Self-Inflicted Wounds: Heartwarming Tales of Epic Humiliation (13 page)

Then I fell, and fell hard. And my dignity was never quite the same again.

I developed a crush on a boy my sophomore year so deep-rooted, so epically sweeping,
that it lasted almost the rest of my high school career. It was like an emotional
tumor, worming its way into every part of my thoughts and affecting all of my behaviors,
turning me from a bookish artsy weirdo into a bookish artsy weirdo who stared at points
mid-distance for hours and generally acted one thousand times weirder than she ever
had prior. This crush was so big and all-consuming that almost immediately, everyone
I knew, and shortly after that, everyone in my school,
⁵
knew about this humiliating and totally debilitating crush. It was tragic on an operatic
scale, and there was nothing I could do to stop it. I had taken my elementary school
crush, multiplied it by my now much larger bra size, and given it fangs.

When you are a teenager, and you like someone, it takes over everything. It is all
you can think about when you wake up, and the last thing you reflect on when you fall
asleep. Everything reminds you of them: your schoolbooks. Your favorite television
show. Walking. Food. Air. Being.

If there was a way to bottle the chemicals produced by a teenager’s brain when they
have a crush on someone, and we could weaponize it, turn it into some kind of aerosol
of want, we could end world war, eliminate poverty, and create a race of super-dedicated
athletes focused on world domination. If we could distill and control the unfathomable
focus with which teenage girls obsess about the boy they like, turn it into a pill,
and give it to everyone, we could solve all of humanity’s problems in a matter of
days.

Teenagers, however, would never, ever, finish their homework.

I could not think. I could not function. I could not sit still in class or hold a
conversation. I could not eat (and, as previously noted, I
love
to eat). I couldn’t be a person. I was, for all intents and purposes, very, very
sick.
⁶
And the more I realized that I was embarrassing myself, oddly, the less I cared.
That is the thing about humiliation; if you eat enough of it, it starts to taste like
normal. Once you have endured the worst embarrassment you can think of, and you have
lived, the next sling or arrow is nothing. You have formed a psychic callus over your
soul, and now nothing can touch you. The world is your oyster.

Your aloof, humiliating, affection-rejecting oyster.

This boy was not requiting my crush in any way. He did not like me in the way that
I liked him. We had mutual friends, and so he was serviceably polite to me, and, at
his best moments, tolerated me, which to a teenage girl is tantamount to a marriage
proposal,
⁷
but that was cold and fleeting comfort. Based on a few well-placed and workmanlike
interactions over time, I was able to fan the flame of this emotional tragedy for
a couple of years, as my friends, acquaintances, and the general population of my
high school marveled at both my infinite stamina, and my infinite sadness.

I can’t say exactly why I was crushing so hard, and honestly, it’s irrelevant. It
does not matter what was wonderful about the boy. When we are crushing on someone,
they are a swirling blur of dimples and crooked smiles, hair flips and skateboard
tricks. They make us feel drunk, confused, outside of our bodies. They are a small
planet, drawing us in with invisible gravitational force. But when we look back, we
can’t figure out what specifically made them so alluring. Sometimes we can’t even
remember why we thought they were awesome in the first place. That’s the thing about
crushes. They are magic. Terrible, dark, evil magic.

Eventually the crush faded, as it had to. The heart can only take so much rejection,
or, in my case, total indifference. Plus I had shit to do. I couldn’t just sit around
pulling petals out of flowers and making cootie-catchers for the rest of my life.
I had to move on. And I did. Slowly, with a lot of effort and focus, the help of my
friends, and a few well-placed make-out sessions with other guys. And just when I
thought I had gotten my shit together . . . the boy liked me back.

What the fuck!!!

Not
okay.

Instantaneously, all the hysteria and internal emotional damage of the previous two
years came rushing back, and I was incapacitated again. Like, in seconds. This was
not fair. Deep down, I knew I was at the top of a very long, very perilous emotional
slide, one made of jagged edges and razor blades and cut lemons and really bad germs
that were going to get inside me and render me a weepy, sloppy, oozing mess. I didn’t
care. It was like I had been standing at the top of a high dive for two years and
now I finally had a chance to jump. It didn’t matter that when I looked down I saw
the pool had been drained and was now full of broken glass and silverfish. I had climbed
up here, and I was going to fucking do this thing.

So me and this boy hung out one night, and when it was clear we were going to hook
up, it made me crazy nervous, so I drank.
⁸
I definitely drank too much. At this point, I was just trying not to have a nervous
breakdown. I would have drunk diesel fuel if it had been on hand and someone told
me it would take the edge off and make me not feel like a great ugly babbling idiot.
And it was a fun night, at least in the beginning, because after a bit, I was more
buzzed than nervous, and that was good. And then I was just more drunk than buzzed.

And then I was just fucking
drunk
.

And then we did hook up. And it was awesome, or as awesome as it could be considering
I’d been fantasizing about it for half of my high school career,
⁹
the kind of awesome where you want a burger all day, and then when you eat it, it’s
good, sure, but it’s just a freaking burger, not heavenly ambrosia or Green Lantern’s
ring. Just a burger.

The next day, however, I remained stoked. Very stoked. Hungover, and sick as blazes,
but very, very, very stoked.
¹⁰
And it was a Saturday, sunny and perfect, and the boy and I decided to take a drive
to the beach, but first we decided to get something to eat. Which I thought was a
perfect idea, because I was the kind of hungover that makes people dig out their own
eardrums with a broken pencil. So a nice cold soda and a giant hot falafel, full of
garlic and tahini and a bunch of other gloppy shit that is hard to pronounce and even
harder to keep down when you are hungover, seemed like the perfect idea at the time.
In fact, anything the boy said seemed like a perfect idea to me.

I was still very, very lovesick.

We got the food. I ate the falafel. I smiled at the boy. Falafel. Boy. Falafel. Boy.
All my dreams were coming true. I turned to look out the open window, thrilled to
be with this boy I had been obsessing over since the beginning of time, the cool breeze
on my face, blowing my hair back, making me feel happy to be alive, my eyes full of
sunshine, my soul full of bubble gum, my heart full of . . .

Puke. My lovesick heart, replete with puke.

Which was now flying out of my mouth at Mach Five like demons expelling from the pit
of my being, propelled outward by the incantations of a wild-eyed priest. And then
it was being blown right back into my happy face by that cool breeze, and into my
hair, and my face, and my falafel, and the car.

And all over the boy.

And that was the beginning, and the end, of the first great romance of my young life.
I had finally found my threshold of humiliation. And the boy had found his threshold
of having vomit shot around the interior of his car by a human Gatling gun.

So we had both found our limits. Which was something.

I got over him very, very soon after that. And I learned two things. One, it is a
waste of time to love someone who does not love you.

And two, never eat a falafel when you are hungover. Seriously.

Both will end quite badly for you.

( 15 )

The Hot Wasabi and the Infinite Sadness

“Our vanity is most difficult to wound just when our pride has been wounded.”
—
F
RIEDRICH
N
IETZSCHE

“I can never set foot in this place again.”
—
A
ISHA
T
YLER

It
may be difficult to imagine, but there was a time in this country, before the Internet,
and Gawker, and Pinkberry, and ringtones and Spanx and indeed, civilization, when
you could not purchase sushi at every corner store, mini-mall food court, and supermarket
in the country.

And stick with me here, as I know this is hard to comprehend: there was a time when
Americans, gulp . . .
did not eat sushi at all.

Years ago, barely anyone even knew what sushi
was
. The word conjured images of slabs of raw, unmasticable flesh, when it conjured any
image at all. More often, if you said the word sushi, people would blank out as if
they had just remembered they had left their iron on at home. There was no dynamite
roll, or firecracker sauce, or crispy rice, and you certainly could not get your crab
creamy and spicy. Sushi was exotic, unpronounceable, and very
other.

And it was raw. Fish. What the fuck is wrong with you?

At the risk of dating myself, this dark age of dining coincided with my junior year
in high school. And in keeping with my lifelong philosophy of running headlong and
blind into things that I was neither familiar with nor completely understood, I had
somehow found a sushi restaurant near my house and set about trying to become an expert
in Japanese cuisine. This being San Francisco, we had a higher than normal percentage
of Asian restaurants, but the really authentic ones were ensconced deeply in parts
of town where most non-Asians did not dare venture out of xenophobia or bewilderment.
But there were some Asian restaurants outside San Francisco’s Chinatown or Japantown
that catered to the uninitiated (read: white people), and it was in one of these that
I began my soft initiation into the world of adventurous eating. Which was not very
adventurous at all.

The restaurant was called something innocuous and welcoming, like “Sushi Fun Time,”
or “Rock ’n’ Roll Sushi” or “Come On In, White People, Almost Everything is Cooked,”
and it was perched on Church Street near my favorite bakery, just in case I pussied
out at dinner and needed to fill up on more familiar foods afterwards. Nothing got
the taste of oddities like eel out of your mouth better than seven or eight carrot
cupcakes.

I was determined to master this cuisine, and quickly, because I wanted to impress
others with my internationalism and modernity, and because I had seen Molly Ringwald
eat sushi in
The Breakfast Club
, and if that waif could do it without gagging, so could I. So I would go, sometimes
with friends, sometimes alone, and try everything on the menu, or at least everything
that had been cooked first, which, because it was a non-Asian-friendly restaurant,
was almost everything. If you wanted shrimp or egg or something called “sea legs,”
along with copious piles of gut-impacting white rice, this was the place for you.
I have no doubt that the sushi chefs there laughed their asses off as they counted
their money on the way home each night—they were serving the Japanese equivalent of
Spam and eggs.
¹

Eating at this restaurant was part of my larger plan to become more cosmopolitan.
And during the execution of this plan, which also included shopping at consignment
shops, smoking unfiltered cigarettes, writing terrible poetry, and eating Wor Won
Ton soup—way cooler than regular Won Ton soup, of course, because of the “Wor” part—I
met a boy.
²

This was a boy I liked, one I wanted to impress. So naturally the next step was to
take him on a date to the Japanese restaurant and dazzle him with my extensive knowledge
of foreign cultures and their cuisines.

So I asked him to come with me to this restaurant. Naturally, because he was a regular
old American, and not of Asian descent, he had never heard of sushi, let alone eaten
it, so I was already batting a thousand in terms of mysterious woman-of-the-world
points. The restaurant was unusual, it felt cool and fancy, they gave you wet towels
when you sat down, and it reeked of pickled ginger and danger. I was on fire.

I ordered for the both of us, which felt dazzlingly modern.
³
If I had broken out a cellular phone at the time, I would have taken some kind of
world record for forward-leaning behavior. I showed the boy how to mix his soy sauce
with his wasabi, and how to scrape the chopsticks against each other to remove any
wayward splinters.
⁴
And when the food came, I explained the strange green substance on the plate as “wah-sah-bee,”
a “kind of Japanese hot sauce.” I knew the boy liked hot sauce, and I wanted the boy
to like me, so I wanted to show him that we were alike. That I could take it. That
I liked it hot.

With a flourish, I took a nice, generous gob of wasabi on my piece of shrimp sushi,
popped it into my mouth, and chewed with a look of sly confidence, mixed with a judicious
amount of world-weary boredom—just enough to show him that I was happy to be there
with him, but not
too
happy. I mean, I liked him and all, but I did this kind of shit all the time. Who
knows? Maybe after this I would go skydiving. That was the kind of thing sushi eaters
just
did
. We defied death, and we ate our sushi
spicy
.

I chewed. I smirked. And then, I exploded.

A masticated combination of shrimp, rice, wasabi, snot, saliva, tears, and shame sprayed
across the restaurant like pea soup from a possessed child. There was no table, no
corner, no patron untouched by the spray of fluids shot outwards by the combination
of truncated sneeze and deep belch of despair that erupted violently from the floor
of my being.