David described himself as a member of the “suspect class.” He grew up hanging out with bikers and belonging to the outcast crowd, which made him an easy target to the sort of people who are always looking for someone to label. Living on the fringe, a person experiences all sorts of underground cultures. “I’ve seen all kinds of stuff, well, Satanist stuff,” David explained, “but someone who calls himself a Satanist is not necessarily anti-Christian; Satanism is an aspect of Christianity. Those kids are just going for shock value or trying to express a darker feeling of exclusion.” David explained that society frowns upon the expression of darkness inherent to Satanism or other alternative cultures because “someone from ‘regular’ society sees that and he sees it as completely different from himself. Most people living a ‘normal’ life are denying their darker thoughts and urges, but they’re human-and they’ve got them.”
I could immediately identify with what David was saying. I’ve always belonged to various subcultures on the outskirts of society. Music was usually the only thing that brought the kind of kids I knew together. Within the music community, a person can find an understanding, a sense of belonging, the kind that’s so important to adolescents trying to figure themselves out. In the ‘80s, if you wore an SNFU shirt and you came across another kid wearing the same shirt, there was an immediate connection, and you had found an instant friend. It felt as if you already knew one another, because you had already been introduced to the same ideals, ethics, beliefs, whatever. Outside of the music world, inside the walls of what are all too often overly conservative high schools, you could expect the complete opposite reaction to your long hair and rock music and dark clothes. I never acted out in high school, never gave anyone any reason to believe I was a danger or a threat, but I can remember the intensity of students’ and teachers’ reactions to me. Once, a bunch of worried parents even held a meeting to discuss how to deal with my influence on their kids. They believed I could introduce them to drugs. Of course, not one of those parents ever approached or talked to me. People fear what they don’t understand. Had any of those men and women bothered to get to know the kid they intended to vilify, they’d have been shocked to discover I’d never done a drug in my life.
David told me that you could see the extent to which people project their fears onto a single person, and the effects of this phenomenon, in the case of Charles Manson. “Look how they vilified Charlie by putting all that crap on him. I’m sure it’s changed the way he projects himself outwardly, especially during major media interviews. In the past, you would see him on TV and he’d act like he was thinking, ‘I know you expect me to be this, so I’ll show you this; I’ll show you all about what you’ve got going on in your own stupid head about what you think I am.’ But he sure is not going to go ahead and unburden himself of his darkest thoughts and deepest beliefs in that kind of venue. Some people end up getting very much the wrong idea.” One clip from a Manson interview has gone viral on the Internet, racking up millions upon millions of views on YouTube alone. It shows Manson, dressed in an orange jumpsuit and sitting in front of an American flag, responding to the prompt, “Tell me, in a sentence, who you are.” Manson literally leaps at the chance to answer, lurching forward into a series of erratic facial expressions and gesticulations. He shrugs his shoulders, cocks and contorts his brows, rolls his eyes, and sticks out his tongue. After almost ten seconds of this, his shoulders rise futilely one last time and he shakes his head as he replies with all conceivable sincerity, “Nobody.”
“The public persona is something created outside of him. He wasn’t any of that. That was the newspapers and magazines and news broadcasts trying to sensationalize the story; they made the Manson Family sound like they were all a bunch of rabid dogs feasting on babies.” Because of this, David said, people are all too eager to jump to the conclusion that Charles Manson is a master mind, a mind reader, a manipulator capable of directing the masses to do his dirty work. “The last thing he’s trying to do is control somebody or get somebody else to do things.” The man David calls his friend is an “unassuming” inmate who’s been in prison the majority of his life and is, therefore, expert at doing time. And part of doing prison time is knowing how to keep most people at arm’s length. “So many people have tried to fuck him over, and rip him off, and use himfor one thing or another.”
Hearing this, I had to ask David if he felt Manson was at all accountable for the Tate/LaBianca murders. And he answered me confidently, “Whatever they were doing, I don’t think Charlie gave them guidance; I don’t think he said, ‘Go to this address, and perform these specific acts.’“ He qualified his answer further when I pressed him. “At the time, there were all these radical things going on. I could see that he could get paranoid and say, ‘Hey, look, do what you need to do,’ but, beyond that, I don’t think he sent anybody anywhere with instructions to do any specific thing, including not murdering anyone.” David attributed the murders to “happenstance” on the part of all people involved. And he vehemently denied the possibility that Manson brainwashed his family members. “You can’t make someone do something they don’t want to do,” David said. “That’s absolute bullshit.”
I asked David how he and Charles met, the series of events leading to their eventual friendship. In fact, before he was transferred to PHU, David didn’t know much about Charles Manson. “I was born in ‘62, so I was pretty young [during the Mason Family murder spree]. I remember hearing his name a lot as a kid, but I didn’t really pay a whole lot of attention.” Charles was in the hole when David arrived on the unit in the late ‘90s, and so David’s initial introduction to the notorious inmate was though the incessant rumors he heard circulating in different parts of the prison system. “They’d say that if someone got transferred to PHU, they could end up making millions of dollars from the Kennedys for killing Sirhan or from the Folgers for killing Manson.” David, who’d been transferred to PHU in the first place for “knowing too much,” was simultaneously reluctant to hear this gossip and intrigued by the thought of how a man with such a large price tag over his head survived in such a system.
“When Manson got out of the hole, he’d been here for a while so he knew everybody. He came in real comfortable with his environment and we were talking to the same people, so we ended up meeting each other pretty quickly.” David said the two started “slowly getting to know each other.” Though neither was particularly interested in making new friends, the two began “bouncing off each other,” sharing life experiences and ideas about music, literature, and art. David said that the two felt like kindred, creative spirits in a place filled with the ill tempered and uninspired. “You kind of gravitate toward people; if you’re not full of shit you kind of gravitate toward people who aren’t full of shit.” Ultimately, though, David claims their friendship is really founded on trust. “Like I said, the guy does his time; he kind of stays to himself, partway for privacy, partway because a lot of these guys are snakes and try to burn anything that they can because he has resources on the outside through all the people that contact him. Rather than being one of the flies trying to suck blood out of his ear, I’m just another cow in the field. I’m trying not to be too involved, trying to just kind of do my own thing. He influences other people by his thinking, his philosophy on certain things. Charlie has a “let it be” kind of an attitude. Other people’s interactions with him, don’t impact the way he thinks, the way he acts, or the way he believes things. They end up by their demands, and wants placing pressure, intentional or not, on him. That’s how they impact him most, the outside forces, but it’s not so much outside thought. He is pretty much locked into his thoughts and beliefs, and the way he sees them.”
Knowing more now than I ever thought I’d know about his home, it intrigued me to imagine the kind of art Charles Manson produced in prison. I’d learn from David that Manson deals mainly in the abstract: lots of squiggles, circles, and color. He will get to work on a new piece whenever he can get his hands on new pencils
, crayons, markers, or colored pens. Art supplies are pretty difficult to get a hold of in PHU. Manson rarely finishes his projects and he will often start something, move on to something new, only to return to work on something he began long before; he sees everything as a “work in progress.” Though somewhat dissipated, distracted, he evidently puts a lot of time and effort into his work.
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 hi
m, “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.
Charles Manson Now Page 10