Acres of Perhaps

by Will Ludwigsen

  Q: Who found the food?

  A: Us girls because we were small and could fit in the Dumpster and the pigs might let us off if we showed them some skin. We cooked it, too, after we got the gas working. We’d let Charlie and the other men eat first because they’d need their strength if the fuzz came down on us.

  Q: What music did you listen to in the Safehouse?

  A: All sorts of stuff. The record player was going all the time and Charlie’d could come in at any time and wake you up for dancing or sex or dancing and then sex. We had Captain & Tennille, Rod Stewart, ELO, Donna Summer, all the stuff that made you move.

  Q: Who decided what to play?

  A: Oh, Charlie did. He was the DJ. He knew how music was supposed to flow.

  Q: What was his favorite musical group?

  A: Hands down, the Bee Gees. He thought they had it all together.

  Q: And “Night Fever”...

  A: Yeah, he talked about that all the time. We’d have a little communion with acid and trip out on the pillows while he explained what the lyrics meant.

  Q: And what did he tell you?

  A: It was all about the coming revolution of the kids and the blacks and the gays to overthrow all the old piggy white people. He had every line down, but I can’t remember them all.

  Q: Well, here, let me show you people’s exhibit 219. Does that help?

  A: Wow. That’s big. You had it printed up. Okay.

  Q: These, of course, are the lyrics to “Night Fever.” Can you walk us through Charlie’s sermon?

  A: Well, it starts right there with listening to everything all around you and there’s something going down for the young people who can feel it in the streets.

  Q: Go on, please.

  A: That next part about the waves means the radio, and when they sing about dancing it means people are getting up to take their time on the dance floor. And the part about sharing and stealing means there will be no property after the revolution, everybody sharing, so it won’t really be stealing.

  Q: Who is the woman controlling his mind and his soul?

  A: That’s New York, man. It’s the rhythm of the city, the beat under your feet, the big disco dance we’re all a part of.

  Q: And what is it that “we” know how to do in these next lines?

  A: It’s talking to us, the Family. We know how to do what needs to get done and how to show the world it’s time to rise.

  Q: And how’s that?

  A: By killing some of the old white people who were dead already in their paper hearts.

  Q: What did the title mean, “Night Fever”?

  A: You know what it means. Everybody knows what it means. It’s the feeling you get in the night that nothing is wrong and everything’s right and it’s time to boogie.

  Q: Is that what you did at United Nations Plaza with your knives and guns, Miss Kovacs? You “boogied”?

  A: Oh, yeah. We boogied.

  From Night Fever: The Story of Charles Manson’s Assault on the World, by Vincenzo Cozzi (with Curt Gentry). W.W. Norton, 1980.

  The media made a big deal out of calling us prostitutes, but to be accurate, we were thieves—nobody intentionally paid us for sex. I know now it’s a ridiculous distinction, but Charlie had a way of making the ridiculous sound sane. “No sense makes sense,” as he liked to say.

  If a man wanted to take us away from Infinity to a hotel room for some sex, then it was our choice to go. If the man was high, it was our job to take care of him. If the man was richer than we were, it was okay to slip a few fifties out of his ostrich-skin wallet for our time because we sure needed them more than he did. And if he was high and tripping, maybe moaning about how his wife wasn’t as skinny as we were, it was cool to pick up our shoes and quietly leave.

  If someone gave us trouble, there was always Samson to straighten them out.

  The only problem was that, as Charlie put it, we were overhunting the preserve. Infinity had a limited clientele, and pretty soon the word was out that money had a habit of disappearing when we were around. The time was coming when they wouldn’t let us into the club.

  Frodo came up with the solution. One of her “dates” took her to Studio 54 and she saw a whole new world of higher class marks, people who lost ten grand a night up their nose or between the couch cushions. She told us later she watched two girls descending from the ceiling with their legs astride a giant foam unicorn in a rain of glitter, and she knew where we had to be. Where Charlie had to be.

  The place had everything she and Charlie loved: celebrities, money, drugs, and plenty of darkness.

  From Disco Aphrodite: A Manson Girl Speaks Out from Prison, by Violet “Aphrodite” Wensinger.

  Doubleday, 1981.

  Q: Can you please state your name and occupation for the jury, sir?

  A: Steve Rubell, entrepreneur.

  Q: What is your most profitable enterprise right now?

  A: Right now? Studio 54. You may have heard of it.

  Q: And what happens at Studio 54?

  A: What doesn’t happen at Studio? It’s a party with a thousand of my closest friends.

  Q: Did you ever see the defendants at Studio 54?

  A: A few times, sure.

  Q: Do you know the dates?

  A: We really don’t keep track. I know Charlie started coming around a few months after we opened.

  Q: Did you let him in right away?

  A: Absolutely not.

  Q: Why not?

  A: What you have to understand is that I don’t run a business. I run a party, and a party is only as good as the people who come. It’s a delicate mixture, like baking a cake. Too much of one ingredient, too little of another…suddenly you’ve got a puddle of batter in your oven. That’s my main role at the Studio. I’m like the chef, picking the right ingredients each night. I think you’d be a pretty good ingredient, Mr. Cozzi, like a splash of vanilla.

  Q: Thank you, Mr. Rubell, but my leisure suit is at the cleaners. I take it Charles Manson was not the right ingredient?

  A: Not at first, no. He showed up every night in the same terrible blue suit. His hair and his beard were a mess. He looked like a lost extra from Planet of the Apes. He had a good patter, I’ll give him that—he was entertaining, talking about his philosophy of disco while I kept pointing to other people over his head.

  Q: What changed Manson’s fortunes?

  A: For one thing, he started dressing like a human being. Someone cleaned him up, trimmed him down to just a moustache, helped him pick out some tighter pants and an open shirt. He had a nice pair of boots that made him taller. And of course, he had the girls with him.

  Q: What kind of girls?

  A: Cookie Puss, Ziggy, Frodo, Aphrodite, a couple of others. We tried to let them in a few times but they refused without Charlie. Then they’d dance out in the street and they were better than half the people inside. That wasn’t good. So they cleaned Charlie up and I finally let him in. That would have been near, what, Thanksgiving of 77, I guess. I was feeling sentimental.

  Q: Did you invite him in again after that?

  A: Yeah, they were like a circus act. They danced all together and gave out acid. How old fashioned is that, acid? People liked it though and it got them loose and on the floor. They were kind of like unpaid employees. My favorite kind.

  Q: Were there any hints of violence?

  A: No, but Charlie’s big thing was getting in the DJ’s booth. He told me all the time about how he had this super power music mix that would blow everyone’s minds. I didn’t pay much attention, honestly, until he got Truman to talk to me about it.

  Q: Truman Capote?

  A: Yeah. Charlie had a way of ingratiating himself so most of the guests thought he was just this groovy little guru.

  Q: So you gave him a chance as DJ?

  A: On Truman’s suggestion, yes. He said it’d be a “spectacle,” that’s the word he used. I gave Charlie one hour. Wow, that was the biggest mistake of my life. That hour was death.
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br />   From Night Fever: The Story of Charles Manson’s Assault on the World, by Vincenzo Cozzi (with Curt Gentry). W.W. Norton, 1980.

  The disco scene in New York was one of strange, often literal, bedfellows. For better or worse, Studio 54 was a shimmering beacon of something interesting in New York, something not yet rusty, gray, or abandoned. You’d arrive in your enormous gas-thirsty Chevy with its pressure-cooker engine, and you might be bumping asses with Bella Abzug or David Bowie or Andy Warhol thirty minutes later.

  For a brief shining time, it was New York’s pacemaker, returning an artificial pulse to a dying city and some dying careers. It was a place to go where you could tell the world—forgive me—that you were staying alive.

  The quality or distance of the fame wasn’t important; a writer gelded by booze and drugs like Truman Capote could still command an audience because you never knew when he’d be somebody again.

  From “White Supremacists Can’t Dance: The Mediocre Music of Manson,” by Leslie Van Houten. Rolling Stone, December 1997.

  SCENE: A shark-eyed man wearing two-thirds of a white leisure suit is rapping on my apartment door with a .22 revolver strapped to his hip, and I can’t tell if he’s here to kill me or screw me.

  So I let him in.

  I’ve met Charles Manson in passing at Studio 54, but then, I’ve met everybody in passing at Studio 54. At Studio, everything is done in passing, and so is everyone. It’s possible I’ve danced with Charlie or his girls, or I’ve shared a drink with them, or they’ve offered me something stronger. I may even have taken it.

  When Charlie comes into my apartment, he has the bobbing strut of the supple-spined disco man. He lifts his white cowboy boots for step after step across my carpet like a sailor newly back from sea. I motion to the settee and—nodding, smiling humbly—Charlie takes a seat.

  Steve Rubell collects people for his club like you or I would collect stamps or coins, and it’s clear he has a weakness for the misprints. Charlie is the human equivalent of that stamp with the plane printed upside down, someone who probably shouldn’t be but somehow is. He isn’t beautiful and he isn’t a celebrity, but he is a spectacle, and a club needs those, too.

  Manson is even shorter in person than he seems on the dance floor, and here he resembles a little boy sitting uncomfortably on Grandma’s couch, afraid to touch the ribbon candy. He is wearing no shirt beneath the jacket of his suit, and the visible stripe of his chest hair looks sweaty as though he’s been outside all day playing. At what Charlie plays, I have no idea.

  CM: Hey, man, I appreciate you seeing me.

  TC: Can I offer you something to drink?

  We both glance at the glass bar cart and the glittering skyline of bottles there, but he shakes his head.

  CM: I’m not much of a drinker.

  TC: Neither am I.

  I pour myself my special orange beverage, suspecting I’ll need it.

  CM: I’ve seen you at 54 a few times. Everybody loves you.

  TC: Do they?

  CM: Oh, yeah. They all say you’re the guy to talk to, like you know everybody’s secrets.

  TC: That’s not love, Charlie, but sometimes it’s good enough.

  He’s glancing all around now, appraising my home, lingering on the stained glass hanging behind me and the portrait from Warhol.

  TC: How long have you been out of prison? Less than a year?

  He starts, and for the first time, I see a darkness flash in his eyes that he usually hides better.

  CM: Who told you?

  TC: You did. I’ve interviewed a lot of cons, and they all have the wariness you’re showing me right now, a kind of defensive bravado. It’s a survival mechanism, waking up from your Rip Van Winkle prison dream to a new here and now on the outside.

  CM: Prison ain’t a dream, brother.

  TC: In one way it is—time moves differently there. You learn to adapt, to be tabula rasa, the blank slate ready for whatever culture will have you.

  CM: How long have you been out of prison, then?

  TC: I’m sorry?

  CM: You don’t belong on that floor at 54 between Cher and Rocky either, I’ll tell you that. You like watching more than dancing.

  The vodka is doing nothing for my headache, and neither is Charles Manson. I let the slippers drop and prop my feet on the couch.

  TC: Please tell me you have something less obvious to say than that.

  CM: How about this: I could kill you if I wanted. This gun is loaded.

  TC: I rather wish you would. It does wonders for sales. But I doubt you will. You weren’t in prison for murder, I don’t think.

  CM: You could kill me.

  TC: Not on this carpet. Besides, you don’t want to kill or be killed. You want, let me guess, to be famous.

  CM: Why do you think that?

  TC: Because that’s why people go to disco clubs, Charlie. It’s a very American problem, wanting to belong but be special at the same time. We solve it by becoming celebrities, people who belong at a higher level.

  CM: I just want to play my music.

  TC: What instrument do you play?

  CM: I’m a DJ.

  TC: You play other people’s music?

  CM: When I play it all together, it’s my music. I make people feel good, and when I do it right, it changes them.

  TC: Into what?

  CM: Into people who are turned on. People living in the now, seeing what’s what, looking past all the jive and hustle they’re being sold.

  I sit up again because, truly, this is not a conversation that can be taken lying down anymore.

  TC: So you’re a disco revolutionary?

  CM: Most people call me a disco outlaw, but yeah, I think the world’s gonna be real different someday soon and some people are gonna be hurting.

  I cover my eyes with my hand.

  CM: Are you laughing?

  TC: Charlie, you can’t be a disco outlaw. The songs are made by companies, the beats calculated by computer. The dances have names, for God’s sake—they name the ways you’re supposed to move all in unison. The clothes you’re wearing, the words you’re using...they sold them to you. You bought them.

  CM: You don’t get it, man. Out there on the floor, we all become one. So what if they sold it to us? That’s what the pigs always do, isn’t it? They make all the shit we use to take them down. They don’t know what they’ve got so we take it from them. It’s Night Fever. We’ve got it and they don’t.

  TC: Maybe you are a man of the 70s after all.

  CM: Hey, they told me you were cool. That you saw things. I thought you did, too. Aren’t you a queer? They’re treating you and the blacks and the kids all like shit, like little money batteries, and all you’re gonna do about it is write stories?

  TC: What did you want me to do? Join your little army?

  CM: All I needed was one good word with Steve so I could do my thing. I was gonna go up into that booth and play a music mix that would start something. But maybe you’re too old and you’ve given up.

  TC: You want to DJ at Studio? That’s your Shot Heard ‘Round the World?

  CM: You’ll find out.

  I lie back down, this time covering my eyes with a pillow.

  TC: If you’d asked nicely, I would have persuaded Steve to let you do it.

  There is silence in my apartment though I can feel—almost smell—Charlie standing near me. There is the clicking snap of a holster clasp.

  TC: Just not in the face, Charlie.

  Again, there is silence.

  CM (quietly): I know how the world works.

  I feel first a warm hover and then a tugging at my zipper.

  From an unpublished essay intended for Music for Chameleons, by Truman Capote. 1980.

  Charlie had this idea that the perfect combination of music and drugs could unlock the mass consciousness of all humanity. He called it “Night Fever,” and it would turn the whole world into a disco where everybody could dance with everybody and there was nothing but love. />
  I’m not all sure where he got that idea, but I know he was amazed by how all those random movements on the floor at Studio 54 could seem like one spiritual organism.

  He worked on the set list for his night at Studio 54 like someone writing an opera. He tested it on us at the Safehouse, playing record after record and watching us make love between them. He tried it with us on MDMA and then with us on speed, and he wove together this magical disco symphony he was sure would change the world.

  “We got to be ready,” he told us not long before his big debut. There were no lights or music in the Safehouse because the power had been cut off. By then, most of us had been fired from our ordinary jobs, and he’d gotten a few of us gigs as strippers. I’d paid up our account again with money from a private dance, but Con Ed still hadn’t gotten around to flipping the switch back on for us.

  “How many people in this world do you think are all the way alive?”

  We all knew the answer was not many, especially in a city where it was easy to see them all as “traffic.”

  “Some are kind of alive, some think they’re alive enough,” he told us, “but they’re just running a program they’ve got from TV and church. Go to work, go home, eat, shit, fuck, buy things. They don’t dance. They don’t let themselves dance. They’re all part of their own hustle.”

  The thing I see about Charlie now is he rarely said anything untrue—it just wasn’t true enough.

  “They’re not used to being all the way alive. When that mix spreads from the club, it’s going to be Night Fever all over the world. The blacks are going to wake up and get theirs, the gays are going to wake up and get theirs, and all the scared white straight people are going to drop to their feet begging to be forgiven.”

  I remember Frodo squirming on one of the cushions, drizzling wax from a candle in long streaks on her bare legs. “Begging to be forgiven,” she said, smiling.

  “We’re gonna forgive some and we’re gonna fuck others, but it’s all from love. Some people can’t stand being all the way alive so we have to help them.”

  He took a long-barreled revolver from his jacket and raised it at us. He swept it around the circle and stopped to aim right between my eyes.