Brave Read online

  I remember the exact moment, walking down Tenth Street in Seattle, when I started to see myself through men’s eyes. Horns started honking and I heard men yelling. I looked around to see what was going on. There was nothing. Just me. I was what was going on. I was the reason for the noise. Except for it wasn’t really me that was the reason, it was my body and my face. I had developed a chest almost overnight. I felt embarrassed and ashamed. I felt like I was leading men on just by existing, just by having these appendages.

  It got so I couldn’t walk a city block without men honking, wagging their lewd tongues through their V-split fingers. That’s when a new form of disconnection happened for me. I disconnected from the me that I always knew and became two selves. One self was internal and the other self external, one of me became two.

  I didn’t enjoy the attention because it made me feel dirty. I wanted to see what I could do about it. I went to the Seattle Public Library and combed through medical books researching breast reductions. The surgery looked terrifying, not like I could afford it, anyway.

  The other half of me asked, Why does a man’s desire supersede my right to dignity? What makes certain men think their perversions are more important than a girl’s right to exist as a free human in society? Eventually I figured out that I needed to be like the sad carriage horses that walk with blinders on the side of their face. Otherwise I was giving my energy away, acknowledging the verbal assaulter’s presence. What a pity that so many of us girls and women have our peripheral vision taken away simply because of unwanted attention. I heartily disagree with the whole “boys will be boys” bullshit. No, raise your boys to see girls as humans, not objects.

  Around this time, I got my first jobs, both somewhat under the table. The first was at a funeral home. A punk friend of mine was living in the attic of the place and told me they needed help setting up viewings for the families of the dead and that he’d give me $30 a week. Having recently turned fourteen and with slim employment options, I said yes. Working at the funeral home quickly became the best time of my week. In contrast to the rest of my life, I found it peaceful. The dead couldn’t harm me. I found it soothing. I was more spooked by the fact that I was not spooked. Sometimes the lights in the viewing room seemed as if they were vibrating and they’d flicker. One of my favorite things to do was adjust the furniture and lighting for the family’s viewing pleasure. I would stand by the open casket before the family came and I’d do my best to get a “vibe” from the deceased person and adjust my lights and the decor accordingly. I think that’s where my love of lighting came from. Only a couple of times did I feel like the dead were going to come back to life and strangle me, but most of the time it was, honestly, relaxing.

  I stole a pack of Jesus cards (the cards the funeral home gave out at the service) and gave them to my father for his birthday. Until the end of his life he bothered me about getting more. I couldn’t bring myself to admit that his favorite Christian illustrations with the beautiful gold leafing were stolen and belonged to the dead.

  In retrospect, after losing a few people in my own life, I could’ve lived without some of the things I saw at the funeral home: bodies wrapped in clear blue tinted bags, their legs crossed, rings still on fingers, stacked on shelves in the freezer. One time I opened the window flap of the crematorium. That was not a good idea. Can I honestly say they are all your ashes in an urn? Maybe, maybe not.

  My other job was at an old movie theater called the Broadway. I loved that job, too, but for different reasons. Two films played for long periods of time when I was working there: Who Framed Roger Rabbit and Working Girl. Two dichotomies in a sense. One was Jessica Rabbit of the “I’m not bad, I’m just drawn this way” fame, and the other was Melanie Griffith as Tess, a secretary in NYC who dreams of bettering her life and so masquerades as her bitch boss played by Sigourney Weaver. These two films had a strong influence on my young mind. At home we mostly watched classic films, so newer films were a treat. I was inspired by the idea of rising up like in Working Girl and making my way through a male-dominated world to excel beyond what people thought I was capable of. With Jessica Rabbit, I realized that not only were our bodies shaped similarly, she helped me realize I loved to sing. On matinee days when there were one or two people in the theater, I’d go into the darkness of the aisle, put a flashlight under my chin, and sing, “you had plenty money 1922, you let other women make a fool of you . . .” then click the light off and run back into the box office. I considered it my singing time. So I owe my love of singing to a cartoon.

  Usually, I was relegated to the front of the house at the theater. The male manager would stick me outside of the big double doors and encourage me to ask men if they’d like to come in and watch a movie—the theater’s very own Lolita there to lure men in. It felt dirty and the men who’d come would look me up and down first as if it was their due since they were going to buy a discounted ticket. Later on in Hollywood it would feel the same.

  I got fired from both jobs within a month. The funeral home because they found out my age and the theater because I said no when asked if I wanted to be in on the skimming of box office money.

  My dad told me we were moving out of the Cave and into a beautiful Craftsman home from 1908 that he got a great deal on. I soon found out why he got a great deal on this place—it was the only house on the street that was not a fraternity house. Yes, I as a girl with dyed jet-black hair, black clothing, and an even blacker expression, was plunked down smack in the middle of University of Washington’s Frat Row. You have got to be fucking kidding me. Walking to the bus stop was super fun, let me tell you. It was like running a gauntlet of stupid. The jocks would scream at me as I walked, calling me a freak. I was like, yeah, stupids, I’ve heard this before and it was boring the first time. Each morning, I’d rig my boom box stereo speakers to my window and put on the band Alien Sex Fiend (imagine a cat screeching along to industrial music) on a loop as loud as I could to annoy them.

  My father and I were archenemies at this point. I hated him with every fiber of my being. I wanted him to be in the funeral home dead. He may have wanted the same of me. My father’s unbalanced mayhem was daily at this point. My older brother came to live with us, which did not go well for him. My father was mercilessly vicious to both my brother and me, raging even at breakfast. It was such a constant steady stream of annihilating put-downs. My older brother is wickedly funny, but had a very rough time in his teens and dealt with the constant abuse by retreating into himself. Just like he had blond hair and blue eyes, and I was dark, our personalities were night and day. I was tough, he was sensitive. The truth was, I was highly sensitive as well, I just had to have a kind of self-made invisible armor around me to survive.

  One night my brother went to hang out with our younger cousin Stevie just outside of Seattle. They were walking down the side of the road when a drunk driver in a pickup truck swerved and killed my cousin, knocking him ten feet out of his shoes. My brother had to see our poor cousin’s brain spread across the pavement. When my father found out, he told my brother it should have been him. My father’s untreated mental-health issues were creating all kinds of damage at this point. I longed for his old self to come back. I would watch kids with their dads and I would get jealous.

  It came time to enroll me in school, but I didn’t really have the necessary documents. We found an alternative school called Nova that catered to kids too smart or too weird to be anywhere else. It would’ve been a good place for me, except for it was all hippie kids. I fucking hated hippies. They reminded me of my earlier years and they pissed me off because I equated them to the hippies in the Children of God. The hippie chicks would lecture me about all the chemicals in my Revlon lipstick. I would respond by whipping it out, applying more, and blowing a kiss. I also enjoyed leaving kiss marks on the white walls. I always got in trouble; it was obvious who was doing the kissing.

  My dad took me back-to-school shopping at REI, an outdoorsy I-shoot-bears kind of store with ca
rgo pants and anoraks—not my idea of where to buy clothing. I was more of a Moth, a cross between a Mod, that sharp 1960s look, and a Goth. I fashioned miniskirts out of black wide-necked turtlenecks from Goodwill, cutting off just the neck part and wearing it over black tights, with a pair of Doc Marten lace-up boots that my aunt bought me. I had my own weird flavor going on.

  When I would get any little amount of money, I would spend it on one hit of acid or a line of speed and go dancing at an all-ages club called the Underground on Friday night. I loved this place, lots of Goths and freaks. My kind of people. Not only did they play fiercely awesome music, but I, higher than high, would rule the nightclub stage, like I had when I was a runaway on the streets. I’d get up there, extend my arms, knock the queens off, and basically announce, “I’m here, bitches, step aside.” I was there dancing like a little machine till 2:00 a.m. I’d usually fib and tell my dad I was spending the night at a girlfriend’s house, which created a time problem for me. I had nowhere to go after two in the morning, so what I decided to do was to go sneak in and sleep in the Lake View Cemetery, one of Seattle’s oldest cemeteries. The cemetery was gorgeous and Bruce Lee was buried there, his grave usually covered with oranges and pennies. I found the cemetery’s silence and safety reassuring. Plus, weird sex stuff was going on in the bushes in the park next door and I wanted no part of that. Come Saturday morning I’d straggle home, my arms filled with flowers that I’d taken from various graves. When my father asked where I’d gotten them from, I’d simply say a nice man gave them to me on the street. Amazingly, he bought it every time.

  Other nights I’d just sneak out, making a big show of going to sleep in my closet and then leaving out the front door when I could hear my dad’s soft snores. I’d make sure to leave the front door open in case anyone wanted to come in and murder him, but no one ever did, much to my disappointment.

  When my dad announced I “owed” him $300 a month in rent, it put the fear of God in me, or at least the fear of being forced back into homelessness. The experience of being homeless and hungry casts a long, long shadow. I’m not sure you can entirely imagine what that’s like unless you have been hungry, really hungry, at some point. Can’t-sleep-because-your-stomach-is-eating-itself-for-the-third-day-straight hunger. My fear of landing back on the streets was like a blackness looming behind me. I was terrified of living like that again.

  But how on earth was I going to come up with $300? The answer came when I was skipping school one day. I saw a flyer on a pole that said I could get $35 a day to be an extra in a movie. I’d been poring over classic films, watching with my dad, one of the things that even during this period we still could enjoy together. I calculated $35 a day for who knew how long and figured I could get the $300 that way.

  This wasn’t quite what you’d call a classic film: a movie called Class of 1999, with Malcolm McDowell and Pam Grier, a silly B movie about a future school where the teachers were cyborgs. But hey, $35. I quickly applied for and got the part because they liked my look. An extra is what it sounds like, an extra body, an extra face, to fill in the movie. I was more of a featured extra; I’d just pop up in shots, completely out of place, but because I was cool looking they put me in all over. They drew a little black heart on my round cheek because I was in a gang called the Black Hearts. It was almost like I was a silent film character, all over the film, but never speaking.

  There was a guy on set who was probably in his late forties. He was super friendly and he reminded me of a nice version of my dad, so I’d joke with him a lot. I always thought adults liked me because I was so much different from other kids my age, and I was funny. One weekend, he asked me to walk around downtown with him and some of the other extras. I said I would. We were supposed to meet him in the hotel lobby. I waited and waited. I had the front desk call his room and they told me to go up. I went expecting to see my Black Heart extra gang, but no, it was just me. The door opened and I got pulled in right into his chest. Awww, fuck. His beard scratched me as he jammed his tongue down my throat. It all happened so fast. He promptly pulled down my shirt and fondled my breasts. Of course, it was me who felt dirty and ashamed.

  Looking back, this man was just another industry pedophile, no different than a street troll, but I didn’t know that yet. There are so many of them. It’s an open secret in good old Hollywood. When charges are filed (rarely), the studios just continually settle with the victims, and use their PR machines to invalidate the claims. Usually where there is smoke there is an inferno, especially as Hollywood is concerned. I tucked the experience into one of my many inside compartments and went back to work. It didn’t occur to me to say anything. For years I thought of the incident as a sexual experience versus assault. Later when I became an adult, I realized that it actually was assault.

  The truth of it is, the shame was not mine, and for all victims in similar situations, it is not ours. The shame is reserved for every creep who has ever touched us inappropriately. The shame is on the abuser, not the victim, not the survivor. It is tragic that so many of us have to survive this kind of crap, and I’m so sorry if it has happened to you.

  The good thing to come out of my foray into movies was meeting a cool kid named Joshua Miller, a child actor from a famous cult film called River’s Edge with Keanu Reeves. Class of 1999 was his first movie without his acting-manager mother on the set; he was thirteen to my fourteen. I corrupted him as best I could. I acted super worldly, and I suppose, in comparison, in some ways I was. At least in the wild and free way I lived. We snuck into a very adult bar called the Pink Door and got tipsy on blue martinis while we watched a cabaret performance. I also got him stoned on weed using an apple as a pipe.

  Joshua would go on to become a very big writer in Hollywood, and he and his writing partner, Mark Fortin, wrote Dawn, my directorial debut. We developed a lifelong friendship, my longest relationship with another human, besides my family.

  It is thanks to Joshua that I ended up in Los Angeles. When his mom came to the set of Class of 1999 one day and met me, she thought I had the goods to be a star and sent me to Hollywood on the Amtrak train.

  This is how I wound up getting my first speaking role, one line in a Pauly Shore film called Encino Man. Oh dear is right. I thought the executives and the director and all the studio people on the set were definitely not as cool as they thought they were. I was introduced to an old agent lady named Beverly and she told me I had to change my name because I sounded like an Irish scrub girl. I told her that her last name didn’t sound so pretty, either, and maybe she should consider changing it. I had no problem talking back, but the comment about the name stuck with me even though I didn’t entirely agree. I toyed with changing my name to Rose Mayfair because I was reading one of Anne Rice’s vampire books at the time and there was a character with that last name. Luckily there was a supermarket chain called Mayfair and that discouraged me from changing it. My last name may not be the prettiest, but I’ve always liked how Rose McGowan looks in print; to me it looks strong.

  I was told by the mean agent lady that I wouldn’t get hired if I wasn’t emancipated. She told me that lots of kids had their money stolen by their parents and while I couldn’t conceive of that happening—I believe I had twenty-five cents to my name—I figured it was best to protect myself.

  So the next logical step in my illogical life was divorcing my parents, aka emancipation of a minor youth. I was fifteen. I needed freedom like I need air.

  I had been in Los Angeles for a few months. The family court building is where you get to see behind the rich L A façade. There were families of all kinds with their bored kids running up and down the halls—terrified-looking mothers, some fathers, and then me, the kid who was representing herself in court. I thought it best to dress like what I thought an adult dressed like, which to me meant tan pantyhose, the kind you get in the drugstore out of those funny-shaped eggs. I was pretty sure I never wanted to look like a grown woman if I had to wear pantyhose, but I could handle it for half
a day if only to impress a judge with my adultness. I remembered Melanie Griffith’s pantyhose in that movie Working Girl and decided that must be what an adult woman wears. I was going to, too.

  My name was called. Showtime. My heart racing and my pantyhose falling, I tried to inconspicuously yank them up but only succeeded in making a huge tear. The judge was stone faced. I launched into my case. He tried to point out that a child’s place was in the home. Not my home, I said. Besides, only in the technical sense could one say I’d ever been a “child.”

  “Let me tell you about my home with my father, Judge. The last solid year we spent together. We lived in a grim, dreary place with zero light in depressing Seattle, Washington. My father was an artist. For him to live where there was no light must’ve been terribly difficult on his already crossed brain wirings. Artists see light in ways others don’t; they literally depend upon it. Maybe that’s what was wrong with him. Maybe that’s why he hated me.” But I didn’t say all that, I just highlighted the abuse.

  It was a matter of survival. I said I could no longer tolerate being a man’s property. The judge cleared his throat and declared my freedom. I was technically now an adult, but still not old enough to drive. I was officially no longer the responsibility of my family, which was ironic, considering that they’d never been responsible when it came to me, anyway. And I was emancipated, which is ironic, given how I would spend most of the next few years, being owned by another man. I escaped the control of the cult and my father, only to run headfirst into another kind of ownership.

  CAPTIVITY

  After the emancipation, I got word that my mom had found work in Los Angeles and was getting a divorce, so she was single—my favorite version of her. By this time she had graduated from the University of Oregon, Phi Beta Kappa with a double major in English and journalism. We were no longer legally bound to each other, and we felt like equals. More friends than mother/daughter. We moved into a great little place, a white wooden house from 1918, right in the heart of super-sketchy Hollywood. It was so much fun.