Читать книгу Brave - Rose McGowan, Rose McGowan - Страница 10

Here’s the thing about cults: I see them everywhere.

If you’re deep into the Kardashians, you’re in a cult. If you watch your favorite TV show and go online and you’re in chat rooms with everybody else who’s obsessed with that show and you’re breaking it down episode by episode, you’re in a cult. If you’re bingeing, scrolling, absorbing from one news source more than any other, especially if it happens to be fair and balanced, you are in a cult. You’re living your life through other people. If you blindly vote for so-and-so, you’re in a cult. If you’re deep into your country’s propaganda machine, you’re in a cult. Look around you and see where the cults are, because they are everywhere. Anywhere there is group thought and group mentality: you’re in a cult, you’re in a cult, you’re in a cult.

The first step to deprogramming yourself from a cult is realizing you are in a cult. I would know, I escaped from two of the most iconic cults of all time.

For those who knew me as an actress, I must inform you that I was never that person. I was playing the part of someone who played parts. I was trapped by rigid societal ideals and gender expectations placed on me by people who shouldn’t have been allowed near me (or you). I got such a deeeeeeeeep mind fucking. I rejected brainwashing early on in life, but later, Hollywood’s Cult of Thought actually got me.

My life altered irrevocably the day I turned into a pixel, beamed up to an orbiting satellite and beamed back down, blasted across living rooms, bedrooms, lives. My job was to take you away from your struggles for a while, to make you feel empathy, to make you feel at all. I took my job seriously. But like in most cults, because I was a woman, I was considered to be an owned object. I was sold for the pleasure of the public. Deeply programmed men (and women) made money selling my breasts, my skin, my hair, my emotions, my health, my being. I was not taken seriously, nor was I respected. Not by most of society, and certainly not by the Hollywood cult with its massively industrialized Madonna/Whore complex.

Imagine if your value to the company you work for was measured by how much semen you could extract from anonymous masses of men. ’Cause you know, if strange men masturbate to your movies, you must be of some value. Sounds like a sex worker, right? You’re not too far off.

Imagine that every word to come out of your mouth for nearly seventeen years, day after day, month after month, angle after angle, take after take, was something an all too narrow-minded male wrote for you to say. It’s meta and it’s deeply abnormal.

It took me a long time to figure out that I was in another cult, because I was too busy being other people, not myself. By telling the story of my life, I am reclaiming it.

But let’s start at the beginning, shall we?

In a stone barn, in the tiny Italian countryside town of Certaldo, delivered by a blind midwife, as the story goes, I came into the world. There’s an American saying: “Shut that door! Were you born in a barn?!” I guess I never have to shut doors if I don’t want to. I have that prerogative. I suppose sometimes you’re just earmarked for weirdness from birth, and I think I’m one of those.

The barn was on the property of the duke of Zoagli, known as Duke Emanuele, who, upon joining the Children of God, donated his estate and land to Children of God. His sister Rosa Arianna lived on the property, but loathed all the Children of God members living there. My parents named me after her, Rosa Arianna, I think to make her like them. Didn’t work.

It was incredibly beautiful there in the rolling hills outside Florence, the dark green cypresses and silvery-green olive trees, vineyards, and orchards, those enormous old terra-cotta jars holding red geranium flowers. I suppose if you have to be in a cult, it was as good a place as any.

Nah, it was better, and even at a young age, I saw the beauty and knew it was wildly extraordinary. I connected to its nature as an escape from what I was born into. As a result, I’ve always been drawn to shapes, colors, and light patterns, and the Italian countryside has haunted me my whole life, in a good way.

From my earliest memories I recall hearing a lot about a terrifying old man named “Moses” David Berg, our fearless leader in the Children of God. He would send his directives out in cartoon pamphlets called “Mo Letters.” Whatever Moses David wrote, that’s what was done. Each time there was a new letter it would be as if the ruler of the universe had spoken. (Kind of like the head of a studio in Hollywood.) And I guess as the self-appointed prophet he was, Moses David turned out to be the King of Creeps. But the others didn’t know that yet. Some would never know.

I remember a lot of hairy legs, men’s and women’s, like in the cartoons where you only see the adults’ legs because that’s your perspective as a child. I remember a lot of singing, praying, clapping, and snapping. Yes, snapping. I was told I had to sit on the floor all day and learn how to snap my fingers, otherwise God wouldn’t teach me to drive when I was sixteen. I didn’t understand anything about sixteen and driving, but even then I could tell finger snapping as the key to doing anything was patently absurd.

One night, a ghostly looking woman in a white robe came into the room I was in. She was like a shadow holding a candle—there was no electricity. It was storming outside and I remember the wooden shutter slapping against the old glass window. I had been worried the window was going to break, but I was now distracted by the woman in white who sat by my feet. The wind was whistling through cracks in the stone and I was having trouble hearing her. The wind stopped and she looked straight into me and said, “Have you let God into your heart?”

I sat up, looked at her, considered carefully, and shook my head no.

The woman pinches my foot and twists my skin. I am not going to cry out because I know that’s what she wants. For this refusal there was punishment. Corporal punishment, slaps and spankings, because “spare the rod, spoil the child.” She twists harder. I bite the inside of my lip so I don’t cry. I stare back, silently defiant.

The woman says it again, this time in German, “Hast du Gott in dein Herz gelassen?”

I think about it and say, “No. Not today. Try tomorrow.”

She slaps me across the face. Hard.

Even at that tender age, I reasoned that if I invited him into my heart, it would be their God I was letting inside. It would no longer be my God, whom I was very protective of. And their God was cruel. What they were preaching made no sense to me, their actions not squaring with their words. That was not a reality I wanted to exist in.

Later my younger sister Daisy urged me to just say yes, that it would go easier for me, but I kept taking the punishment instead. I was, as my name foretold, quite thorny, whereas my sister was a little golden-haired, sweet child. I would stare at her and wonder how she got that way and how she couldn’t see what was going on. It was a strange sensation growing up behind these walls and being told I did not belong to the outside world, but I also knew I didn’t belong to the world within.

When that woman or another woman or another man, all strangers, returned the next night and the night after, I always had the same response: “No, no, I have not let God into my heart.”

Slap.

One night I could hear the woman’s German whispers and her feet doing a quiet kind of stomp on the floor. I knew I was going to get hurt again.

“No.”

Slap.

When she was gone, I saw that she left her Bible on my sleep mat—all the kids slept on flimsy orange or blue plastic mats. I hid her Bible behind a cabinet. Each day I’d tear out a new page, put a small piece in my mouth, work it around, add more, and spit it out, turning it into little mush blobs. Then I would take the Bible blobs and form them into tiny animals. I hid them behind the cabinet and would visit them now and then when I could steal a moment. They were my toys, one part saliva, one part Jesus.

I figured if I literally ingested their God, maybe I could answer, Yes, I have let him in. Maybe they’d stop punishing me.

The smacks, the pushes, enforced the message that you were not allowed to be imperfect. When I was about four, I had a wart on my thumb. I was toddling down this long hallway when one of the doors opened. I remember the shaft of light and all the dust motes dancing. A man with shaggy blond hair picked me up, looked at my hand, and said, “Perfection in all things.” He held up a razor blade and sliced my hand with one swipe, winking at me as he sat me back down. “Perfection in all things,” he said again before shutting the door and leaving me in the hallway. I didn’t cry, I was too stunned. Blood ran over my hand and I made a dripping mess of the hallway. The blood coursed over my fingers, the red strangely pretty. Like my hand, I was numb. I knew not to react because, one, that was something they wanted from me, and, two, I thought maybe there was something to this perfection thing. I walked on.

The hallway assault is what started a narrative that fucked with my head for years, that of perfection as self-protection. I told myself if I were just perfect enough, I’d be okay. If I were just perfect enough, I’d be left alone and no one would want to hurt me.

From then on, I willed myself to be as perfect as possible because I didn’t know what would happen to me if I wasn’t. I was terrified of having an aberration in any way. I was sure that having any kind of flaw would spell doom. But first I had to figure out what all my flaws were. And so began a habit of being extremely hard on myself, seeing myself from the outside in. I started to look at my hands and feet daily to make sure I didn’t have any bumps growing. There were no mirrors that I can remember in the cult. When I would later arrive in a culture that was so externally focused—America, and then Hollywood—this caused a tear in the fabric of my being.

The funny thing was that in almost direct opposition to the message the cult sent us about perfection, my father was preaching to me and my siblings that we were not, under any circumstances, to develop an ego. Our focus was to be on our internal development, the development of our souls and our intellects. I suppose we were supposed to be perfect physically, but remain humble in the face of our perfection? I was never really sure. All I knew was that I was not supposed to think good thoughts about myself. That God would punish me for thinking that I was awesome.

Never once growing up was I told that I was intelligent, smart, or beautiful. I don’t know what that feels like. I was never told I could do anything I wanted if I set my mind to it. I was told I was worth nothing in the eyes of God. I was told I was going to be a whore. I was told I was dirty. And the thing is, I knew they were wrong, but the words still stung.

From an early age, I remember being furious that nobody would listen to me just because I was a child. It was so unfair. I hated being little and powerless. I would look at the people in Children of God and think, But all these things you’re all talking about, I could solve them in two easy steps if you adults would just listen to what I am saying, but nobody would listen to me. Because I was a girl. That set a real pattern for my life. I was a born dissenter—not for the sake of being contrary, but because if you could see things for what they were, identify the source of a problem and the solution, why wouldn’t you want to fix it? But nobody would listen to me. They just sat me at the little kids’ table. Not unlike later in Hollywood. Just a girl, after all.

My only friends during my time in Children of God were my older brother, Nat; my pet lamb, Agnello; and an old gray-haired farmer named Stinky Fernando. Stinky Fernando was deeply suspicious of bathing. You could almost chew his smell, it was so thick. I had to breathe through my mouth whenever he was around. One day I heard Stinky Fernando screaming. My father and some of the other members took him by his arms and ankles and threw him in a river. Much to Stinky Fernando’s surprise, his skin did not melt off.

Stinky Fernando took Nat and me into an old barn and showed us faded Playboy magazines while feeding us stale Kit Kats. A real treat. I wondered about the women in the magazines. They didn’t have hairy legs. It was confusing. I loved the rancid Kit Kats, though. I loved candy way more than I loved their God.

I bottle-fed my friend, the little lamb Agnello, and helped take care of her. My first pet. One night at the long dinner table I took a bite of food, and a thin woman with a mean face and center-parted hair started to laugh. Others joined in, and soon everyone was laughing. I didn’t understand what was funny until they told me it was Agnello being served. And so I realized my pet was being fed to me for dinner. I sat stunned while everyone at the long table laughed. I pushed my tears down and felt a coldness wall off my heart toward these people, something crystallizing into a stone of pure hatred as I looked at their monster faces. They had a particularly cruel streak, and they liked to destabilize the younger members. These were lovers of Christ, right? To this day, I’ve never eaten lamb again.

I started to become angry. Angry at the injustices that were adding up. Angry at the rules that seemed, and were, so arbitrary. I decided the best course of action was to light it up. And so, one day my older brother decided to light a stable on fire. He was mad, too. I for sure wanted to be there for that, so I ran after him to help. We were in the barn when my brother pulled out a book of matches. He started lighting them and flicking them at the hay on the stone floor. Whoosh. The fire leaped up the side of the walls and onto the ceiling. The roof was thatched hay and started popping above us. I tried stamping out the flaming pieces with my feet, but I was too little and it was too late. I stamped and stamped, but I couldn’t put them out. If I had known how to say fuck, I am sure I would have. The roof crackled more and it was getting very hot. I knew we were in big, big trouble if we went outside and were caught by the adults. But everything was on fire.

We chose to run.

This is the part where I’m supposed to tell you some hideous story of punishment for lighting it up, but I really can’t remember. I do remember the terror of being found out. It made me feel like my skin was about to fall off with fear. The movie scene of this would be:

A sturdy blond boy and an elfin girl are hiding from their father. Suddenly four hands grab them by the shirt collars, dragging them off. Turning down a path in a maze, the children are paraded past a gauntlet of leering cult members. The members drag the children to the Judge of All. The Judge of All is on a throne made of soft wood. There are young nude women, heavy breasted and round bottomed, on their knees, gazing up adoringly and reverentially at the dynamically dangerous leader. The leader tilts his head back, eyes shut. He’s being worshipped. He’s in heaven on earth. The women work oils and lotions into the leader’s skin, their hands using a feathering touch as they go, chanting with intention. The leader, the Judge of All, opens his eyes and points at the boy and girl. The shaming begins.

Sounds like a Hollywood film, right? Maybe it’s not too far off. In fact, my life as a performer began there in the cult. We were made to go out in groups to sing at local orphanages and hospitals, or on the streets, to perform. Singing Jesus songs on the streets of Rome with a hat in front of me, street busking. After the coins would stack up in the hat, a hand would come over my shoulder to take all the coins I’d earned. They let me carry the empty hat. Gee, thanks. It was my work that was bringing the money in and I was pissed at the injustice of having to give it up. I’d see regular families with the kids walking around with gelatos and candy and I’d wonder about their lives at home. Did they have a bed? We had plastic mats and I got cold at night. The girls wore pretty dresses; I had faded brown overalls and Jesus sandals. My hands and feet would get dirty and I’d try to hide them when other, cleaner children looked at me. For hours we would stand and sing those damned songs, under hot sun, in the rain, it didn’t matter. I was five or so. My little legs would get so sore from standing, but I knew I couldn’t sit or there’d be trouble.

We had to return with money or else there would be sanctions and punishments against our family. I could feel the stress of the adult members as the “Systemites” (that’s what they called people outside the cult) turned away and ignored us and the pamphlets we were selling. Little incoming money equals not much food. Not surprisingly, there was often hunger. Our food was rationed. If we returned with not enough money, the rationed food was given to another family as punishment. If potential new members or press were coming to visit, they’d put us kids on a white rice, milk, and sugar diet to fatten us up. We’d stuff ourselves with it until we gagged, but I loved it because at least there was something to keep me full. Plus, sugar, which I loved.

Sometimes the local press would be invited to come and cover our good deeds: “To see what great work we’re doing in the Children of God community, join us.” See, we’re not a bunch of freaky hippies, what kind of freak could sing a Jesus song this well?

I was sent to entertain sick children in hospitals. I remember thinking: Kid, if this is your last day on earth, I’m really sorry that we’re forcing you to listen to little me singing about Jesus. I don’t want to be here, either. I apologize.

But even though it was awkward performing in hospitals—and this may sound weird—I always knew I was going to be famous, even before I understood what fame was. It was kind of a foregone conclusion. I don’t know how to explain it.

At some point in my childhood I remember being taken to see a film. It had a great impact on me. I don’t know what it was called. It was Italian. The lead actress had short raven hair and was a nurse. She wore a crisp white uniform and a little white hat. She was in a phone booth, crying and screaming at her married doctor lover, who was throwing her aside. She took the back of her hand and smeared her lipstick across her face. She ripped her shirt open, popping its buttons. Her chest exposed, she took lipstick out of her purse and drew all over her breasts like a wild woman. I was captivated. It was fabulous. I wanted her lipstick and her hair. I finally got to see some glamour in my young life and I knew it was for me. My feelings of being in the wrong life intensified.

At some point my father found a Brownie, a vintage camera, so the few photos that exist from my childhood look like they’re super old and are largely black and white. I watched my father as he captured objects and people with the camera. Then I got to play with it myself. I learned to see things through a frame. Looking through that crappy lens, I felt as if I could see more and that everything I looked at told a story. Soon I was nearly always outside of myself, watching and filming and documenting everything that was going on, taking note of everything: smells, sounds, tastes, situations, people. Only now can I see that this was early disassociation to deal with trauma. Looking through a lens has been a coping mechanism I have employed throughout my life. It had a silver lining: my falling in love with photography and cameras. But more than that, it gave me a way of putting something between me and the world, and a different way of looking at it. Every detail as seen through a lens. Because it’s not really happening if I’m once removed, right?

I also used books as an escape. Words were my solace and my saviors when I was small and have remained so to this day. Words, different lives, different centuries, that was how I survived.

Books also furthered my training for being an actor because I took on the persona of whichever character I was reading. It could be a serf, it could be a queen. I would mimic the posture, everything about that character, while I was reading his or her story. When I finished a book, I went into mourning for that character because it was a death. I took books very seriously. But not the Children of God books. I could not understand how anyone could believe them. Those Mo Letters were just so . . . well, stupid. It’s so hard to understand how so many have fallen for it.

Meanwhile, the beliefs and practices of Children of God started getting more and more dangerous. Moses David, our leader, made the young women members do this thing called “flirty fishing.” He sent them out—and these were little more than girls, really—to seduce men at bars or cafés. The men would wake up in the cult. Moses David christened the girls “Hookers for Jesus.” Hookers for Jesus? Fuck you, Moses David, you piece of shit. Fuck you for all the pain you caused. At the end of the day, it was all about male dominance, and using sex as a weapon for mind control. Beautiful women were major targets, not unlike what I would later see in Hollywood. And, like in Hollywood, there were women who helped Moses David do bad things to others.

The cult was a highly sexualized environment, run by men, to benefit men. My father loved it, I could tell. I remember standing in a corner, watching my father preach, as he sat on a thronelike rattan chair. Women—girls—were on their knees staring up at him with dreamy expressions. Women literally worshipped at his feet. I remember looking at the women on their knees. Then my father on his throne. I’ll never be like those women, I thought. Never. It grossed me out. Looking back, it was the time of my father’s life when he was at his most radiant. Abuse of power was inevitable, and he certainly abused his position.

One day my father said to my very young mother: “Saffron [my mother’s name in the cult], I want to be married to this other woman as well.” Well, hell. That must have sucked. There have been lots of times I have wanted to go back in time and kick my father’s ass, this being one of them. My poor mother’s own mom, Sharon, had just died tragically. My mother’s dad was gone, too. She was alone in a cult in another country with a bunch of kids she was told to have and now this? It must have been crushing. She had no choice, and he took another wife. That’s how my four youngest siblings—two full and two half—are so close in age.

Children of God next started advocating child-adult sex as a way to “live the law of love,” which is just beyond disgusting and criminal. I saw an eleven-year-old girl being forced to sit next to a naked man, with his floppy dick on his leg. They made her sit between his legs so he could “massage” her back. I saw her tears. Even then I knew none of it was “normal,” whatever normal was. I don’t think there really is such a thing as “normal,” but I knew that this was something deeply wrong, something to be avoided at all costs.

I feel bad for that small child I was, who from age three or four already knew so much about surviving. I didn’t know what it was like to feel safe. In its place, there was stress and, underneath it all, a deep undercurrent of fear running through the commune. From a very early age, I realized kids were very far down the list on things to care about, which is lame when you’re the child on the bottom of that long list.

An unfortunate necessity in this environment was being able to immediately pick up on danger. I excelled at it. One of my survival skills was, upon entering a room, to locate a weapon. I would do an immediate scan of the area to see what I could use to cause someone else the most damage and defend myself against attack. My quick mind and rapid thought processes have been my lifelong savior as much as my fight. I’ve always gone by the seat of my pants, and my intuition is damned good. It’s too bad I didn’t apply the same skills to Hollywood. It would have saved me a lot of heartache. It could have saved me from unspeakable trauma.

In any case, my outwit-and-outlast mentality served me well as a child. Thankfully, I was just young enough to escape getting molested, or maybe my penchant for always having very short hair and wearing my brother’s hand-me-downs helped save me. They thought I was a boy most of the time. Although the boys certainly got nailed, too. Fuck, maybe I was just too much of a troublemaker.

It would only have been a matter of time, but luckily for us, my father drew the line at pedophilia, and he made secret plans to leave. We couldn’t just announce we were leaving and walk away, though. When the cult got wind of certain members wanting to leave, one of their children might disappear, or some family would get severe punishment meted out to them, as a way of teaching the others.

And so one night, my father told us there was a man named Bepo and he was after us with a hammer. There was a car waiting for us, we got shoved in, and go go go.

First we fled to a place called Munano, a small town in the Tuscany region of Italy. We lived in a centuries-old stone house where we boiled water and bathed in a round rusted metal tub. We were scraggly kids wearing hippie hand-me-downs. I was used to having many kids around me, so it was strange to share a room with only four other children, to be suddenly with so few people, even if they were my actual family instead of “The Family.”

My father had left the Children of God physically, if not mentally, taking his other wife, Esther. As for my mother, all I know is that she was left behind. There were so many women in the cult that I didn’t have a firm grasp on my mother as an individual. It was just one more level of destabilization in what would be a pattern for me in my life.

Now that we were in this small medieval town, I was sent to my first public school. It was very confusing. In the cult, we had worn whatever fit from the pile of donated and hand-me-down clothes, and I mostly wore my brother’s clothes. Now I was assigned to wear a pink button-down smock. I preferred the blue smock and asked why I couldn’t wear it instead. I asked the teacher about this logic, and she told me because I was a girl I had to wear pink. Only the boys wore blue. I thought that was some of the dumbest shit I had ever heard. I was furious that I was now different from my brother for an arbitrary reason. I didn’t understand why I now had to wear pink. I still don’t.

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.

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.