Brave Read online

  Unfortunately, as the oldest girl I got the shaaaaaft. I had to be Mom Jr. I was ten. Taking care of a gang of wild children is not easy when you’re a kid. I didn’t want to be a substitute mom. I was not suited for it because I like to think too much and get agitated when I can’t. I need quiet. I didn’t want to be the enforcer, I wanted to go and stare at the clouds. My style of child rearing was not with the best bedside manner, to put it mildly. I was getting angrier and angrier at the circumstances of my life. My powerlessness. I knew I had to help my mom, and I did, but I was not cheerful about it.

  Oregon was where I learned to understand the value of a dollar. I discovered what it’s like to struggle and be embarrassed when you leave the free food line at church with your block of bright orange cheese. The sadistic school receptionist called our names out over the loudspeaker so everyone in the school could laugh at the poor kids who had to claim free lunch tickets. I’ll never forget the sneer on the receptionist’s smarmy face when I had to pick up my tickets. Complete classism. I resented those lunch tickets, not to mention the disgusting food. I scalped the tickets on the side to make a little profit. I’ve always been very entrepreneurial.

  Things were going somewhat okay in Oregon, which was to say, hard. Then I met a guy named Lawrence. He lived down the street from us. He had caught me sneaking under his fence to feed his dog bread and give it water. The dog was tied up, chained to a tree. His collar was so deeply embedded in his throat that it had maggots all around it. This was a severely abused animal, which should have given some indication of Lawrence’s character. He caught me feeding his dog and threw me out of his yard by the strap on my overalls. I landed on my ass. I hated him instantly. Two weeks later, I got home and who should be sitting in a chair in our living room but Lawrence, with his fat belly, making everybody wait on him hand and foot like he was king of the castle. I walked in the door and he looked at me with a sadistic smile. I froze. He said, “Hi, Rose. Call me Dad.” I remember just screaming, “NO!,” and running into the field that was behind our house, hiding there. Soon after, he moved in with his two daughters, Autumn and Mary, and his son, Larry (Junior). Lawrence Sr. was charming at first. But I wasn’t falling for it. I knew what his dog looked like. I knew the hell this man could bring. He was truly evil, and he had my mom snowed. I kept desperately trying to tell her, but she wouldn’t or couldn’t listen to me. Despite the fact that she’d escaped Children of God and its patriarchal structure, the societal programming that a man was going to save her was so deeply embedded, she couldn’t see the truth. She was probably also lonely. My mom didn’t have any girlfriends because she was so busy with so many kids and working full-time.

  Probably the first time I ever saw anything sexual was walking into my mom and Lawrence’s bedroom. I didn’t even understand what was going on, when suddenly a shoe was thrown at me. That was my introduction to sex. A shoe to the head.

  As it turned out, my creepy new faux dad was molesting his daughter Mary. We found out years later when she bravely brought charges against him. I always felt something was really wrong, though, instinctively. Mary, who was about fourteen at the time, and I were forced to take baths together while Lawrence watched. Having only recently met her, it was distressing for me. I knew something was off about this and hid myself as much as I could. We would both huddle and turn away.

  Apparently Lawrence liked blondes, and thank God I had dark hair. But I saw him looking at my sister Daisy, who was blond. Sometimes she would walk down the hall and I would see him stand up and start following her. I would block his path and get in his face. Well, I would get in his stomach, because I was ten. One particular time I spit at him and it landed perfectly on his lips. He gave me a beating and I took it. I was damned if I was going to let him do anything to Daisy. One of my proudest achievements is keeping her safe from him.

  But there was only so much I could do to protect my sisters and brothers during this period. I did my best. My youngest brother, Robby, was three and a half, so cute and so pretty. He rode his Big Wheel tricycle down the street, and for some reason, it set Lawrence off. Lawrence marched out, took spiky rosebush branches, and beat my little brother until he was bleeding all over his back and his bum. Outside of the house, Lawrence made his son and daughter forcibly hold me up and make me look through the window to watch him as he beat my brother. I had never hated anyone more.

  Lawrence would find other sick ways to rile me up. He knew I hated the N-word and he would get in my face and say it over and over until I lashed out at him, so then he had an excuse to beat me with his belt buckle. Now I look at ten-year-olds and I think, Jesus, they’re small. I was small.

  Lawrence listened in on the line when we had our weekly phone call with my father to make sure we didn’t tell him what was going on. He monitored the mailbox, too, so we couldn’t send any letters for help. It drove me insane that this worthless human had power and control over me. The beatings were one thing, but silencing me was his favorite thing and what I hated him for the most. He punished me by not allowing me to speak for a month. I was not allowed to utter a word. I felt so violated. I have had my voice stolen many times since, but that was a big one because it was so literal. I have no idea what I did to get grounded off speaking; knowing me it was probably for talking back. When it was mealtime, I would look across the table at my mother, beseeching her with my eyes, trying to get her to intervene, but there was nothing to be done. Having a voice and being heard is a fundamental human right and this indignity set a kind of pattern in my life.

  After a while, my mom did try to break up with him, numerous times. She’d say it was over, that he was gone for good, and I’d get my hopes up, but then he’d be back. One night, he drove around in his pickup truck with a shotgun threatening to kill my mom. I hid in the back of the truck and when I caught sight of her running, I’d shout warnings: “He’s coming from the left, he’s coming from the right, go right!” Finally, after that, she broke up with him for good. Abusive relationships are no joke and extremely hard to escape, but she did it.

  Later, my mother found out he’d done terrible things to all these other women he’d been with before and after her. He’d gotten off every single time in court, playing the system. He even got off the molestation charges. The cops loved him. He got off all the time. No one would listen. Eventually, Lawrence kidnapped his son’s girlfriend and raped her across three states in the cab of his truck, holding a shotgun on her. He was finally arrested and sentenced to jail time. I hope he’s dead. I hope someone drove a stake through his heart.

  I think of how many kids are abused, and how heartbreaking it is that no one helps them. And then it just begets more abuse. I don’t know where Lawrence’s kids are today. Poor Mary. I hope that poor girl is still alive, and I hope she’s doing okay. I hope her and her siblings haven’t had their lives totally ruined.

  I remember thinking as a young girl, How is it possible that women can be so gullible? They just ignore the reality of what is happening and believe what they want to believe. I think women in general, and my mom for sure, got sold this bill of goods, the story that a man will save them. I don’t think that’s really changed even for girls today. We’re still getting sold the same story. I had to unpack it because later even I was ensnared in an abusive relationship.

  We need to look at why so many women believe a man is going to save us. It’s not because of evidence of saving. I haven’t seen a lot of dudes on white stallions pulling up to single women’s homes. In fact, I have seen most women get on their own damn stallion. It’s just male-dominated society that snows us into not noticing it’s we women doing the saving. We are the white stallion and we have to wait for no one but ourselves.

  Even though I had these early experiences with men who were horrible beasts, I still somehow got it imprinted in me that a powerful man was going to come along and make my life easier. In reality, they usually just complicated things. Even though rationally I knew it wasn’t true, there’d
always been this feeling deep inside me that I was bad, and men were, somehow, the superior ones. I was bad because I was tempting. I was bad because there was want attached to me. Lawrence was truly a psychopath, probably the first true psychopath that I met. I would go on to meet others, but he set the mold. There’s a direct correlation between my relationship with my father and Lawrence, and later on my relationship with men for the rest of my life.

  RUNAWAY THINKER

  Everyone thinks Oregon is full of peace-loving hippies. Not the people I was around. They had jacked-up trucks, boosted up with big wheels, and gun racks in the back windows. There were dead deer hanging upside down from practically every carport, with blood draining into a bucket. I have never, in all the places I’ve been, been in a place more happily vicious than Oregon. I know others have had different experiences there, and I am glad for them, it just wasn’t my experience.

  People had severe reactions to me there. They went out of their way to tell me I was strange and hideous. I remember encountering a mother in the Fred Meyer department store—she must have been about thirty, a grown woman—who jerked her little girl away from me when I smiled at her, calling me an ugly freak. Her daughter started to cry. I decided to go and see what it was she saw. What was it about me that was ugly? I went into the bathroom and stared at myself in the mirror. My eyes looked even, my nose did, too; I couldn’t figure out what it was. I had short hair, but what was wrong with that?

  One day when I was about eleven, walking down the street in Santa Clara, a suburb on the outskirts of Eugene, I heard some really awful rock music and a loud car exhaust. I knew this was a bad combination and I was proved right. “Freak!” the guy in the car yelled. I ignored him and kept walking. Next thing I knew I was hit in the head and covered with a brown liquid. Wet from my head down to my toes. The car sped off. As I wiped at my eyes I saw a giant plastic bottle of Pepsi with its top jaggedly cut off. Then I noticed the stink rising. The bottle was the driver’s chew spit. It was like the movie Carrie where she’s doused in blood, except for I was doused in nicotine and saliva mixed with some old soda. I didn’t cry, I just sighed and went home to hose myself off. The chew nicotine smell didn’t leave me for a week. Every time the air moved around me I could smell the hate.

  My father was still living in Colorado at this time, and my parents decided I was to go back to Evergreen and live with him again. We kids bounced back and forth fairly often as there was no formal custody agreement. It was such a strange dichotomy. I went from Oregon, where I was relentlessly deemed hideous and ugly and freakish, to Evergreen, where I was suddenly popular and considered a beauty. This was a strange development. I looked in the mirror again and stared at the same eyes, nose, and mouth, and wondered why before when I had been in another state I’d had things thrown at me, and here I was being worshipped and anointed with instant popularity. I thought about it deeply and came to the conclusion that other human’s reactions were useless to me. Ultimately, it allowed me to cancel out what other people thought of me. Later on, when fame came, this deduction probably saved my sanity.

  In the meantime, I was handed one more mind fuck on my very first night back at my father’s, when I told him what had gone on with Lawrence. He simply said to me, “Well, you made a mistake, you should have sent me a letter from your school.” The idea had never occurred to me. That effectively shut that conversation down and made the whole situation somehow my fault.

  The two sides of my father became more pronounced. His light side was still magical. He made things fun simply because of how he reacted to the world. My father had a laugh that sounded like this crazed hyena and just when you thought it would stop, it would continue, and everybody else around him would start laughing, too. I can still hear it today. But at this point the dark side was starting to appear more regularly. He was getting angrier and angrier that the little girls in the family were growing up, and not so worshipful. That included his wife. He was having more flashes of rage and becoming more and more cruel. Eventually I had to go back to Oregon to my mom.

  A few years later, I was attending Madison Junior High, my least favorite school in my spotty scholastic career. In eighth grade, I went to my first and only school dance. It took place in a squat brown building with bad lighting and cheap decorations. I was skirting around the edges of the room, on the sidelines of the crowd, when I heard a gravelly voice say, “Heyyyyyy. You wanna hallucinate?”

  His name was Jack Fufrone Jr. I recognized him from sex-ed class, where we had just learned about fallopian tubes. He had a curly oiled mullet that was strangely mesmerizing, and one of those downy molester mustaches that young rednecks like to cultivate. It was clear my teenage drug dealer had been held back a few grades.

  Fufrone Jr. tore off a tiny piece of paper and told me to put it under my tongue. I had no clue what acid was, but I was all in for adventure. He had handed me a tiny corner of a tiny square of paper. I looked at him and took the rest of the square, too. Soon music was pulsating off the rec room walls, and my ears heard every little noise. I left the dance to wander the grounds. Trees started to breathe. My soft young mind was on fire.

  After the dance was over, my friend Linda took me home and dropped me on my front lawn, where I lay tripping my brains out, pine needles in my hair, staring up at the trees. My mother came out, dragged me inside, and propped me up on the couch. Furious, she began the interrogation. “So what is it? Are you stoned?” I didn’t even know what that meant. “Are you drunk? Are you high?” She kept pummeling me with questions, and I was so annoyed because I just wanted to feel the feelings that I was feeling and see what I was seeing, without this rude interference.

  Since the acid had rendered me mute, I had to marshal the strength to speak. I managed to summon just two words: “Fuck” . . . “you.” It was like a silent bomb went off. I had never cursed at my mother. Major miscalculation.

  By this point, there was another man in the picture, my new stepdad, Steve. He was a mean dry drunk. I remember him telling me that mosquitos never bit him because he had mean blood. He was not at all into us, my mother’s children. We could all tell he didn’t want us to exist. But we did, so there was a problem.

  He was not kind to my younger brothers. Brutal. He didn’t like me, either, because I could see him for what he was, and I was always trying to alert my mother. Steve saw his opportunity to get me out of his hair, and he jumped at it. He started in that I was a drug addict, had all the earmarks of a drug addict, because I liked to wear all black and listen to the Doors. One hit of acid. One. Hit. I’m fairly sure it requires more to be an addict.

  Two weeks later my mother deposited me in a drug rehab program where I was locked up, at age thirteen, my shoes taken from me to prevent my escape. I told the doctors that I had never taken drugs in my life beyond the one hit of LSD, and they told me I was in denial. Hats off to them: there was no way out of this one. My home for the foreseeable future was the top floor of Sacred Heart hospital, in miserable Eugene.

  The time I spent in rehab was both entertaining and monotonous. They taught us about drugs for about four hours a day: what the street names were, what the street value was, where you could get it, what its effects were. Everything you ever wanted to know about drugs but were afraid to ask, straight from the authorities. What the fuck? Did they want repeat customers?

  I was by far the youngest person there and soon became the ringleader. One time in the dining room I snorted Sweet’N Low sugar substitute to prove how tough I was and to piss off the nurses. I had never snorted anything, but I saw it in one of the hospital’s educational films. That was maybe the most painful thing I’ve ever shoved up my nose, so the joke was on me. I can honestly say that sugar substitute is a real chemical. You probably shouldn’t ingest it and certainly not snort it. The drain was vile. It tasted like rat poison. I managed to keep a poker face and refused to cry like I wanted to do. Making it seem like nothing was probably the best acting I’ve done to date. The nurses were v
ery unhappy, but I got a cheer from my fellow rehabbers.

  There was family therapy one day a week and that was a joke. Everyone in your family had to tell you about how they were affected by your drug use. It didn’t really work because I had only done one hit of acid. Mostly my brothers and sisters looked confused. My sister Daisy told me to just say I was a drug addict, that it would go easier on me. Once again, if I admitted to something that wasn’t true, it would pacify those in power. If I admitted I was a drug addict, they’d let me out sooner. I thought about it, but no, once again, I refused to betray myself to make my life or other’s lives easier.

  I was furious to be stuck somewhere and under tight control. The amount of time I was supposed to be in there was dependent on my good behavior. But I knew myself, and I knew my attitude was not going to improve. I was the unit’s problem child because I was, quite literally, a child. From what I could see, my behavior was never going to get better. The only way out was to escape. So I did. I had become friendly with our floor’s janitor. He did not care at all when I slipped past him into the stairwell and even waved good-bye.

  I made it out to the street and just ran. No small feat considering I was only wearing the hospital sock booties with the little gripper pads on the bottom.

  I wandered for a few blocks until I came to a coffee shop. I met a girl in the bathroom while piercing my nose with a needle, as one does. She helped me push it all the way through. Her name was Chloe. On the street you meet people and they become your instant best friends. Chloe introduced me to two older punk rockers named Slam and Mayonnaise, total street rat degenerates, both in their late twenties. One had dark hair with big spikes, the other blond with big spikes. There were lots of teen vagrants in downtown Eugene. I was hoping it wouldn’t be my future.