Self-Inflicted Wounds: Heartwarming Tales of Epic Humiliation (9 page)

Looking back, I realize he was cultivating initiative. I will admit, at the time though,
it just felt super mean.

His goal was to train the fear out of me, to make me someone who went after her goals
without hesitation. If I wanted things in life, I would need to go out and get them
myself. Better to learn that early before the world punched me in the face with it.
The brazen self-motivation he instilled me with was invaluable, and has served me
in every aspect of my professional and personal life to this day. It has made me brave
and risk-taking in my creative life and fearlessly loving in my private life. It has
also made me highly accident prone (the freakishly tall thing doesn’t help, either).

Unfortunately, in training the fear out of me, he also trained out any shred of cautiousness,
circumspection or reservation, any inner voice that might have said, “Hey, maybe you’d
like to think this through before you leap headlong into a room full of armed bear
traps?” I don’t have that twinge, which for the most part—minus a few dramatic injuries,
literal and metaphorical—has been a good thing. For the most part.

My dad was right. Fortune favors the bold, and he was trying to make me bold. He was
almost always right.

Except for this one time.

When I was a kid, I liked a boy. And because I never did anything in half measures,
I liked this boy a lot. Like,
a lot
a lot. I liked him so much it was all I could talk about, think about, do. I obsessed
about this boy constantly, so much so that I was becoming a thorn in my father’s side,
even more of an annoyance than I typically was. I loved this boy (I thought), but
because I was a kid, and had no idea what love was, or what to do about it, I would
just wail and gnash and babble about it constantly like an alarm clock of unrequited
love with no snooze button.

My father wanted desperately to smash me in my snooze button.

Being focused on problem solving and personal empowerment as he was, he came up with
an even better solution to the problem, one that he engaged in repeatedly throughout
my childhood and still occasionally uses to this day. He threw money at it.
⁴

He decided he would give me some money, and I would ask this boy to dinner. I could
pick a restaurant and pay for everything. It was a grand idea, a sweeping gesture,
modern, forward thinking, feminist even. It was a very big idea.

It was also a terrible idea, as I was ten years old.

My dad gave me sixty bucks to execute this nefarious and dazzling plan. For weeks
that sixty bucks burned a hole in my pocket, the way my love for this boy was burning
a hole in my soul. But even then, I knew this plan wouldn’t work. I sensed that my
father was probably the only father at my school, in my neighborhood, or the universe,
encouraging
his daughter to take a boy out on a date at the age of ten.
⁵
I knew there was a terrible rift in the space-time continuum, and though I couldn’t
figure out exactly why this scheme would fail, I didn’t need Velma to tell me this
plan would go terribly awry, meddling kids or no.
⁶

Nonetheless, my father had issued a challenge, and I had both a deep need to please
him, and an intense desire to buy sixty dollars’ worth of Chinese food. So after several
weeks of paralysis and delay, I mustered up the tiny girl nuts to ask this guy out.
I cornered him against the putty-colored stucco of the fifth-grade classroom during
recess, and asked him if he wanted to go get food with me after school sometime.

He cocked his head.
Like, outside of school?

Yeah!
I showed him the money.
My dad gave me this.

His eyes bugged. Sixty bucks was a lot of money to a fourth grader, then and now.
⁷

It just seemed weird for me to have that much money. I don’t know what the boy was
thinking, as this was pre-gangsta rap, but if he had any stereotypical rap/drug/black
people tropes available to him mentally, they were bobbing wildly around his head
like apples right now.

So, like, just you and me?
He squinted.

Yeah, just you and me, and we can order and eat whatever we want. I’m going to get
a huge plate of sweet and sour pork and eat out all the pineapple.
⁸
And you can have whatever you like. My treat.

This didn’t have the intended seductive effect.
⁹
He just stared. So I tried to sweeten the deal.

My dad’s gonna give us a ride. On his motorcycle. He never gives me rides, so this
is a pretty big deal.

Both of us?
He was squinting more tightly now.

Both of us, yeah! On his motorcycle! It’ll be cool.

The amount of danger involved in this proposition was now too insurmountable to overcome.
Going on a date, with a girl, without adult supervision, and our own money, and getting
a ride on the back of a motorcycle? With a guy who looked like a leather-clad Apollo
Creed?

I could see him shut down.

I’ll uh . . . I’ll ask my mom.
He slowly backed away, eyes focused on some distant and suddenly interesting horizon
point.

I watched him go, that sixty bucks a fistful of lava in my pocket.

He wasn’t going to ask his mom. I knew it. I somehow also sensed that we wouldn’t
ever be speaking, or making eye contact, ever again.
¹⁰

That was the first time I ever asked a boy on a date. It definitely left a bruise.

And while I have engaged in many wild acts of bravery in my life, including scuba
diving, ice climbing, spelunking in winter, and telling jokes to rooms of intoxicated
strangers, it was a very long time before I ever did anything that truly reckless
again.

I did, however, get to treat my dad to an amazing Chinese lunch. $61.37 worth, in
fact. He spotted me the extra $1.37. And I ate every single piece of pineapple out
of my order of Sweet and Sour Pork.

Nothing ventured, nothing gained.

( 9 )

The Bunny Fiasco

“All honor’s wounds are self-inflicted.”
—
A
NDREW
C
ARNEGIE

“Trying to do the right thing sucks.”
—
A
ISHA
T
YLER

Despite
my desire to be tough, I have always had a tender heart.

Or maybe it’s the other way around. Maybe because I have always been an emotional
cream puff, I have tried to harden myself to the inevitable knocks that life brings.
But deep down, I am a giant bowl of marshmallow fluff with feet and glasses and a
penchant for maudlin Korean pop.
¹
I have always been a softie, and I fight it with every fiber of my being.

Sadly, my being’s fibers need to hit the gym.

I have always wanted to save things: animals, plants, bugs, butterflies, people, hobos,
rabid dogs, wayward rodents. There is no living thing for which I cannot find sympathy,
no animal I cannot anthropomorphize.
²
I cry at children’s movies. I cry watching the news. I cry during Nike ads. I cry
reading cereal boxes.
³
I am constantly welling over with heartrending compassion. I am a total and complete
sucker.

When I was a middle-schooler, my mother moved into a house that shared a fence with
another family who owned a lot of animals. Their property was a veritable barnyard
wonderland. And because the homes shared a perimeter, their yard was our yard, and
we were suddenly surrounded by domestic wildlife. They had absolutely no business
doing this shit. They lived in Oakland, not Ohio. The block was surrounded on all
sides by industrial buildings, cement, cyclone fencing, and the beginnings of the
East Bay rap scene.

This was no place for chickens.

But chickens they had, and ducks, and a goose, and probably some other animals they
kept chained up in their basement, because they were weird, and clearly didn’t understand
contextual appropriateness when it came to animal life. They also had bunnies. Two
bunnies, in fact, that lived next to the chicken coop, and seemed pretty pissed about
it, as chickens make terrible neighbors. They are rude, insensitive, and never know
when to stop talking. Chickens are dicks.

Whenever I went to stay with my mom, I actually kind of liked having all of these
animals around. As discussed, I had a lot of survivalist fantasies, and one of them
involved homesteading (of course), so I thought it would be good to study these animals
and figure out how they worked, in case I had to steal a few in the dead of night
and strike out on my own to make a life for myself in the post-apocalyptic wasteland.
So I observed the animals closely, to learn what I could about their care and feeding.
What I learned is that bunnies don’t do much but shit and fuck, chickens will eat
absolutely anything you feed them, including cigarette butts and small coins, and
geese are total assholes.
⁴

Don’t feel sorry for the goose. That goose would chase me around the yard without
relent every single time I stepped outside. He was like a fowl model of the T-2000—resembling
an ordinary bird but without fear, remorse or mercy, seemingly tireless and hell-bent
on the destruction of the human ankle. Eventually we had to keep a broom by the back
door so we could make it to the car. You can see how this would be frustrating, especially
since
this wasn’t our goose.
Trust me, if it had been, my mother would have broken her vow of vegetarianism and
we’d have eaten Rusty Pete for dinner with some fava beans and a glass of grape juice.
Alas, he was the pet of another, and so to be feared and avoided, and occasionally
pelted with shoes.

While we were doing all of this goose evading, the bunnies did what bunnies do, and
had bunny babies. And I quickly realized that geese are not the only assholes in the
animal kingdom. Geese may be the most aggressive, but chickens have their own brand
of lazy evil.

Soon after the baby bunnies were born, the chickens starting eating the baby bunnies
alive.

They pecked at them through the wire of their cage, which was pushed perilously close
to the walls of the chicken coop. And they were terribly, heinously, ghoulishly effective.
In about a day, they had pecked all the baby bunnies to death.

All but one.

Of course, upon discovering this ghoulish tableau, I immediately tried to save that
baby bunny. Separated from its mother, who had rejected it due to what I can only
imagine was some deep and irreparable psychological trauma involving murderous chickens
pecking her family to death, the baby bunny was alone in the world. So I set about
saving that bunny, knowing nothing about rabbits, babies, or living things in general.
⁵

The neighbors were nowhere in sight, which I took as tacit permission to take possession
of their infant rabbit. I lifted the bunny from the bunny cage and placed it gently
in a shoe box lined with blankets. I do not know whether this was what the bunny needed,
but it did sure make the bunny look cuter. I tried to feed the bunny milk. Why? Because
babies drink milk. Don’t they? I had no idea. I took that baby bunny everywhere, because
from what I could tell, you didn’t just leave babies lying around to fend for themselves,
no matter what their species or phylum. I didn’t know what you did with babies when
you had them, but I know you didn’t just prop their shoebox in front of the television
and let them watch the soaps while you were away.

I took the box to school, and carried it from class to class. I tried to conceal the
box from the prying eyes of teachers and other kids by holding it inside the flap
of my jacket, pretending it was an art project or a diorama for some imagined homework
assignment. But the halls of a middle school between classes are a hectic and treacherous
place. I, and my delicate bunny, were pushed, jostled, and occasionally smashed violently
against the wall as we navigated the corridors. The box and its precious contents
were dropped. More than once. I am not proud of this. I was eleven. I was an idiot.
An idiot with good intentions, but an idiot nonetheless. That bunny was on a slow
inevitable slide toward darkness that started when chickens attacked, and accelerated
when a well-intentioned but entirely bewildered preteen took the reins. That bunny
never stood a chance.
⁶

It did not take long for that last bunny to die. It wriggled slower and slower, every
leg twitch or head turn a silent protest against the world that had forsaken it, little
eyes blinking in mute judgment of my failures. When at last the tiny bunny lay still,
we buried it in my dad’s backyard, under some marigolds, and I cried for at least
a day at how unjust the world was, and how cruel, and how chickens fucking sucked.

But somehow, even though my act of compassion had failed mightily, and my heart had
been broken by cruel fate and fowl, I never lost my desire to be kind. I had tried
to save something. I had tried to do good, and the fact that one light had been snuffed
out didn’t mean that others couldn’t be kept burning. I might have failed this bunny
terribly, but I knew somehow, someday, I would not fail the world.

Because out of the young and hopelessly stupid, much like baby bunnies from the womb
of a willing and fertile rabbit, hope springs constantly anew.

( 10 )

The Time I Desperately Wanted to Get My Period

“It is usually the imagination that is wounded first, rather than the heart; it being
much more sensitive.”
—
H
ENRY
D
AVID
T
HOREAU