Self-Inflicted Wounds: Heartwarming Tales of Epic Humiliation (16 page)

My friend and I entered the contest as a duo. Concept was everything, and the song
would drive the look, so we set about picking an anthem. This being the nineties,
we immediately chose Janet Jackson, and us being idiots, we settled almost as rapidly
on a song that was completely out of our league. Remember, this was the zenith of
MTV, when it was still relevant, impactful, and hit-creating. Oh, and it also actually
played music videos rather than just a litany of reality shows featuring drunken train
wrecks in desperate need of parental guidance stumbling about like human pinballs
in search of a hole. MTV was still Music Television at the time, and the videos that
were kicking the most ass were ones where everyone wore leather and looked like background
actors in
The Crow
. Janet was awesome then, and we were all part of the “Rhythm Nation.”

We had this thing locked up.

Except for the fact that neither of us could dance. At college, I had accumulated
a group of friends whose favorite pastime was sitting around eating bacon-topped pizza,
arguing about the feasibility of large-scale organic farming, and drinking cocktails
that had been mixed in an industrial garbage can. None of that involved dancing, choreography,
or physical exertion of any kind.
⁵
The most physical we ever got was getting drunk and running outside in our shirtsleeves
to construct a life-threatening ice slide in the frigid wee hours of a January morning.

No matter. Pop stardom was my destiny. Bring it on.

After watching the video for “Rhythm Nation” one thousand times and finding ourselves
able to replicate absolutely nothing therein, we decided we needed a ringer, someone
who could make us look better and, failing that, dance around wildly to distract everyone.
Luckily, the house I lived in had a resident dancer and choreographer who was a fantastic
dresser with a scintillating personality and killer stage presence. We threw ourselves
on his mercy, much like a frumpy housewife might fling herself at the feet of RuPaul,
begging him to make her more feminine. We were failures at dancing, but more than
that, we were failures at being sexy girls. We needed serious help. We needed a gay
man.
⁶

Buoyed by his agreeing to be our resident visionary and
sergent instructeur
, and encouraged by his faith in us,
⁷
we set about remaking ourselves in Janet’s image. Naturally, I thought I should be
Janet, being tall and hard to camouflage. My best friend was short, blond, and adorable—not
particularly Jackson material.
⁸
We wrestled with this, and since we valued our friendship more than we cared about
what was quickly turning into a massive drag on our free time, we agreed to split
responsibilities. Much like Stevie and Paul, we would live side by side on the piano
and share the spotlight, offering up a shining example of racial harmony for all to
see.

None of this was top of mind, particularly. Most of the time, we were drunk on vodka
and grapefruit juice. But it did seem as if, executed properly, we could change the
world with this shit. Or at least get laid.

We were renewed, our vigor and commitment made fresh. Unfortunately, the initial enthusiasm
sparked by the addition to our two-man band lasted about a day. College students are
notoriously lazy, veering madly between floor-sprawled apathy and manic all-night
productivity. The diagnosis of bipolar disorder—where a person swings from wild bouts
of intensely effective hypermania and elation to long dark periods of depression and
inertia—should be voided for college students. Embracing bipolarity is the only way
you can actually get through college: weeks of procrastination, defined by days huddled
in the dark of your dorm room in unwashed sweatpants, weeping and eating Snickers
bars by the fistful, followed by forty-eight hours of mind-boggling effectiveness,
during which you clean your entire room, including your roommate’s sty of a side,
⁹
take apart your computer, rearrange its guts to make it n
¹⁷
times faster, put it back together, throw away the leftover parts (which were just
decorative anyway), make a seven-layer lasagna using only your hotplate and a bunch
of leftover ketchup packets, write three research papers, and finish an entire semester’s
worth of clinical psychology reading in one night. Rinse, and repeat.

Our first few rehearsals were pretty high-energy and motivated, and then we just fell
apart. We were exhausted, and not very good. Also, as college kids, we were prone
to easy distraction—the lure of a party, or a half-eaten pizza, or an extra hour of
sleep proved irresistible. Instead of actually dancing, we began engaging in mental
training—you know, the kind where you think about something a lot without ever actually
doing it. I am a professional at this kind of training. I visualize myself winning
the Olympic Pentathlon, inventing a phone that can be controlled by brain waves, or
doing the laundry. I do not actually
do
these things, but I see myself doing them, and that is almost
more
satisfying, because I am also lying down.

By the night of the performance, we were not even close to ready. We did not know
the choreography, we had not memorized the lyrics, we could not dance, and I was developing
an epic leg cramp. But this thing was happening, so we put on our best approximation
of the wardrobe from the “Rhythm Nation” video—black leotards and tights, borrowed
leather jackets, and ballet flats—a combination that, I hoped, would magically make
me a better dancer. I prayed fervently that beefy white tube socks stuffed into delicate
slippers might have some kind of transformative effect. It did not.

Panicked, at the last minute we decided to pull in a fourth, a girlfriend of ours
who was bored and avoiding homework, and who knew even less of the choreography than
we did, but had a great body and was willing to wear lingerie. We figured if nothing
else she could parade around and distract everyone from noticing the cat pile of madness
that was our dancing. She was game, and played her role with gusto, striding back
and forth for no particular reason, gesticulating wildly, blowing kisses to the audience,
and generally shaking her moneymaker.

We, on the other hand, could not have shaken our moneymakers if they had handles on
them like giant human maracas. But we did our best to communicate the spirit, if not
the actual choreography, lyrics, look or anything else of that music video. We stumbled
back and forth across the stage, straining to keep time to the beat, faces masks of
concentration, bodies a tangle of arms and legs, flailing and pulsating with utter
lack of rhythm. We were an aerobics class in an insane asylum. But we sold it with
everything we had, and as the song ended we froze, posed in triumph, arms raised like
gymnasts, gasping for air, chests heaving, faces lifted to the sky, feeling like champions.
In that one shining moment, we were winners. We were, indeed, a part of the Rhythm
Nation.

Also in that moment, we knew, deep down in our hearts . . . that our performance had
sucked
. If there had been a real Rhythm Nation, our passports would have been revoked. We
were terrible.

Happily, most of the audience was too drunk to care. There were girls, they were on
stage, they were wearing tights, and that was good enough for them. They applauded
loudly, and cheered lustily. Whether it was because they loved the performance, or
because it was finally mercifully over, didn’t matter. We had vamped like crazy in
the ultimate vamping contest, and in situations where appearance is everything, it
may matter more that you look like you fit the part than that you actually fit it
at all.

And I learned that when all else fails, dance your ass off. Preferably in suggestive
clothing.

Hey, entire careers have been built on less.

I’m talking to you, Madonna.

( 18 )

The Time I Created My First Sketch Character

“There’s dignity in suffering, nobility in pain, but failure is a salted wound that
burns and burns again.”
—
M
ARGERY
E
LDREDGE
H
OWELL

“Boot, then rally.”
—
A
ISHA
T
YLER, REPEATING AN OLD
D
ARTMOUTH SAYING, RIGHT BEFORE BOOTING AND RALLYING

Despite
the fact that it was an Ivy League school, a bastion of academic excellence, elite
accomplishment, intellectual refinement, and
blah blah blah
, the thing that Dartmouth was best at, the area in which it truly excelled, was partying.

Dartmouth was founded in 1789 in the wilderness of New Hampshire to educate the Native
Americans of the area. As of 1992, that still hadn’t really happened. What
had
happened instead is that a lot of white Anglo-Saxon Protestant dudes went to the
woods for four years and drank an inhuman amount of beer. The school is in Hanover,
in the wilderness of New England, and from its very beginnings, there has never been
much to do up there. The main pastimes of the school in its early years were hiking,
clearing woodland brush, building fires, and making underclassmen wear hats with propellers
on top. You can imagine a wee dram of alcohol might make the time pass more quickly.

Nowadays, the area around Hanover, New Hampshire, once completely desolate, is only
slightly less desolate—a place for which the arrival of a Ben and Jerry’s shop is
enough to elicit mental breakdowns and uncontrollable tears of joy. This place is
in the middle of nowhere. A place full of hormone-filled kids, living on their own
for the first time, in the middle of nowhere.

There is bound to be some drinking.
¹

I am not boasting about this. It is just how it is. Young people are stupid. Aggressively
stupid. Now put them in a context in which they are essentially unsupervised. And
make that place very cold and very far from anything worth doing at all. And now remove
girls.

You can see how the social culture at Dartmouth would form almost exclusively around
drinking.

Dartmouth College is not special in this regard. All colleges have drunken dummies.
²
And I don’t think Dartmouth is even the biggest, or even the tenth biggest, party
school in the country. But it is the preppiest. And the one where you are most likely
to get terrible frostbite if you pass out in the wrong place.
³
When Dartmouth kids party, they are
serious
. There is a saying at Dartmouth—more like a war cry—that people use when they are
partying: “Boot and Rally.” This is when you drink so much you have to throw up, then
turn right back around and put more booze into the happy void created by all that
vomiting. This is not just a slogan, but a rigorous practice and source of pride among
students. If you are on the verge of “booting,” you may even pull the trigger to get
things started, something that might be shameful if you are a thirteen-year-old girl
trying to lose weight, but is a puke-green badge of courage if you are a nineteen-year-old
premed student with an organic chemistry midterm on Monday morning.

You are tough. You are motivated. You love fun like it gave you a blow job once. You
will not let a little nausea or overindulgence put you on the sidelines. This is your
last chance to let loose before you pull a thirty-seven-hour cramming marathon (remember
that college bipolar disorder I explained). You. Will. Not. Fold. You boot. You rally.

Blood vessels and brain cells be damned.
⁴

Because the school is so isolated, not only has it developed an intensely competitive
culture around drinking, but it has also developed an intricate and hoary social structure
revolving almost exclusively around fraternities and sororities, or “Greeks.”
⁵
These organizations have had a death grip on the social life of the campus since
ale was transported to campus in casks on the backs of pack mules, along with hardtack
and smallpox-infested blankets. Members of the Geek culture will tell you they are
critical to promoting a sense of brother- and sisterhood, responsibility, civic-mindedness,
and philanthropy. Mainly they are just ways for people to feel like they belong, for
other people to feel like they don’t belong, and for
other
other people (girls, and a few boys) to flirt with guys and gain access to mass quantities
of free beer.

I don’t know how it works at other schools, but at Dartmouth, all the houses had beer
on tap, pretty much all the time. When I arrived, this was akin to entering an academic
building and realizing it was made out of marshmallows, with candy cane rails and
hot chocolate faucets. Beer. Available any time, from beer taps. Unsupervised beer
taps.

Heaven.

I did not behave delicately when I found this out. I have never had an excess of self-restraint,
but in this case, I lost it. I was Augustus Gloop at Willy Wonka’s place. I had my
mouth around those spigots like they were dispensing test answers. As any proud American
wandering a Costco with a tummy full of “some kind of meatball” will tell you, anything
free is absolutely worth having, and worth having twice.

I didn’t even really
like
beer that much at the time, but let’s be reasonable. Turning down free booze is like
turning down free money. It’s just not done. Not only should you accept when it is
offered, you should do your best to drink more than your fair share, just in case
someone finally gets their wits about them and decides to bring a halt to this whole
Christmas-morning-all-the-time thing that’s been going on.