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.
It was in the bathroom of the plane taking me to America that I remember first really seeing myself in a mirror. I didn’t really know what I was staring at, because I had no attachment to the face I was staring at. I didn’t know that once I got off that plane, I would land in a world of here’s what you can’t do because you’re a girl and here’s why you’re different and fucked because you’re a girl. It was like a pink school uniform for the mind. The first place I was sent was a small town naval base. I went from Florence, Italy, to Gig Harbor, Washington. Or to be more blunt, I essentially went from the cradle of Western civilization to a place with rednecks and jacked-up trucks with big wheels. America was terrifying. Loud. Jarring. I hated the food instantly. I hated how aggressive people were. My brother and I were sent, ahead of my father, to live with my step-grandmother, Dorothy, yet another adult I didn’t know but was supposed to attach to. She was a tall brunette cigarette smoker with a big throaty laugh. She loved America. She talked about it a lot. My first night in the USA was spent in terror of the bear she told me might eat me in the night. The only thing she knew how to cook was boiled tomatoes, and I cried because I missed the food in Italy.
I was taken to Denny’s, a chain restaurant with frankly terrible food, the worst that American cuisine has to offer. They had a big menu with pictures on it. I was so excited to see spaghetti on the menu, I started speaking excitedly in Italian and waving my hands around. When it arrived, it was a gelatinous blob. I stared at it. Picked it up with a fork, and instead of being normal pasta, it stayed together as one unit. There was also a big lake of lukewarm water underneath the spaghetti blob. I just started crying because I knew my life was never going to be the same again. I had landed in a world of Tater Tots and Cheez Whiz, and there was no going back. Fuck.
Everything was different. Not just the food, but the land, the trees, the sounds. It rained all the time in this new place. The cars were so big and so loud. The people were so big and so loud. I had never even seen wooden houses. In Italy all the houses had been made of stone. I had never been around Americans. I had never heard music piped in through loudspeakers. My brother and I huddled together when announcements blared out in the supermarket. We’d never seen fluorescent lights. We’d never seen orange cheese.
Dear America, why is your cheese orange? Who decided: “Let’s make this an unnatural shade of orange”? It’s completely arbitrary. My brother and I thought it was hilarious. We’d point our fingers and snicker. But the joke was on us. We were stuck there.
My first day in my American school I was made to stand in front of the class and lead them in the Pledge of Allegiance. I didn’t know what the Pledge of Allegiance was. I could understand English—I just refused to speak it. I heard the teacher say, “This’ll get the Communist out of her.” I turned to the teacher and uttered just one word: “Fascistas.” Fascists. That’s what the Italians were during the war, you dummy, not Communists.
Indeed, it seemed the welcome message was unmistakable: You’re different. We must crush the difference out of you.
There’s a tenacious myth that America glorifies individualism, but trust me, if you are a true individual, you will be persecuted. Schools force-feed you the propaganda version of the world and of history. The bullshit version. So that by the time you graduate you’re chanting along with everyone else: “America, hell yes, white men are number one!” Why? Why do you say America is number one? Because if you actually look at the statistics, around the world America is not in fact number one at anything anymore, except maybe obesity, firearm deaths, the death penalty, and incarceration rates. Oh, and of course, military might and our other big export: American film and television.
This is when reactionaries start yelling about how other countries are worse, so why don’t I go live there, et cetera, et cetera. My view is why not just be better? Why should we continue to feel superior just because other places are worse? That sounds like bad logic to me. We can just be better by thinking differently. Thinking whatever is different about you must be stripped from you is the WRONG way to approach things. Thinking you must be homogenized for everybody else’s comfort level, because God forbid discomfort, is the WRONG way, too. Fuck those ways of thinking. Do not bend yourself to make others feel taller.
When I arrived at school, they said to me, “Stop reading what you’re reading. This is what you’re allowed to read because you’re X.” “Stop doing what you’re doing, girls can’t do that.” The adults I met were dedicated in their pursuit of beige, not all, but most. Our neighbors had no interest in being intrigued or expanded by an alternative lifestyle or viewpoint. They didn’t want to know what else might exist out there in the world. They just wanted to kill it because it was different. I longed for my dad and his strangeness. I needed an antidote, fast.
After a few months, my brother and I were flown to a state called Colorado to reunite with my father. Colorado is one of the most beautiful places on earth. We lived in a little wooden house at the base of a majestic mountain in a mostly hippie community, a town called Evergreen. I loved Colorado, even if I still was not a fan of American food. Soon after, my new stepmother arrived, and life in Colorado was mostly good. I adjusted to my new life better in this freer environment than I had living by the naval base. I had come to love Colorado even if I didn’t understand a lot of the social cues of my school peers. At least I was treated well by the teachers, so that was a nice change.
Around this time, I found a book on astral projection. Astral projection is the practice of essentially leaving your body behind and traveling by spirit. I would lie in bed and practice my hardest to get out of my body. I wanted to travel and find my mother.
My mother was still in Italy, and unbeknownst to me was making her way back to America to a state called Oregon. Later I would find out that my dad essentially left her behind to get out of Children of God on her own. Her only living relatives were her sister and her grandmother Vera. Grandma Vera sent her the money to get home and helped my mom restart her life in traditional society.
One day I was told I’d be going to Oregon that night to join my mother. I was excited at first, before I understood that Oregon was not going to be a happy place for me.
Looking back, I have to say, I am incredibly impressed with my mom; she made it back from Italy, raised six kids on no money, occasionally surviving on food stamps, while my dad was living with his new wife. My mom had six kids not because she had really wanted to, but because the cult had encouraged her to. To me it seemed she was embarrassed about her life. Even now, I know she dislikes it when I talk about the cult, but to me it’s