Acres of Perhaps

by Will Ludwigsen

  “Are you all the way alive, Aphrodite?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Are you alive enough to die?”

  “Yeah,” I said again.

  “Are you alive enough to kill?”

  I hesitated then, and Charlie’s look could have been disappointment or anger or maybe even fear. By then, he’d taught us those were the same things.

  He stood up and then he helped me stand up. He took my right hand and placed the gun there. He placed my finger on the trigger.

  “Charlie, I don’t—”

  “I know,” he said. “I know you don’t.” He knelt before me and positioned the barrel about an inch from his heart.

  “Pull the trigger,” he said.

  My drug of choice was always acid because it made me feel like I could flow through the world like mercury, shimmering and quick. I felt the gun but it seemed far away down my long winding arm, like the signal from my brain would take an hour to get there.

  “If you love me, pull the trigger,” Charlie said.

  “I can’t—”

  “There’s no ‘I,’” he said. “There’s no ‘can’t.’”

  The thing the counselors keep asking me here in prison is how we could do it. I still don’t know, but the closest I come is remembering moments on the dance floor when the music takes you over, when you forget yourself and become something more. There are kinds of music that don’t come over speakers but through groups of people, expectations and hopes, tests of love.

  I don’t know about the others, but I killed for Charlie to prove I was one of the good kinds of people who loved him.

  I pulled the trigger. There was a pop, nothing so thunderous as on TV, but Charlie sprawled back with his hands to his heart and blood seeping through his fingers. When he hit the mattress, everybody was leaping and crawling to his side, including me.

  The girls started kissing him and so did some of the boys. I patted my way up his body, crying how sorry I was. When I got to his face, I pressed my lips to his. He surged back against me like in the early days, and then he sat up.

  Everybody backed away and Charlie opened his hands. A blood-sticky bullet dropped to the floor.

  “If you’re all the way alive, nothing can hurt you anymore,” he said, holding me close.

  The lights flickered, surged, and then the record player started to turn. The word “weeeeeee” moaned from the speaker and then “…are family” leaped out at full speed. Everybody started to dance.

  At the trial, Cozzi said it had to be a blank, part of Charlie’s scheme to make us believers. All I know is that when I opened the cylinder later, the other eight bullets were live.

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

  Doubleday, 1981.

  Yeah, I was there on the night of Charlie’s big “debut.”

  Steve came up to the booth and told me what was going down and promised he’d still pay me. It was annoying, but I figured, okay, fine. Then Charlie shoved me out. I offered to show him how the mixer worked but he shot me this look like it was some kind of insult. I held up my hands and went back with Steve so Charlie could do his thing.

  His thing was to lay a big glittering turd on the dance floor.

  He had the set list in his shaking hand, and he started off with Meco’s Star Wars disco theme because, he told us, “I want to show people they’re going to outer space.”

  That was okay—it was a standard—but then he went down the rest of the list and none of it matched. It was like playing Beethoven with a boxing glove.

  See, what people don’t know about being a DJ is that it isn’t playing music: it’s listening to people, feeling them. It’s an act of love. You touch the crowd here and see what they do and then you touch them another place. Charlie’s set was like bad teenage sex, all about getting him off in the backseat of a car while he pushed and pushed, getting angry when nothing was happening.

  I don’t remember everything he played, but I know he did “Love Train” and “Shake Your Booty,” but he also did “Come Sail Away,” which is like undanceable for two full minutes. Two full minutes is an ice age on the floor. It’s long enough to kill the dinosaurs.

  Everything he played was…ordinary. Stuff you’d hear on the radio. All he had were 45s, no 12 inches, just the canned stuff that people who think they know disco would play. You wouldn’t think it was possible to be tone deaf with someone else’s music, but Charlie was.

  In the end, Charlie got twenty minutes. Truman Fucking Capote was standing in the middle of the lights holding a thumbs down. That’s how bad it was.

  Steve told a couple of big guys to show Charlie the door, but he didn’t go quietly. Neither did the girls or that giant fucking redneck. They were screaming how night fever was coming down fast and all the phonies would be burned alive. Everybody got all quiet and embarrassed for them.

  Interview with Xavier “X-Man” Martinez. From “White Supremacists Can’t Dance: The Mediocre Music of Manson,” by Leslie Van Houten. Rolling Stone, December 1997.

  One of the worst ideas I ever had, a blunder that could have cost us the trial, was calling Truman Capote to the stand as a witness. Dave Gerstock and I decided at the end it would look suspicious if none of the putative intended victims of “Night Fever” testified, especially now that all we’d have from Libby Kovacs was her grand jury testimony that Justice Dudley had ruled admissible. Capote was, for better or worse, the sanest person alive who could corroborate Manson’s motives.

  From the start, though, it was clear Capote was there to entertain himself and needle Manson at every chance.

  Probably the most famous example came on the day when I asked Capote why he’d persuaded Steve Rubell to let Charlie DJ at Studio 54.

  A: I was curious what he’d do. There was just something fantastic and dangerous about him, that’s all.

  Q: Attractive?

  A: Attractive, you mean, to people like me? I suppose he was, in a feral musky sort of way. He seemed wild and strange, like a creature you’d find left on a cottage doorstep in a crib of woven sticks. Feral but…interesting. Like a satyr.

  Q: Can you describe a satyr for the jury?

  A: I’m sure I don’t have to for the jury, but for the lawyers here, I’ll say a satyr in the Roman sense was a mythological being with the head and torso of a man but the legs of a goat.

  Q: You saw Charles Manson as a satyr?

  A: I suppose, though the trouble with Mr. Manson is the goat is his top half.

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

  JUMPIN’ JESUS!

  Psycho Disco Guru Leaps Eleven Feet to Get at Capote

  Tackled by Bailiffs as Girls Chant “Burn Baby Burn!”

  From the New York Post, April 19, 1979.

  Charlie didn’t believe every single person in Studio 54 mocked us as we were taken away—only the famous ones. Just Cher and Andy Warhol and Suzanne Sommers, Rick James and Elton John, and especially Truman Capote.

  Things got dark fast after that night. Night Fever was coming down, Charlie assured us, and there were signs of it everywhere. The Blackout last year had been only the start. The lines at the gas stations. Shirtless children climbing all over burned out cars in the Bronx. Son of Sam and the Hillside Strangler and Ted Bundy. Hijackings in the skies. Bombs in the Middle East. People everywhere broke and angry who hadn’t yet heard the call of disco.

  “When they ain’t got nothing more to hustle, they’re gonna come hustle us,” is what he kept saying.

  Guns aren’t hard to come by in New York and Charlie became a collector. The Safehouse started looking less like the harem room of an Arab potentate and more like an armory. Charlie and Samson traded drugs and sex with us for machine guns and swords and bayonets, and pretty soon they were cleaning them night and day with “Night Fever” warbling over and over from the record player.r />
  They taught us how to use them, and I guess the smallest part of me, the Indiana part, knew that when we did, it wouldn’t be good. I wish I could say I was a better person, the one my parents raised, but I guess when you hear and see the same things every day and only those things over and over, you do what the rest of the monkeys are doing.

  I’m sorry that’s all the explanation I have.

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

  Doubleday, 1981.

  Q: Okay, Ms. Wensinger, if you’re ready, please tell us what happened on the night of November 19th last year.

  A: Charlie didn’t let us see the news, but we had a radio. Between songs, they came on with this story about these people who’d killed themselves in South America.

  Q: At Jonestown in Guyana?

  A: Yeah, but we were hazy on the details. By then, we were all on speed for most of the nights and half of the days because Charlie wanted us alert for whatever came down. That’s what came down.

  Q: The murder-suicide of more than 900 followers of Reverend James Warren Jones.

  A: Back then, they were saying it was a few hundred.

  Q: What was Charlie’s reaction?

  A: He took it as a sign.

  Q: Of what?

  A: That Night Fever was starting. He had this vague idea they were all black and Communist and they liked to dance.

  Q: He was inspired by Jones?

  A: You know, I’m not so sure. I think in the end he was jealous of him. That he’d talked so many people into dying for him. All Charlie had was about ten of us.

  Q: What did he do?

  A: He turned off the radio and told us it was time. We had to get on the revolution’s dance floor and show our moves.

  Q: What was the plan?

  A: The basic gist was he wanted us to kill as many famous people in New York as quickly as we could. He joked about how many it would take to steal the headlines from Jones, what the exchange rate was between a rich white person and a bunch of broke black ones.

  Q: What did he have you do?

  A: He told us to get into dark clothes and then go with Samson and Frodo down to U.N. Plaza to get Truman Capote.

  Q: What did he mean by “get”? Do you remember his exact words?

  A: He said, ‘Write his last story for him.’

  Q: What was he going to do while you were doing that?

  A: He was going to take Cookie Puss and Ziggy to get John Lennon.

  Q: After you “got” Capote, what were you supposed to do?

  A: After Capote, we were supposed to get Barry Manilow, and after Lennon, they were supposed to get Andy Warhol.

  Q: Did anybody protest or disagree?

  A: No. Frodo was stomping all around like Godzilla, roaring.

  Q: How did you feel?

  A: I was scared. Not of doing it so much as of what was waiting for us down in the streets. Charlie had made it seem like the whole world would be like the blackout, smashing windows and beating people in the streets with pipes.

  Q: How were you armed?

  A: He gave me this crazy long bayonet that hung from a belt and Samson had a couple of Buck knives and a rifle, and I think Frodo had a hammer or something.

  Q: What were your orders?

  A: He took me aside and told me I was the smart one, the one he trusted and loved the most. He told me I knew what had to be done, that it had to be special.

  Q: Do you remember the word he used?

  A: Yes. He said to make it ‘witchy.’

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

  Samson parked his truck on 49th Street in front of 860 U.N. Plaza. The wheels popped up on the curb and we probably looked like a murderous version of the Beverly Hillbillies, Samson shirtless in his overalls. The doorman rushed at us in his uniform with the big gold epaulets and Samson jumped down from the driver’s seat. Frodo sprung from the passenger side and I was still climbing out when I heard Samson’s whooping noise and the crack of gunshots.

  All I saw across my eyes was the color red.

  I stumbled on the concrete for some reason and fell right next to the doorman, whose name I now know is Devi Ibrahim. Blood was bubbling from a large hole in the center of his face, and something like words were whistling from somewhere in that skull like air was leaking from everywhere. My face was inches from his and I think he saw me. I hope I didn’t look scary in the last moments of his life but I probably did. Everybody’s scary when you’re dying.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  I followed Frodo and Samson into the lobby, and I saw Samson poking the rifle barrel between the closing elevator doors. I saw three, four flashes in the crack of the doors, and then there was a ding when they opened again. Frodo skipped inside with her hammer raised, and the man we found wounded in the corner was holding up his hands and crying out, “Wait! Do you know who I am?”

  “You’re dead,” Frodo said, swinging the hammer. It cracked against his arm, the left ulna as they said in court, and his scream went around and around us in the elevator like a pinball. Samson was pressing the button for the 23rd floor and letting Frodo take care of business.

  “I’m the Deputy—”

  She swung lower this time, catching the man under the jaw. Teeth flew from his mouth as Samson watched with smiling approval.

  “—Permanent—”

  That was Timothy Surgeoner’s last word. She slammed the hammer down on the top of his head and it sank nearly to his nose. We didn’t find out until later he was America’s Deputy Permanent Representative to the United Nations, on his way home from the office. Frodo stomped his briefcase, laughing because it was Samsonite.

  Everything was still red.

  The elevator doors opened on the 23rd floor to a very surprised married couple, the Auldridges. We had no way to know he’d been a Green Beret in Vietnam, but he shoved his wife aside and stormed toward Samson, who hadn’t been expecting it. They fell back into the elevator and Mr. Auldridge had his thumb stuck deeply into Samson’s neck.

  Frodo took the bayonet from my belt and put it in my hands. “Do it to it!” she said.

  I looked down. Samson’s eyes were bulging, something that terrified me to see in someone I’d slept with, someone I’d loved. Yet even then I hesitated.

  Frodo wrapped her hands around mine, sticky with someone’s blood, and she guided the bayonet into the center of Chip Auldridge’s back. He lifted his head and cried out, but then Samson threw him off. I kept stabbing because he was there and he was already dead and if I was stabbing, maybe they wouldn’t make me do anything else.

  Frodo sang out a few bars of “Stayin’ Alive” in time with my motions, but then she ran into the hallway calling out, “Where ya goin’, tiny dancer?” She caught up to Mrs. Auldridge by plunging the hammer claw between her shoulder blades.

  The building seemed to list to one side when I stood up, and at the end of the hallway, I saw Samson kicking at a door. It took him two tries before splintering under the force of his foot. The two of them ran in and I staggered after, which is how my handprint got on the wallpaper. I didn’t do it on purpose. I didn’t do it to be witchy.

  Samson and Frodo were screaming in the apartment, tearing it apart in a real helter skelter, smashing the stained-glass pictures and stabbing the couches and tearing books in half at the spines. Capote wasn’t home, but they chopped or slashed their way into every closet and cabinet to be sure. Frodo threw a typewriter through the window and it tumbled to the street below, and then she threw a bunch of manuscript pages after it, something Cozzi later said was a book called Answered Prayers. It fluttered out the window like a flock of pigeons.

  Answered Prayers. When I looked it up, I found out that’s from a quote saying answered prayers are more painful than the unanswered ones.

  Before we left the apartment, Frodo leaped up onto the bed,
lifted up her skirt, and left a huge shit in the middle of the pillow. Then she wrote “BURN THIS MUTHA DOWN” and “DO IT TO IT” and “NIGHT FEVA” in blood on every wall we could find. I was the one who wrote “WE ARE FAMILY” in the elevator.

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

  Doubleday, 1981.

  While Sam, Libby, and Violet were assaulting 860 U.N. Plaza, Charles Manson was calmly driving through the city in a stolen Chrysler like a tourist dad with his daughters. He was somehow unable to find the enormous section of trees and grass on an island and follow it around until sighting one of the most famous buildings in the world.

  Manson couldn’t—or, more likely, didn’t want to—find the Dakota. For Cozzi at trial, this meant he was more interested in his own animosities than starting Night Fever, and maybe that was true. For a lot of others, it meant he was a chicken shit, and that was true, too.

  They gave up after an hour and he took them for ice cream.

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

  When Jurors Three and Eleven returned, I asked if they needed anything and they shook their heads. I could tell from their pallor and the sweat beading on their foreheads that they wanted it over as quickly as possible and I felt it was my duty to oblige. By then, five hours into Violet Wensinger’s testimony, I wanted it to be over, too.

  Q: What happened when you reached the ground floor?

  A: When the doors opened, there was an old lady standing there with one of those folding carts full of groceries.

  Q: Deborah Lunt?

  A: That turned out to be her name, yes.

  Q: What happened?

  A: She looked at us all soaked in blood, Samson with the rifle in his hand and Frodo with my bayonet. I was flexing my fingers because the blood was drying on my skin and making them stiff. That’s a funny thing to remember, but I do.