Brave Page 3

  We had a neighbor lady named Antonella who knitted me yellow wool underpants, which are just as uncomfortable as they sound. They were bulky and lumpy and needed to be tied so that they stayed up. I was and am wildly allergic to wool. They itched so much on my way to my first day of Systemite school that I ditched them and left them behind a bush. I walked out onto the play area on my first school break. It was stressful for me because I didn’t know what kids did in regular school. I didn’t know what the bells meant or what the rules were. That day, the girls on the playground were doing the Italian version of Ring Around the Rosie: Amore, Tesoro, Salsiccia, Pomodoro! After saying “pomodoro,” the little girls would fall on their backs and kick their feet up in the air. I saw a girl approaching to invite me to play. I thought about my lack of underwear and stiffened, pulling my stupid pink smock down farther. The girl came closer and asked me to join the others. I went mute. I shook my head vigorously side to side, standing rigidly against the wall of the schoolyard. I pulled my smock down farther in case she had any idea to drag me out to play. The girl looked at me like I was crazy. I was still mute. It was my first interaction with a noncult child and I didn’t know how to talk to her. So I just stayed mute.

  I was immediately shunned by her and the other girls and labeled a snob. Sigh. It set the tone for the rest of my patchy scholastic career and, really, my later life. They knew I was different. I knew I was different. Not better than, not worse than, just different. It wasn’t a feeling I had, it was just a fact. I didn’t integrate well. I didn’t relate to children at all. Theirs was a language I didn’t, and couldn’t, speak. They had concerns in life to which I couldn’t relate; my problems were about surviving. When you have really big, dark things happen to you, it takes a lot more to care about things. It felt like I was about eight thousand years old in a small person’s body, essentially an alien among those who understood traditional societal constructs.

  On the way to and from the village school, I buried insects. I had a knack for seeing insects in peril. I would arrive at school puffy eyed from shedding tears at my self-made bug funerals. I’m sure I was unnerving as a child because of my intensity. I know I was because I basically was the same as I am now, and I tend to unnerve people to this day. I saw past everything, all the spiderwebs that people often hide behind so they can tell themselves a story about themselves. It made my father in particular very uncomfortable. Like I said, he may have left the Children of God, but the need to be a demigod preacher never left him, and suddenly he was a cult leader without a flock. He expected the women and children around him to worship him, and I never did. To have somebody around who’s staring at you and puncturing through the falsehoods you’ve established to live your life must have been unsettling.

  Thus, in an ironic twist after all he’d put me through, my father lectured me on how essential it was for me to be more childlike. Couldn’t he see that he was the reason I couldn’t be? When the onus of survival is put upon a child, surely that hinders her ability to go play with a doll like other good little girls. I could lay that squarely at my father’s feet.

  Going back through my life, I can see why my father lived his life differently; it was a reaction to how he was raised. Well, that and a uniquely special kind of mind. His father, my grandfather James Robert McGowan, was an American patriot, a navy man through and through. He was complex, alcoholic, and tough. Grandpa Jim had five children under the age of eight when he went to fight in Korea. His wife, Nora, a mentally fragile beauty from Quebec, Canada, was left to raise the kids alone while he was at war. When Grandma Nora found out that Grandpa Jim had a Korean lady on the side, her occasional bouts of mental illness became intractable. At least that’s what my dad told me. The navy committed her to their psych ward, and involuntary electroshock therapy followed. It was early days for that kind of therapy: Grandma Nora was a guinea pig.

  During this period, chaos reigned in my father’s childhood home. My dad and his siblings would alternate wearing the one pair of shoes they had. Only the child wearing shoes could get to school and have a hot meal. It breaks my heart to think of them taking little forged notes from a “parent,” written in a child’s scrawl, asking the grocer to please give them bread that would be repaid later. A gang of men broke in one night when they were alone and ransacked the house. The children hid in the refrigerator.

  I would like to say I can’t imagine their terror, but it wouldn’t be true. I can relate to the instability, hunger, raging mental illness and its fallout. These are all old friends of mine, and my family’s.

  I would later come to understand that my father was most likely manic-depressive. The manic side was the magical side, the bright, funny, wild side cackling at the wheel of our car as we skidded around the mountain roads. The depressive side was the monstrous, violent side. The more overwhelming his life got, the more the dark side won out. He had fallen into doing heroin at one point in the early ’70s in Venice, California. I think that’s where he met the people from Children of God, and how he got clean, and then his new drug became Jesus. He was like a rock star and Jesus became the instrument he played.

  Had he gotten help earlier in life, it would no doubt have saved my relationship with him, and his relationship with my brothers and sisters, his relationship with art, his relationship with the world, with women, probably with everything. As for my mother, with her porcelain skin, long, reddish-blond hair, and blue eyes, she was a magnet for the wrong kind of boy. The wrong kind of boys turned into the wrong kind of men. She ran away by the age of fifteen. At eighteen she met my father, Daniel. By nineteen she was pregnant and in a cult.

  While my mother was pregnant with me, her mother, Sharon, climbed the Three Sisters Mountain in Oregon and tragically slipped, plummeting to her death. She was thirty-seven. I was told that’s why I’d always be sad, because my mother was sad during my pregnancy. For years I thought my intense internal sadness was due to this, but later I realized it had more to do with brain chemistry.

  Sharon, with her beautiful red hair and green eyes, had also married young, a bad match. I’ve blocked out my grandfather’s name, her husband. I suppose I could find out, but I frankly don’t care to. The mores of the time being what they were, a damaging blanket of silence covered all intransigence. The dying gasps of the Kennedy era and the pervasive requirements of feminine civility and perfection have in their way fascinated me for as long as I can remember. The stifled rage must’ve been a constant for women of that era, not knowing that in a few short years everything would change. I can’t even imagine how much rage I would’ve had to stifle back then, because I’ve had to stifle so much now.

  My mother impresses me greatly. I truly think she’s one of the most intelligent people I have ever met. Her mind works at a very fast rpm, like a Ferrari brain. She was/is a beautiful woman, and she was preyed upon. Maybe that, besides an agile mind, was what got handed down to me.

  But I’m grateful for many other things handed down to me from my family. A dissenting punk spirit. A quick, cruel wit, curiosity, love of history, and above all, a love of words. One of the great things that both my mother and my father gave me is this ability to see art everywhere. I fantasize about having tetrachromacy, where you can see over a million colors. I see shapes and patterns in everything. I’m always surprised that when people grow up in a more traditional way, sometimes they don’t seem to be able to see, to really see, the things all around them that are pure art. To me, that is what makes the experience of life. It’s also something that helped me survive.

  For all the flaws of my childhood, I consider myself lucky to have been raised with a European sensibility. We had Italy and its history, its architecture, and its art. I think Europe and older cultures have a different sense of rhythm and time. I find the system, especially the system I now know best, the American system, aggressively determined to crush free thought and those it labels “other.” I’m here to tell you that “other” is where it’s at.

  Peop
le tell me they’re sorry for how I spent my childhood. That’s cool, I simply tell them I’m sorry for how they live. Growing up behind the proverbial white picket fence frankly seems as dangerous to me, and a different kind of cult, the cult of the mainstream. I’ve known some fucked-up people behind those picket fences. At least with my family it was all right there to see. One of the great benefits of growing up, moving a lot, and continuing to do so as I got older was that I met people who thought differently, and in that way I was raised to view the world from a different perspective. I am grateful for that, if anything.

  I was also bequeathed the one thing that runs strongest in my family: a strong urge to destroy oneself. The phoenix that has to rise because life has turned to ashes. My life has ashed itself numerous times, more times than I can count. But goddamn, all those ashes built a beast.

  I know I am not alone in this life ashing thing. So many of us seem to have this preternatural ability to rise because we have no other choice. It’s something that fascinates me about the human spirit. I think our rising is the bravest thing we can do, and I don’t think people give themselves enough credit for it. How many times have we been told we’d be nothing? But we are not nothing, we are phoenixes and we rise. All it takes is some bravery. Turning our lives around is the bravest thing we can do. One step at a time, first we walk, then we run.

  One of the things people don’t realize about cults is that they’re all over: it’s not just wild-haired cult leaders. Of course it was extreme in the Children of God when they began advocating sex with children and the selling of women, viewing them as merchandise and property. But when it comes down to it, this mentality wasn’t far from what I would later experience in Hollywood and the world at large. At least with Children of God, I knew what I was running from. Hollywood and media messaging was a lot more insidious.

  I have patches of memory from the night we escaped the commune. Like a movie scene, it comes in flash images. I remember asking my father where my mother was. No answer. I remember the running. Holding my father’s hand. And the green corn-like plants with their hard stalks whipping my small face. The lightning, thunder, and rain raging in the night sky. Sometimes in the movies, it rains to heighten the drama. Well, this drama was heightened. The rain was pouring.

  Ironic, then, that after Italy, my father would send me to the perpetually rainy American Pacific Northwest as my next home.

  AMERICAN GIRL

  It was in the bathroom of the plane taking me to America that I remember first really seeing myself in a mirror. I didn’t really know what I was staring at, because I had no attachment to the face I was staring at. I didn’t know that once I got off that plane, I would land in a world of here’s what you can’t do because you’re a girl and here’s why you’re different and fucked because you’re a girl. It was like a pink school uniform for the mind. The first place I was sent was a small town naval base. I went from Florence, Italy, to Gig Harbor, Washington. Or to be more blunt, I essentially went from the cradle of Western civilization to a place with rednecks and jacked-up trucks with big wheels. America was terrifying. Loud. Jarring. I hated the food instantly. I hated how aggressive people were. My brother and I were sent, ahead of my father, to live with my step-grandmother, Dorothy, yet another adult I didn’t know but was supposed to attach to. She was a tall brunette cigarette smoker with a big throaty laugh. She loved America. She talked about it a lot. My first night in the USA was spent in terror of the bear she told me might eat me in the night. The only thing she knew how to cook was boiled tomatoes, and I cried because I missed the food in Italy.

  I was taken to Denny’s, a chain restaurant with frankly terrible food, the worst that American cuisine has to offer. They had a big menu with pictures on it. I was so excited to see spaghetti on the menu, I started speaking excitedly in Italian and waving my hands around. When it arrived, it was a gelatinous blob. I stared at it. Picked it up with a fork, and instead of being normal pasta, it stayed together as one unit. There was also a big lake of lukewarm water underneath the spaghetti blob. I just started crying because I knew my life was never going to be the same again. I had landed in a world of Tater Tots and Cheez Whiz, and there was no going back. Fuck.

  Everything was different. Not just the food, but the land, the trees, the sounds. It rained all the time in this new place. The cars were so big and so loud. The people were so big and so loud. I had never even seen wooden houses. In Italy all the houses had been made of stone. I had never been around Americans. I had never heard music piped in through loudspeakers. My brother and I huddled together when announcements blared out in the supermarket. We’d never seen fluorescent lights. We’d never seen orange cheese.

  Dear America, why is your cheese orange? Who decided: “Let’s make this an unnatural shade of orange”? It’s completely arbitrary. My brother and I thought it was hilarious. We’d point our fingers and snicker. But the joke was on us. We were stuck there.

  My first day in my American school I was made to stand in front of the class and lead them in the Pledge of Allegiance. I didn’t know what the Pledge of Allegiance was. I could understand English—I just refused to speak it. I heard the teacher say, “This’ll get the Communist out of her.” I turned to the teacher and uttered just one word: “Fascistas.” Fascists. That’s what the Italians were during the war, you dummy, not Communists.

  Indeed, it seemed the welcome message was unmistakable: You’re different. We must crush the difference out of you.

  There’s a tenacious myth that America glorifies individualism, but trust me, if you are a true individual, you will be persecuted. Schools force-feed you the propaganda version of the world and of history. The bullshit version. So that by the time you graduate you’re chanting along with everyone else: “America, hell yes, white men are number one!” Why? Why do you say America is number one? Because if you actually look at the statistics, around the world America is not in fact number one at anything anymore, except maybe obesity, firearm deaths, the death penalty, and incarceration rates. Oh, and of course, military might and our other big export: American film and television.

  This is when reactionaries start yelling about how other countries are worse, so why don’t I go live there, et cetera, et cetera. My view is why not just be better? Why should we continue to feel superior just because other places are worse? That sounds like bad logic to me. We can just be better by thinking differently. Thinking whatever is different about you must be stripped from you is the WRONG way to approach things. Thinking you must be homogenized for everybody else’s comfort level, because God forbid discomfort, is the WRONG way, too. Fuck those ways of thinking. Do not bend yourself to make others feel taller.

  When I arrived at school, they said to me, “Stop reading what you’re reading. This is what you’re allowed to read because you’re X.” “Stop doing what you’re doing, girls can’t do that.” The adults I met were dedicated in their pursuit of beige, not all, but most. Our neighbors had no interest in being intrigued or expanded by an alternative lifestyle or viewpoint. They didn’t want to know what else might exist out there in the world. They just wanted to kill it because it was different. I longed for my dad and his strangeness. I needed an antidote, fast.

  After a few months, my brother and I were flown to a state called Colorado to reunite with my father. Colorado is one of the most beautiful places on earth. We lived in a little wooden house at the base of a majestic mountain in a mostly hippie community, a town called Evergreen. I loved Colorado, even if I still was not a fan of American food. Soon after, my new stepmother arrived, and life in Colorado was mostly good. I adjusted to my new life better in this freer environment than I had living by the naval base. I had come to love Colorado even if I didn’t understand a lot of the social cues of my school peers. At least I was treated well by the teachers, so that was a nice change.

  Around this time, I found a book on astral projection. Astral projection is the practice of essentially leaving your body behind
and traveling by spirit. I would lie in bed and practice my hardest to get out of my body. I wanted to travel and find my mother.

  My mother was still in Italy, and unbeknownst to me was making her way back to America to a state called Oregon. Later I would find out that my dad essentially left her behind to get out of Children of God on her own. Her only living relatives were her sister and her grandmother Vera. Grandma Vera sent her the money to get home and helped my mom restart her life in traditional society.

  One day I was told I’d be going to Oregon that night to join my mother. I was excited at first, before I understood that Oregon was not going to be a happy place for me.

  Looking back, I have to say, I am incredibly impressed with my mom; she made it back from Italy, raised six kids on no money, occasionally surviving on food stamps, while my dad was living with his new wife. My mom had six kids not because she had really wanted to, but because the cult had encouraged her to. To me it seemed she was embarrassed about her life. Even now, I know she dislikes it when I talk about the cult, but to me it’s not her shame, it’s just an alternative adventure she went on. There is no shame that should be hers, plus I’m certain it was my father’s idea.

  When my mother landed back in America, her grandmother helped her get government housing. These houses were pretty basic compared to the prettier home I lived in with my father, but I was ecstatic to be reunited with my mother and other siblings.