Self-Inflicted Wounds: Heartwarming Tales of Epic Humiliation (14 page)

And the boy. Dear god in heaven, the boy.

The boy took the full force of the explosion at dead center mass. The boy was at ground
zero of the explosive device that was my head. If I had been entertaining any fantasy
about making out with this boy, about us ever swapping spit, well, that fantasy had
come fully and horribly true. His face was full of it. He had gotten plenty of my
spit without any of the sweaty, groping, dry humping fun that usually accompanies
it.

As we sat there frozen, me with my hand over my face, trying to hold in the last bits
of sushi and my dignity, him trying not to hurl a little bit into his own mouth, the
rest of the restaurant poised in that heady electric moment between surprise and gales
of shaking, involuntary laughter, I thought to myself, “This is why Americans eat
bland food. You can’t injure yourself or others with a nice, soft bowl of Spaghetti-Os.
A Rice Krispies treat never made anyone explode.”

I gathered myself. I took that damp towel (thank god for that damp towel) and handed
it sheepishly to the boy with a head tilt that indicated “for your face.” There were
no words, no need for protestation or explanation. This thing had happened. There
was no coming back. My fluids were all over the interior and patrons of a fine dining
establishment, and there was nothing to do but hold my head high and plow ahead, sinking
the experience deep into my subconscious like a hastily buried corpse.

We finished the dinner with diminished enthusiasm and a marked reduction in eye contact.
But despite my humiliation, I didn’t die. I made it through the meal, and it was delicious,
even if I did eat demurely and with a bit less gusto after my eruption.

And against all odds, the boy and I did go on another date, and there was nothing
for me to do but screw up my bravery again, because I had set the bar for experimentation
(and failure) so high that all I could do was keep running at things or admit defeat.
And I was far too young and reckless to let a tiny bite of something spicy turn me
into a food pussy. So we ate other exciting foods together—Thai and Ethiopian and
palate-searing Hunan—and the boy and I dated for quite a bit of time after that, although
we never ate sushi together again.

Since then I’ve become an even more adventurous eater. I have eaten spicy things and
raw things, smelly things and moldy things, animal guts sautéed in butter and set
before me with a flourish. Some have been delicious, some confusing, and some have
been downright disgusting. But I have never lost my love of culinary adventure, because
life is too short to be afraid to bite something on a plate that cannot possibly bite
you back.

Well. Not literally, anyway.

( 16 )

The Time I Was in an A Cappella Group

“A knife-wound heals, but a tongue wound festers.”
—
T
URKISH
P
ROVERB

“Could someone lick the salt out of this?”
—
A
ISHA
T
YLER

When
I struck out from home, I struck out big.
¹

I had this idea rattling around in my soft and delusional teenage head that I was
going to do something great and unconventional in life. The group of colleges I chose
to apply to fit my cockeyed grandiose vision. They were all institutions I could barely
afford—elite, expensive, culturally and geographically remote—places where I would
be financially panicked, academically stressed, and socially isolated. I had realized,
after twelve years of teetering on the fringes, excelling academically but struggling
socially, until finally finding my home among a group of like-minded weirdos, that
I excelled most under adversity; a bit of stress kicked my survival instincts into
gear. I had suffered through high school, and academically, at least, things had gone
well, so why should college be a breeze? I equated challenge with excellence. And
I can see now, looking back, that my unspoken goal was to make my college experience
as discomfiting and miserable as possible.

Just to see if I could take it.

There is a strong possibility I had some kind of undiagnosed psychological problem.
That problem may persist to this day.

Based on this self-abusive criterion—essentially “where will I be the most uncomfortable?”—I
formulated my college choices. It was a canonical list of oddballs: Bard College,
a school as diverse as the front row at an Ani DiFranco concert; Reed College, most
famous for its extremely high rate of academic-related suicides; UC Santa Cruz, which
eschewed traditional grades in favor of pass/fail grades, accompanied by gold stars
and “good job!” hemp cookies; Oberlin College, a school somewhere in fuck-all northeast
Ohio, a place I could not have located with Google Maps’ assistance, if Google Maps
had existed back then; Marlboro College, a Vermont liberal arts school where for all
I knew they ate their own composted feces; and Dartmouth College, about which I knew
only two things: that it was an Ivy League school, and that they had their own ski
mountain, which was highly important to me, as I had recently taken up snowboarding.

None of these schools, with the exception of UC Santa Cruz, was anywhere near my home,
and all of them were in remote locations where I would not know anyone, nothing would
be familiar, and the weather would be bewilderingly frigid for a good part of the
year. Up until this point, I had lived my entire life in California. The warmest coat
I owned was a Members Only jacket.
²
I had no idea why I wanted to go somewhere remote and cold. I just knew that every
time I told someone I was thinking of going to school in New Hampshire or Ohio they
had a million reasons why it was a bad idea. This only made me want it more.

I could say that I was being rebellious, but the fact is that to rebel you need something
to rebel
against.
Perhaps I was rebelling against what I
thought
others thought
I should do: go to the safe school, the one close to home, where I would feel most
comfortable, with a culture most similar to the one I had experienced thus far. Of
course, I would miss my parents, the things and places and people I knew. But like
my parents, who moved across the country, far from their families, when they were
young and in love, to start a new life, I wasn’t afraid of change. I wanted to make
a bold gesture, to do something expansive, frightening, life changing. I wanted to
go to the metaphorical ends of the earth, to flirt with the unknown.

Or at least get to wear some really cool sweaters.

My years of apple polishing and obsessive-compulsive academic fastidiousness had paid
off, along with that summer of guiding the hearing impaired precariously along the
razor’s edge of near drowning. I got into every college to which I applied. I had
a surfeit of options. Of course, the obvious choice was Dartmouth. It was the only
Ivy League school in the bunch, it was the farthest away from my home, it was in the
mountains of New Hampshire and so guaranteed to rest comfortably in frigid temperatures
for a good portion of the year, and it had a reputation for being unapologetically,
even threateningly, conservative.
³

It also had two other very critical things going for it. It was a huge party school,
and it had way more guys than girls in attendance.

Copious quantities of beer and dudes? And all I had to deal with was a few supercilious
assholes in crested blazers? Sold.

I arrived on campus in the blazing heat of a late New England summer, sporting Birkenstocks
(so as to more clearly define myself as
From California,
I thought) and dragging all my shit in a couple of suitcases: one full of clothes,
the other full of terror. This place was the opposite of everything I had known previously:
East Coast, old, wealthy, full of kids who had come from privilege, few of whom had
ever worried about where they would live, or how they would pay the bills. And none
of them, I was sure, had ever lived through the horror of watching a chicken peck
a litter of baby bunnies to death.

These kids had not experienced adversity. They were loping about in well-worn boat
shoes and crisp new L.L. Bean sweaters, laughing about the staff at the country club
and their time on the Vineyard, and wondering what kind of cookies their maid would
be baking and sending to them in a care package labeled to look as if their alcoholic
mother and emotionally remote father “cared” about them. They all spoke the same language,
thought the same thoughts, were cut from the same cloth. They were a school of very
confident, very well-dressed, yet casually offhanded fish. For the millionth time
in my life, I felt completely out of my depth. But this time, I was thousands of miles
from home.

This time, I was on my own.

There are two ways to go when you find yourself on the outside looking in. One is
to walk firmly in the other direction, embrace your isolation, and celebrate your
outsiderhood. I had taken this path my entire life. For the most part, it had worked,
if for no other reason than that I didn’t have to worry about rejection if I never
sought acceptance. Also, over in the corner alone, no one would notice me talking
back to the voices in my head.

The other strategy is to walk boldly toward the center of the crowd and embrace what
everyone else is doing and, if you’re lucky, beat them at their own game. I had been
on the outside for most of my life. College was a fresh start. I figured now was the
time to see what it was like on the inside.

Not everyone else was on board with this strategy.

One of the things that embodies the Ivy League experience, something that is most
archetypically
Ivy
, is the a cappella singing group. This bastard child of the collegiate Glee club
and barbershop quartet has been around since the late 1800s, proliferating at a time
when the Ivies were the sole domain of men.
⁴
Every Ivy League college has one (or more) of these precious groups, with such sickeningly
confectionery names as the Princeton Nassoons, the Brown Jabberwocks, the Yale Whiffenpoofs,
and the Dartmouth Aires. They are a blast to see perform, generating a combination
of feelings akin to eating chocolate-covered bacon: it tastes strangely delicious,
but you can’t divine exactly how you feel about it. Is it a brilliant stroke of genius
or an abominable chimera that defies the laws of nature?
⁵
Are you in on some great joke? Are they? Is there a visionary puppet master pulling
the strings, or are we all riding in a horseless cart, bobbing our heads blissfully
to a marginal arrangement of an even more marginal Boston song?

Not that it mattered. If you wanted to live at the epicenter of Ivy life, to be most
quintessentially collegiate, the a cappella group was the way to go. The only way
to be more fully Ivy would have been for me to get a trust fund and a coke habit and
start sleeping with sorority girls. I figured I couldn’t get to the third thing on
that list without slogging through the first two, and, as far as I knew, my family
wasn’t concealing some secret fortune I could use to fuel a drug habit.
⁶
So, a cappella it was.

The problem is, the established a cappella groups didn’t want me. I don’t blame them.
My voice was okay, but I still hadn’t outgrown my gawkiness, and I had stubbornly
spent most of my freshman year wearing my Birkenstocks around campus in a hideous
act of fashion defiance.
⁷
Birkenstocks did not go with the overweeningly preppy style of a cappella groups.
They were bright-eyed and fresh-faced and sang like angels and knew lots of things
about white wine and would all work on Wall Street when they graduated. I was sleep
deprived and my hair was a mess and my voice was untrained and I would be lucky to
get a job as a receptionist at a medicinal pot dispensary if I kept rocking those
ridiculous shoes.

I was not a fit.

So I continued with my freshman year as best I could, considering I was trying to
navigate an icy campus with an armful of textbooks and unsuitable footwear. I soldiered
on. And then halfway through the year, something miraculous happened. All the girls
that had been rejected from the other a cappella groups decided to form their own
group, and they asked me to audition. This was my shot! I imagined myself vacationing
with Muffy on the Cape, sipping minted iced tea, and wondering what the riffraff down
at Princeton were up to. I auditioned, I got in, and I was thrilled. My nefarious
plans for infiltration were finally coming together.

Unfortunately, this group was brand new, and so had none of the gravitas, elegance,
or fashion sense that over a hundred years of elite East Coast Ivy League snobbery
had conferred so delicately on the other groups. We were earnest, we loved to sing,
we adored ironic arrangements of mid-eighties New Wave songs, but other than that,
we were making it up as we went along. And because we were outsiders and had no history
to respect or traditions to hew to, we decided to reject the conventions that defined
the other groups and go our own way. We would blaze a new creative path.

Honestly, we just had no freaking idea what we were doing.

We struggled. We had a few music majors, but no one who could actually arrange music.
We had a few people with rhythm, but no one who had ever conducted a musical group.
We had some people who could sing, but no one who knew enough about vocal theory to
help develop their voices. Rehearsals were an orgy of confusion, punctuated by brief,
satisfying moments of harmony, followed by more delirium, and ending in chicken sandwiches.
We knew where we wanted to go, but we had no idea how to get there.