I asked David to describe PHU, and he did so completely that I no longer could only envision Charles clanging in an otherwise empty metal cage. The unit consists of two tiers and twenty-four cells. The bottom tier contains cell numbers forty-one through fifty-two and the upper tier houses cell numbers fifty-three through sixty-four. Each cell is designed to hold two inmates, except for one wheelchair-accessible cell designed for an inmate protected under the ADA. The beds are big slabs of concrete equipped with thin mattresses and hollowed in two places each to allow storage of personal possessions. The head of each bed is attached to the back wall, just below a small slit of window about four inches wide and two and a half feet high. Between the two beds and two windows is another concrete block attached perpendicularly to the wall and extending about two and a half feet, parallel to the floor. It’s supposed to be a writing desk, but David asserts it’s more of a coffee stand or a countertop than a writing surface. A few shelves are mounted on the cell walls and there is a “toilet and sink combination.” As a whole, according to David, a Corcoran PHU cell can be described as “basically bedrock.”
Case Worker
So when I got out I went to the case worker in LA, and I said, “You know what, man, I don’t wanna be out here. I don’t have a job, I’m out here, I don’t know anybody, I don’t know what I’m doing out here, whatever ‘out here’ is.” …[O]ut here was another planet. I got out and I was supposed to meet some guy’s wife, and she wasn’t there, you know. I had been lied to all the way down the line, but I didn’t know the difference. When you’re in there and everybody lies to you, you don’t know they’re lying. You get out and you find out they were lying all those years. I met the preacher in the parking lot, and I said could I get a ride to the bus stop. No, he was in a hurry, he had a committee meeting. I thought the preacher was real, I thought he was love and Jesus. I didn’t realize he was just another case worker doing a job, and playing preacher for a pay check. He wasn’t a man of God.
Witness Program
So then I’m in the witness program, and they put in the paper, “Charlie Manson was shot and killed at a party.” That was in the Frisco paper in 1967. You could probably find it if you looked in the paper long enough, where I died over there. The reason is the federal government does it like that because they don’t want people in the prisons to gain strength by watching you make it on the outside, ‘cause if you make it, all the convicts in prison will try to make it. They don’t want that. They try to put that to rest, try to keep that down, so they say I died. That’s when I appeared with the Grateful Dead. At that time I didn’t understand what I understand now. I never realized they had me on the program, played on my program. I thought that only happened inside prison. It happens outside too.
Bottom Lines
I see the bottom lines on everything. I see the bottom of it. Richard Nixon had the top of me. Richard Nixon is my divorce court. He’s my Elvis Presley’s testicles. I go to court and I’m standing in court. Court wouldn’t be there had I not been standing there. So the court rides on what I’m doing. The judge gives somebody a position to represent me. The district attorney takes a position to represent me. That goes off into the sheriff, goes off into the psychiatrist and the doctors and the cops and the sheriffs, and the highway patrol. Probably when I’m standing in that courtroomfor stealing a car there’s probably 150,000 people representing me. The National Guard is representing me. The park rangers are representing me. All the prisons are representing me. The boys’ schools and reform schools are representing me. I’m the king of crime. I’m the criminal. I’m the juvenile delinquent, the rebel, the outcast, the unwanted. I’m everything that everybody looks down on and is standing on, spitting on, cursing and calling names, and hating, buying and selling all the different things.
Pretty soon it just gets to be a part of my mind and my life, get everybody working me and doing whatever they can get away with and whatever they can get from me. So then I call that “my me,” and I get outside and I look at everything you guys are doing in your life out there. See, I got a life in here and everybody that comes in here is feeding on my life. The psychiatrist wants to come in like he’s helping me, and the sociologist and the penologist and the criminologist and all the “ologists,” and make rules. They’re going to make rules and wait for me to do something crazy and then they can come in and playact like they’re sane. Then they want to handcuff me because they need my hands for something so they’re representing my hands with it. They’re representing my heart for that and they’re representing my head for those things. They’re cutting my hair and selling it for something and making pictures and books and changing my name and saying they’re me in another perspective. They’re my divorce court. Pretty soon I see where everything’s going and it’s all in my life, man. Have you ever considered what it would be like for a human being to be kept in cages and prisons for sixty-three years?
Krishna
They did a training class over here and most people don’t realize why they did the training class. They think it was because of something that they were told. But actually what it is…all the microphones are over here. You got the whole world hearing but they wont admit it. You know, that’s why as soon as I got a cell phone, they went right to it, got it quick as they could because they knew that a cell phone is a threat to all these microphones, because they got their own private lines on what’s going on. Because the whole world is right here. But you don’t see that because it’s been coming for years and years and years. It started… when Krishna Venta blew himself up in the fountain of the world in Box Canyon, California. Krishna had a cult and they were based on the water and there was the Feather River project that just started. Land was fifty cents an acre at that particular time.
Now the same land is 50,000 dollars an acre because what they did, they went out and they took the water holes and put them in a tank and put them in a pipe and brought them down in a river and brought the river down and sold the water to the city. And all the animals died. They didn’t care about that, you know. They didn’t care about the wildlife and whatever, the snakes, they just took all the water off the land and put it in these artificial rivers and it dried the land up, man. And Krishna seen it because he had a big fountain in his cult area and when it dried up it stopped, and he said, well, you can’t buy and sell the water. The water’s for everyone. If you start buying and selling the water, man, you’re taking the animals off the earth. There will be no animals left. ‘Cause the animals can’t afford to buy a drink.
People wanted to send Patty Hearst to the graveyard and it came to me, like what should we do. And I said we’ve had enough trouble. No, yeah, she was right on but she was not right on. She was there and she just got involved with some bad people, you know, and in other words they had her. See, what should have happened is Patricia Hearst should have been with me to start with. If she had been with me to start with, she wouldn’t have had to go and prove the things she went through, and we could have had some say with the water at this particular point. See, because what happened is, the thought I’m here in, right now, at the end right now, was started on this level in the State of California by Krishna Venta when he sacrificed his life and the life of nine women. I think it was nine, maybe it was fifteen, but what he did when his fountain turned off, he put dynamite under his house and blew everybody up. But the thing, he didn’t know that what we learned from that was the people that pick up the mess they don’t tell the truth. In other words they lie. Them guys didn’t die the way they said they did.
No way in hell are you going to convince me that those people laid in that fire and they didn’t jump up and say ouch or run or do anything. That’s bullshit. That was all put up. Yeah, that was the FBI, that was the system trying to get around for what we’d already done. I was in reform school when Krishna came on TV, that he had blown himself up with all his women, but you know as a child, I wasn’t impressed. That was just another movie. So when I ended up over there at that area, with all his women thinking what the hell am I doing here? You know it’s like the spirit of everything had brought me there, you know, and there was just, like, the spirit of my life is what brought you here. And the spirit of your life will bring somebody to your book. Yeah, just follow. You know now I’m taking credit for something that’s really not my play, but you know it was in the spirit of what I was doing.
My Fans
Want to hear another perspective? The people that did all this stuff, you know, they were my fans. They weren’t my family, they were fans and they wanted to get me over and that’s why they did it. That’s what the whole thing was created for. Susie came to me with a butcher knife and blood up to her elbows saying, “I love you so much and I love your music so much and I just killed myself for you. I give you my life.” I told her, “All you’ve done, witch, is put me back in the penitentiary for the rest of my life. You haven’t done me no favors.” All that was supposed to be for me. You know, they did all those murders for the love of me. It wasn’t love of me, it was love of their own life that they seen in ATWA. When I seen what I seen and I woke up to what I woke up to, I communicated that to them and they seen that, and when they seen that they said wow. This is our life, where, you know, Charlie can save us.
The Beatles ain’t going to save us. They looked at the Beatles. The Beatles wasn’t our heroes. The Beatles were punks, poobutts, rumpkins. They were doodads. They wasn’t saying anything. The music was good but what they were saying was nothing. It was just Rocky Raccoon and a Bible set against a Bible and all that shit. I mean it was nice but when you’re talking music to God, man we’re not talking… Marilyn Manson, we’re talking Moses, we’re talking angels, we’re talking zodiacs, we’re talking universal love. When I got arrested, and I got busted, all the people there were going to start an E.L.F: earth, love, and family. That’s what I got convicted for, being the earth, love, and the family. Fucking Susie gave her whole life for those people, man. They didn’t show her one minute of mercy. They played on that girl. That was their little playground, Susie. Like it doesn’t bother me. I never lived in that society anyway. I’ve always lived over here in the basement. At the bottom, wherever that is. Does that make sense? Susie gave her own life, man, for ATWA. She may have snuck out the side door, I don’t know. I don’t believe nothing they say, you know that.
VI
FROM THE INSIDE
Prisoners on Corcoran’s PHU are issued two sheets, a pillow, and either a cotton or a woven wool blanket, the former usually preferred over the latter, which itches and sheds and “gets crap all over the cells.” TVs are allowed, and so are three main appliances, an appliance being a radio, musical instrument, lamp, hot pot, or typewriter. What flies in terms of accessory appliances depends solely on how strict the guards are at any given time. Prisoners are technically allowed either ten or twelve books each, but the few who read as avidly as David are usually given leeway to store more. An inmate’s total accumulation of personal property, everything from tennis shoes to clothes to chess sets and decks of cards, should occupy no more than six cubic feet of cell space.
David believes you can tell what sort of man a prisoner is by the way he keeps his cell. An unstable and insecure person is likely to stack and hoard property in his space, as though his belongings anchor him to his sanity. Others, like David, accumulate very little. “Other than a couple of personal photographs and letters, you could set fire to my cell and I wouldn’t care.” Other guys are less attached to stuff. They have almost nothing in there purposely. Those are the guys that live with a lot of deprivation, been through different prisons, they just don’t want to have all their stuff taken away from them, they’re not leaving themselves open to being ripped off. Or suffer any kind of loss that they don’t have any control over. You can do a lot of things to maintain privacy and control over your immediate environment and what’s going on around you. There are inmates who possess almost nothing,
seemingly on purpose as a means of control. Because what you don’t own can’t be taken from you. Although, prisoners on PHU are subject to a lot less theft and are required to hand a lot less contraband over to authorities. There are punitive cell searches, during which “they tear your crap up,” but far fewer than on other units. David told me, “This unit is sort of like a stupid step child, tolerated by an apathetic step parent. They will come in and do a spanking but usually they just prefer you to not be their problem, so they’d just as soon ignore you if they can.”
I asked David what Manson’s cell looked like. “Lived in,” David said. Fortunately, he was willing to clarify further his assessment and described Manson’s space as “cluttered” but organized, in that there is a home for every possession. “He’s not fastidious, but he’s not a slob either.” All in all, David sees Manson’s living space as a reflection of Manson’s (relatively) active lifestyle; on any given day, the things that are out of place are those he’s used for that day’s projects and activities.
The area outside the cells is filled with tables and chairs for the inmates to eat, play cards, and just hang out. There are a TV and a few large fans, a table at which the overseer sits, a bookcase and two showers (one on the bottom tier and one on the top). David cites a main difference between PHU and any other prison unit: “Unlike mainline, where it’s ‘five minutes in the shower and then get the hell out,’ these guys [PHU inmates] seem seriously inconvenienced ifyou ask them to get out within twenty minutes.”
Getting along with the guards in PHU is about knowing the patterns and tendencies associated with an officer’s specific background. Those that start off or have spent a lot of time on PHU generally have good relationships with the prisoners; they
are quite familiar with each man and treat him accordingly. But those guards that have consistently worked in crowded and violent units, those that have had to worry about, as David says, “somebody trying to spear them through the door, throw shit and piss on them, spit on them, or scream at them -’You did this!’ or ‘Where’s my fucking mail?’ or ‘I know you stole my stuff!’ -” generally approach work on PHU with a lot of hostility. It is a gradual process, getting to know the inmates and the system, to realize that PHU isn’t an ordinary unit filled with ordinary prisoners. At any given time though, David says, he deals with three types of authority: the cops that “start out as assholes and stay true to those colors,” those “who are fair and even handed” from the first minute they step onto the unit, and those who “will smile at a man on Tuesday and then look at him on Wednesday like ‘who the hell are you?’“ The latter, according to David, is the most difficult type to get used to.