Self-Inflicted Wounds: Heartwarming Tales of Epic Humiliation (10 page)

“If wishing makes it so, I should start wishing for better stuff.”
—
A
ISHA
T
YLER

I had
a lot of time on my hands as a preteen. My dad worked crazy hours, long and punishing,
sometimes at more than one job. He was in constant need of a break. The minute my
overworked, overwhelmed, overtired single father got the faintest whiff of the idea
that I could take care of myself and stay home without supervision, the cat was out
of the bag. Or, more specifically, the dad was out of the apartment. Like a shot.
¹

This was not abandonment. I was sufficiently stocked up. There was food and water,
and a tiny door to crawl out of in case I needed to escape. I had homework. Phone
numbers. Emergency plans. I had come to understood that fire burned. I knew that strangers
were evil. I would be fine.

And I was fine. I didn’t mind the solitude. I had always been a solitary kid, first
forced to, and then electing to, play with myself (stop it) so this was nothing new,
nor particularly daunting. By this point I was on nerd autopilot; the idea of not
doing what was expected of me never even crossed my mind. Ever the apple polisher,
I would come right home after school each day and immediately do my homework, read
recreationally, and, if I was feeling a bit rebellious, nap.

By this time, it would only be four-thirty. I was a little
too
effective at time management. My dad wouldn’t be home for hours. I needed to formulate
a game plan or descend into a swirling eddy of crushing boredom.

I started to devise all kinds of time-killing activities. I crafted. Did puzzles.
One of my favorite pastimes was to save my allowance until I had enough money amassed
to afford an impressive assortment of frozen dinners, which I would then purchase,
carry home, prepare and eat.
²
This, if augmented by a lengthy selection process at the supermarket freezer wall,
could easily kill several hours. My favorite was the deluxe turkey dinner, because
digging into that cranberry dessert made it feel like Thanksgiving no matter what
day it was. And the associated feeling of danger involved with secretively eating
so much meat felt akin to getting wildly drunk.

Or maybe that was the tryptophan.

I was a big kid for my age, so when I did put my latch key around my neck and venture
out into the world, I was generally left alone. The supermarket was directly across
from our flat—I could practically run there and back without encountering one single
adult—and the neighbors and vendors in the neighborhood all knew my father. And from
what they knew, he was a large man with an intimidating mustache who rode a motorcycle,
wore leather for function rather than style, and for all they knew could kill a person
with a set of
nunchakus
or several silently thrown ninja stars.
³
As a result, they gave me a wary yet protective eye, along with a wide and generous
berth. No one wanted to wake up with a mouthful of
shuriken
.
⁴

So for the most part I was left to my own devices, which included reading a lot of
speculative fiction, eating an ungodly amount of frozen “delicacies,” doing my homework
far in advance of its deadline, and hanging out at the stereo store next door to our
apartment building, where they had huge televisions, an entire wall of killer Pioneer
stereo amps, a soundproof speaker room, a languid staff of twenty-year-old salespeople
slowly dying inside from acute boredom and low wages, and a big leather chair that
reclined when you pulled a lever on the side. Because I was a kid, no one dared ask
me to leave; either they feared my dad irrationally or they were sure I was a street-faring
waif who could use a few hours in a warm place. I lived in that chair, and every time
I pulled that lever, I pretended my own personal Enterprise was hitting warp speed.
⁵

I spent most of the seventh grade, and the following summer, like this: reading, hanging
out at the stereo store, eating unsafe amounts of processed turkey, and imagining
I was the captivating yet resolute captain of an intergalactic space vessel. And then
somewhere in there, with all that free time to ruminate, I decided I was officially
a teenager, and it was time to get my period.

As I also believed in mental power, having just finished a book on telekinesis,
⁶
I thought the best way to get my period was to start acting as if I already had it.
But as I was living with my father, who would as soon discuss menstruation as gouge
his own eye out with his
shuriken
, I had no freaking idea how to do that. I didn’t know what a period felt like, what
it did, how long it lasted, its point of origin, none of it. All I knew was that it
heralded the onset of womanhood, and doggone it, I was done with being a kid. I had
eaten all the potpies I could stomach. It was time to kick this shit up a notch.

I stopped buying frozen dinners and started buying Jean Naté, mainly because there
were one thousand ads for it on television all day long, and that was all I saw at
the stereo store. I would splash it on like the lady in the ad, liberally, as if I
was trying to exterminate skin mites or drown a small rodent, and then jump immediately
back under running water to rinse away the extraordinary feeling of burning skin.
⁷
I would then mist myself liberally with Love’s Baby Soft, because I was weak-willed
and any kind of targeted advertising had an immediate and propulsive effect on my
impressionable preteen mind. I would finally grab my bag of sunflower seeds and neon
sour candies, toss in my dog-eared copy of John Christopher’s
The City of Gold and Lead
, and head over to the stereo store to loiter like a street urchin.

I spent most of my seventh grade summer dehydrated, green-tongued, and smelling like
a Malaysian whorehouse.

But I was hell-bent on becoming a woman, and if not a woman, at least less of a girl
than I had been thus far. I was propelled forward by recklessness and the insuppressible
impatience cultivated by a summer without the distracting influence of camp. I decided
that the best way to kick this whole thing off was to just go and get some sanitary
pads and start wearing them around. I was already wearing grownup cologne. Why not
rock the undergarments as well?

I went to the drugstore across the street and purchased the most imposing menstrual
pads I could find, because I was going to be a real woman, and real women needed maxi
pads. Not mini-pads, or slim liners, but
maxi
pads. For the
maximum
woman. Which I was. And I took them home, along with six turkey potpies and a bag
of Sno Balls, and opened up the box.

Holy shit.

I inspected the pads as if I was an alien life-form who stumbled upon a pepperoni
Hot Pocket and was trying to use it to make a phone call. I had no idea what these
things were. They looked like a tiny hammock for a bird, or an upholstered slingshot,
or insulation material for a nuclear submarine. There was no adhesive, no instructions,
and definitely no signage indicating “this way up.” And because my father was at work
and my mother was at work and I shouldn’t have been spending my money on sanitary
products I didn’t need anyway, I had no one to ask. I was on my own. I delicately
placed one of these salami-sized zeppelins into my undergarment, zipped up my pants,
and prayed for my period.

After a while, when nothing happened, I decided it might be a good idea to take this
thing out for a spin. People walked around while they were getting their periods,
right? You always saw people doing things and being surprised when their period arrived,
like Brooke Shields in
The Blue Lagoon
. She wasn’t just sitting on a kitchen chair in her overheated apartment waiting for
something to happen. She was out there
living
when her little visitor showed up. Besides, I was freshly Jean Natéd and ready for
the world. I ventured down the stairs and out onto the street.

It became clear to me in that first sunlit moment, and remains crystal clear to me
now, why (aside from systemic sexism and the attendant glass ceiling) it has taken
so long for women to achieve social equality. It is fucking impossible to do anything
when you are wearing a maxi pad.
Anything.
It is like trying to hold a wet soda bottle or a flopping adult mackerel between
your legs. As you walk, you look like a circus performer executing a highly challenging
contortionist’s trick. You can think of nothing else, and your facial expression betrays
it.

I walked up and down my block a couple of times, taking my new installation out for
a spin. The more I walked, the more it migrated, downward then backward, slowly creeping
out of the rear of my pants until it looked like I had shoved a roll of toilet paper
down my jeans. I surreptitiously reached down to adjust it as I walked, before slamming
smack-dab into a million-year-old lady rolling her rickety wire cart to the supermarket.
She was annoyed, then disgusted, then confused, then alarmed, as she looked down to
see my entire forearm down the front of my pants. And then she ran. As much as a million-year-old
lady can, anyway.

I couldn’t blame her.

It was hot outside, and the pad was getting damp. I was sweating, maybe from the heat,
maybe from anxiety, maybe from the tension of trying to hold this floppy rolled up
newspaper at the center of my burgundy corduroys. It had started out annoying and
then moved to truly uncomfortable. No wonder the woman in the commercial was splashing
herself with Jean Naté like it was made of gold; these pad things held on to every
bit of moisture, every drop of sweat—condensed, concentrated, magnified it—and sent
it booming back upwards like a cotton-filled version of a smell megaphone. They were
uncomfortable, impractical, totally detectable, and much like having a wedgie or something
green and cruciferous lodged between your teeth, made you feel unbearably self-conscious.
I was beginning to rethink the whole “I can’t wait to get my period” thing.

I took the pad for a few more laps before half-skipping, half-limping back to my apartment
to fling it, and the entire box, into the trash in a huff. This period stuff was no
fun, and what’s worse, it had cost me the value of four Salisbury Steak repasts. I
could have been sticky with brown gravy listening to Steely Dan on the Ankyo next
door, and instead I was lying in a pool of sweat, my face pressed against the cold
linoleum, wondering how I was ever going to handle womanhood if I couldn’t manage
a simple test stroll to the bus stop. Apparently becoming a woman required more than
cheap cologne and some bulky sanitary apparati. It seemed easy when you looked at
it, but it was clear I was going to need more time to figure this shit out.

After a while, I pulled the box of pads back out of the trash. I then stuffed them
one by one inside an empty TV dinner box, and took it out to the garbage can by the
curb. My father had enough to worry about without thinking his daughter had gotten
her period.

Or worse—that she was walking around for an entire afternoon wearing a sanitary pad
in the summer heat for no apparent reason.

A girl that bored should really be in summer camp.

( 11 )

The Time I
Actually
Got My Period

Well,
this just sucked.

( 12 )

The Time I Snuck Out of My Home in the Night Like a CBS After-School Special

“Better to die ten thousand deaths than wound my honor.”
—
J
OSEPH
A
DDISON

“I literally want to die.”
—
A
ISHA
T
YLER

The
summer before my freshman year in high school, my father and I moved to the Haight-Ashbury
neighborhood of San Francisco. You may know this area, because it was made famous
by the hippie movement of the 1960s, and was canonized in many of their songs, manifestos,
and hysterical scrawlings in poo on the walls of LSD dens.

The Grateful Dead lived there. The Human Be-In happened there. Hippies converged upon
it during the infamous 1967 Summer of Love. And now my father and I were living there.

Things were about to get decidedly less interesting.

An atmosphere of daring and creativity still permeated that neighborhood, even decades
after that infamous summer. Maybe it was the murals, or the street artists, or the
buskers, or the head shops. Or maybe it was the roving gangs of pot-smoking hippies
who refused to accept that it was 1984 and time to put on some pants and get a permanent
street address. But there was an excitement and a danger to the place, and it soon
began to infuse my life in a variety of ways.

Even though we didn’t have a lot of money, I had good grades, and I was able to attend
a progressive high school that year, one that was full of the children of rich people
who felt guilty about being rich and so sent their children to an alternative learning
environment where grades and evaluation ran secondary to personal growth and achievement,
and where everyone was encouraged to express their ideas freely without fear of judgment
or censure. It was also a school where a bunch of dirtbag rich kids drove European
convertibles and did unholy amounts of cocaine. I don’t think things were going exactly
as those parents had planned.

But hey, they were rich, and rich people like to throw money at their problems,
¹
then throw money at the problems their money causes, then get their kid a BMW. This
is just the way of things.