Even more incredible than Manson’s letters was the feeling that their content lent much weight to Donald’s story. I trusted that the two did indeed know each other on an intimate level. I couldn’t believe I had made such a connection by chance, and I wouldn’t believe the extreme places that connection would take me. Life was about to take off on the crazy train, because as my friendship with Donald developed, everything else began to fall apart.
When I told my girlfriend Sheila about Manson’s letters, she wasn’t impressed. In complete disgust, she said, “I can’t believe you’d allow something like that in your house! What’s wrong with you?” I was taken aback by her reaction. “It’s not like I bought a Gacy painting,” I said. “Manson never actually killed anyone.” I reminded Sheila that I worked in psychiatry and so I naturally found Manson fascinating. She was silent. I knew Sheila would be dumping me soon, and the thought was devastating. Things had been falling apart for a while, and the closer I tried to get, the farther she pushed away.
Sheila was the most important person in my life; we had worked together for years and we were great friends. We had started spending a lot of time together while she was going through a really rough breakup with someone else. She was fun to be with, and so fucking cute; I could hardly handle it. It was an awkward transition, but after a year or so, we ended up in a relationship. She had two amazing daughters and she was a great mother. One of her girls was an aspiring writer, and the other one was a rocker who just loved music. I never had the opportunity to tell them how much they meant to me.
I was hardly myself those days. My friend Dave died from cancer and his brother Danny, my best friend and roommate of seven years, also died from cancer, six weeks later. Shortly after I lost these important people, Sheila gave me the “It’s not you; it’s me” speech, and said she needed some space. Basically, she had found someone else. It was too much.
Danny and I had been in several bands together over the years. Almost daily, for as long as were roommates, we’d end up in our basement, making noise. He was a drummer, and I was sort of learning how to play guitar. We promoted and set up shows for hundreds of bands; our lives completely revolved around music. It was normal for us to catch bands four or five nights a week and Dave was usually right out there with us. Both Danny and Dave toured with bands, selling merchandise, and doing whatever promotional work they could. Dave was starting to turn his love of music into a career, touring with international bands like Into Eternity and Edguy. He never learned how to play an instrument, but his friends wanted to take him out on tour anyway. It was impossible to go to a show and not run into Danny or Dave; they were always there.
After both were diagnosed with cancer, I wanted to do a benefit in their honor. But they resisted. I reminded them how many benefits they’d done, how many bands they’d helped out, how everyone now wanted to do something for them. Every local band wanted to participate and our newspaper carried a frontpage story about the event. When the show finally took place, Dave had died and Danny was very sick. Danny was able to make it to the show, and watching him give his final goodbyes to those closest to him broke my heart. It was the last show my band ever played and the hardest set I have ever had to get through. Emotionally, I felt completely drained. I gave up on music midway through recording my band’s second album. I had made it through the vocals of eight of our fourteen songs when my voice just left me. We never did finish that record.
It’s difficult to get help when you’re in the helping profession, not that I was looking for it. I’d never felt so lonely, so compelled to dive into that loneliness and make sense out of what I was feeling. I experienced myself as disconnected, displaced. I’d become a textbook case of depression. I never considered stepping outside of myself and asking for help; I believed that what I was experiencing was only grief, part of a natural process we all find ourselves in sooner or later. Danny and Dave were both younger than me, and their deaths functioned as a wakeup call in my life. I became acutely aware that we’re here for a very short time.
Eventually, a couple of my colleagues sat me down and told me I should seriously consider taking a leave from work. I tried to argue, but they were right, and I knew it. My work demands a certain level of focus, of which I didn’t possess much. It was hard for me to connect with anyone, or feel any empathy after losing so many of the most important people in my life. I had thought about taking some time off, but I never did. Sitting around the house was the last thing I wanted to do; I needed to keep busy.
Danny was a super guy. Lots of our friends toured, and the only time we’d see them is when they’d stay over, it was pretty routine to have band people crashed all over our house. Before Danny passed away, one of his friends, Buck, found himself sort of homeless after his girlfriend kicked him out. Danny asked me if it would be all right if Buck stayed at our place for a few weeks, until he “got his shit together.” Those few weeks turned into a few years, and even now I highly doubt that Buck has his shit together.
Buck is a brilliant graphic artist, who worked meticulously for hours in front of his computer, fine-tuning the details of a CD cover, or perfecting some other project. He is an extremely talented artist and he had a ton of great ideas. Buck is pretty scattered, and it’s difficult for him to follow through with anything. I was grateful to have him around, though. He was the only guy I knew who would go along with some of the crazy things happening in my life.
When I told Buck about Donald Taylor, he thought it would be great if we all entered into a business partnership together. We decided to create a website and sell Donald’s manuscript as an eBook entitled One Gay Man. Almost immediately after the launch of the book and the website, we were contacted by Howard Stern’s people; they wanted Donald on his show.
Buck and I decided to accompany Donald to the Howard Stern taping in New York City, and we brought along a few friends to help film a documentary about the trip. We shot in NYC, Tennessee, Los Angeles, and Las Vegas, but we never produced anything from that footage - for good reason.
Howard said that none of his other guests had “ever said so much.” At the end of Donald’s interview, which chronicled his alleged exploits with Hollywood’s crowded closet, Howard asked him if he would be willing to take a lie detector test to prove his story. Donald was startled. “No,” he said; he didn’t care if people believed him or not. By the time Donald made his way back to the green room, he was completely flushed, as if he were in shock. He wanted to leave, immediately. We had planned to stick around until the end of the show and then go for drinks. I was choked to leave so soon, because Perry Farrell, one of my favorite songwriters, was one of the show’s other guests. I’d always wanted to meet him.
I’d begun to doubt Donald’s story. His ability to recall details repeatedly in exactly the same way eroded his believability. His stories began to feel like speeches, and his speeches began to sound like scripts. He was also starting to fall too deeply in love with the limelight, turning into a bit of a diva. Our documentary was not successful; Donald wasn’t able to act at all natural, so the crew gave up and wrote the project off as an adventure. Donald left us a few days earlier than expected.
Since I had some extra time in my itinerary, I tried to get in touch with Szandora and Stanton LaVey. My band had approached Szandora about doing an album cover and had been completely thrilled when she accepted. At the time, she was one of the top fetish models in the world. Certain people have an energy that runs a lot deeper than beauty and Szandora is one of those people. Stanton LaVey, then her husband, is the grandson ofAnton LaVey, founder of the Church of Satan and author of the Satanic Bible.
I was able to get in touch with Stanton first, and he told me that everything was messed up, that he and Szandora were going through a divorce. We met for drinks at El Coyote in Los Angeles, a landmark Mexican restaurant that’s been around since the ‘30s. As we sat down, Stanton told me this was the restaurant where Sharon Tate ate her last meal. He explained that, every year o
n the evening of “the murders,” he and his friends gathered there. The tradition had become a holiday of sorts.
I couldn’t get past how much Stanton looked like his grandfather. Like most kids who were into heavy metal, I was introduced to Anton’s philosophy and the Satanic Bible in high school. Stanton told me he was “born into evil.” I got the impression that he was a complex character, very intense. I could philosophize with the guy for hours on end about pop culture, music, and art. We hit it off. He had very strong opinions and he was passionate about his beliefs. I liked that. Stanton had a confidence about him, his own unique brand of charisma. He told me that the three most influential people in pop culture were Anton LaVey, William Burroughs, and Charles Manson. Anton LaVey and Charles Manson had been friends. Stanton told me that one day he would share their secrets with me.
Death Row
When you’re on death row, there’s a bell in the chapel that rings every day, and after you’re there for a couple of years, you begin to realize the bell you hear every day never ends. Nothing begins and nothing ends, it goes on forever. It’s like a big sound wave going out into the universe. It’s really weird, everybody wanted me dead, isn’t that far out? They were lined up spitting on me, going through all my things. I went to death row. Do you know what they told me? “We don’t want you out here, don’t come out here, don’t come on the row.” I said, “What do you mean we, are you pregnant? I only see one of you. Are you telling me you don’t want me on the tier, I’ll deal with you.” See, when he said “we” that puts me one down right, so I come out on the tier and there’s three of them, and they are moving on me. This is serious business, and they’ve got their reasons for what they are doing, that I don’t see.
Then, somebody stands up with me and says, “I can’t let this happen on my tier.” And the three said, “What do you mean?” He said, “If I let you gang up on this guy, then you’re going to be ganging up on me,” and he said, “I’m not going to let you gang up on anyone around me.” Then another guy on the other side of the tier stood up and said, “I’m standing with that too, I don’t want you ganging up on nobody on my tier. If you got one thing you want to say to this man stand forward, other than that we’re not going to let you gang up on him.” So, that’s what saved me right there, man.
One guy stepped forward and I said, “What’s your problem, man?” He said, “We don’t allow snitches on this tier,” and I said, “Man, snitching ain’t never been on the front page of the paper, my whole life has been right there, if I would’ve ever snitched on anybody, it would have been right there in the open. My word is my bond, my life. I don’t snitch on nobody, dig?” He said, “Well, we were told.” I said, “You take it back to wherever you got it, ‘cause whoever is giving you that garbage is trying to front your life off.”
So, we went on down the road, and I was left with that lesson, and two or three times in my life on this tier that I’m on, things have happened where I could have ganged up on somebody, but I held down, stood down from that. I don’t do that because my life was given to me by someone, so I try to pass that on in my life, as being a part of my life. I don’t think we should gang up on people. That’s why we got courts, that’s why we got laws, rules, and regulations for our survival. Any time that you don’t give the laws, and the rules, and the regulations to the most low-life fucking Manson in the world, then what you got is something coming from the will of God ‘cause the laws are made for survival. That’s why all those men died on all those battlefields to make those traditions. We live in the shadows of those traditions. That’s what I tried to explain. I was on the witness program, the State of California should of never bothered me. They should have stood down off of me. I didn’t have anything to do with that, that wasn’t my play. I’m not saying that I’m a good man, that I’m not a crook. I’m not saying that I haven’t buried a few people. That doesn’t have anything to do with what happened there. What happened there wasn’t my play, it wasn’t in my lane.
I’m not saying I’m not worse than that. I’m probably a thousand times worse. Tex [Watson] was a child, you know. Whenever I do something, I don’t ever get caught. People don’t know what I do. I don’t let them know what I do. If I let you know what I do then I can’t do it. I’m the sons of liberty in the graveyard. That’s my gang. My gang is crooks. That’s my family, that’s my cult. That’s what we were convicted for. You just seen a little bit of it. You didn’t see what was really going on. See, with what really goes on I don’t need to break the law. The law’s kind of stupid actually. You know, I’m not conspiring with nobody to do anything.
Can you imagine the Pharaoh conspiring with somebody to put a prick in the pyramid. He put his brick in the pyramid with his mind. Conspire? Tex wrote in his book, “I think that’s what he wanted me to do.” He was right. He was a good soldier. He did exactly what he was supposed to do, and did it well, man. Yeah. He did one mistake, they say, and I don’t believe he made a mistake. They say he left one fingerprint. I don’t believe it. He was too perfect under my guidance, man, to leave a fingerprint, and they said he left a fingerprint and I said I don’t believe that. He didn’t make a mistake. Tex did not make a mistake. There’s no such thing in my kingdom.
IV
HOW IT ALL STARTED
When we returned home, Buck received inquiries from various tabloids about Donald. We booked Donald on more radio shows and his story took off exponentially with each interview he gave. But we were still stuck on how adamantly Donald had declined a lie detector test on the Howard Stern Show, so we gave him an ultimatum: Do the test, or we’re done. He complied.
Kendall Shull is arguably the world’s leading polygraph expert. Shull served with the FBI as a special agent for twenty-five years, and was chief of the entire FB polygraph program when he retired. If anyone can tell if you are lying, Shull can. We contacted Shull and he agreed to test Donald at his personal facility in Knoxville, Tennessee. Donald was very quiet on the drive to Knoxville; it was obvious that the looming lie-detector test was getting to him. In desperation, he tried to talk us out of the whole idea. “How many other authors have to go through this?” he demanded indignantly. I explained to Donald that he really had nothing to fear, that this was a formality that had to be dealt with sooner or later.
When we arrived at our destination, Shull greeted us, explained the entire process, then asked to be alone with Donald so that he could conduct the test. The polygraph test took four hours, and centered mostly on the question, “Did you have sex with Elvis Presley?” In short, it soon became very apparent that I had driven two thousand miles and strapped a seventy-two- year-old man to a polygraph machine to determine if he had indeed blown Elvis when, with almost completely certainty, he had not. Donald pretended to sleep for the entire duration of the long ride home.
Things were finished with Donald. There was no longer any reason to believe the rest of his story. Yet, I still felt there had been a legitimate connection between Donald and Manson. I looked over the stack of correspondence again and couldn’t convince myself that the letters weren’t legitimate. It was clear that Manson’s letters were intended for Donald; they addressed Donald’s questions and communicated an intimacy that seemed specific to a certain sort of relationship. Each letter was addressed to Donald in the same child-like scrawl and stamped with the postmark from Corcoran Prison.
To stay sane after such a letdown, I began journaling and even started to piece together the beginnings of a book. I wanted to write about people’s connections to one another, how important those connections are, and how their dissolution directly influences depression. Because it’s been my experience that the pain a person experiences during depression is really the ache of being separated from the whole -life, love, God, whatever you want to call it. I was heavily influenced by the uncompromising truth of writers like Tony Parsons, Karl Renz, Leo Hartong, and was very drawn to they’re teachings. They were able to speak from a depth that really resonated within me. I
knew I had to meet these people. So, I planned a six week trip to Europe. My time in Europe changed me; I had never before spent so much time both alone and in the company of so many wonderful people. Tony, Karl, and Leo met with me, and with brutal honesty were able to help me see the simplicity of life. Away from everything, I was able to confront myself and my feelings. Never in my life had I cried so hard or felt so humble, so alive, so thankful. I was worried about returning to Canada. I thought my old, less self-assured mindset might come creeping back, and I’d end up depressed again. But I didn’t.
One Friday afternoon after my return, I received an unexpected letter from Corcoran Prison. An inmate named Kenny Calihan, who claimed to be a friend of Donald Taylor’s, had written to me in order “to introduce” himself. Kenny said that he got my address from Donald, who had filled him in on the adventures we’d had while promoting One Gay Man. Kenny knew about the letters exchanged between Donald and Manson. He told me that several of the inmates at Corcoran had read Donald’s letters at some point; he assured me that most everyone found them to be “hilarious.” He explained that the prisoners routinely pass around each other’s mail and retrieve old messages from the garbage. And, because no other inmate in the history of the American prison system has ever received as much mail as has Charles Manson, his letters are both most coveted and most easily attained. Kenny said that he has been friends with Charles Manson since 1992. I couldn’t believe what I was reading.
I immediately called Donald and asked him why the hell he’d given my address out to inmates. Donald answered, calmly, that he didn’t think I would mind. He had been writing to Kenny for a few months and had determined Kenny was a pretty good guy. Donald told me that Manson was serving a year’s sentence in the hole for something related to getting caught with a knife, a very serious offense. Donald had become acquainted with Kenny through a letter Manson himself hadn’t been able to read. Kenny handled much of Manson’s mail, as would a secretary of sorts.
Charles Manson Now Page 6