Death Trip

by Johnny Satan

  If I could get angry at you I would try to kill every one of you. If that’s guilt, I accept it. These children, everything they have done, they have done for love of their brother. Had you not arrested Robert Beausoleil for something he did not do...

  [Interruption]

  I have killed no one and I have ordered no one to be killed. I may have implied on several occasions to several different occasions that I may have been Jesus Christ, but I haven’t decided yet what I am or who I am. I was given a name and a number and I was put in a cell, and I have lived in a cell with a name and a number. I don’t know who I am. I am whoever you make me, but what you want is a fiend; you want a sadistic fiend because that is what you are. You only reflect on me what you are inside of yourselves, because I don’t care anything about any of you and I don’t care what you do.

  I can stand here in front of this court and smile at you, and you can do anything you want to do with me, but you cannot touch me because I am only my love, and it is all for me, and I give it to myself for me, because I look out for me first and I like me, and you can live with yourselves and your opinion of yourselves. I know what I have done.

  If I showed someone that I would do anything for my brother, include giving my life for my brother in the battlefield, or give where else that I may want to do that, then he picks his banner up and he goes off and does what he does. That is not my responsibility. I don’t tell people what to do. If we enter into an agreement to build a house, I will help you build the house and I will offer suggestions for that house, but I won’t put myself on you because that is what made you weak, because your parents have offered themselves to you. You are not you, you are just reflections, you are reflections of everything that you think that you know, everything that you have been taught. Your parents have told you what you are. They made you before you were six years old, and when you stood in school and you crossed your heart and pledged allegiance to the flag, they trapped you in truth because at that age you didn’t know any lie until that lie was reflected on you.

  No, I am not responsible for you. Your karma is not mine. My father is the jail house. My father is your system, and each one of you, each one of you are just a reflection of each one of you, and you all live by yourselves, no matter how crowded you may think that you are in a room full of people, you are still by yourself, and you have to live with that self forever and ever and ever and ever. To some people this would be hell, to some people it would be heaven.

  I have mine, and each one of you will have to work out yours, and you cannot work it out by pointing your fingers at people. I have ate out of your garbage cans to stay out of jail. I have wore your second hand clothes. I have accepted things and given them away the next second. I have done my best to get along in your world and now you want to kill me, and I look at you and I and I look how incompetent you all are, and then I say to myself: “You want to kill me, ha! I’m already dead, have been all my life – I’ve lived in your tomb that you built.”

  I did seven years for a thirty seven dollar check. I did twelve years because I didn’t have any parents, and how many other sons do you think you have in there? You have many sons in there, many, many sons in there; most of them are black and they are angry. They are mad, and they are mad at me. I look and I say: “Why are you mad at me?” He said: “I am mad at you because of what your father did.” And I look at him and I say; “Well,” and I look at my fathers and I say:

  “If there was ever a devil on the face of this earth I am him.” And he’s got my head anytime he wants it, as all of you do too, anytime you want it. Sometimes I think about giving it to you. Sometimes I think about just jumping on you and let you shoot me. Sometimes I think it would be easier than sitting here and facing you in the contempt that you have for yourself, the hate that you have for yourself. It’s only the anger you reflect at me, the anger that you have got for you.

  I do not dislike you. I cannot dislike you, I am you. You are blood.

  You are my brother. That is why I can’t fight you. If I could I would jerk this microphone out and beat your brains out with it because that is what you deserve, that is what you deserve. Every morning you eat that meat with your teeth. You’re all killers, you kill things better than you. And what can I say to you that you don’t already know? And I have known that there is nothing I can say to you. There is nothing I can say to any of you. It is you that has to say it to you, and that is my whole philosophy: you say it to you and I will say it to me.

  I live in my world, and I am my own king in my world, whether it be a garbage dump or if it be in the desert or wherever it be. I am my own human being. You may restrain my body and you may tear my guts out, do anything you wish, but I am still me and you can’t take that. You can kill the ego, you can kill the pride, you can kill the want, the desire of a human being. You can lock him in a cell and you can knock his teeth out and smash his brain, but you cannot kill the soul.

  You could never kill the soul. It’s always there, the beginning and the end. You cannot stop it, it’s bigger than me. I’m just looking into it and it frightens me sometimes.

  The truth is now, the truth is right here, the truth is this minute, and this minute we exist. Yesterday – you cannot prove yesterday happened today, it would take you all day and then it would be tomorrow, and you can’t prove last week happened. You can’t prove anything except to yourself.

  My reality is my reality, and I stand within myself on my reality.

  Yours is yours, and I don’t care what it is. Whatever you do is up to you and it’s the same with anyone in my family, and anybody in my family is a white human being, because my family is of the white family. There is the black family, a yellow family, the red family, a cow family and a mule family. There is all kind of different families. We have to find ourselves first, God second, and kind, k-i-n-d, come next.

  And that is all I was doing. I was working on cleaning up my house, something Nixon should have been doing. He should have been on the side of the road picking up his children. But he wasn’t. He was in the White House sending them off to war.

  I don’t know the different people that have got on the stand; one friend said I put a knife to his throat. I did. I put a knife to his throat.

  And he said I was responsible for all these killings.

  I have done the best I know how, and I have given al I can give and I haven’t got any guilt about anything because I have never been able to say any wrong. I never found any wrong. I looked at wrong, and it is al relative. Wrong is if you haven’t got any money. Wrong is if your car payment is overdue. Wrong is if the TV breaks. Wrong is if President Kennedy gets killed. Wrong is, wrong is – you keep on, you pile it in your mind. You become belaboured with it, and in your confusion...

  I make up my own mind. I think for myself. I look at you and I say:

  “Okay, you make up your own mind, you think for yourself, then you see your mothers and fathers and your teachers and your preachers and your politicians and your presidents, and you lay in your brain with your opinions, considerations, conclusions...” And I look at you and I say: “Okay, if you are real to you it’s okay with me but you don’t look real to me. You only look like a composite of what someone told you you are. You live for each others’ opinion and you have pain on your face and you are not sure what you like, and you wonder if you look okay.” And I look at you and I say: “Well, you look alright to me,” you know, and then you look at me and you say: “Well, you don’t look alright to me.”

  Well I don’t care what I look like to you. I don’t care what you think about me and i don’t care what you do with me. I have always been yours anyway. I have always been in your cell. When you were out riding your bicycles I was sitting in your cell looking out the window and looking in pictures in magazines and wishing I could go to high school and go to the proms, wishing I could go to the things you could do, but oh so glad, oh so glad, brothers and sisters, that I am what I am. Because when it comes down around your ear
s and none of you know what you are doing, you better believe I will be on top of my thought. I will know what I am doing. I will know exactly what I am doing. If you ever let me go before you kill me. And then I don’t really particularly care anyway, because I still will be there and I will still know what I am doing.

  In my mind I live forever. In my mind I live forever, and in my mind I have always lived forever. I am only what you made me, I am only a reflection of you.

  I have done everything I have always been told. I have mopped the floor when I was supposed to mop the floor. And I have swept when I was supposed to sweep. I was smart enough to stay out of jail and too dumb to learn anything. I was too little to get a job there, and too big to do something over here. I have just been sitting in jail thinking nothing. Nothing to think about. Everybody used to come in and tell me about their past and their lives and what they did. But I could never tell anybody about my past or what my life was or what I did because I have always been sitting in that room with a bed, a locker, and a table.

  So, then it moves on to awareness: how many cracks can you count in the wall? It moves to where the mice live and what the mice are thinking, and see how clever mice are. And then, when you get on the outside, you look into people’s heads. You take Linda Kasabian and you put her on the witness stand and she testifies against her father. She never has liked her father, and she has always projected her wrong off to the man figure. So, consequently, it is the man’s fault again, and the woman turns around and she blames it on the man. The man made her do it. The man put her up to it. The man works for her, the man slaves for her, the man does everything for her, and she lays around the house and she tells him what he should do, because, generally, she is an extension of his mother. His mother told him what to do and she trained him for twenty years and passed him on to the wife. Then the woman takes him and tells him what to wear, when to get up, when to go to work.

  Then when she gets on the stand and she says when she looked in that man’s eyes that was dying, she knew it was my fault.

  She knew that it was my fault because she couldn’t face death.

  And if she cannot face death, that is not my fault. Why should she blame it on me? I can face death. I have all the time. In the penitentiary you live with it, with constant fear of death, because it is a violent world in there, and you have to be on your toes constantly.

  So, it is not without violence that I live. It is not without pain that I live.

  I look at the projection that comes from this witness stand often to the defendants. It isn’t what we said, it is what someone thought we said. A word is changed: “in there” to “up there”, “off of that” to “on top”. The semantics get into a word game in the courtroom to prove something that is gone in the past. It is gone in the past, and when it is gone, it is gone, sisters. It is gone, brother. You can’t bring the past back up and postulate or mock up a picture of something that happened a hundred years ago, or nineteen seventy years ago, as far as that goes. You can only live in the now, for what is real is now.

  The words go in circles. You can say everything is the same, but it is always different. It is the same, but it is always different. You can “but” it to death. You can say: “You are right, but, but, but...” You sat here for nineteen days questioning that girl. She got immunity on seven counts of murder. She got. I don’t know how much money she is going to make in magazines and things. You set her up to be a hero, and that is your woman. That is the thing that you worship. You have lost sight of God. You sing your songs to woman. You put woman in front of man. Woman is not God. Woman is but a reflection of her man, supposedly. But a lot of times, man is a reflection of his woman. And if a man can’t rise above a woman’s thought, then that is his problem, it is not my problem. But you give me this problem when you set this woman against me.

  You set this woman here to testify against me. And she tells you a sad story. How she has only taken every narcotic that is possible to take. How she has only stolen, lied, cheated and done everything that you have got there in that book. But it’s okay, she is telling the truth now. She wouldn’t have any ulterior motive like immunity for seven counts of murder.

  And then comical as it may seem, you look at me and you say:

  “You threatened to kill a person if they snitched.” Well, that is the law where I am from. Where I am from, if you snitch, you leave yourself open to be killed. I could never snitch because I wouldn’t want someone to kill me. So, I have always abided by that law. It is the only law that I know of, and it is the law that I have always abided by.

  But she will come up here and you enshrine her, you put her above you, and you strive to be as good as something below you.

  It is circles that just don’t make any sense in my reality. But of course again that is my reality and it has nothing to do with you, because you have got your reality and you have to live with what you believe in. But this woman has got here and she has testified. She said she wasn’t sure, but maybe.

  Then the magical mystery tour wouldn’t be able to be explained to you. A magical mystery tour is when you pick up somebody else and play a part. You may pick up a cowboy today, and you go around all day and play like a cowboy. You put on a hat and you ride a horse.

  This is all we have done. We have played like mom and dad. We have loved each other. We have done everything we could to stay outside the frame of the law, the shakedowns. Nothing has been stolen. I have got better sense than to break the law. I give to the law what it has coming. It is his law. If I break his law, he puts me back in the grave again.

  I haven’t broken his law yet but it seems as if somebody lays around and somebody needs to fulfil a spot, they snatch it up and say: “This will do. We will put this over here. We can hang this on him, or we can do this to that.”

  Then the words go onto another meaning and another level of understanding. Why a woman would stand up and project herself into a man and say: “Actually he never told me anything, but I knew it all came from him.” Her assumption. Am I to be found guilty on her assumption?

  You assume what you would do in my position, but that doesn’t mean that is what I did in my position. It doesn’t mean that my philosophy is valid. It’s only valid to me. Your philosophies – they are whatever you think you are, and I don’t particularly care what you think they are. But I know this: that in your hearts and in your souls, you are as much responsible for the Vietnam war as I am for killing these people.

  I knew a guy that used to work in the stockyards and he used to kill cows all day long with a big sledgehammer and then go home at night and eat dinner with his children and eat the meat that he slaughtered. Then he would go to church and read the bible, and he would say: “That is not killing.” And I look at him and say: “That doesn’t make any sense, what are you talking about?” Then I look at the beast, and I say: “Who is the beast?” I am the beast. I am the beast. I am the biggest beast walking the face of the earth. I kill everything that moves. As a man, as a human, I take responsibility for that. As a human, it won’t be long, and God will ask you to take responsibility for it. It is your creation. You live in your creation. I never created your world, you created it. You create it when you pay taxes, you create it when you go to work, then you create it when you foster a thing like this trial.

  Only for vicarious thrills do you sell a newspaper and do you kow tow to public opinion. Just to sell your newspapers. You don’t care about the truth. You take another Alka Seltzer and another aspirin and hope that you don’t have to think of the truth and you hope that you don’t have to look at yourself with a hangover as you go to a Helter Skelter party and make fun of something that you don’t understand.

  J.O: Please confine your remarks to the issues in this case, Mr. Manson.

  C.M: The issues in this case? The issues in this case? The issues in this case are that Mr. Younger is Attorney General, and I imagine he is a good man and does a good job. I don’t know him. I can’t judge him. But I know he
has got me here. He set me in this seat. Mr. Bugliosi is doing his job for a paycheck. That is an issue. He is doing whatever he is doing. Whether he thinks it is right or not, I couldn’t say. That is up to him.

  The only way that I have been able to live on that side of the road was outside the law. I have always lived outside the law. When you live outside the law it is pretty hard, you can’t call the man for protection. You have got to pretty much protect your own. You can’t live within the law and protect yourself. You can’t knock the guy down when he comes over and starts to rape one of the girls, or starts to bring some speed or dope up there. You can’t enforce your will over someone inside the law.

  I gave everything I could think of to that old man and that ranch for permission to stay there, and I have given the people that stayed on that ranch my all. When no one wanted to clean the toilets, I would go and clean them. People would see me and they would see what I do and see the example that I set. They see, when I am cleaning out a cesspool, that I am happy and smiling and making a game of it. Like I was on a chain gang somewhere once upon a time and they come and pass the water. I make a game out of it, or I make a pleasure out of a job. We turn it into a magical mystery tour.

  We speed down the highway in a 1958 automobile that won’t go but fifty, and an SKE Jaguar goes by, and I state to Clem: “Catch him, Clem, and we’ll rob him or steal all of his money,” you know. And he says: “What shall we do?” And I say: “Hit him on the head with a hammer.” And we magical mystery tour it.

  Then Linda Kasabian gets on the stand and says: “They were going to kill a man, they were going to kill a man in an automobile.” To you, it seems serious. But like Larry Kramer and I would get on a horse and we would ride over to Wichita, Kansas, and act like cowboys. We make it a game on the ranch.