by Aisha Tyler
In my head, this makes sense—medium heat, fun soon; maximum heat, fun now. So there I stood, hair in tiny afro-puffs, barefoot in gauchos and chiffon, perched daintily atop a perilously wobbly chair, waiting for a large pot dangerously full of grease to reach the proper temperature, which in my murky child mind was “volcanic.”
When smoke started to rise from the pan,10 I figured it was time to add the potatoes. Nice, wet, freshly sliced potatoes, cut in jagged hunks with a dull blade, and dropped into the oil in big, grubby, first-grader handfuls. Wet potatoes hit the hot grease, and did the thing that physics and chemistry demand. Sizzling droplets of grease sprayed angrily outward—onto stove, chiffon, and open flame.
Hooray! And also Yikes!
The fire flared up immediately. In seconds, it went from a tiny fire on the stove to a huge fire in the pot, and young as I was, I still knew this was a big fucking deal. Even then, I had the composure to think to myself, “You little asshole, you knew this could happen.” But I clung to confidence as I yanked the pot off the burner to the cold side of the stove, certain the fire would go out. Instead, it flared up higher. “Hm,” I thought. “That kills that theory.”
Then I jumped back in fear, and freaked the fuck out.
Now, I did know something like this could happen. I shouldn’t have been cooking when my mom was out. I definitely shouldn’t have been cooking food in scalding-hot oil. Indeed, as I suspected, I was a little asshole. But I had done it like a hundred times before, and nothing had ever gone wrong. I had a flawless track record up to that point.
As a result, all I had learned about little kids, shoestring-cut potatoes, and scalding-hot oil was that if you put them all together, you got a French-fry filled, happy little kid. As far as I was concerned, the voice in my head—along with my mom’s admonishments and that idiotic bear on Saturday morning TV blathering about lit matches and forest fires—was totally full of shit. I was careful, and even more than that, I was smart, and I was special. I could break the rules, because I was better than everyone else.
This would be the first time I learned that this was not true. It would not be the last.
The fact that the stove was on fire was a shock. Stuff like this was supposed to happen to other people. Dumber people. People not dressed up so fancy, or so hellbent on their own satisfaction. But it was happening to me, and it forced me (after climbing down off the chair to frantically get some water, throw it on the fire, learn irrefutably that water does nothing to grease fires but aggravate them and terrify you, get out the fire extinguisher from under the stove, put out the grease fire, and cover half of the kitchen in a fine white layer of regret) to confront my heretofore deeply held faith in my own superiority.
Reality is a bitter, bitter pill.
One thing was certain. I was not going to get away with doing the dishes and hiding the evidence this time. Unless I could sift through the Yellow Pages11 and find a house painter who could cover the damage before my mom came home for the low, low fee of my weekly allowance, I was screwed. There were burn marks on the stove hood. There was a discharged fire extinguisher lying limp on the grease-spattered kitchen linoleum. Worst of all, there were oil splatters on my mom’s favorite chiffon shirt. I was more than screwed. I was dead.
And in it crept. The sneaking suspicion that maybe I didn’t have it all figured out. Maybe others had something to teach me. Maybe . . . just maybe . . . I still had a few things to learn. It seemed farfetched, but possible.
I got in a hellstorm of trouble that night. An early (and painfully brief) moment of tearful relief on my mother’s part was followed by a reckoning not seen since in that household. Grounding. Restriction of television. General elimination of fun. There may have been cold gruel. It was a long time ago, and hazy, but I distinctly remember some kind of manual labor. And I took it all without complaint, because I had brought this on myself, and for once, I had learned my lesson. Never, ever, prepare fried foods in chiffon.12
My kitchen fire era came to a close that day. I never made that unique set of mistakes in that precise order again. And from that experience grew the first silvered glimmer of an overarching axiom that I have come to embrace lustily, after having proved it to myself (and others) hundreds—no thousands—of times in my life. Stark and egregious errors, the truly epic failures, forge character. They burnish your edges and make you the person you are.
Not burning your hand 100 times in a row teaches you nothing but self-satisfaction, smugness, and wild-eyed arrogance.
But burn your fingers terribly just one time, and you will stay the fuck away from that stove.
Winning is awesome. Winning is the goal. Winning is what you should pursue unfailingly, unflinchingly, without pause or compromise. But to truly win, to become the kind of person who both knows how to pursue excellence and can recognize it once achieved, you must fail. You mustn’t just be able to deal with failure, you must embrace it, wrap your arms around its shoulders like a frigid bedmate who rejects your every sexual advance, yet lashes out in rage and knuckle-punches you in the nuts the minute you turn away.
Failure doesn’t want you. It wants you to want it. And only when you can look it in the eye and stare it down like a gladiator in the blood-soaked arena with a mix of both contempt and bemusement, can you truly win.
Winning doesn’t teach. Winning rewards. You can only really learn from failure. And in the end, after you have taken a prolonged physical and psychological beating that would destroy a lesser man or woman, you will understand that success is not the absence of failure, but rather the presence of not quitting when you do fail. To win, you need to fail, and fail hard.
Pursue failure, and you will trip over success along the way.13 That, or you’ll trip over the dangling train of your stained chiffon tunic.
Either way, you’re going down.
( 3 )
The Time I Was a Human Maypole
“Do not show your wounded finger, for everything will knock up against it.”—BALTASAR GRACIAN
“I probably shouldn’t have said that out loud.”—AISHA TYLER
I was a weird kid.
Not entirely by my own choosing, either. Movies always like to portray weird kids as “quirky” or “offbeat,” marching to the beat of a different drummer, listening to emo-dubstep through duct-taped headphones and screaming into a ravine in the rain with their oddly attractive yet adorably quirky friends.1
Unfortunately, my life was not a Wes Anderson movie, so I was just weird. Weird weird. A fucking weirdo. Unnaturally tall, tragically bookish, gawky, horsey, slouchy, loud. I interrupted conversations. I snorted when I laughed. I bit my cuticles obsessively.2 I loved reading so much that daylight hours could not contain my love of literature, and I would take a flashlight under the covers and read far into the night, usually some very dense and impenetrable science fiction that invariably involved time travel. I played the violin, for chrissakes.
I was also a loner. And I didn’t just play alone by default. I liked it. One of my favorite things to do was to go to the library on a Saturday and spend the entire afternoon looking at pathology books. If you don’t know what a pathology book is, it is a reference book for doctors who need to see pictures of what diseases look like. Some of these books are so large that you cannot hold them in one hand, or even two, but instead must ask assistance from a librarian to lift them onto one of those large and dusty podia in the corner of the reading room,3 so you can stand atop a footstool and turn pages gingerly as you gawk at the incredible, and often nausea-inducing, misfortune of others. I would look at everything. Infectious compendia. Venereal disease anthologies. My favorites were the ones that showed startling growths, tumors, and goiters in vivid detail. Goiters. No idea why I was into this; I just was.
I was the oddest child.
Compounding my oddity was the fact that my parents were kind of weird, too. Not in the tragically complex way that I was, but they had their moments. My parents were of that generation that migrated we
st in the seventies, in search of personal freedom, patchwork corduroy, free love, and joints the size of babies’ forearms.
They had grown up very differently. My father lost his own dad during World War II and was raised by a single mother, engulfed by four sisters in the hardscrabble streets of Pittsburgh. He eventually fled all that estrogen for the relative calm of Washington, D.C., where he met my mother, a Howard University homecoming queen and civil rights activist. They were young, beautiful, and politically aware, which meant, of course, they needed to pack all their crap into a puke-green Chevy and move to California.
And they did just that, driving west from D.C., meticulously avoiding the South, which at the time was not the most hospitable place for two young brown people with devastatingly fierce afros, and landing eventually in the San Francisco Bay area. It was progressive, it was culturally vibrant, and, most of all, it didn’t snow there, which was a major attraction for my parents, as they both hated cold weather and vowed never to shiver through another East Coast winter again.
They also decided, once fully committed to California as a choice, to just push this hippie thing all the way to the wall—why not?—and burn incense, study meditation, put pictures of dead Hindu guys around the house, and stop eating meat. I have to applaud their commitment—there’s a reason you never saw many black Hari Krishnas4—but this was not a recipe for popularity. Coming to school each day smelling like carob and Nag Champa incense is not a mark of normalcy. I didn’t have much to work with from the start.
The icing on the honey-sweetened carrot cake was that when I started first grade, my parents sent me to a private school. This was commendable on their part. They wanted a better life for their daughter, to provide a safe learning environment where their kid could play a string instrument, enjoy opera, and speak with white people in their native accent. There is nothing wrong with these dreams. They are utterly valid. But to be not just the one black kid, but also the one tall kid, the one vegetarian, the one kid railroaded into Transcendental Meditation, the one kid most likely to show up at school with a bag of date rolls and a copy of the Baghavad Gita under her arm, well, this was just straining the capacity of human comprehension. When you’re a kid, you may be able to get away with being one kind of weird. But being seven kinds of weird is putting gravy on your ice cream sundae. It’s just. Not. Allowed.
Don’t feel sorry for me. I got very good at playing alone. I loved to read, and to build sand castles, and erect little villages made out of sticks and mud, where the cowboys and the Indians would live together peacefully, and the Indians would give the cowboys tobacco and maize, and the cowboys would give the Indians blankets infected with a virus that would make their descendants many generations hence impervious to alcoholism and fluent in their ancient tongue. I was a happy kid. I needed no one.
There is a funny thing that happens when you reject the social hierarchy and go off on your own. People start to resent you. They don’t know why, they just do. When you are a weird kid, people think you should want to be like them. Why wouldn’t you? They are popular and awesome, and you are offbeat and struggle with eye contact. When it becomes apparent that you don’t want to be like them, they start to wonder. “What the hell does she know that we don’t know?” “Why doesn’t she like us when we are so very enamored of ourselves?” And, “What’s so interesting about that pile of sticks and sand shaped like a teepee?” And rather than ask you about your rigorously authentic, well-constructed sand structure, they smash it, because that is just what kids do.
Kids are assholes.
Once I got on the radar of the other kids at school, who didn’t know why they didn’t like what I was up to, they just didn’t, my reverie was shattered. Long periods of nattering harassment were punctuated by intense bursts of physical taunting that bordered on operatic. It culminated (for the first time, anyway) one day when one enterprising young child, who had no doubt seen this done on an ABC after-school special the week prior, decided it would be satisfying to mount a more concentrated effort at my ridicule—something more organized, collaborative, and with more, I dunno . . . oomph.
He gathered the others, who up until this point had been coming at me erratic and scattershot, and together they concocted a coordinated attack. These kids got me alone, during a rare moment of reflection,5 joined hands, and started (I kid you not) to taunt me while dancing around me in a circle. Very quickly, as they gathered speed and intensity, it began to resemble a May Day dance, with my classmates in the roles of the towheaded Nordic cherubs celebrating the abundance of burgeoning spring, and me the confused and sullen maypole, who wished this discomfiting jubilation would end so she could get back to reading about life in an alien society in the year 4870.
When I say they were dancing in a circle around me, I am being altogether literal. They joined hands, formed a circle, and skipped around me clockwise in a circle while chanting my name. Not my family-given name, but my meditation name. When my parents got into meditation, we all got spiritual names. The one I received was Sujata, which in Sanskrit means “from a good family origin.”6 I have a feeling none of this irony was lost on my parents. They are nothing if not funny.
Anyway, somehow, in a moment of severe weakness about which I will always feel a deep regret, I told one of my classmates about my meditation name. This was like placing an unpinned grenade in the hands of a poo-flinging monkey, one incapable of sympathy or mercy, but very good at dancing clockwise in a circle while singing.
So there was me, the wretched human maypole, and them, the remorseless children blind with glee, and the singing of my meditation name, and the dancing. This went on far longer than any amount of taunting should without devolving into violence and tears; me observing dispassionately, them doing their best to mimic the Von Trapp kids, only without all that wholesome earnestness. I would not show weakness, and they had rotational inertia on their side, so this thing went on for what seemed like an eternity.
In retrospect, I have to give it up to these kids. They were organized, they were all moving in the same direction, their chant was both haunting and melancholy with a slight mordant twinge,7 and it was well concepted and perfectly executed across the board. And it sure did make me feel like crap. Which I’m sure was their intended result.8
Now, you may be asking, “How exactly is this wound self-inflicted? Seems to me like these kids were the crass bullies and you the dainty innocent.” But you see, my friend, you have missed a crucial element to the story: I gave them the ammunition with which to bombard me. I couldn’t control the fact that I was tall, or odd, or a nerd, or a creepy loner, but I could control the level to which I allowed my tall, odd, nerdy aloneness to be weaponized.
I pretty much just handed over the detonator on that one.
The fact is that there will always be predators in the world, heartless dead-eyed thugs just waiting to exploit even the slightest show of weakness on your part. And you may not always be able to avoid predation. Some of these assholes are good. But what you can do is avoid feeding their fire. They will dig for days or weeks to find the chink in your armor; don’t lift up your chain mail the first day and show them where your soft parts are. If they’re going to drive a blade through your delicate heart, for god’s sake, make them work for it.
Don’t get me wrong: hold fast to who you are without apology or compromise, because the things that make you odd as a kid make you unique as an adult. Don’t ever let anyone make you feel ashamed of who you are, no matter how outside the main. But if you can, try to avoid throwing metaphorical gas onto their flame of incomprehension. In my case, I was already a tall, bespectacled, vegetarian girl who was the only person of my ethnicity in the student body, didn’t have a television, and was obsessed with reading. I didn’t need to throw one more straw of oddity onto my camel’s already strained back. People have a hard enough time understanding each other as it is. The last thing you should do is actively make yourself seem stranger than you already are.
&n
bsp; Because there is another axiom that holds true for human beings, and it is simple and universal. Much like the Incredible Hulk, what we don’t understand, we don’t like.
And what we don’t like, we smash.
( 4 )
The Time I Got Boobs Way Before Everyone Else
“An insincere and evil friend is more to be feared than a wild beast; a wild beast may wound your body, but an evil friend will wound your mind.”—BUDDHA
“Mean girls suck.”—AISHA TYLER
If you were tuned into popular culture at all in the year 2010, you may remember the “It Gets Better Project,” a campaign launched to help young people gripped in the throes of bullying. Adults who had been bullied as children, many of them gay, spoke to a generation of young people, telling them that no matter how desperate, how isolated or ostracized they felt now, things would get better. That they would grow up, find themselves and like-minded people who would love them for who they were, develop confidence and a sense of self, and the taunts and jeers of youth would fade into the background like so many vuvuzelas at the World Cup. That campaign was awesome.
This chapter is not like that.
I do wish, however, that the adult me could talk to the third grade me, and use those three words (without infuriating people for whom the phrase “it gets better” has real meaning and substance). Because the fact is, it did get better, but at the time, when I was eight years old, and getting boobs, I thought the world was coming to an end.1