Brave. Rose McGowan

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СКАЧАТЬ but there was nothing to be done. Having a voice and being heard is a fundamental human right and this indignity set a kind of pattern in my life.

After a while, my mom did try to break up with him, numerous times. She’d say it was over, that he was gone for good, and I’d get my hopes up, but then he’d be back. One night, he drove around in his pickup truck with a shotgun threatening to kill my mom. I hid in the back of the truck and when I caught sight of her running, I’d shout warnings: “He’s coming from the left, he’s coming from the right, go right!” Finally, after that, she broke up with him for good. Abusive relationships are no joke and extremely hard to escape, but she did it.

      Later, my mother found out he’d done terrible things to all these other women he’d been with before and after her. He’d gotten off every single time in court, playing the system. He even got off the molestation charges. The cops loved him. He got off all the time. No one would listen. Eventually, Lawrence kidnapped his son’s girlfriend and raped her across three states in the cab of his truck, holding a shotgun on her. He was finally arrested and sentenced to jail time. I hope he’s dead. I hope someone drove a stake through his heart.

      I think of how many kids are abused, and how heartbreaking it is that no one helps them. And then it just begets more abuse. I don’t know where Lawrence’s kids are today. Poor Mary. I hope that poor girl is still alive, and I hope she’s doing okay. I hope her and her siblings haven’t had their lives totally ruined.

I remember thinking as a young girl, How is it possible that women can be so gullible? They just ignore the reality of what is happening and believe what they want to believe. I think women in general, and my mom for sure, got sold this bill of goods, the story that a man will save them. I don’t think that’s really changed even for girls today. We’re still getting sold the same story. I had to unpack it because later even I was ensnared in an abusive relationship.

      We need to look at why so many women believe a man is going to save us. It’s not because of evidence of saving. I haven’t seen a lot of dudes on white stallions pulling up to single women’s homes. In fact, I have seen most women get on their own damn stallion. It’s just male-dominated society that snows us into not noticing it’s we women doing the saving. We are the white stallion and we have to wait for no one but ourselves.

      Even though I had these early experiences with men who were horrible beasts, I still somehow got it imprinted in me that a powerful man was going to come along and make my life easier. In reality, they usually just complicated things. Even though rationally I knew it wasn’t true, there’d always been this feeling deep inside me that I was bad, and men were, somehow, the superior ones. I was bad because I was tempting. I was bad because there was want attached to me. Lawrence was truly a psychopath, probably the first true psychopath that I met. I would go on to meet others, but he set the mold. There’s a direct correlation between my relationship with my father and Lawrence, and later on my relationship with men for the rest of my life.

RUNAWAY THINKER

      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, СКАЧАТЬ