Self-Inflicted Wounds: Heartwarming Tales of Epic Humiliation (8 page)

What was crystal clear to me, even then, was that being a hero was a 24-hour-a-day
job. One never knew what kind of obstacles life, or an evil international league of
villains, might throw my way. The eventual test of my mettle could be anything, so
I needed to be ready for
everything
.
³

This knowledge pushed me to put myself in terrifying or difficult situations with
the goal of trying to endure them mentally. I don’t know why I was so hell-bent on
pockmarking my childhood with potentially psychologically and even physically damaging
episodes, but I liked the idea of mental toughness as well as physical toughness.
It was one thing to be able to take a punch. It was another entirely to be able to
withstand crushing disappointment or emotional devastation and still push forward.
Did David Lightman in
WarGames
freak out when adorable Joshua turned out to be the sinister yet earnest WOPR, wanting
to play Global Thermonuclear War for real?

No. He grew a pair and hightailed it to some island in the Puget Sound looking for
Professor Falken, a guy he believed to be dead. And then he went to NORAD. Fucking
NORAD. If Lightman could try to get into the most defended military bunker on the
globe to save the world, I could put up with being a little chilly, or wet, or hot,
or hungry. And I could certainly deal with a bit of physical discomfort, say for example,
having to pee.

What did I care for bodily functions? Peeing was for humans and weaklings. I was an
action hero. John McClane. Sarah Connor. Storm. Starfire.

And so it went, deep in my young survivalist phase, that I often found myself on the
long bus ride from school to my home high in the Oakland hills,
⁴
a trip that required three bus rides and a punishingly long walk up a very steep
hill. Usually on this half-mile crawl, I engaged in elaborate fantasies about summiting
Kilimanjaro or bisecting the Mongolian steppe. Every experience was an opportunity
for personal growth.

Yes. I am as disgusted as you are.

The walk was long but beautiful, passing blackberry patches and plum trees as it wound
into the hills, and I would usually bookmark whatever sci-fi I was reading to forage,
filling my backpack or lunch bag with fistfuls of sticky, smashed fruit that I could
use later should the Bay Area power grid go offline, or the food delivery systems
be disabled by pestilence or wildfire. In reality, I wasn’t going to be saving any
lives or feeding hungry masses. However, I would be wiping streaks of moldy fruit
juice and furious ant populations out of my Trapper Keeper for weeks to come.

On this fateful day in late spring, despite all my training for the apocalypse, I
had miscalculated terribly. In my haste to start that day’s adventure, I did not pee
before I left school. On the three bus rides home, separated by long waits at transfer
points, I ignored the pressure building in my lower quadrant, telling myself I was
stronger than my body, that I could hold it, I was no little girl, I was a Jedi, a
ninja, a bushido warrior. Peeing was for suckers. And peeing in one of the many locations
available to me on my trip home wasn’t just for suckers, it was for people who liked
touching surfaces that in all likelihood were saturated with the pee of strangers,
the Bubonic Plague, or, even worse, the Bubonic Pee of Strangers, which was about
the worst thing my little mind could possibly conjure, and even now sounds pretty
fucking awful.
⁵

So, true to my life philosophy, I held it in. But on the third bus ride, as we jostled
and bounced and jiggled and skittered along Telegraph Avenue on a bus that should
have been condemned to the junkyard a decade prior, my resolve began to weaken. Or,
more accurately, my ten-year-old pelvic floor began to weaken.
⁶

I was no weakling, I told myself. I thought of Luke Skywalker on Dagobah, trying to
raise that infernal x-wing out of the swamp. He didn’t give up, and neither would
I. I turned all of my mental power inward, on whatever muscles would keep the most
terrible of tragedies from happening to me on this bus. And I
believed
. As Yoda admonished Luke, not believing is why we fail. So I would
believe
that I could make it,
believe
that I could get to my stop before the trickle became a torrent and I was reduced
to a sad little lukewarm puddle of a girl on the bus. I would
believe
that my mind was stronger than this ever more urgent, more pressing matter. And—as
liquid is wont to do when affected by the inexorable pull of gravity—man, was it pressing.

I stumbled off the bus at my stop, eyes pressed shut against the building internal
storm, and started jogging up the hill. Never had my trek up Kilimanjaro seemed more
insurmountable. The once welcoming blackberry patches were now dark and haunted thickets,
the plum trees mocking me as I half-ran, half-bobbled past, legs twisted in agony.
My destination quavered in the distance like a receding mirage, every mailbox a toilet,
every patch of grass offering sweet relief. But still I pushed on,
believing
that I could make it.

At least my mind believed. My body was calling bullshit.

About two-thirds of the way home, I started to realize that perhaps I required additional
Jedi training (or
any
Jedi training at all) before I would be ready for such a herculean task as carrying
a full bladder home with my person unmoistened. This was the real world. I could not
raise a spaceship with my mind. I could not lift a pebble with my mind. And I certainly
could not hold this pee in for very much longer. I began to sprint. It was too late.

I made it as far as my front porch, and that infernal x-wing went crashing back into
the swamp, sending water sloshing everywhere.

Yes. That was a
Star Wars
–urine metaphor. Welcome to the Fortress of Blerditude.
⁷

After I cleaned myself up, and the landing, and the stairs, and a little bit of the
living room floor, I took thin solace in the fact that I had made it all the way to
my front porch. That was almost as good. With practice, I could do better. Like Kyle
Reese in
The Terminator
, I didn’t make it back home, but there was honor in the effort. And, much like Reese,
in defeat was spawned new hope for the future.

Mental toughness is all fine and good. But when you gotta go, you gotta go.

( 8 )

The Time I Asked a Boy on a Wildly Inappropriate Date

“It takes a lot to wound a man without illusions.”
—
E
LLIS
P
ETERS

“My illusions are all I have.”
—
A
ISHA
T
YLER

I have
a sneaking suspicion that my father wished I had been born a boy.

I don’t have a problem with this. People want lots of things they can’t have. Unlimited
wealth. The ability to fly. A magical bowl of soup that never empties no matter how
much you eat.

Life is rife with disappointment.

Dads want boys; moms want girls. All that dreck about just being happy the kid has
all ten fingers and toes is all very well and good, and just the right tone to strike
in mixed or judgmental company, but if cornered and alone with no possibility of discovery,
most parents would admit to wishing for a little Mini-Me to shape and mold and railroad
into doing all of the things they were too busy or lazy or terrified to do themselves
when they were young.
¹
Of course parents love their children, no matter the gender. But they also long secretly
for a child whose body and emotions are similar to theirs, and therefore easily molded
and understood. Now, you may be a parent, and disagree with me one hundred percent
on this. You may be simmering in outrage right now, ready to fling the book across
the room. But for the sake of argument, for the time being at least, work with me.

I definitely don’t believe my dad was disappointed. I was deeply loved and fiercely
protected by a father who believed I could do anything I set my mind to and often
encouraged me to try everything, no matter how daunting or outrageously ambitious.
But for a parent, there are naturally a different set of fears and expectations with
girls. The threats are more numerous, the potential pitfalls more abundant, and perils
menace every turn. With a girl, you worry about predators and pregnancies and intolerably
maudlin teenage angst, with the requisite terrible poetry and Taylor Swift on repeat
that accompanies it. Girls are complicated and wonderful and messy and emotional and
nuanced and delightful and devastating.

With a boy, you just hope he doesn’t turn out to be an asshole.

Because a girl’s life can be fraught with so much more peril, they are naturally terrifying
to a father, who has never been a girl, and so can only see the dangers she faces
but cannot put himself in the shoes of his daughter to understand how they might be
overcome. Some fathers react by trying to control every aspect of their daughter’s
life, restricting where she goes, what she does, who she sees, and turning her, inevitably,
into a slutty alcoholic loudmouthed tramp with rebellion issues and a daddy complex.

The other way to go is to mentally and physically equip your daughter to face anything
the world throws at her, to make her thoughtful, tough, self-possessed, and independent.
She may still turn out to be a slutty alcoholic tramp, but at least it’ll be her
own
money she’s spending on flavored booze and Magnum condoms.

My father has always been about independence. From the time I was big enough to walk
to the front door and open it, he encouraged me to explore the wide world on my own,
and develop the skills to attack it headlong. He worked hard to raise a girl who was
bold and fearless, who never felt sorry for herself and who could overcome setbacks
with grace and determination. Upon retrospect, I realize that he was also trying to
get me to be independent enough to get the hell out of his face so he could woo a
special lady friend or watch the freaking game in peace. His approach served its purpose
nonetheless.

One of his favorite things to do with me when I was a kid was to start the day with
a kind of motivational call and response. These were akin to a coach’s locker room
speech before the big game, a general’s rallying cry before a major assault, or a
drunken heckler’s hurled taunt. These were different in that they involved a little
girl in a misbuttoned cardigan running perpetually late for school. And they were
shot through with age-inappropriate language, as my dad had a daughter to raise and
money to make and no fucking time to screw around.

They often went something like this:

Dad: Whose day is it?

Me: My day.

Dad: And what are you gonna do?

Me: I’m gonna grab it by the balls.

Dad: Louder!

Me: I’m gonna grab it by the balls!

Dad: That’s right! Grab it by the short hairs and twist!

Me: Twist!

Dad: Have a good day, baby. And remember, keep your grades and your drawers up.

There were variants on this theme, usually having to do with telling people who doubted
you to fuck off, or kicking the corpses of your defeated foes, but they were all equally
rousing and similarly outrageous. My dad was arming me for a world full of predators,
obstacles, and disappointments.
²
He didn’t have time to craft a butterfly-soft approach. He had shit to do.

I respected it then. I respect it now.

My dad’s approach to cultivating independence in a child was simple and straightforward:
do as little as possible to make your child’s life easier. The world is terrible,
people are terrible, and no one is ever going to make things easy on you, so why should
your parents trick you into thinking that for the rest of your life you’ll be enjoying
crust-less sandwiches and tubes of drinkable yogurt lovingly provided by others? This
included stuff that most kids take for granted, like getting rides to places, or having
activities planned or meals prepared. It wasn’t that he was cruel; he was incredibly
kind and supportive. I was a very loved kid. It’s just that I never got a fucking
ride anywhere besides school.
Anywhere.

I remember once wanting to go to a party in high school. It wasn’t in a particularly
bad part of town, but you did need to go through a rather heinous area to get there.
I
really
wanted to go to this party. It was all I could think about. I rarely got invited
to anything, and certainly not anything I actually wanted to go to. But this was at
a popular kid’s house, and other popular kids would be there, and I had it on good
authority that there would be
beer
. This party needed attending.

I asked my father about this party constantly. Weeks in advance, I primed this guy
to be prepared to take me to this thing. I even worked it out so if he would take
me, I could get a ride home from someone else. I couldn’t have made it easier for
him. It was a night he was home; his vehicle fueled up. I had cleaned not just my
room, but the entire apartment and several lengths of adjacent sidewalk. There was
no reason for him not to take me to this party. Providing this small kindness would
require little effort for maximum reward. This is how I saw it.

This is not how he saw it. As he saw it, he was not a chauffeur, he did not work here,
he did not have me so he could wait on me hand and foot, and if I wanted to go to
a party, I could get there myself. I had money, I had a brain, I had the bus schedule,
and if I wanted things in life, I knew how to get them.
³
And I wouldn’t get them blocking his view of the television.