So, then they kick me out of prison. They say, “Your time is up, we gotta let you go.” They can’t deal with me so that’s what [they] do. I’m not in prison, that’s my home, man. “Get the hell out of here! We don’t want you in here no more ‘cause you’re fuckin things up, ‘cause the kids are not looking up to us like we’re father now and they’re giving us trouble, and you’re causing trouble!” You get to the point where people are destroying themselves, they would cut their own wrist, and you see them committing suicide, before they could accept the truth about themselves. Go to the nut wards and they got them filled with the criminally insane. You know what crazy is, you see it every day, man. Do you realize that everybody in the hospital in Vacaville that forced medication on me, and had me strapped down, and played all that stuff on me are all dead? In other words they did it to themselves. What you are trying to put on me is what you’re thinking; it ain’t got a fuckin’ thing to do with me. They put me on the “no mind list.”
They said “You’re on the “pay no mind’ list.” They tell everyone “Leave him alone, and don’t pay attention to him, don’t listen to him, don’t even mention his name, don’t say nothing about him, just get rid of him, get him away from us, because we can’t stand him.” So, I go outside, and I go over to the music and the Grateful Dead is playing, and they put me on the witness program. Not because I snitched on somebody or betrayed a trust. I didn’t snitch on nobody, and I didn’t betray a trust, but they’ve got me on the Federal Witness program. They say, “Leave this man alone, do not put him in jail in any direction whatsoever, he’s the devil, and we can’t control him, and we can’t whip him, we can’t beat him. He anticipates everything we’re going to do. So stand off of him, ‘cause he’ll destroy everything you fuck with him with. If you do something against him it’s going to turn back on you a thousand fold.” And so, I’m out there walking around, here comes the State of California and the Italian Mafia, district attorney. They said I killed people. “I ain’t killed those people! I didn’t have a fuckin’ thing to do with killing those people!” That’s your kids. Mr. Richard Milhous Nixon. That’s your government, that’s not my government. My government is George Washington, your government is Abraham Lincoln. That has nothing to do with me, I’m from the South. I’ve got enough fuckin’ brains to realize that I’m stupid, and I’ve got enough intelligence to understand that I don’t know anything, that God is great, and God is bigger than me. I’m not as big as God, but all the fuckin’ assholes that got me locked up, they think they are God.
Charles Manson
Corcoran State Prison, California, 2010
A MEETING WITH MANSON
“Get down!” Charlie commanded, a sneer on his face.
He had the guards’ full attention, two of them, in the center of the room, standing in the circular area that acted as a security desk. Charlie crouched down, ready to leap at any second. I was taken by how agile he was. He met the gaze of the guards full on, trying to determine if he should continue. “I’ll kill you,” he shouted. “Can’t you see this gun? I’m serious!”
We were in the visiting room at Corcoran California State Prison, a place Charles Manson has called home for more than twenty years. Over the past few years, I’d developed a relationship with Charlie; this was our first visit. He had not been to the visiting room for almost a year and now, it seemed, he was making up for lost time. Charlie had begun acting out a bank robbery for this intimate audience: the guards and me.
This was live theater at its best. Charlie squatted down and moved around with an urgency, an intensity that caught us completely by surprise. The scene took about ninety seconds to complete. When he finished, he sat down and took a few moments to catch his breath. “Ah, I feel pretty good. I just can’t breathe,” Charlie laughed to himself. I was speechless.
Charlie likes to philosophize and talk about the deeper meaning ofthings, about ultimate reality. Often, he uses extreme examples to exemplify a point. During this visit, he tried to show me how he experiences reality. The bank robbery scene
was intended to exemplify a concept Charlie called “level seven” which, he later explained, meant conquering fear. Level seven is a degree of heightened awareness, the level at which Charlie says he lives. I interpreted Charlie’s one-scene play as an illustration of being in the moment-mindfulness, and presence, that sort of thing.
Charlie and I share a lot of the same insights, but we’ve come to them from completely different worlds. I’m normally pretty good at putting myself in other people’s shoes. But I can’t imagine enduring sixty-three years in prison. I’ve often wondered how I’d handle seclusion, isolation. I don’t think I’d fare too well. Charlie’s spent most of his incarceration in solitary confinement, where he is forced to be with himself, with his thoughts, forced to confront his demons, forced to develop insight from a depth unknown to most men. Charles Manson is, without a doubt, the most complex person I’ve ever known.
We developed a relationship over the telephone, gradually, in intervals lasting fifteen minutes, the length of a collect call from Corcoran. Almost immediately, I realized I didn’t really know this guy at all. I had assumptions, sure, but most of them were unfounded. Sometimes Charlie is kind, empathetic, and funny. Other times he’s vile and mean; he can be a real condescending asshole. It’s almost impossible to discover the real Charlie. Yet this is exactly what I have tried to do.
Charlie often has a unique way of getting a point across, as the following actual transcripts from our phone conversations shows:
MANSON: I got a gun, right?
ME: Okay.
ME: No?
MANSON: You do, you can’t imagine that I’m standing there looking at you right now. I mean my voice is there, don’t you realize that my body could be there just as easy?
ME: All right, I get it.
MANSON: If I got a gun and I’m standing there with a gun and I tell you, you know, “Get off of that chair, stand up,” would you stand up? ME: Yeah, of course.
MANSON: Then I tell you, “Then if you don’t do what I said I’m going to blow your brains out, you understand me?”
ME: Yes.
MANSON: Do you think that I would lie to you about anything?
ME: No.
MANSON: Then you can understand what I’m saying. I say, “ Well then, here, take this gun.” And I’m handing you the gun, could you reach out and take this gun in your hand? Would you feel safer that way?
ME: Absolutely.
MANSON: In other words, can you face your fear in what I’m saying. Okay, so you got the same options. If I don’t do what you say you can shoot me, right?
ME: Okay.
MANSON: I’ve been in that all my life. There’s two guns up here on the tower that tell me what to do. And when they tell me what to do, I do what they say to do, because if I don’t do what they say to do they will shoot me. Does that communicate?
I
THE WONDER YEARS
I was an odd kid. Unlike most boys my age, I wasn’t interested in sports. My heroes were Houdini, Robert Ripley, and The Elephant Man. I had a tremendous interest in things like sideshows and magic, and, while the other boys in town tossed footballs and climbed fences, I collected bugs. More important, I tried to save them. After a heavy rain, I’d run outside to rescue worms from the gutter, gently scoop them up and return them to the grass with a prayer that they’d tunnel themselves back to their homes in the dirt below. I adorned my childhood bedroom with prized natural artifacts unearthed through countless explorations of the outside world; deer antlers, feathers, even wasp nests decorated my space. I loved to catch, study, and spend time with the tiny, complex life forms I could gather up in the palms of my hands, things like minnows, frogs, and snails. But I was ultimately most fascinated by the enormous, the fantastic, or the extinct: terrifying things that aren’t supposed to exist. I could contemplate dinosaurs and sea monsters for hours on end.
I grew up in Saskatchewan, in the middle of the Canadian prairies. As a kid I developed a love for seashells and a fascination with the ocean, even though the closest ocean was fifteen hundred miles away. When I learned that marble is actually comprised of millions of compressed shells, I fantasized about visiting the Parthenon in Greece and the Coliseum in Rome, not because they are two of the largest, most impressive structures ever made by humans, but because they are comprised from some of the smallest gems in nature. I haven’t outgrown my
childhood affection for simple treasures like seashells, and small clusters of my collection are displayed in almost every room of my home. Once, I toured Graceland, where I was delighted to discover Elvis had decorated so much of his castle in vases filled with seashells. The man could have owned anything in the world, yet he showed off his shells as though they were some of his most valuable possessions. Propped up against one of the vases in the display was a small, stuffed teddy bear.
I love a great underdog story and I began to tell my own when I was just three or four years old. Babysitters would later relate that they’d been “freaked out” by the tales I’d spin as a toddler. Most stemmed from an epic creation story I’d constructed about my own family, a carefully detailed account of its origins as an underground tribe, which was hated by rival tribes, and hunted if any member dared venture above ground for food.
I spent summers visiting my grandmother in the small town of Bateman, Saskatchewan. She was most supportive of my storytelling and loved to share some of the narrative she’d collected from her own experiences. I was fascinated by a story she told of her emigration from Holland to North America, a trip during which a passenger caught a strange fish. The creature was the ugliest thing anyone on board had ever seen: it possessed the torso of a monkey and the tail of a fish. Listening to this story as a child, I could have sworn the animal in question was a mermaid. On board, the fish writhed and hissed at everyone in sight. The passengers tried to keep the fish alive, but it died, and they had no choice but to throw it back into the ocean. I couldn’t believe that they hadn’t released it sooner. I always thought that story was incredibly sad. I still do. Years later I saw P.T. Barnum’s Fiji
mermaid in a museum, and it looked exactly as I’d imagined the creature from my grandmother’s story.
I loved to be in Bateman, walking along quiet dirt roads on which you could hear a car moving three miles away. Everything about that time and place was beautiful. My cousin Kent, who was nearly the same age, accompanied me on all my adventures. Kent knew all the kids in town, and together we always found a gang with which to make slingshots, climb roofs, or hunt for buried treasure. We loved the band Kiss, listening to rock ‘n’ roll, pretending to drive anywhere and everywhere from the ripped up seats of some broken down car.
One lazy summer afternoon, my Uncle Roy unexpectedly sped up the road in his rusted out green Ford truck to take me home. He told me my mother had been in an accident and was badly hurt, that it was important we get back home immediately. I didn’t want to go with him. I didn’t trust him. My grandmother urged me to leave, however; she told me my mother needed me and I could come back later. I still remember the crazed look in Roy’s eyes as he drove, way faster than he should have. He was preoccupied, and I knew whatever was going on in his head would disturb me.
From an extremely young age, I’d seen my relatively sane family members drink themselves into delirium, and it scared me. I hated being around drunk people, and I did whatever I could to avoid them. I usually retreated to my room, listened to records, or read books. I thought that getting inebriated was what older people did. Yet, each time I watched an adult slip into drunkenness, I’d worry the fix would never wear off, that he or she would never return to normal, whatever that was. And,
while almost every adult I knew got wasted and stupid, there was something different about Uncle Roy when he drank. He never did anything to me, and, at that age, I couldn’t really pinpoint why he seemed to be the worst, most pathetic drunk. But I began to associate everything about Uncle Roy - his creepy, perverse sense of humor, the glazed, psychotic look that could take over his face - with everything awful about alcohol.
We drove the hundred and fifty miles back to my parents’ house in record time. Everything moved as if it had been set to fast forward. During the ride, I kept my face fixed on the passenger side window. I was staring into the ditches on the side of the highway, watching colors blur, browns into greens, nothing really in focus. In truth, I don’t remember seeing or processing a single thing. I got out of the truck and walked up to the house, and saw the back door gaping open as if someone had carelessly forgotten to close it. Inside, I was shocked to see, for the first time in my life, my dad shaking and sobbing. In the basement, past the green tile steps, my Uncle Steve washed blood off the wall. There was so much blood, all of it thickened in a dark, red stain that, no matter how forcefully he rubbed, didn’t seem to get any smaller. I watched as Uncle Steve kept his eyes riveted to his work, wiping furiously until the center grew larger, spread outward, and finally began to dissolve. I realized that I hadn’t known what complete shock felt like until this moment,
My father wept as he told me my mother had been in a car accident and was taken to the hospital. I could tell he was lying, probably because he had never lied to me before. I asked him why Uncle Steve was washing blood off the wall, but he just stuttered and cried more. I went to my room. I didn’t feel safe. I
was doomed. I assumed things would only get worse. My brother and I shared bunk beds, and as I fell onto the bottom one that was mine, I tried to rationalize everything in my brain, produce an answer for what I’d just seen. My mother lived eight hours more before she died. As I lay there, I prayed and made promises, but I somehow knew she was dead, even while she kept breathing.