I Love You but I've Chosen Darkness

by Claire Vaye Watkins

  Naturally, at first I felt myself a mutant. I was afraid and disgusted. But most vaginal dermoid cysts are benign, I read. They come from DNA the baby leaves in you. I admit I did not entirely grasp the science. But rather than hate or fear the tooth, I resolved simply to monitor it. Observe without judgment, as the yogis advised. I ministered to the tooth. I fetched the green glass jar of olive oil and the ceramic fingerbowl Theo had used while stretching my perineum throughout the third trimester. It had been a source of great anxiety for me during pregnancy, the fate of my woefully inelastic perineum. My fear of episiotomy was right up there with fear of death and c-section, though it was the c-section that ultimately rendered my dutiful stretching regimen for naught.

  I dipped my finger pad in the olive oil and stroked the tooth with the same forced fondness with which I applied ointment to my stretch marks, trying to practice the self-love encouraged by my therapists and budtenders. I deleted certain apps in hope of replacing the shocking image search results for birth+injury or vaginal+dermoid+cyst with the throbs of my own body.

  Miraculously, it worked! The tooth was hard and unequivocal, but not unpleasant to touch. It did not at all interfere with masturbating, neither with digits nor with toys, and Theo and I were not really having sex at the time, so the tooth was truly no bother. Neither were the others, as, gradually and at about the same rate as my daughter, I cut a ring of them.

  Tooth enamel is the hardest substance in the body, I read, understanding myself to be mythical and rare. Possibly it was my imagination (and what does it matter if it was? what is any of this—love especially—if not imagination?) but after my teeth came in, my orgasms became longer and stronger, more intense and easier to come by. I filled my alone time with them.

  Yes, I said love. I loved the teeth and was unafraid of that love. I loved freely, as the poet advised. The teeth became my secret companion. I told no one, not Theo and, as I’ve said, not his colleagues tasked with evaluating what sort of risk I posed and to whom.

  I did not want to hurt the baby or myself. I stressed this. We were the only people I didn’t want to hurt.

  How long have you felt this way? was a question they all liked.

  Since my baby was born. No, before. Way before. Since I was clouds pressed against a mountain. Since Tecopa.

  I was okay. If I stopped breastfeeding and started meds and kept going to therapy and called my sister every day and journaled and beed a lizard at hot yoga four or more nights a week and took a lover or two, I would be okay—would survive my child’s first winter, a sludgy era of despair, bewilderment, and rage passed in the palm of the mitten.

  A Personal Narrative of People and Places

  The Amargosa River is one of the world’s most remarkable water courses. . . . You may cross and re-cross it many times totally unaware of its existence, but in the cloudburst season it can and does become a terrible agent of destruction.

  —William Caruthers, Loafing Along Death Valley Trails: A Personal Narrative of People and Places

  The Amargosa River begins as rare rain on the proving grounds, Pahute Mesa, not far from the made-up place where California becomes Nevada. The rain braids in washes down the alluvial slopes of Frenchman Flat and Yucca Mountain and seeps into the rock, flows south underground for about ten thousand years and sixty miles under a desert basin splashed with turquoise, aquamarine, smears of amethyst, rose quartz, folds of charcoal and onyx sparkling above dry lake beds of bleached bone dust. The river is ephemeral, sometimes there but mostly not, its few oases guarded by impenetrable thickets of thorny, black-barked mesquite.

  However, near the town of Tecopa, the Amargosa surfaces to a surprise party of riparian wonders. Mesquite, as ever, but also endangered pupfish and voles, bobcat, coyote, cattails, mint, aspirin bark and other medicinal plants. Here the river turns, wends west then north in what my biologist calls the J curve, and in its wending digs a canyon. All along this canyon there are springs, water rising hot from the rock year-round. The jade mud at the springs is bentonite, good for the soul, skin, upset stomach or snakebite. A mask of it sucks the poison out. The water itself is said to heal. Fossil water, my biologist calls it.

  We considered this place ours, my family and I, its names hints we did not take. Amargosa is Spanish. Tecopa is Paiute, after a Paiute chief. A mining company’s way of asking to dig. Yucca Mountain, the site of the would-be Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository, genus Yucca, subfamily Agavoideae: agave, yucca and Joshua tree. Joshua comes from the Old Testament by way of the Mormons, as in leading whoever needs leading out of the desert. The Amargosa River never gets out. It dies below sea level somewhere beyond Tecopa, baked into the sky above Death Valley. Death as in death as in no one gets out alive.

  * * *

  —

  The summer of 1967, the summer called the Summer of Love. My father turned seventeen and hitchhiked from his parents’ house in Thousand Oaks up to Haight-Ashbury and from there to a commune in Taos. In September he went home to LA to start his senior year. But he couldn’t handle school anymore. So says his 1979 memoir, My Life with Charles Manson by Paul Watkins, cowritten with Guillermo Soledad, the pen name of a member of the faculty at University of California at Santa Barbara. Paul dropped out, forfeiting his position as class president, and once again fled back to the Haight, only to find the weather had turned and the scene soured. By March of ’68 he was back in LA, living in a pup tent in Topanga Canyon, hiking, smoking pot, jamming all day on his flute and French horn.

  One day, Paul was tooting his heart out amongst the butterflies, bees and mustard weed when two blue jays joined in. That’s how he likes to tell it. The jays reminded Paul of his friend Jay, who had a house up the canyon. Paul followed the creek up the canyon to Jay’s, where he discovered Jay’s car gone and in its place a school bus painted completely black.

  Paul knocked on Jay’s front door. Two naked, wispy-legged teenage girls with waist-length hair stood in the doorway. Jay doesn’t live here anymore, said Brenda and Snake, welcoming Paul inside. Ten or twelve people—most of them girls, and those mostly naked—sat on the floor around a low table topped with candles. A fire in the fireplace. At the head of the table, a shirtless man holding a guitar.

  Brenda introduced Paul. Charlie said, Won’t you stay and make music with us?

  They played, Charlie talked, and then the rap session gave way to an orgy—we moved together in a kind of harmonious, inventive slither.

  As harmonious and inventive as the slither may have been, Paul woke at dawn the next morning, slipped on his moccasins and split. He hitchhiked up to Big Sur and camped alone on the beach for three months, did some housesitting, then once again gravitated back to Los Angeles. Thinking he’d hitch to his camping spot, Paul stood with his thumb out on the corner of Topanga Canyon and Ventura for mere minutes before a battered green Plymouth pulled over. Snake and Brenda, fresh off a dumpster dive, invited Paul to come see their new digs.

  Want to smoke a number? he asked from the backseat of the Plymouth.

  No thanks. We’d rather make love.

  Snake drove the Plymouth up Santa Susana Pass to Spahn Ranch. Paul unloaded his stuff and joined a group playing music in the woods. After, Paul and Snake—fifteen years old and dispatched by Charlie for this purpose—spent the rest of the afternoon balling in a eucalyptus grove. That night Charlie drove the Family to Bel Air to play music with Dennis Wilson. This reads like easily the best day of Paul’s short life.

  Everything at Spahn’s was seen through a veil of dust, Paul writes of the movie-set ranch where he lived with the Family. The very next day they knocked out the wall dividing the jail from the saloon. The girls brought in mattresses and tapestries and turned the space into a giant bedroom. The boys installed a toilet in the corner, as no one was to leave during the evening ritual of music, lecture and orgy—the heaviest psychosexual therapy imaginable—which for the most part my dad mak
es sound like a lot of fun.

  Charlie’s rap in those early days urged egolessness, surrender and other Eastern precepts cribbed from the Beatles. Plenty of acid that first summer, and group sex where casual rape was disguised as radical body positivity, but no talk of violence. Not even as much talk about the revolution as Paul would have liked. He’d been busted in Big Sur the summer before, tripped on acid all through a roadside beating from the cops, did some time in jail. Some time. That’s how he put it to Charlie, eliding the specifics of his two-day incarceration. Charlie had done time, real time, and it was this time that made him brilliant, more serious, more committed than the burnouts Paul had lived with in the Haight and Taos.

  Which is not to say the scene at Spahn’s was no fun. The girls cooked and cleaned and embarked on thieving expeditions to keep everyone in zuzus, Charlie’s word for junk food. The boys smoked dope, played music, took Dennis Wilson’s Ferrari on a joyride on Santa Susana Pass and totaled it. Sadie had a baby. Minus a few bad trips—freak-outs, choking, confusing requests (Paul come over here and show this girl how to give head)—this was a beautiful time.

  But the friction between the Family and Spahn’s wranglers, once easily lubricated by alcohol and dope, began to chafe. Charlie and Paul tried and failed to infiltrate Fountain of the World, the tantric monastery over the hill. Three new girls joined the Family: Juanita, Leslie and seventeen-year-old Catherine “Cappy” Gillies, whose grandmother owned a ranch in Death Valley. That’s when Charlie began rapping in earnest about moving to the desert.

  The family spent October rebuilding the engine of their fifty-six-passenger International school bus and remodeling its interior, adding plush carpets, satin tasseled curtains, a refrigerator and a stove. On Halloween they loaded the black bus with mattresses, blankets, clothes, musical instruments, food supplies, five cases of zuzus, a kilo of grass, and fifty tabs of acid and lit out for the Mojave. They camped comfortably in the bus the first night, candy and drugs for dinner and sex for dessert. By dawn the next morning the bus was northbound, their magical mystery tour headed into the Panamint Mountains.

  They found Goler Canyon, the only route to Cappy’s family’s ranch, treacherously steep, too narrow for the bus, strewn by flash floods with immovable boulders. Forced to ditch the bus, they loaded their backs with all the supplies they could carry plus two infants (another baby had joined) and hiked for miles up the canyon.

  The Family tried to settle into the bunkhouse of Cappy’s family’s ranch, known locally as the Myers place, but Charlie grew increasingly paranoid. Cappy had told her grandma it would be only girls camping up there. Charlie and Paul scouted for other homesteads and soon found one farther up Goler Canyon, seemingly abandoned. Paul and Charlie tracked down its owner, Ma Barker, in Ballarat, the nearby ghost town. Together they convinced Ma Barker to trade them the Barker Ranch for one of the Beach Boys’ gold records.

  * * *

  —

  Death Valley marked a turning point for the Manson Family, my father “wrote.” Our family lore credits this desert with saving his life, but first it tried very hard to kill him. The cosmic vacuum of the desert was a perfect place to program young minds. The vastness of scale offered by the stars, the treeless mountain ranges and plunging valleys urged surrender. With infinity so close at hand it was easier to give yourself . . . Ideas that would have seemed utterly inconceivable to me in West Los Angeles were perfectly understandable on a crystal clear morning from the peaks of the Panamint Mountains.

  Death Valley inspired the particulars of Charlie’s apocalyptic thinking, particularly its ghost river, the Amargosa, here flowing, here raging, here dried to nothing. He became obsessed with one spring in particular, Devil’s Hole, bottomless, waves in its waters from earthquakes on the other side of the world.

  This phenomenon always perplexed Charlie, who, from the time we arrived began speaking of “a hole” in the desert which would lead us to water, perhaps even a lake and a place to live. Charlie’s mythic hydrogeology sent him and Paul on grueling night hikes in search of a subterranean world, a cave, a place where we might take the Family and make our home when the shit came down. They hiked, smoked, Charlie rapped. Paul collected rocks and gaped unscientifically at the shock of stars overhead. Had they been there this whole time?

  Nights got colder. Supply runs to LA and Vegas demanded hours of hiking down and then back up the canyon lugging plunder. Gas was scarce. Isolation invited madness. Paul watched the deterioration of his friend Brooks Poston, who took to chopping wood from sunup to sundown to avoid Charlie. Charlie himself struggled to adapt to the desert, hanging comatose in a hammock all day and raving like a demon after dusk. The flower child in Charlie Manson was dying, wilting away in Death Valley day by day, freezing by night.

  Then, all at once, things changed dramatically. Charlie went to LA for a meeting with Dennis Wilson and Terry Melcher and returned euphoric, having heard The White Album and found in it a name for his doomed prophecy: Helter Skelter. Race hate was palpable in the city, Charlie said, perfect conditions for the Family’s album. They would lure young love to the desert while the rest of the world burned. The Beatles had put the revolution down to music.

  Later, after, Charlie said, Why blame it on me? I didn’t write the music.

  He summoned the Family minus Brooks and Juanita back to LA, to the Yellow Submarine, a yellow two-story house on Gresham Street in Canoga Park. Suburbia . . . mellow enough when compared to L.A. proper but hectic after living in the desert. With his Family submerged in the Yellow Submarine, Charlie kept on with his grisly raps and tests. Paul enrolled in Birmingham High School to recruit teenage girls. The macho brigade moved in: mechanics, bikers and ex-cons, Vietnam vets, men tutored by the state as Charlie had been, men content to do what they were told in exchange for sexual gratification and good weed. Charlie sent Sadie, Ella, Stephanie, Katie and Mary to work as topless dancers in clubs in the valley. To buy vehicles and outfit them properly, we needed money. The girls went to work willingly.

  On Gresham Street the Family focused on their music. Recording sessions at Brian Wilson’s studio went poorly. Charlie arranged for Terry Melcher to come hear them play in the Yellow Submarine. The girls cleaned the house, set up the instruments and made dinner: vegetables, lasagna, green salad, French bread and freshly baked cookies. Then they rolled some good weed. Melcher didn’t show. That motherfucker’s word isn’t worth a plugged nickel, said Charlie.

  Preparations for Helter Skelter accelerated. The Family moved back to Spahn’s, hoarded dune buggies and Harleys, listened to The White Album nonstop. Charlie rapped on the Book of Revelation, chapter 9, locusts and scorpions, electric guitars and the coming holocaust the Family would ride out in their hole. “When all the fightin’s over,” Charlie said, “the Muslims will come in and clean up the mess . . . cause blackie has always cleaned up whitey’s mess. But blackie won’t be able to handle it and he’ll come over and say, ‘You know, I did my number, man . . . I killed them all and I’m tired of killing. The fightin’ is over.’ And that’s when we’ll scratch blackie’s fuzzy head and kick him in the butt and tell him to go pick the cotton.”

  * * *

  —

  Around this time Charlie instructed Paul to steal a big heavy duty Dodge ambulance-weapons-carrier and take it on a supply run to the Panamints. Paul thought of Brooks, zombied-out and withdrawn last Paul had seen him. He hesitated only a moment before hot-wiring the Dodge. By four a.m. he’d loaded the stolen truck with supplies and several girls . . . still in their nighties and T-shirts. By dawn this band was back in the desert, thinking themselves free.

  Instead they were busted, the stolen truck pulled over outside the town of Mojave, the group thrown in jail. The next morning, Paul was bussed to the Los Angeles county jail. He was booked for car theft and, after a couple of days, released.

  Returning to Spahn’s so suddenly, after anticipating a stay in the des
ert, made me even more aware of how denigrated things had become. Guns and Buck knives and bad vibes from the wranglers. Charlie, too. Gotta get a goddamn truck up there man. Something’s stopping us. One afternoon in late June, Paul and Charlie walked to the corral. Charlie climbed the fence and sat watching the horses. Paul asked how much longer. Charlie winked down from the top rail. “Helter Skelter is coming down,” he said, “but it looks like we’re going to have to show blackie how to do it.”

  Another Panamint run—another bust. Released again, and newly appreciative of Charlie’s rule that only the girls carried dope, Paul ached for the desert. What was the barrier keeping him away? He felt it hitchhiking out of his city, felt it all the way to Ballarat. It was with him hiking up Goler Canyon, until the moment he saw Brooks bounding down the hill like a frisky goat.

  Been climbing mountains, Brooks said. Met this far-out old prospector dude.

  Paul Crockett, Big Paul, the man my father credits with deprogramming him. The three men wandered the desert for three days. Crockett showed Paul and Brooks the velvety texture of bentonite clay, how to find opal, lapis, gold. He showed them how the desert is an organism. At a mine called Gold Dollar he taught them that everything was by agreement.

  Paul said, Charlie says everything is in your imagination.

  Yeah, that’s kind of how it is . . . but it’s there because we agree to it . . .

  The Panamints had agreed to Paul, offered clean air and water, sobriety, meditation, dark skies and deep sleep. His mornings passed billygoating up and down the mountain with a backpack full of that same mountain, his afternoons helping Juanita in the garden, making food from the mountain or grinding the mountain with mortar and pestle to pry gold from the quartz base. Evening meant dinner and making music.