I never burned myself because I felt worthless. It certainly wasn’t because of neglect, and I definitely wasn’t trying to punish myself. I wasn’t taught to suppress emotion—the exact opposite, actually. My dad led with his whole heart and embraced emotions. He was all about clarity and closeness.
My parents built a home that was safe, a family who could tell each other anything—and, for the most part, we did. My friends loved my parents too, and it wasn’t at all unusual for me to come home and see one of my buddies sitting in our kitchen with my mom and dad smoking cigarettes and just shooting the shit. All my friends called my parents Mom and Dad, while some, the ones who got close, just called my dad “D” for short.
It was a safe house, and nothing any of my friends ever told my parents ever escaped those walls. They’d show up with coffee and they always knew exactly how my parents took it. My friends could talk to my parents about anything, and they did—girl problems, school problems, or trouble at home. My mom and dad were so dialled in to what was happening in all their lives that they knew exactly who needed advice, who could use a good kick in the ass or an ego check, and who just needed a place that felt safe to hang for a few hours. Sometimes my friends needed somewhere that felt like home, and that’s what our house was for them—a second home. It was nothing for us to have another kid at the dinner table three or four nights a week. But after so many of those nights around the dining room table, the nights my dad loved, full of those kid stories and uncontrollable laughter, I’d disappear to my room and pull out the cigarette lighter and a small purple box full of my mother’s sewing needles that I kept hidden in the back of my guitar amp.
Nobody who hurts themselves ever does it because they’re in a good place. Nobody thinks it’s cool to self-harm. Nobody cuts, burns, screams, fucks, or drinks the pain away for the attention. But for me, it was more reward than punishment. It was ritualistic and routine. It became the thing I looked most forward to, even though I knew I’d often hate myself afterwards. It was a compulsion. An addiction. A purpose. Burning myself gave me everything and asked nothing in return. The snap of flint off the lighter, watching the end of a needle go from silver, to black, to red, then white. The feeling of my skin popping up in tiny lines and dots when I’d drag the tip of it across my body was like meditation. It was a recharge.
I never hurt myself out of anger, and I never slid the end of a hot needle under my toenail because I thought I was a bad person. I did it because the pieces inside me that never felt like they fit together suddenly did.
I know this now, but I didn’t then. I couldn’t articulate it; I didn’t have the tools. I couldn’t ask for help because I didn’t know what I needed help with. I’d go from feeling overwhelmed to feeling nothing. There was never much in between. I was popular but never felt close enough to anyone to really care one way or another if they walked out of my life and never came back. Some pieces just didn’t fit. Burning was never a way to cope with emotions. It was a way to feel them.
I had no point of reference for why burning worked, but it did. I wasn’t trying to accomplish anything, and there was no nihilistic endgame. To be honest, I didn’t know if I was different or completely normal. But I knew that in those moments, I’d feel normal. Whatever that was.
Having spent so much time with my brother setting up the Cub Scouts hall for the weekly AA meeting my dad would host, and hearing so many stories, I learned two things about addicts. The first was that distractions work. That’s why so many people in AA smoke—one cigarette right after another. It’s a distraction.
My brother and I would get there early with my Pop on Saturday nights, put the industrial-size pot of coffee on, set up four or five rows of chairs, and place an ashtray on every other seat. I’d usually fall asleep within the first half-hour or so, face-down on a folding card table off to the side. I’d wake up two or three times—when everyone clapped at the end of a speech, when someone got emotional and needed support from the room, or when the entire group would say “Hi!” followed by some stranger’s name right after a not-so-anonymous drunk just courageously announced to the room that they, too, were an alcoholic. Those Saturdays were never easy, but I never regretted being there.
The second thing I learned was the one universal truth that binds all addicts together—they lie. All addicts lie. I was a great liar, although I always tried my best not to. I never wanted to have to lie about my burns, so I hid them. Bottoms of my feet, backs of my arms, behind my knees, but mostly the tops of my thighs and the one place nobody would be able to see unless the lights were on. In those rare moments when someone did notice, I’d say my scars were from chickenpox when I was a kid, or mosquito bites, or I’d cop to having an STD that I didn’t have. That was the tradeoff. I was far more comfortable with someone spreading the lie that I had herpes than I was with telling the truth. All addicts lie.
Playing guitar was my distraction. That’s what worked for me. Like all those guys in AA who chain-smoked to keep their hands busy long enough to not drink, I’d play guitar long enough to try to feel something. I don’t really remember ever crying, but I do remember every single time I should have cried and didn’t. I wasn’t “anti emotions” or anything like that. I was the exact opposite, actually—I wanted my feelings to all come out in music; I wanted to write love songs, heartbreaking ballads that people would listen to when they got dumped or that kids would slow dance to for the first time in junior high. And to try to get those emotions down in words, I did everything I could—I’d strip myself down to nothing. Literally. I’d get naked, light a candle, and sit in the middle of my room in the dark with my cold guitar across my lap, listening and playing along to the saddest music I had—which at the time was Sinéad O’Connor and my brother’s Enya tape. I sat there for hours in my own head, listening to New Age emo shopping-mall music, trying to cry.
And when that didn’t work, I’d turn my amp around and grab that little purple box of needles and my cigarette lighter.
For me and the guys I hung out with, most of our teen years were spent fighting off boredom. We didn’t have a ton of options in Acton. There was no mall or movie theatre, and going to McDonald’s on a Saturday was a plan you made on a Wednesday because it took two or three days to find someone who was able to borrow their parents’ car to make the trip to Georgetown. Avoiding boredom was just what we did. No matter how much it hurt.
The first time I burned myself it was on a dare. I was showing off.
That night, one brutally humid July evening in about 1990, there was a house party down the street from our place. And believe me when I say that “house” is a major overstatement. Imagine handing a seventeen-year-old the keys to a converted garage and saying, “This is yours now, go nuts.” That was Scott’s place. There was a mattress on the floor, a half-dozen stolen lawn chairs, a hot plate, and a mini fridge. The walls were six different shades of plaster and primer, and covered in holes from fists, heads, and beer bottles being thrown at a red target that was spray-painted just beside the back door.
Scott was a big, tough, sometimes violent, and very misunderstood town heavy. He was a fighter. His mom lived in the main part of the house and didn’t give a fuck what he did. I didn’t know what happened to Scott’s dad, why his half-brother was in prison, or why his mom didn’t care what he got up to. Nobody knew. I always found it strange that none of this was ever acknowledged. Nobody bothered to ask. They all just got drunk at his place and threw shit through his walls.
It was weird. We really shouldn’t have been friends, but we just developed this thing. He was obsessed with the military and knew my dad was a marine—he respected that, and I suppose he respected me because of that. Scott was hard inside and out, but when you needed him, like when someone was going to kick your ass, he was a pretty good friend to have around.
We never had any deep moments, never talked about feelings or secrets, and when he’d ask me to go with him to the emergency room because he’d sliced his own arm open with a hunting knife or broke his hand on a wall, I never asked, “Why?” I never needed a reason, and he’d never volunteer one. He didn’t have to let me in, and I was fine with that. That’s why I’d always get the call to go with him. On nights like that we’d drive to the hospital with all the windows down because Scott was usually a little too drunk to be behind the wheel, so the fresh air would keep him sharp enough to get us there, and the two hours in the emergency room and a dozen stiches always sobered him up just enough to get us back home.
Nobody ever discussed mental health back then. To be honest, it was probably years later when I even heard those two words put together like that. Back then, you were just weird, odd, or fucked. That was it. Most times it wasn’t because of anything that anyone could help, but if someone asked, the easiest answer was always just “Yeah, that guy’s fucked up.” It’s not that people weren’t compassionate, but anytime anyone offered help it was only because they thought you were fucked.
I was drawn to people like that. I didn’t know why, but I always gravitated to people who seemed hard. People who I could tell were made of rock. People with secrets and scars. The broken and the fucked. That’s probably why I fell so in love with Missy and became such good friends with Scott. We gave each other everything and asked for nothing in return.
That night at Scott’s place the party was the same as it always was—a total skid fest. Older drunk guys kicking around, Lynyrd Skynyrd and Steve Miller Band on repeat, shit beer, and all of us just trying to escape boredom or impress a girl, and maybe win a bit of money along the way.
Pass the Penny might have been the worst idea of all bad ideas. This wasn’t a competition that took place in one night, and the only way to win the cash would be if you showed up the following weekend with proof of your victory.
Here’s how the game was played. Four or five guys all threw five bucks into a hat and the group chose a treasurer to hang on to the cash until one of us eventually won. With proof. Everyone was handed a two-inch nail, a penny, and a beer. Each of us had to come up with a very distinct way of marking our penny with the end of our nail. This wasn’t easy, especially when you were drinking. Mainly we’d just try to carve a straight line or an X into it—at least that’s what I did. When we all had our pennies marked up, it was up to you to remember what you had scratched across the Queen’s face. Once all the coins had been appropriately vandalized, you’d close-hand pass it to the guy on your left, and without looking at it, you’d pop it in your mouth, like a children’s vitamin, and wash it down with a beer. You’d swallow. The fucking. Penny.
Now comes the gross part.
In order to win, you had to show back up next week with your penny, and get it validated by the guy who’d handed it to you. Once I swallowed mine, I knew there was no way I was going to spend a week looking through my own shit for twenty-five bucks. I was never going to see that penny, or my five bucks, ever again, and I was totally good with that. At this point I was just hoping I wasn’t going to die—or worse, that I’d have to explain to my dad that I swallowed a penny for a chance to win less than thirty dollars in a stupid game that I invented.
Horseshoes was different. It wasn’t so much a game as it was a test of strength, or courage or stupidity. The trick was this: If you took your cigarette lighter, lit it, and turned it upside down, the flame would heat up the oval-shaped metal cap that covered the flint and housed the little wheel that you had to roll forward every time you used it. If you held it there for a few seconds the metal would heat up, then you’d blow out the flame and touch the metal cap to your arm. Just a super-quick dab, like a stamp. The hot end of the lighter would leave a little burn on your arm in the shape of a horseshoe, and that was that. No big deal. The burns were nothing more than you’d get accidentally touching your hand against the side of a hot frying pan. It would blister for about a week and disappear shortly thereafter. This was a game I could win.
At the party that night, I took a cigarette out, lit it, and smoked about a third of it with my left hand while I held my neon pink lighter upside down with my right. Both the tip of my thumb and the knuckle on my index finger burned and turned black as the metal started to smoke, but I held it. When the wheel burned free and popped right off, I held it. When the cap went from silver to black to red to white, I held it. When I lifted the sleeve of my T-shirt and sank the metal end of it into my shoulder, I held it. When the bottom of the lighter exploded in my hand…I held it.
This wasn’t a burn that was going to go away in a week or two. I knew I’d just permanently scarred myself. I knew this was something I was going to have to lie to my mother, and everyone else, about. Probably forever. And I did.
But I didn’t care.
In that moment everything made sense. The reason I was able to slide the hot end of a lighter into myself so easily was because I wasn’t afraid. I was never afraid of pain. My whole life I had a pretty indifferent relationship with physical pain without realizing how directly tied it was to my inability to deal with what was happening on the inside.
That was the second-last time I ever burned myself in front of anyone else.
Oh, and yes, there was a Pass the Penny winner that following week. One of the older skids showed up with his penny and collected his twenty-five bucks. Nobody cared.