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.
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