It wasn’t so much his words, but the power, the energy, the charged charisma that emanated from his grubby little being. I began to understand why his troubled followers literally worshiped the man, why they would do anything, good or horrendously evil, to please him.
“The world is rotting,” he continued with escalating intensity. “Can’t you see it? Open your eyes. Pollution is all around you. Money is raping the earth, destroying the trees, polluting the air and water. Your children are choking and dying under your money noses. Your children cry for help, but you don’t hear them. You ignore them and they come to me. The children you ignore, I will keep. Someday they will rise up and kill you to save the world.”
After a pause, Manson cried out with resounding fervor: “I have a mission that makes my life worth something! You have sold your planet and your children. I have come to buy them with your blood!” With that, he darted from the door and retreated to his bunk.
I staggered down the alley, my head spinning from everything I’d just heard. It wasn’t until I was halfway down the hall that my senses returned. Thank God this man was locked in a cell, I thought. Thank God I could walk away from his hypnotic influence. What must it have been like for those who followed him when he was free, the impressionable young women who barely had any thoughts of their own? They were the perfect empty vessels, and Charlie had filled them with the most beguiling poison.
How could those disfranchised little girls from broken, dysfunctional families have fought it? I was a prison-hardened ex-cop and ex–navy fighter pilot trainee who had studied for five years to be a secular Sulpician Catholic priest, with additional Jesuit studies at the University of San Francisco. My head was clear, my will strong, my cynicism sharp, and my faith unbending. And yet, because of my open mind, I had temporarily fallen under this criminal’s spell. No wonder his followers had chosen to spend the best years of their lives camped around the entrance of a dank, foreboding prison, waiting for a sound, a glimpse, a fleeting thought to drift down from their imprisoned guru. I knew then that they would never leave. Squeaky’s calls would never let up, and the letters that poured in from troubled souls around the world would continue to arrive as long as Manson was alive.
From that moment on, I was hooked on Charlie and his Family. Not as a follower, but as a professor studying a strange, mystifying phenomenon. For the next eight years, I would be Charles Manson’s jailer, protector, and counselor. I would oversee the security and treatment of this strange, elfin man on a daily basis. I would control his life. In a way, he would also control mine.
The next day, while making my rounds, I stopped in front of Charlie’s cell. This was a different approach, a more public and casual visit. Charlie, a master of the moment, sensed that this wasn’t the time for a serious discourse on the meaning of life. His demeanor completely changed. He was less agitated, his voice was quiet and restrained, and his speech was clear and to the point.
“Do you know who I am?” he asked again.
“Of course.”
“No. I mean, do you know about me? Who I really am?”
“No. I know why you’re here, but I don’t know much about you.”
Charlie skittered to his bunk, grabbed a book, and stuck it through the cell bars. It was Helter Skelter, former L.A. prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi’s best-seller about the sensational Manson trial.
“Take it. There’s lots of lies in it, but it tells about me,” Charlie insisted. I thumbed through the pages, then handed it back.
“Thanks, but I’ll get my own copy.”
I was surprised that Manson was promoting that particular book. It painted a horrendous picture of him, at least from a sane person’s perspective. Then again, maybe Charlie reveled in the demon-possessed, murderer-controller, modern-day Adolf Hitler image Bugliosi presented. It’s difficult to fathom what feeds a felon’s self-image. Whatever Charlie’s reasoning, he would have to be more careful about his literary boastings in his current surroundings. There’s a strange, harsh, and totally inexplicable morality that exists among prisoners. While many ruthless and sadistic behaviors are accepted, even celebrated, others, like child molestation and crimes against women, are generally condemned. Manson’s offenses didn’t fall squarely into the banned categories, but he was still considered to be weird and sick. Like the “chomos” (child molesters) and rapists, he needed protection. He’d never admitted it, but he was aware of it. Manson was one of the best I’d ever seen at manipulating the system to keep himself out of danger.
I bought Helter Skelter that weekend and read it again with renewed interest. The horror of what Manson and his followers had done terrified me. The savagery and lurid detail surrounding the murders was staggering. I couldn’t shake the eerie images of drugged, homicidal zombies invading Hollywood and cutting up eight socialites—including Petticoat Junction actress Sharon Tate’s unborn baby. In a particularly gruesome touch, Charlie’s depraved crew used their victims’ blood to write cryptic messages like “Pigs” and “Helter Skelter” on the walls.
Although Charlie himself had not participated in the first set of murders, he went out the second night and personally selected supermarket magnate Leno LaBianca and his wife, Rosemary, to be his clan’s next victims, breaking into their home and tying them up. Once they were so secured, he left and ordered his followers to do the dirty work.
I again wondered why Charlie would want me to read such a disgusting depiction of his madness. Was he bragging, or was it merely an attempt to fill me with fear? I was sure it was both. The cunning little bastard believed that fear motivated everyone. What better way to instill fear than with that book?
My initial experiences with Charlie made me recall an article I’d recently read about Dr. Albert Speer, Hitler’s chief architect. Speer described his first impression of Hitler, catching one of his speeches in a “dirty, ill-lit beer hall” in Munich. Until then, Speer had viewed Hitler as nothing more than a “vulgar, rabble-rousing fanatic in a comic-opera Brownshirt uniform.” That changed as Dr. Speer listened.
“Hitler started to speak earnestly, persuasively, almost shyly,” Dr. Speer recalled. “His manner was completely sincere, more like a dedicated professor delivering a lecture than a screaming demagogue. Within a few minutes, he had the entire audience in his grip, and by no means was everyone there his supporters. Soon, his low-pitch manner disappeared, his voice rose to a hypnotic pitch, and there was a palpable aura of tension and excitement in the hall, a crackling emotional voltage.… His dynamic presence filled the room. His voice swelled, his eyes transfixed the audience. It wasn’t so much what he said, I hardly remembered afterwards, but the mood he cast over the entire hall; it had an almost orgiastic quality.”
This was exactly the way I reacted to Manson. I was thankful that the cult leader had been caught and cut down when he was, because, like Hitler, he would have done a hell of a lot more damage had he remained free.
Part of me wanted to stay away from this man, to keep my distance and treat him like any other prisoner. Another part sucked me in, drew me to him like a heroin addict to a needle. I’d abstain for a few days; then I couldn’t stand it anymore and would have to go to his cell for my next “fix.”
One afternoon, this feeling was so overpowering that I was moved to pull Charlie from his cage and bring him to my office for a chat. Charlie sensed it was time for another royal performance and obliged. Like Dr. Speer, I sat in rapt attention as he put on his latest show, this time giving me a rousing rendition of his life story. He began by conjuring primitive images of serpents and other animals and weaving them into spectacular metaphors. He spoke for an hour about the horrors of his life, how he’d walked out of prison the previous time with good intentions, then encountered his female followers and started his “Family.” He described in detail how he used LSD to turn them on, and made love to each one. He expressed an amazement at the emergence of his own persuasive powers, discovering for the first time that people would follow him and that h
e could control them.
He continued by reciting a chapter from what I can only describe as Manson’s personal book of Anti-Proverbs, a stream-of-consciousness series of loosely connected nuggets of disturbed, life-guiding thought.
“What do you know about fear? To save people from what they do to themselves, it would take a greater fear than the earth has ever seen. A fear only I can unleash! Fear is nothing more than awareness. Awareness is love. Absolute fear is absolute awareness. Give in to your fear and it will cease to exist. All you are left with is the awareness. And that awareness is love.
“See, all is love? There is nothing that’s not love. Confusion is love in another form. But what really is love? Love is a word we used for God. But even that’s misguided. What we mean by love in that form is intelligence. The understanding of things that are beyond you. Beyond you, but not beyond me. Because I can see. I understand. That’s what you people can’t accept in your paycheck-whore worlds. It blows your mind to confront the truth that I’ve been enlightened, and the rest of you haven’t.
“I’ve been charged with waking up the world. But why should I? I tried that before and look what you did to me? The people, they’re not worth the trouble! Humanity as a whole isn’t worth shit. You could search the earth before you could find five honest adults. A few individuals out there understand and touch life, but the rest are spineless predators trying to get over on someone else to justify their own existence. The ego gets so big they don’t realized their dick’s gone soft.
“So why should I care anymore, even with my knowledge? The people don’t care enough about themselves to listen! No one wants to do it themselves, man. They all want to follow a leader who tells them what to do. Believe me, I know that trip. If there’s anything I know, it’s that. Everybody wants to be saved, but they won’t take the first step necessary to rescue their damned souls. They’re out there in their little churches waiting for Jesus to come back and save them from the doom and gloom of their meager existence. But Jesus already came! He left his message two thousand years ago. Wasn’t that enough? Hell no! Greedy paycheck whores want him to come back. They missed him the last time, so they plead, ‘Please come back during my time.’ That’s crazy, man! You know what I tell these people? How many fucking times do you want him to come back? Every time he comes back, you turn on him like rabid rats and give him nothing but shit—just like you’ve turned on me! He came back in Germany during the 1930s and people are still bitching about that. The Iron Cross replaced the wooden one. Millions of people died trying to put order in the world, and when the forces of greed and evil rebelled, the truth was lied about and covered up.
“What if he don’t come back at all anymore? What if he sees what you did to me and says, ‘Fuck you all. You don’t deserve it.’ Humans need gods. God don’t need humans. That leaves us on our own, man. All we have is our mind. But that’s all we need! The mind is everything. It’s Christ, Buddha, the devil, it’s God himself. It’s where the music plays and the passion simmers. It pumps the energy of life up from the heart.
“People say I’m bad. I’m evil. I’m a beast. But what do they know about good, bad, and evil? They know nothing! There’s no good or bad in my world, just ‘is.’ It doesn’t make a difference what I’ve done, what I want, my hopes. Good or bad has nothing to do with it. A wolf jumps on a precious baby squirrel and swallows it down while the mother watches in horror. What could be more horrible than that, watching a mangy wolf eat your child? But is the wolf bad? Is the wolf a monster? No! The wolf’s only doing what nature has programmed it to do. Nature put it on the earth and said it has to eat to survive. Baby squirrels are on the menu. Even the mama squirrel eventually comes to understand this. The only ones who don’t are humans. People don’t understand the order of nature. All they know is how to screw it up. A dog wags its tail and plays fetch because humans give it food and water. But take away the humans and their handouts, and those sweet little puppies will turn into snarling beasts tearing apart rabbits and cats and small children and eating their bloody carcasses to survive. And those are our beloved pets that share our homes and beds. What makes us think that we’re any different? This innate human arrogance is why I’m in a cage and the animals are in cages in zoos and all of you are on the outside blighting the planet.
“Humans are worse than dogs because it wouldn’t even have to come to survival. If people knew they couldn’t die, if they couldn’t be punished for anything they ever did, what do you think would happen? Absolute evil. Strip away the concept of retribution, bring down the walls of fear, and the true evil nature inside humans will gush forth. To keep control, we are schooled, taught and programmed against our own natures by the fear instilled in us by grown-ups and authority figures. And it’s all a lie! We are warned not to lie, that it’s bad to lie, but the people who are telling us that are lying to us all the time! You see, doing good, that’s easy. Being good is a breeze, man. Just stand in line and do what everybody else is doing. Doing evil, that takes effort, work, and creativity. The hardest part is afterward, when you have to step back and deal with the rewards. And one of the most important rewards is that you can never truly understand good until you’ve done evil. That enlightenment will lead to a perfect universe within oneself and a balance between good and evil.
“You may be free in what your tiny, schoolbook minds know as freedom, but you tell me who’s free. Are you more free than me? I’m a hundred different things. I’m a glass of water, a rock, a grain of sand, a guitar, a rattlesnake, a young girl, an eagle, a cactus in the desert sun. I can be all of that, but you can be nothing but the one simpleton human that you are. You have no thoughts of your own, just what others have programmed in you.
“I confess! I’m not human! People have cried that derisively, tried to sear me with that stinging brand, but they’re too lost to know how right they are. I am beyond human. I am everything and everybody! Because of this, you think I’m insane. You tag me as crazy. But it’s you who are crazy! You don’t have the intellect to understand an entity that is a cobra, a wolf, a scorpion, or sometimes, nothing at all. I’m just a reflection of what you are thinking at any given time. Yet, you can’t see the beauty there. You can’t see the power. You think I’m insane because I’m angry about the lies of this world, the greed, the lust for money, the rape of the earth, the pollution, the mass confusion, and the relentless inbreeding of fools with no intelligence whatsoever.
“Even locked in here, I can see what’s out there better than you! Selfishness! The whole world is awash in a black plague of selfishness. Everybody spends their every waking second chasing after what’s best for them and them alone. They’re all lost! A total lost cause! How long can I scream that this is the true insanity? How long can my followers keep screaming the truth? Our very existence lies in the air, trees, water, and animals. Ignore this, and we all die. Not just me. You’ve condemned me to death in your corrupt courtrooms, but I’m not going out alone. You’re all sentenced to die with me. And even while you’re dying, you continue to reach out with your shriveled fingers to grab little green pieces of paper with dead people’s pictures on them.
“When the end comes, and chaos rules, and the ordered world you’ve created crumbles to dust, you won’t know how to survive. You’re weak. You’ve depended upon your own corrupt universe instead of the natural order. You’re, chasing your tail, and it will lead you into a black hole worse than anything you’ve accused me of.
“So what do you do? Instead of listening, you hang it all on me, Charles Manson. You want me to fight all your fears and die all your deaths. You’re trying to kill me over and over, but I won’t die. You tried to march me into that gas chamber with the preacher on each side and the pigs in front and back, but you couldn’t do it. My power was too strong. You couldn’t extinguish the light! And you know why? Because deep inside every one of you, you know I’m right. You have the proof. An ex-con comes out of jail, and all your children, the children of your doctors, lawyer
s, Harvard grads, they come flocking to me for the answers. To me! Not you who raised them, but to me, a man with no formal education. And I told them to go away, not to follow me. I told them to go home and ask their moms and dads. And you know what they said. They begged, ‘Please, Charlie, don’t send me away. My mother and father won’t let me come back. They hate me. They don’t understand. Only you understand. Please, Charlie, let me stay.’ So I let them stay. And people say that terrible things resulted. Whose fault was that? Mine? You can’t hang that on me. You can’t even hang your hate and revulsion on me. How do you feel about the murders? That’s all that matters. Not what anyone did, but how the rest of you feel about what your children did. It happened in your world, not mine. Nothing like that ever happened among my people. Strange how that was lost on everybody. It’s like this prison. Terrible, savage men in here, did brutal things on the outside. But what they all did combined wouldn’t equal what would happen if you opened these bars and left them to themselves for a few hours. The blood and savagery against each other would be unspeakable. It wasn’t like that in the desert. My children lived in perfect harmony. Do you think I would have tolerated any bullshit like that among the kids? We weren’t about murder! We were about fucking and blow jobs and eating pussy and playing music and getting high and doing our thing and having sex all day and night. It was your world that wouldn’t leave us alone. It was your world where the sickness and madness existed.
“What is murder anyway? There’s no murder in a holy war. That was a holy war. Everything’s a holy war. You don’t draw a line and say killing these people in Germany and Vietnam is okay, but killing these people in Hollywood isn’t. That’s the height of hypocrisy.
“How can you pretend to know me and my motivations when you don’t even know yourself? Our brains are like spaceships from another planet that the best scientists in the world can’t figure out. It’s ten thousand light-years beyond mortal comprehension. There are five computer chips to grow one fingernail and ten fibers just to let you take a shit and a hundred million satellites to move thoughts around. It’s operated by flies, snakes, beetles, mice, and cockroaches. Yet, take the brain of a human and put it in a maggot’s head and it will go crazy. It will convulse and die from the horror of human thought.
Taming the Beast: Charles Manson's Life Behind Bars Page 2