Читать книгу Brave - Rose McGowan, Rose McGowan - Страница 12

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 very 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.

It was raining hard that night and we all sought shelter under a church’s porch. My bed for my first night as a homeless teen was the cold, wet dirt. It was the oozing mud that woke me up, seeping into my ears. My hearing was distorted, but I could make out some high-pitched screams that didn’t make sense. I could vaguely see in the dim light that Slam was on top of Chloe. I didn’t see Mr. Mayonnaise. To this day I don’t know if it was consensual. I hope it was.

Once again, I think I was left alone because I looked like a boy. I remember feeling saved because I didn’t have breasts yet. I slid out of there inch by inch, losing my socks in the process. My ears were killing me, and my vision was starting to double. Barefoot and covered in wet mud, the only thing I could think to do was deposit myself back at the hospital, so that’s what I did. I collapsed at a nurse’s feet crying about punks and possible rape.

No one believed me. No one would listen. I’ve never lost the wondering and guilt about Chloe. It is something that drives me to correct injustice.

Everyone was very relieved to see me back, but two weeks and many educational drug movies later, I left again. My roommate gave me some shoes, a couple of sizes too big but better than nothing. I got three other patients to open an alarmed door so I could leave in the elevator.

This time I escaped for good. My life as a runaway had begun.

Being a runaway in Oregon is deeply unpleasant. There’s the cold rain, always the rain. Wet jeans clinging to my legs, never fully being dry. And the hunger. I was starving all the time.

There were times when I was a runaway that I woke up after having these weird blackouts. Once I came to while standing on an overpass, woken up because my shoulder bag and backpack had gotten hit off my shoulder and were flying down the road. There were times during difficult moments when I would disappear from my body. While my physical self was left to deal with the repercussions of what was happening, my mind was in another place, gone. That was my method of protection, floating up above, watching everything happen as if through a camera lens. It was not unlike the kind of trances I would go into later while acting, but that wasn’t on my agenda just yet.

I had no contact with my family at this point. I was just out there. No one was looking for me. I wasn’t offended by the not looking, I was just on my own.

It’s funny, on the street you just kind of fall in with other kids like you. The discarded. The uncared for. The lost. One night in front of a Circle K minimart I met a ghostly Nancy Spungen–looking young woman with a mane of fried white-blond hair. She told me her name was Tina and she was a stripper. I had seen a classic film about the burlesque star Gypsy Rose Lee, so I was pretty sure I knew what being a stripper entailed. But when I asked Tina if she could spin her tassels for me, I was rewarded with a blank stare. She took me to her place, a small box of an apartment with mattresses on the floor and cheap stucco popcorn ceilings. I am not a fan of popcorn ceilings, but I had to make an exception in this case. Kindly, Tina said I could stay for a while. Christmas was coming, and even though I probably wouldn’t eat that day, I did want a roof over my head.

After a week, Tina told me I had to put in some money for the heating bill. Aww, damn. What to do? Aha! I decided I was going to rob my mother’s house. I made my way back down south to Santa Clara, hitchhiking through small green town after small green town. I finally made it to the house. I waited until I was sure no one was home and crawled in through the cat flap, as I’d done every other time I was locked out.

The house smelled like Christmas. Fuckers.

I picked through the presents, irrationally offended that none were for me. In the movies, the tearstained mom would be on the national news, pleading for her runaway daughter’s return. In reality, there was no sign I’d existed. Merry Christmas to me.

I loaded up the wrapped presents satchel style and shimmied out the cat flap. I thumbed a ride in a Datsun 280Z with a guy who looked like Weird Al Yankovic. He dropped me at Pawn-N-Such. I charmed the owner into buying some of my brother’s Nintendo games. I got $27, enough for Tina’s heating bill.

I was punk as fuck. I’ve always loved adventures, tiny and large, and this was definitely an adventure.

Tina didn’t like me at her apartment while she was out, so at night I would go prowling. Usually I’d try my luck sneaking into gay underground warehouse parties where I became somewhat of a mascot. I would usually do the one hit of acid that I’d manage to procure, or later one line of speed because that was more readily available in the club, and I’d dance until I got kicked out. I would go up on the boxes and just dance like a little machine. That’s where I could really lose myself. On the dance floor was where I could channel my fear, stress, everything. I could turn into a kind of dance robot and just move. Sometimes the guys gave me poppers and giggled when I fell over on the floor.