Rose McGowan - Brave

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.

People 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.

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.