probably also imagine how frustrated I felt that the only thing I
had to trade were foods that, while edible, could easily be used for industrial doorstops
and NHL-strength hockey pucks. It is hard to convince someone to give you their container
of Jell-O squares or extra Ring Ding when you cannot even muster up adjectives to
properly describe what you offer in return. I struggled to make my case, but had very
few descriptives in my arsenal: chief among them “soft,” “bitter,” “slightly acrid,”
and “doesn’t taste as much like dirt as you might expect.” I was woefully outgunned.

This did not deter me from trying. I was one against an army, a wrench in the machine,
and I would fight until my very last breath, or until I was forced, once again, to
eat my avocado sandwich and date-coconut rolls alone on the tetherball court. Each
day was an opportunity to try anew, to get back behind that rock and roll it incrementally
up that hill, to prove that I, all respect to
Glengarry Glen Ross
, could
always be closing
.

I tried everything. Seduction. Subterfuge. Threats. Bribery. None of this was even
remotely successful. In a world of carnivorous A-Rods, I was a vegetarian Adam Dunn.
⁶
No, I was worse than Adam Dunn. I was batting a perfect zero.

I don’t know when it was that I resorted to supplication. It was truly dismaying to
realize that in a world ruled by extortion, bargain, and leverage, I was weaponless,
without enticements of any kind. I had nothing anyone wanted. When you have nothing
to bargain with, you resort to what honorable yet impoverished people have done for
centuries—alms-seekers, ne’er-do-wells, freeloaders, and bums—you beg.

This was as pathetic in practice as it sounds in retrospect. To be a little kid, roaming
at recess, begging for scraps of bread like a Benedictine friar at the tail of the
Plague is tragic on a very high order. But desire and hunger soon overcame any shreds
of pride I had left, and wolfish bites of a crème-filled golden cake can sweeten even
the bitterest dregs of shame. Fortunately, kids have as much capacity for extreme
generosity as they have for dead-eyed cruelty. And when you fling yourself upon their
mercy, and maybe promise to organize their cubby or do their homework, they will give
you their castoffs freely and with open hands. As easily as they can be cruel, kids
can also be kind; a direct appeal to that buried bit of nice can tease it quickly
to the fore. All I needed to do was drop the wheedling and manipulation and
ask
for what I wanted—a practice that has served me countless times since. Sometimes
the most effective path to a destination—be it boardroom, bedroom, or lunchroom—is
a straight, direct, unabashed line. The only thing someone can do to you when you
ask for something is tell you no. But ask enough times and
someone’ll
finally say yes, if only to get you the hell out of their face.

I lived through most of fifth grade on half-eaten bologna sandwiches, orange Skittles,
Dorito dust, Twinkie heels, and those weird-shaped Boston Baked Beans from the bottom
of the box.
⁷
And I learned that every once in a while, if you ask for what you want, you’ll get
it. Or at least, a third of it. Maybe with a few bite marks.

I have not always depended on the kindness of strangers. But for one long and delirious
year, I cast my fate, and my awful hippie lunches, to the wind. And the wind blew
castoff pizza crusts back into my face.

It was a fair exchange.

( 6 )

The Time I Almost Seared My Flesh to My Dad’s Motorcycle

“A wounded deer leaps highest.”
—
E
MILY
D
ICKINSON

“Holy crap I’m on fire. Again.”
—
A
ISHA
T
YLER

For
many, childhood is about puppies and cupcakes, running through meadows chasing kittens,
candy, dreams, rainbows, and puppies again.

I say childhood is about tragedy. Crushing, tear-stained tragedy.

For me, childhood isn’t something you savor so much as something you survive, a litany
of tragic episodes and cosmic insults, birthday letdowns and social rejection, skinned
knees and heartbreak compounded exponentially and punctuated only briefly by wee slivers
of cake-induced joy, until one day you wake up and you’re twenty years old and you
got so drunk the night before that you passed out on your best friend’s futon in your
underwear, slept through midterms, and will probably flunk out of college and be forced
to manage an all-night diner or park cars for a living.

Oh, and while you were sleeping, someone wrote on your face. In Magic Marker.

Childhood—it is not for the meek.

Since childhood is so punishing, such a hazing gauntlet writ large, it only makes
sense that one should make as many grand gestures as possible—to “go huge,” if I may
coin a lame and not particularly compelling phrase.

So that is what kids do. They throw tantrums, explode into screams, hurl and squeal,
cry and giggle, until they near asphyxiation. Everything is the “best thing
evarrr
” or “the end of the world” or “if I don’t get this I will
die
.” There are no half measures in childhood. Everything is cataclysmic.

For me, this extreme expression took many forms, but none so painful as the year I
decided to dress like a ballerina.
All the freaking time.

Not at a cute age, either. This was long after the age of three, when I would have
looked totally adorbs in a tiny pink leotard, ballet shoes, and a tutu dusted with
chocolaty fingerprints that could either be a dancer’s skirt or a princess dress depending
on what struck me over my Wheatena that morning.

No, I was the hoary age of ten when I decided I wanted to dress like a prima ballerina
(or perhaps a weird old SoHo hippie who made her own granola and never wore pants
because “they interrupted the flow of my
chi
, man”). I wanted people to know that I was serious, not about ballet necessarily,
but about art. Somehow I had decided that the best way to showcase my seriousness
was to wear a ballerina outfit at all times, and to all places.

Why did I fixate acutely on such a specific fashion choice? I have no idea. Kids seize
upon things. Favorite shoes. Special dolls. Compulsive hand washing. Eating paste.
Who knows why? The juvenile mind is a mystery. I may have watched a PBS special on
dancers one afternoon. It might have come to me in a fever dream. But one thing was
sure—despite the total impracticality of this concept, I could not be swayed. I was
hell-bent on my own slow and very soft destruction.

I wonder, looking back, if perhaps I needed to order my life, to control it in some
way, because so much of it had changed so dramatically. My parents’ divorce had finalized,
and I was living full-time with my father. Before you nod your head in wistful understanding,
it wasn’t that traumatic. There was no mayhem, no blowups or Kramer vs. Kramer dramatics.
I went with my dad, my sister went with my mom, and we all still saw each other as
much as possible. Life went on. But there may have been a part of me that needed to
control what I could control. And wearing the same outfit, or a variation on that
outfit, every single day, certainly qualified as
controlling.

First, I needed the outfit. I went to my mom for this. I wanted a series of coordinated
ensembles: leotards and tights, with a matching ankle-length wrap skirt that tied
at one side. These all had to match perfectly in color, which meant we had to buy
the leotards and tights, find matching fabric, purchase a skirt pattern, and have
the wrap skirts built from scratch.
¹