Brave. Rose McGowan

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