Sway

by Zachary Lazar

  “Don’t move so much,” one of the cops said. “Look at your leg. Your leg is twitching. Just relax.”

  They cuffed his hands behind his back. He squinted against the sun, stumbling off-balance in the dust, his dirty hair falling into his eyes. He understood that he was going to jail now, but it was impossible to understand what he had done in the last two days, to match it up with anything he knew about himself. When he thought of Gary Hinman, all he could picture was the outside of his house, the A-frame with the broken door, the beat-up cars on the lawn.

  “I’d like this to just be the first part,” Anger said.

  Mick was still looking at the flickering white blank on the wall. He hadn’t moved since the film ended, and it was only now that Anger realized how disturbing it was. He’d made it up of some leftover scraps he had of Bobby in San Francisco; some scraps of the band in Hyde Park, the Hells Angels in front of the stage; some scraps of himself — all of it pieced together like the shards of an explosion. It was not the vision of light he’d started out making three years ago, but the vision of what he’d seen in those three years, all of it that he’d managed to preserve on film.

  “It’s not what we talked about, I know,” he said. “This is just the chaos part, the prologue. It’s just the beginning.”

  “I don’t know why you would show me something like that.”

  “It’s just a film. I’ve been working on it for three years. It’s a long time. You get inured to it.”

  “What is it called?”

  “It’s called Invocation of My Demon Brother.”

  Anger switched off the projector. The room was lit now only by a small hammered tin lamp on the desk. Mick was perched on his stool in a white blouse, a scarf around his neck. In his lap, he had the book of pictures Anger had brought over, the promotional packet meant to explain the yet-to-be-made film, the optimistic sequel, Lucifer Rising. It was a collage of Egyptian ruins, Northern Renaissance paintings, AP photos of antiwar rallies, troops in Vietnam. Interspersed were pictures of the band — glamour shots, but also advertisements for their old records, rigidly staged. There was a close-up of the archangel Michael from Van Eyck’s The Last Judgment. There was a flying saucer above a darkened moonscape, tinted orange and green in the night sky.

  “Everything is falling apart right now,” Anger said. “That’s what we know. This revolution or whatever they’re calling it, it’s really happening. Whether it’s only chaos, or if it leads to something better, we don’t know yet. That’s why I want to make the next film. I don’t think it has to be only chaos.”

  Mick was looking down at the book, a forgotten quality about his unmoving lips. It was opened to a picture of his own face, framed in yellow with the omega-like glyph for Leo. Above his head was a tiny Marine helicopter inscribed with the same sign.

  “I’ve been asking you for a favor,” Anger said. “I’ve been asking you for a long time now. It would take two days. Maybe less.”

  “It’s been a busy time,” Mick said. “You know that. You know this whole story, Kenneth. There was Brian, then we were in the studio, now we’re leaving for the States. The tour. Rehearsals.”

  Anger took the book out of his lap. He put it down on the table and turned away from it: the glossy cover, the careful lettering, the fussy four-color printing. On the cover were two Egyptian gods, Isis and Osiris, signaling with their two raised arms the coming of Horus, the child god. It all looked slightly ridiculous now.

  “I thought you were going to do this for me,” he said.

  “I want to do it. I just can’t do it now.” Mick sat up, not looking at Anger, twisting his neck a little from side to side. “We should go downstairs.”

  “It’s just a film.”

  “Right, and what we do is just music.” He leaned forward on his stool, his forearms resting on his knees. “You want my name, my image, I understand all that. It helps us both. The Lucifer bit — that’s what we’re into now. But I don’t know why you’d show me a film like that when we’re about to go out on tour.”

  Anger reached down for his briefcase, looking at his hands as he picked it up and put it on the desk. He closed his eyes and tried to stop it, but the film was playing itself back in his mind now, sped up to an absurd jumble, a spasm or an assault. An invocation draws forces in. It can lead to an evocation, which spits the forces back out. He didn’t know what had happened with Bobby yet, nor did he know what was about to happen with the band on their tour, but it didn’t matter. It was already present on some level in the film. He opened the briefcase and put the spools inside. Then he closed it and flipped the locks shut.

  GIRL TELLS OF TWO NIGHTS OF SLAUGHTER

  Links Death Cult to Eight Slayings Tate Murder Finally Solved

  DECEMBER 1, 1969.

  Murder suspect Susan Atkins, 21, recounted today how she and a band of hippies broke into the Benedict Canyon residence of Sharon Tate on the night the screen actress and four friends were murdered. She said that on August 9, a man, two women, and herself entered the house dressed all in black to carry out the raid.

  Miss Atkins has also admitted to being present the next night, August 10, when the same group broke into the Griffith Park home of Leno LaBianca, owner of a chain of grocery stores, and murdered him and his wife, Rosemary.

  The lawyer of the pretty, dark-haired girl, Frederick Cobb, described the August 9 killings: “A man cut the phone lines with a pair of bolt cutters, then entered the house through a side window. He then let the others in through the front door. The victims were tied up, then beaten and stabbed.”

  Cobb said that his client told him that Charles Manson, 34, ordered them out on another murderous raid the following night, August 10, at the LaBianca home. He insisted that his client “had nothing to do with the murders” and that she admitted only to being present at the scene. He described Miss Atkins as being “under Mr. Manson’s sway. [She and the others] revere him as a fatherlike figure. He has a hypnotic power over them.”

  The houses of the victims were selected at random, Miss Atkins stated. Her story ends months of uncertainty in what had become some of the most publicized and frightening murder cases in recent history.

  Miss Atkins appeared yesterday in Santa Monica Superior Court to face charges in yet another murder, the July 31 slaying of Gary Allen Hinman, a Topanga Canyon music teacher. Police now believe that the Hinman murder was the first in a series of at least eight homicides related to the Manson group. Also charged in that crime is Robert Beausoleil, 22, who will stand trial later this month. Beausoleil, a rock musician, has pleaded innocent. He has denied any connection to Manson and his followers.

  Miss Atkins stated that the crimes were “an act of war. I was told to go and I went. We had a basic way of living. You didn’t think about what you were doing, you did it.”

  Manson was arrested two weeks ago in a roundup of more than 30 hippies in Death Valley. He was taken yesterday to Municipal Court for a preliminary hearing on charges of receiving stolen property. The bearded cult leader stared blankly as witnesses gave testimony about six stolen motorcycles he is charged with receiving. He did not speak with Deputy Public Defender Ross Kuzak, who represented him.

  ALTAMONT, 1969

  THE CROWD COULD HEAR the band’s helicopter before they found it in the sky, the deep burble of its rotors. It got louder and louder, narrowing in focus, building to a whine. They looked up at it, the large black ship with a swinging arm above its body. It was impossible not to admire it for a moment, a Bell UH-1 Iroquois, a “Huey,” the same kind of helicopter being used in Vietnam.

  It was December 6. The crowd had been gathered there for a day and a half already, staking out their spots, waiting for something they couldn’t quite envision. There were people with cameras and people flashing peace signs, people walking with backpacks on their shoulders, people handing out leaflets. They wore football jerseys, jean jackets, floppy leather cowboy hats, mirrored shades. Some of them wore nothing at all. In their na
kedness, they looked like mendicants — earnest, emaciated, begrimed. They lay on sleeping bags, blankets, cardboard boxes, stood up with their hands on their hips to look out over the crowd to the distant stage. It was a free concert for half a million fans, the biggest concert on the band’s tour, the first time they’d been in San Francisco in three years. All that week the news had been about a series of brutal murders last summer in Los Angeles and the arrest five days ago of several suspects and their leader, Charles Manson, who had already become a new kind of star. Nobody knew what to think about the story, whether it was to be believed. Nobody could explain the strange glamour of it, why the killers were fascinating while their victims were hardly even real. It had already been a day and a half of wine and Quaaludes, seizures by the medicine tent, fistfights, barking dogs, but it was possible not to look at any of that if you didn’t want to look at it. Some of them broke out into fits of dancing and singing, buoyed by the bright, sunny day. There was a procession of people in flowers and beads who pushed a colorfully painted cart through the crowd, its spoked wheels as high as their shoulders. Inside the bed was a blue cow made of papier-mâché, like something from India. In spite of everything they knew about the band, in spite of everything the band embodied, the crowd was thinking about Woodstock, the glow of having been there. They all wanted this to be something like that, and they were already a little frantic, wanting a good spot, not wanting to miss out.

  Someone with blood on his shirt was walked across the field by two people who led him by the elbows. A sixteen-year-old boy sat in the straw drinking wine, staring right at him, not seeing him, brushing something off his sleeve. The helicopter circled above it all, waiting for its chance to land. Then, as if in escort, a group of motorcycles arrived, coming in a long line between the hills, forty or fifty of them, some of the riders with girls on the seats behind them, some of them drinking from jugs of wine. As they got closer to the crowd, they shifted into low gear so that they were half walking, half riding. They were different from most of the fans, older, dressed in black clothes and boots. At either side of their line, people picked up their things and stood up, not even realizing in that moment how afraid they were. Some of them nodded their heads in solidarity; some of them smiled to their friends as if they were somehow a part of it. The motorcycles had saddlebags and mirrors and gas tanks painted black or blue. Behind them came a yellow school bus with a banner draped over its side that said HELLS ANGELS and bore the regalia of the different local chapters. More than a dozen people stood on its roof, drinking beer, shoving one another around, held in by a metal rail. One of them wore a black top hat. He was a tall, thin man with a beard, his clothes covered with dust, raising his arms like a scarecrow as he danced.

  The crowd went back and back, farther than you could see. Even if you wanted to leave now, it would not be easy. There were so many people lolling around, playing flutes or blowing bubbles, their faces so open it was hard to look at them for very long.

  ANDY: They were going to make a record — that was something you were always hearing about back then. But that’s what nobody understands. Charlie wasn’t interested in making a record. I don’t think Bobby ever really understood how far from all that Charlie was, all that rock-and-roll crap.

  DAVE: It was a ramshackle hundred acres set up in the hills above L.A. Lots of dogs. A couple dozen horses. At night you would hear the coyotes. You could walk for miles out there and never see another human being.

  LISA: The trees, the dry riverbeds, the mountains. The mountains would get this fabulous yellow color, with these gray bushes up the sides. Sudden, powerful rainstorms. Rain that would just pour and pour all night. You’d forget what century you were living in.

  DIANE: We raised artichokes. We would sell them in town, and then for a while we had the tourists come in and we’d run it as a dude ranch. We’d put on these long-sleeved flannel shirts, and we’d take these people out on trail rides. Cook them pancake breakfasts. At night, we’d make a fire and sing songs.

  DAVE: One day Bobby drove up with one of his girlfriends and this dog he had, a big white dog. This was probably toward the beginning of 1969. By then, there were more and more people starting to hang around, living in the various outbuildings and the old bunkhouses.

  LISA: He had that kind of crooked face, like he was up to something. That long black hair, the clothes. I think everybody was kind of in love with him. Even Charlie was sort of in love with Bobby.

  KATHY: Riding the horses through the desert. Getting up early so you could be out there when the sky was still purple and then you’d watch it all turn orange. We all got to be good riders. Learned how to saddle them, put the bridles on.

  DIANE: I don’t know how to explain it. I just knew that everything in my life up to then had been this painful, unnecessary lie.

  KATHY: The mountains were just shimmering with light. Birds shimmering out of the rocks. You’d find these dried-up old trees — weird, religious trees. We just took off our clothes and made love in the dirt, just balled all day, like no one had ever done it before.

  DIANE: Locked up in your body all the time, like it’s separate from you. Jealous of it, guarding it, protecting it. It’s such a release to not say no. Such a giving thing to make love with someone you never thought you could make love with. Making love instead of picking and choosing, hoarding yourself like you’re made out of money.

  KATHY: It was a way of being almost interchangeable. You’re growing out of yourself. Getting closer to God.

  DIANE: We would play a game where we were a Panzer division, out looking for Allied tanks. North Africa, the desert. We had field radios and maps and Charlie would come out sometimes and give us directions. He had binoculars and these National Geographics describing the battles, and he and Bobby would drive around the desert, kind of checking out what happened.

  MARK: It was some kind of hide-and-go-seek thing, only there was no one there to find. Riding those jeeps at top speed through the desert, driving over the washes, over rocks. You began to get really involved. The radios wouldn’t work. You’d run out of water. You’d get frustrated, lost.

  KATHY: Charlie would tell you, “You’re just like a prom queen, you’re a prima donna, you always need help,” and then you’d start acting like that. It became a pattern.

  DIANE: You started to try to read his mind. There was the sense that he was always watching you. Not in judgment, but like he was trying to get inside you to understand you.

  KATHY: It was like he was awed by how alive we were.

  DAVE: Barefoot on the rocks. You learn to walk more carefully. You cut yourself, and you learn to pay attention to where you’re going.

  MARK: At night, the emptiness that waits for you out there. No sense of time. If you think about it, you start to panic. You panic in the space of a second, but then you learn to relax into it. You see that time is elastic, that time is all in your head.

  DIANE: The stars. Tiers and layers of stars. You see more of them as you keep looking. The sky gets bluer, less black. They start to swell and pulsate. All that darkness weighing down on you, that light moving farther and farther off into space.

  KATHY: I remember just throwing all the kindling on the ground. Throwing it down and kicking at it and screaming. Minutes and minutes of furious screaming. Just this outlet of rage. And then when it was over I just laid my head on Bobby’s shoulder and cried. I just held him for a long time and wept.

  DIANE: Because we saw what was coming next. It was always the cops or always the war or always someone trying to hustle us or rip us off. And then people wonder what we’re doing out in the middle of the desert. Why we carry knives and need guns.

  DAVE: In San Francisco, there was no place left to live. It happened very quickly — the ghetto feeling, the heaviness. By the time they were calling it the Summer of Love, it had been over for a long time.

  KATHY: You’d see their bikes lined up in the sunlight, the way they leaned to one side, the front wheels all at
an angle.

  DIANE: A few of them wore colors, but it wasn’t uniforms, it wasn’t flashy. Most of them just wore jeans. Not necessarily big, but tough. It was the small ones, the wiry ones, I was always more scared of. They were the ones you could see going off.

  LISA: Mostly it was just drinking beer, having a good time. The bikers were friends. When they were around, the mood was light, we were safe, it was just a party. Everyone relaxed. For a while, they made everything better.

  DAVE: People were coming from all over by then. They’d heard about us. Nobody knew who to trust or what they wanted. Charlie was trying to get the bikers to stay around, he wanted to keep them happy. He wanted them to be protection. I think Bobby thought he was going to be one of the boys. He thought he was as hard as the bikers, as hard as Charlie, so he started scoring them dope, sneaking around, getting all wrapped up with the bikers. That was how it all got started.

  KATHY: The sound of those engines. The pipes. Do you think we were afraid of that sound? I used to be just like a little girl on the back of Danny’s motorcycle. Even my bones were ringing with it.

  DAVE: Whatever he saw in the bikes, the bikes as a way of life. I don’t know why Bobby got involved with what he got involved with. I can’t explain that to you, maybe you should ask him. We had our own thing going there. The outside world was less and less a factor to us. It should have been enough. All I know is that Bobby started to come around more and more once the bikers came.