Self-Inflicted Wounds: Heartwarming Tales of Epic Humiliation (7 page)

We then had to find a seamstress with the skills, ability, and patience to sew these
things up for me. My mother had long ago tapped out of being my bespoke couturier,
as I was never satisfied, and she had things to do, like go to work so we could eat
and shit. So we found a seamstress in Oakland’s Chinatown. I will not say any more
on this subject, because no matter what I do, you will find a way to make it racist.

My parents were kind enough not to stand in the way of my weirdo dreams, and ponied
up the money for this exercise in sartorial suicide. And so I had five of these outfits
constructed in a variety of colors, all of them various shades of dun, none of them
flattering. Somehow, I believed brown tones made me seem more serious, but in reality,
they made me look like a tiny dancing version of Hanky the Poo.

I began to wear these outfits everywhere, regardless of place, time of day, or contextual
appropriateness of my attire. I wanted to make a statement. I was going to be like
Thomas Wolfe or Christopher Hitchens, universally known for my distinct sartorial
style and my utter lack of concern for others’ feelings or happiness. I was more than
a ballerina, I was a tastemaker, and I was going to make myself
known
.
²

This crazed approach immediately posed problems. For instance, it is very difficult
to play dodge ball in a wrap skirt. You may cut a fine figure in the beginning, skirts
flapping elegantly as the ball handler picks off the weak and the slow, but the minute
you need to engage in any type of evasive action, that fabric will wrap around your
tights-clad legs like a lasso around a rodeo calf, and you will fall to the ground,
there to be pelted about the face and chest violently and repeatedly by the stinging
slap of red rubber.

This is also not a practical outfit for: sleeping, walking, running, swimming, digging
in the dirt, climbing trees, picking blackberries, riding a bicycle, swinging on a
swing, playing jacks, or anything requiring dexterity or practicality—pretty much
anything one might do as a kid.

It
was
pretty awesome when I played violin. I looked like a Russian tsarina in afro puffs.
The outfit would also have worked in ballet class, but I had quit that shitshow months
before. Pulling my hair into a tight bun every weekend was giving me headaches, as
was all the random and poorly pronounced French. So I became an impostor, a poseur
in Lycra, waltzing around looking for all the world like a ballerina when the best
I could deliver on that front was a crooked second position and a few wild gesticulations.
But man, did I look
good
.

This extended piece of performance art came to a spectacular halt when my grand ballerina
fantasy ran face-first into my father’s dude-on-a-fast-bike fantasy.

One was bound to get creamed.

My father loved motorcycles, and had always wanted to ride them. And nothing, not
propriety or social norms or the oppressive yoke of fatherhood would defer his halcyon
dream. He had been working toward this fantasy for years, as having kids required
a slow and measured approach. When my sister and I were very young, my parents had
Italian scooters: Vespas, to be exact. This made them the coolest parents ever; even
now they’d be awash in hipster points. They had a custom cart built that attached
to the back of their scooters so my sister and I could ride along with (or actually
behind) them. We sat backwards, facing traffic, strapped in with seat belts, shielded
from the sun by a custom canopy and shielded from auto exhaust and potential impact
by shiny optimism. We loved riding in this cart, and would sit happily side by side,
laughing, playing games, and giving as many passing cars the finger as we possibly
could.
³
Sometimes we went for the double finger for extra impact—this could be compounded
by aiming all four fingers at one driver, or spread out among several motorists for
maximum efficiency. We were a rolling two-kid wrecking crew.

We loved riding with my parents on their Vespas, and when my dad graduated to first
a small, and then bigger and bigger motorcycles,
⁴
I was no less enthusiastic. It was insanely cool to walk to the curb after school
and watch your classmates crawl into their boring old Volvo wagons or VW buses, then
pull on your helmet and jump on to the back of a revving crotch rocket. Add to that
the fact that my dad was an insanely handsome black man with more than a passing resemblance
to Action Jackson, who wore a brown leather jacket and motorcycle boots with no sense
of irony and had a mustache so thick he needed to comb it with an afro pick, and you
can see how this was really working for me. I might have been a weird kid, culturally
off-piste and socially isolated, but at least my dad looked like Dolemite and rocked
a badass ride.
⁵

Despite my love of riding motorcycles, I was only average at being a motorcycle passenger.
I held on with passable surety, my gaze often drifting toward cars alongside or distant
passersby. I would use my father’s back as a podium, placing
The Lord of the Rings
or
The Phantom Tollbooth
atop his capacious lats. More than once, I fell asleep on the back of my father’s
motorcycle, listing frighteningly to one side or the other before being elbowed violently
in the ribs by my terrified dad. This led him to have a custom harness constructed,
one that strapped me to his back so that even in full coma state, I would not tumble
from the bike to the pavement at high speeds.
⁶
I ended up liking this very much, as it allowed me to use both hands to read—one
to hold the book and one to turn the pages—whereas before I was reduced to turning
pages with my nose. So his solution to my somnolence worked out quite well for both
of us.

It wasn’t my drowsiness that ended up being the problem.

Despite his almost daily admonitions to watch the exhaust pipe, the temperature of
which went from ambient to Earth’s molten core in about sixty seconds upon ignition
of the engine, I was always dallying perilously close to hot metal. This was not intentional.
I was a kid, distractible and preoccupied with important things, like whether peanut
butter and olives would make a good sandwich. So I would hop on the bike, arms full
of books and peanut butter dreams, and almost always touch my leg to the exhaust pipe,
letting out a startled yelp, after which my father would roll his eyes and erupt,
“I
told
you to watch out for that pipe! I don’t say this shit for my health!”
⁷
I would nod and agree, and we’d be on our way, Daddy Dolemite and L’il Ballerina,
off to fight crimes in the ghetto and stick it to the man, or at least make a whole
wheat peanut butter and honey sandwich and watch the Sugar Ray Leonard–Floyd Mayweather
fight.

At this time in our lives, I was acutely focused on my artist phase, and rocking my
ballerina outfits daily. With all the work it took to swirl my skirts while maintaining
a haughty air of culture and refinement, taking time to avoid the exhaust pipe was
simply not on my very full agenda. So on this day, I climbed on to the bike in my
brick-brown ensemble, thinking about how elegant I looked, and how after I did my
homework I was going to rip through some Ray Bradbury, when I smelled smoke.
Interesting
, I thought.
Just thinking about
Fahrenheit 451
made me smell fire. My imagination is like, magic or something.

At that moment, I looked down to see that the right hem (and, well, most of my skirt)
had melded itself with the exhaust pipe of the motorcycle, and was aflame. Aflame
in that kind of way where the burning spreads quickly, turning a small hole into a
very big one, and making you question how much longer you will be on this earth. A
thoughtful person would have remained calm, stepped from the bike, and as those 1970s
preparedness commercials admonished, stopped, dropped, and rolled. A less thoughtful
person, say, a dream-addled ten-year-old, would have lost their shit.

This is what I did.

Which made my dad lose his shit.

Which was
not
a good thing.

Dads are big. This is one of their most awesome qualities. No matter what their size
in relation to the rest of the world, when you are a kid, dads are huge, imposing,
and highly effective. They block out the sun, have unlimited supplies of quarters
in their large and bottomless pockets, and can eat your entire plate of spaghetti
in the time it takes you to reach down and tie your sneaker. Dads are leviathans.
They are magnificent. They are not to be fucked with.

Mine, in particular.

In one move, he put the bike kickstand down, leapt from the seat, ripped me from the
moorings of gravity, and threw me to the grass, in a fashion that was at once caring,
gentle, and insanely terrifying. He patted out the flames with the sleeve of his jacket
in what would surely have won the world record for patting out flames on one’s burning
daughter, should there have ever been such an event. And then he stood me up and gave
me the kind of scolding that nowadays would have earned him a viral video on YouTube,
and perhaps a public scolding from Nancy Grace.

This all happened in about fifteen seconds flat.

Coincidentally, this was also the last fifteen seconds of my ballerina phase.

Luckily, I was not burned. There was no physical damage. I did have to spend the rest
of the day looking like the chimney sweep from
Mary Poppins
(my father would not take me home to change, as he was not my chauffeur, he was fond
of telling me), but I was not burned. Psychological damage is harder to measure, but
I can say with confidence that the delicate part of my brain related to pretentious
artiness died a fiery death that day. I went back to dressing like a normal grade-schooler
instead of an affected Manhattan art dealer that trades only in experimental oils.
I had learned my lesson.

Watch that fucking pipe.

And I learned the futility of stylistic rigidity. I mean, come on. Even Thomas Wolfe
wears sweatpants once in a while.

( 7 )

The Time I Peed on Myself and My Surroundings

“Dogs are wise. They crawl away into a quiet corner and lick their wounds and do not
rejoin the world until they are whole once more.”
—
A
GATHA
C
HRISTIE

“When you gotta go, you gotta go.”
—
A
ISHA
T
YLER

I have
always wanted to be hardcore. Incredibly disciplined, immovably resolute, unrelentingly
focused. I have wanted to be one of those people whose mind was always one hundred
percent in control of their body, someone who could jump out of a moving train without
flinching, scale a skyscraper without rope, walk barefoot across a room strewn with
broken glass, should the situation arise.

I have always dreamed of being a badass.

Like most human hopes, this desire is incongruous, unrealistic, and completely inexplicable.
That does not make it any less real.

From the time I was little, I have wanted to be tougher, meaner, less vulnerable,
more disciplined than others. I don’t know why this is. Maybe it is because I am a
firstborn kid and thus, true to all stereotypes, an A-type personality haunted by
fears of failure and inadequacy. Maybe it is because I have always been an outsider,
and so have fantasized about “showing them”
¹
with my athletic feats of prowess, dazzling intelligence, and triumphant victories
as a billionaire playgirl superhero.

I have also always loved action movies. I think people who love action movies have
a very specific personality trait—or flaw, more accurately—which is that whenever
we watch an action film, we immediately put ourselves in the place of the hero. With
each one-on-seventeen bar brawl, each reckless leap down a burning elevator shaft
or hairline escape from a listing helicopter leaking fuel, we remove Bruce or Jet
Li or that kung-fu Belgian with the loads of plastic surgery, and put ourselves at
the center of the action. The more Hollywood action we consume, the more we fantasize,
until every moment is pregnant with the possibility of ninjas dropping from the skylight,
or an armored car loaded with bank robbers and stolen bearer bonds smashing through
plate glass directly in our line of sight, and we will have to grab loose paper clips
and hastily construct a fistful of makeshift caltrops. We are always ready for whatever
may come, even though what usually comes is traffic, homework, bills, dirty dishes,
and lukewarm macaroni and cheese.

But we are ready, my friends. We are fucking
ready.

Maintaining this constant state of heightened readiness requires unwavering focus,
self-denial, and sacrifice. Things must be learned. Other things must be renounced.
Skills must be mastered. And many, many things must be endured. Because one never
knows when one may be called up for service by relentless destiny.

When I was a kid, this preparedness took several behavioral forms. I was precise,
obsessive and very peculiar. For long periods I would only eat cereal, or grapes,
or scrambled eggs with ketchup for breakfast.
²
I would pack my backpack for a quick getaway, secreting away snacks, juice, Band-Aids,
a warm sweater, and perhaps Popsicle sticks and glue in case I had to construct a
weapon or shelter of some kind. I would hoard food, keeping cans underneath my bed,
along with sleeping bags, Mylar blankets, and, of course, copious reading material.
Who knew—I might have to bivouac in some remote place without entertainment for several
hours or even days—a Bradbury compilation or
Little Men
would keep me occupied while I waited for rescue and planned my next move. Even a
heroine needs a little diversion.