by Aisha Tyler
Some might call such behavior stupid. They would be one hundred percent right.
Here’s the thing. I am uniquely, and occasionally quite stupidly, fearless. I have never been afraid. Well, not truly afraid. I have had moments of trepidation, acted tentatively on occasion. Tiptoed toward my fate timorously, doubts creeping, internal alarms blaring. Occasionally, I exercise a bit of caution. But more often, and to my sustained chagrin, I run sprinting toward my own demise, without consideration or forethought. I like to shoot first and ask questions about why there is a bullet lodged deeply in my own foot much, much later.
So on this golden August day in my fifth year, I had been playing outside in my Oakland neighborhood with a dusty scrum of local kids in a completely unsupervised group, the way we used to in the good old days, before the Internet told parents that this was a terrible idea2 and likely to result in your child being abducted by aliens or devoured by wolves. We were all in various states of typically dirty late-summer disarray: faces sticky with rivulets of many-hours-dried melted Popsicle and festooned liberally with dirt, most shoeless and many shirtless, including (inappropriately I suppose in hindsight) me.
Yes, I was running around a city neighborhood unchaperoned, on hot pavement with bare feet, and worse still, a bare chest.3 Now, before you jump into your time machine and call Child Protective Services, get over your prissy self. It was the seventies. Kids ran around unsupervised. This is before people felt the need to meticulously curate every minute of their child’s day. In the morning during the summer, parents opened the front door and forcibly ejected their children into the street with five dollars and a firm admonition to come home when the streetlights came on and not to run into oncoming traffic. This is just how things were done. I suppose if we were rich, the nanny could have followed behind us in the family’s second minivan, but we weren’t, and she didn’t, and that, my dear friends, is that.
So we were running around barefoot, narrowly avoiding puncture wounds from the abundance of rusted nails and broken bottles strewn liberally about the streets, fleeing rabid dogs and hissing cats and the occasional loitering ne’er-do-well, and having the time of our fucking lives. We climbed some trees, chased an ice cream truck, terrorized a squirrel, picked up dried dog poop, threw rocks at things that break when they are hit with rocks, and were generally on raging kindergarten fire, when we found an alley. Sweet.
Naturally, it being an absolutely terrifying place, and me being feckless and wild,4 I decided to go into that alley. And why the hell not? After you’ve touched dried dog feces with your bare hands, nothing much else troubles you. And in that alley, among empty fruit crates and mosquito-infested puddles, we found . . . an abandoned hobbyhorse.
Abandoned! Who the hell leaves a perfectly good hobbyhorse just lying around? I announced to the group. Heathens! Profligates! Godless people, that’s who!
I was a dramatic child.
We dragged this hobbyhorse from its dank hiding place and into the street, the better to surround it with hard surfaces that might embrace a small person’s tumble. We surveyed it briefly from all sides to confirm that it was, indeed, in functioning order. And then, in turn, we each hopped on board and rode that thing like a Hapsburg prince on a Lipizzaner stallion. Springs have never clung to life so dearly, nor groaned in protest so loudly. We played quite orderly, waiting politely in line for our turn, which may seem surprising considering all the tree climbing and poo flinging we had engaged in prior, but this was the seventies, and pre-Internet, and the unique self-involvement of the YouTube era had not been invented yet. We were relatively well-behaved, and when appropriate we shared, and I’m sure most of us brushed twice a day because that Yuck Mouth guy on TV had admonished us to, and who were we to disobey?
And because I had found the horse and was feeling particularly magnanimous, I went last.
Oh. I forgot to mention. This magical hobbyhorse had one flaw. Just a tiny one. The horse was old, and its fragile plastic body had begun to decay, revealing its metallic skeleton. Bits of metal poked through the horse’s sides and hind flanks, and a massive rusted metal bar protruded violently from its head, like some jagged, ferrous horn.5 This toy was a little plastic unicorn just built for destruction. I couldn’t wait to climb aboard.
Please, try to reserve your judgment for the end of the story, where it will be truly well placed.
So we are riding, and we are whooping, and we are feeling the kind of warm self-satisfaction that comes only from courting danger in a pair of sticky Underoos in the afternoon sunshine, and life is good. And I hop on this thing, and I am full of joy.
Now, as I was easily a foot taller and fifteen pounds heavier than all of the previous riders, this horse was taxed beyond capacity. If it had been a real horse, its tongue would have been lolling pendulously from its froth-framed mouth as its eyes rolled wildly in socket, whites exposed to the blue summer sky. But I am happily oblivious to the strain I am placing on this decaying plastic toy, and I rock away, springs groaning, frame creaking ominously, and I ride, ride, back and forth, farther and faster now, until the tail and nose scrape the sidewalk, leaving chips of brown and white in their wake, little plastic button horse nose skittering now across the pavement. And I ride on, dipping farther back now, laughing, eyes closed, face toward the heavens, the sun on my sticky little-kid face, and forward now, so far forward, like I am on a real horse, a real true life horse . . . and I am flying.
And then I actually am flying. Forward, over the horse’s head, and that metal spike, and a bunch of negative space, and I tumble to the ground, smacking into the cement headfirst. This is followed by an awkward somersault, and I am flat on my back, my Popsicle-and-dirt-bearded chin quivering with impending tears.
When you are a kid, there is that moment after you’ve fallen, when you can’t decide how you feel. Things hurt, but not that much. Not yet. You can’t breathe, and you’re a little confused, because just a few minutes ago you were having SO much fun, but now you’re lying on the ground in a heap and all that joy has turned to sawdust and Bactine in your mouth. You have to take a minute to gather your thoughts, because an injury means the end of fun for the day, and maybe a lot longer than that. So you ask yourself: Am I really hurt? Sometimes it’s up to you to decide, and sometimes the injury decides for you. In this case, I wanted to keep playing. But the injury decided for me.
I staggered to my feet, ready to finish my ride.6 But as I stood there, thinking I could “walk this one off” as my father often admonished, the faces of my friends said it all. I was getting a crowd-sourced diagnosis on this one, long before the term had been invented. Their expressions provided ample nonverbal evidence that I was in deep, deep poos.
I looked down. A spreading stain, a bright and crimson line, ran downward from my chin to dangerously near where my junk might be, if I had been old enough to have developed junk, or even know what junk was. It was a long and continuous streak, and growing increasingly bloody by the minute. Even my five-year-old brain knew that a rusty spike slicing you open longways couldn’t be a good thing. My mom had squawked enough about the threat of tetanus and lockjaw coming from dirty metallic items for me to know that I couldn’t just lick the back of my hand and wipe this one away like I did a skinned knee or a rivulet of boogers. This was a job for someone with gauze and ointment and a bottomless supply of kisses for my boo-boo.
The dreaded truth settled in my head with a thud; the thing no kid ever wants to accept. It was time to go home.
And as I realized that, the five-year-old part of my five-year-old brain finally kicked in, and I did what a normal little kid would do. I burst into tears and ran all the way back to my house.
When I arrived there, looking like a mad scientist had tried to flay me open like a tiny Frankenstein, my mother freaked out in appropriate fashion. When I told her what had happened, as she was dabbing my torso with bubbling peroxide and wiping my salty tears, she asked, in that annoyingly reasonable way adults do, “Why would you
play with that toy when you knew it was broken? Why would you do something you knew was clearly dangerous?” To which I gave an answer I was sure was apparent to all but the most dim-witted of people. “Mommy. It looked fun.”
In retrospect, it was fun, once it was confirmed that I wasn’t going to get lockjaw or tetanus or leprosy or cooties. Courting danger, facing fear, and engaging in life fully without caution or conservatism was a fantastic time. And, yes, the possibility existed that I would get hurt, but the possibility also existed that I would have a shitload of fun. And that was just too strong an enticement to ignore.7
“And whose fault is this?” my mother demanded. “Did one of the other kids push you to ride? Was it that hoodlum Malik? I always knew he was bad news. I am calling his mother.”
“No.” I shook my head. “It was my fault.”
Even then, I knew I had no one to blame but myself.
Did I learn my lesson, my mother wanted to know? Did I realize that the world was dangerous? That I needed to be careful? That I should approach foreign objects with caution, and wear shoes, and put on a sweater, and avoid rusty nails and never ride broken hobbyhorses again? Did I? Did I?!?
Yes. I nodded. I had learned my lesson. I would be more careful.
But the truth is that all I had learned was that it might be a good idea to wear a shirt occasionally. And that the next time I found a free hobbyhorse lying around, I was damn well going to jump on that thing and teach it who was boss.
This was a harbinger of things to come. The first time I ran headlong into danger, not just fearlessly, but gleefully embracing what would surely and inevitably be my demise, without caution or restraint. That horse was corroded, barbed, and threatening, its tiny horn tipped with rust and the bloody remnants of a thousand tiny broken dreams.
And it would be mine. Oh, yes. It would be mine.
For that experience, for the ride, the injury, and the scar I still bear to this day, I can only blame myself. It was no one’s fault but my own. I did it to me.
This is the essence of a self-inflicted wound, metaphorical or other. You’d like to project blame, point the finger, claim accident, bad luck, confluence, coincidence. But the truth is the blame lies squarely with you. And the only way to salvage the experience is to try to find a way to learn from it, to grow as a person, take responsibility, and move on.
That kind of personal examination and growth is what self-inflicted wounds are all about. A long, slow movement toward adulthood, and the learning and growth that can only come with a few scrapes and scars.
As for me, I blame the horse.
( 2 )
The Time I Almost Set Myself on Fire
“As the eagle was killed by the arrow winged with his own feather, so the hand of the world is wounded by its own skill.”—HELEN KELLER
“I just fucked up my hand slicing a bagel. Stupid bagel.”—AISHA TYLER
When I was seven years old, I set my house on fire.
I realize that this sounds vaguely Carrie-like, only without all the religious zealotry or repressed sexuality. Also, way less blood.
In my defense, it wasn’t totally on fire, and it wasn’t my entire house. Technically, it wasn’t even a house but an apartment. An apartment with shag rugs, marbled mirrors, and sparkly cottage cheese ceilings. An apartment just begging to be dirtied up a bit. It’s possible I may have been harboring a bit of misplaced anger at the apartment that had less to do with interior décor and more to do with the fact that my parents had just separated. But in my mind, at the time, that apartment was just asking for it.
My parents were in the middle of their first trial separation, and my mom, sister, and I had moved into a two-bedroom apartment in a decent neighborhood in the hills of Oakland, California. Safe, quiet, walking distance to the bus stop. A nearby 7-Eleven provided easy access to neon-blue frozen drinks when needed. A secure underground parking spot offered protection for my mom’s badass 1974 Mustang.1 Not too shabby, considering the solemn circumstances under which we made the move.
I can’t say I was happy about my parents’ separation and impending divorce, but I honestly can’t say I was sad, either. I was a kid, for chrissakes. I didn’t know how the fuck to feel. People often lament about divorces and what they do to children. There is a lot of handwringing about nuclear families and dual parenting and kids needing continuity—and about the damage divorce does to their sense of stability, their belief in the permanence of things, their tender, nascent optimism, and a bunch of other misty-eyed laments.
But I’ll tell you what else fucks with a kid’s optimism and sense of stability: when your parents fight all the time. That shit can really suck. Listening to your parents yell, or cry, or stomp off in anger, or worse, that deafening silence that falls over a home when the two biggest residents aren’t speaking to each other, and only reply in jagged monotone when the kids ask for seconds or beg to be excused from the dinner table2—that is damaging. That shit is no fucking fun at all.
This may be heresy, but as a child of divorce, I can say it wasn’t that big a deal. I’m sure at the time I found it a bit more traumatic, but looking back, it all seems much ado about nothing. My parents didn’t get along. They wanted different things. They broke up. They both seemed moderately happier afterwards. That was good enough for me.3
So. Was I sad about the divorce? At the time, I couldn’t say. What I did know was that all of a sudden I had a lot more unsupervised time on my hands, and that time was ripe for getting into trouble. Epic, thunderous trouble.
Starting with setting some shit on motherfucking fire.
I didn’t actually mean to set anything on fire. This was not some destructive act of rebellion. I just liked to cook. Or, more accurately, I liked to eat. Cooking was a means to an end, and that end was eating awesome shit. I have always loved to eat. I am a large person and I have been this large, essentially, since birth. A big baby. A robust toddler. A giant, stumbling kindergartner who could destroy a roast chicken in seconds, crack the bones for their marrow, and come back for more. I looked old enough to buy beer when I was thirteen. I am the go-to in any group when some shit needs getting off a high shelf. A girl this big needs sustenance.
And when I was a kid, my favorite thing to do was the thing I was absolutely forbidden to do: put a big pot of oil on a flaming stove, and fry shit up. Let’s face it, kids love crispy foods.4 They are always in search of a chip, or a fry, or a crunchy extruded shape of some kind. Once I figured out that crispy food did not come exclusively from the store or drive-through, that one could make these morsels of delight in the comfort of one’s own home, in almost unlimited quantities, I was hooked. No matter the time, I was always down to get high on my own supply.
Maybe I was drawn to the danger of it, too; the irresistible lure of the forbidden. Because while I was older now, and entrusted with more responsibility, I was still a child of only eight years, prone to accidents both unforeseen and entirely predictable. And each day I was given very specific instructions by my mother, repeated slowly and with meticulous diction every time she left the house.
No oil. No stove. No fire.
So of course, the second my mother would leave the house, I would find a pot, fill it to meniscus-challenging capacity with oil, and turn that bitch on high.
I never had a problem, either. I was careful, I told myself. And more than that, my mom was just being controlling, overprotective, and a poo-poo face besides. She had no idea what she was talking about. I could fry just fine. I didn’t need supervision. And I wanted French fries. No one would stand in the way of me engaging in the heat-catalyzed sorcery that turned two small brown tubers into the most extraordinary and life-changing pile of crispy heaven sticks ever to be dipped into a tomato-based condiment. My mother and her admonitions were dream-killers, to be dismissed without regard. And I had done so, hundreds of times, to no ill effect. I made French fries, my mom remained blissfully ignorant, and the balance of power in the universe was maintained. Who w
as hurt in this transaction? No one.5
So on this particular day, I was flouting my mother’s wishes once again. But this day was different. This day I was in a hurry, because I was flouting not one rule, but two: 1) do not cook, and 2) do not wear your mother’s favorite white chiffon top. Ever.6
I was feeling fancy,7 so I had gone into my mother’s closet with an eye to turning this morning into a solitary fashion statement. I first took care to check any pockets for forgotten change,8 and then searched out her favorite top. Not coincidentally, as this was my favorite top, too. I was at the age where everything my mother liked, I liked. I was constantly trying to emulate her in every way. From adoring the Ohio Players (whose adult-themed music I did not even begin to understand) to cinching my belts so tightly they gave the impression, however painful, that I had hips, to copying the way my mom laughed—an adorable little scream-shriek of surprise followed by openmouthed peals of delight—I wanted to be like her, and I would stop at nothing. Nothing at all, including sneaking into her closet and wearing her clothes like some tiny, creepy serial killer.9
And on this morning, I went for the gold: her prettiest, most expensive top, one she saved for special occasions. It was white, layered chiffon, with flowing satin ribbons and a watercolor painting of cranes and irises on the front. It was the closest thing my mother had to a princess dress in her closet, and since I was a little kid, it pretty much was a dress on me, albeit short and a little slutty, as if I was going to a late night kegger for woodland faeries.
Since I was circumspect and modest, even at that age, I decided to rock it tunic style. I pulled her mommy-sized white chiffon frock down over my seventies-era gauchos with the flowers on the butt pockets (don’t hate) and sauntered into the kitchen to prepare, then enjoy, a greasy platter of Idaho’s finest.
Realizing that I was compounding my trespasses, I thought it would be smart to get all this criminal activity done and over with alacrity. My mother was running errands and had taken my little sister with her, but who knew how long they’d be gone? The worst possible arrangement of events would be for my mom to walk in while I was eating clandestinely produced French fries dressed in her date-night finest. So to move things along, I turned the oil up on high, the better to get it ready to fry quickly.