Because of the extensive time he’d spent in the hole, it had been years since Manson had produced any art. One day, unexpectedly, I received a drawing he’d created for me of a coy
fish. Manson had started calling me “Fish,” because of my first name, and so I assumed my new nickname inspired his subject. The piece arrived in a package made of two envelopes crudely taped together. It was an extremely abstract composition made from red and blue colored pencils; initially I had no idea what the piece depicted. I was more struck by the fairly large spider that fell from the envelope and onto my floor before quickly scurrying under my couch, never to be seen again. When I told Manson about the spider, he found it quite amusing. He didn’t attempt to explain the incident. He merely laughed.
My Inmate Friends
Let the dead bury the dead, you know what I mean? I’ve got my partners; I’ve got some dudes in here that are really straight up, man. They’ve been through a lot of hell. You say you’ve had a bad day, and that’s a joke ‘cause your worst day in your miserable life couldn’t be half as miserable as two seconds of these guys’ lives in here. They’re all busted up, they got bones broken, and scars all over them, half their faces are missing. These guys have been through it, man. Even Kenny, he’s been kicked in the head, he’s been stomped on, he’s been through a whole lot of stuff, man. Even though he lies all the time, he’s still a character. I love him, I respect him, I look out for him, you know, but I have to be careful, very careful.
There are a few that don’t exist that exist, and, in other words, they know that they don’t exist. So they exist in that. Kenny don’t exist. You know you can’t just lie every word and exist, man, because lies don’t exist. It’s like an artificial apple, man. It looks good but it’s made of rubber. There’s no life in it. No, see, like the way things are protected, it’s really the older you get you figure out how protection works, you know, like you’re protected by things that happen. Ifyou have enemies and somebody destroys your enemy and, then, your enemy sees you walking with them, then they won’t bother you. You learn from chickens. You learn from dogs and animals, how that alpha wolf, the alpha male, he controls the protection. So it’s, like, they come to me and say do you want this done or this done, you dig? And by what I say will be a mound of protection. I’m the king of the underworld, or the queen of the underworld. Any way you want to put it.
You see it from your perspective, but you don’t see it from the point of view of somebody that everybody hates and, you know, everybody fears you, so they want to destroy their fear. And the more bad they do you, the worse they hate you. When they do you some wrong then it’s all your fault. You’re no good and somebody should do you in. Tomorrow I got the paint shop coming over, and they’ve been taking all the windows out of certain cells and they want you to move everything around, so I can see they’re all setting me up for something. All my friends that are supposed to be my friends, they’ve become aware of it and they get to moving off and acting like they don’t know me. You know, when you’re in jail with a whole bunch of people who think they did bad and think they got wrong coming, they think they got bad coming and they wish bad on everything, because they feel guilty about all the stuff they’ve done. It’s difficult to live in an area like that because you got to be on the defensive with everybody and you can’t trust anybody about anything because they are all lying to you, cheating you, getting you every way they can. And you’ve really got no such thing as a friend and brother, and honor seems to be a joke that died in someforeign war before you were born, and there’s nobody here.
Pincushion
There’s a difference [in] the inmates that don’t kill. I don’t know whether you’ve met any of those. Those are the hard cores. Like this friend of mine who shoveled dirt in the captain’s face. Captain rode the horse over him, broke his leg, and then stomped on his neck. Broke his jaw, knocked out his teeth, kicked one of his eyes out, stomped his ear off. And he looked up at his teeth falling out of his mouth and he said, “You ain’t going to kill me, are you captain?” And the captain said, “No, I ain’t going to kill you.” He said, “I knew you didn’t have no balls, you punk son of a bitch.” That’s the kind of mentality that you’re dealing with when you’re dealing with Manson. I can’t judge anyone, but I can judge everyone. Here is the way it works. Sixty-three years in prison. I’ve been in here with everything you can think of. My cell partner killed his last cell partner, they called him Pincushion, who got stabbed about three hundred times. Every vital organ in his body was stabbed. He’s a hell of a dude, man. He’d get up on a chair and say there’s no knife made that can kill me, and he’d defy everybody.
Everybody but one guy. Killed his cell partner and he used to hold him up for count and tie him with string and hold him up to the bars. He cut parts of his legs off and made sandwiches, cooked him. The judge asked him, “Why did you keep that body, after rigor mortis had set in, in your cell?” He said, “Because that asshole was still good.” He liked sticking his dick up somebody’s asshole and if you wouldn’t let him stick his dick up your ass, he would beat you up, knock you down, then he’d pull your pants down, then he’d get up your ass and fuck you up the butt. He’d come to me with that and I’d knock him out, then I’d throw water on him, and I’d tell him, “You might have done that to other people but you fuck around here and you’re going to lose whatever you got, ‘cause I’m going to take everything you got ifyou do that again!” He knew I wouldn’t stand for that shit. Had the other guy done the same thing he could of still been alive that’s what prison is. Prison is, you don’t judge people, you accept them. If they get out of line you knock them out. When in doubt, you punch them, you punch them as quick as you can, and as fast as you can, and you knock them out.
Time Zones
You notice that retarded people are always truthful, and people that live in wheelchairs, they got a different frequency, they move kinda slow because they can’t go fast like us so they’re more attentive towards things. Slower. I’ve found they’re smarter actually. They’ve got that guy in England in a wheelchair that’s all gimped up, Stephen Hawking. I met a guy like that, in Vacaville, at midnight in a hallway, in an isolated room all by himself and he thought he was running the world. He had a computer there and he was on life support systems and couldn’t get outside because nobody cared. Nobody liked him, nobody cared about him, no one would help him. It was him that was taking care of everybody and I told him, “I’ll come up and get you and take you out to the chapel garden.” So every weekend I’d come from the chapel and get him and take him out, and he had a wheelchair with a life support system on it and he gave me a silver cigarette lighter with a turquoise guitar on it and we were real good friends. But we wasn’t on the same frequency because I was moving real fast and I couldn’t get involved in what he was doing, because I would have to give up a big percentage of what I was doing to slow down with what he was doing.
I noticed a difference, time zones. I called it time zones. I mean, he was actually really running the world and he’d been like this all his life, and all his life he’s lived in that sort of reality. He only had one finger he could use, both of his legs were all gimped up and his arms were all gimped up and he had a thing on his neck… that had hoses hooked into it. He had to hook this hose into his neck so he could breathe and then whenever he took the hose off, the only way he could talk is he had to put his finger over the hole. And when he talked there was no slack in his talk. All his talk was direct, and precise. Everything he did was just perfect because he couldn’t make a mistake, ‘cause if he made a mistake he’d be in bigger trouble than he was already in. I asked him, “What are you in prison for?” He said, “Rape.” Ha, ha, ha. I said, “How the hell did you possibly rape somebody?” He said, “In my mind.” I lost track of him because he was too powerful for me. My ego was too big and somebody else started bringing him down, and as soon as I got him on the ground he got two or three other dudes working for him, dig? He was running it, man. He was up there on his machine and I didn’t have enough sense to keep hold of him, you dig? So he was, just, he was the boss man, he was a leader. He was more powerful than that guy they had on TV from England. That guy’s pretty powerful.
VII
HOLLYWOOD
One evening, Kenny called on an urgent matter. He said it was a good thing I was home, that the “old man” was “freaking out” because an interview he’d been organizing with BBC had fallen through. Once he had my attention, Kenny put the phone down and went to retrieve Manson. When he got on the line, Charles told me that “this shit always happened,” that he hated the mainstream media, that they always promised him everything and delivered nothing. He assured me that when they did provide him the opportunity to give an interview, they purposefully twisted his words around to make him look like “an idiot.” Manson sounded determined to salvage the situation. “You’re in Canada, right? They can’t stop the world press from coming in here and doing an interview.” I told him I had a few friends involved with film and promised him I would try to figure out how to get him his interview. Manson was still venting about his rights and freedoms being taken away when the call ended.
A few hours later, I received a call from a man who identified himself as “Graywolf.” He was not in prison, but he was one of Manson’s closest friends and confidantes.
“Do you know Charlie?”
“Yeah.”
“Do you know Kenny?”
“Yeah.”
“Good, good, okay.”
Graywolf told me he’d called because Charles wanted to get a camera into the prison in order to film what was to be his “final
address.” I learned that, for the previous fifteen years, except for the BBC interview that came to nothing, Manson had refused all offers from mainstream media. He was tired of what he felt was biased editing, a process by which his words were torn apart and pieced back together in ways intended to make him appear insane and unintelligent. Manson now wanted to take the reins into his own hands and find a way to produce an authentic self-presentation. He sought a one-shot deal, a single opportunity to be able to express his thoughts and ideas, uncensored, unedited. And because the State of California has banned all face-to-face interviews with specific high-profile inmates since 1996, desperate and secretive measures were required to fulfill Manson’s plan. Manson insisted that this address be visual; he envisioned it as a global media event that was truly worthy of the world’s attention. It was crucial that his message reach as many people as possible.
Graywolf and I talked about the logistics involved in accomplishing this. Manson wanted the opportunity to address the world, to convince everyone to unite under one common goal, which was “to turn from war on each other to war on pollution.” This war on pollution, out of all the ideas attributed to Manson, even out of all the ideas he has attributed to himself, is today his single, solitary focus. By now, I was well informed about Manson’s fervent dedication to his personal philosophy: ATWA, the acronym for Air, Trees, Water, and Animals. Manson coined the term in the early ‘70s to express his prescription for the planet’s survival. The four components are dependent on each other; and humans, in turn, are dependent on the sum of the four parts. Manson had explained to me that if people would
just make ATWA a priority in their lives, most of the world’s problems could be immediately solved. “That sounds like good common sense,” I’d told him. But he insisted the logic inherent in his ideas made no difference in how people perceived those ideas. “Most people lack common sense,” he growled.
Manson would interrupt completely unrelated discussions to tell me, “Air is the first order.” It usually didn’t matter what we’d been talking about; inevitably, each conversation culminated in one of Manson’s passionate soliloquies centered on saving the air, the environment. Manson’s level of environmental awareness initially surprised me; it seemed so at odds with whom I’d expected him to be. I couldn’t believe that a man who hadn’t touched a tree or walked on grass for more than forty years could have these beliefs. But, as I listened to how determinedly he spoke of the subject, I began to see his desire for a pure planet as a natural extension of himself. This was the truth he valued above all else.
I was also surprised to discover the level of respect Manson has for the military, the uniform. I had always assumed Manson hated authority, and all that goes with it. As we talked about the military, I discovered Manson’s respect was actually admiration; he expressed a very high opinion of all soldiers, from all countries and in all wars. Manson seems like the quintessence of chaos, so his praise for the order that holds everything together almost sounded to me like a contradiction.
I already knew the strength of his beliefs, the gravity with which he spoke, the passion that infused his ideologies. And so I agreed that a uniform would be fitting. Manson informed me that I would have to be in uniform as well, that absolutely
everyone on the production team would have to dress up. He was excited about this project and wanted me to help direct and organize the effort. I was immediately engaged: Charles Manson, the man whose insight and insanity had intrigued me for so long, wanted me to organize his final public appearance and prompt his departing words. I could do that. I began referring to him as “General.” I also started to call him Charlie.
To me, Charlie is simply a man. I don’t believe he has any superpowers; I don’t think he is any more capable than anyone else. I don’t begrudge him his unconventional way of thinking. I suppose this is because in my work I spend so much time with people just teeming with intense and extreme thoughts and beliefs. For more than forty years, Manson has tirelessly insisted that the planet is dying and the future ofhumanity is in bad shape. His stance is radical, partly because it is grandiose to believe one man can single-handedly command the entire planet. But what interests me is that Charles began cultivating these ideas long before the age of Al Gore. And what’s more remarkable is that Manson came to these conclusions in a cage.