Manson in His Own Words

by Nuel Emmons

  But back then, four or five months after my release from prison, I was living a fantasy come true. I had the feeling of being above anyone’s power to ever lock me up again. Sure, the pot and pills we used were technically against the law, but they were so common, a person felt almost legal if he wasn’t actually selling. Other than nailing a few under-age broads who were already giving their bodies to whoever they fancied, I kind of had the feeling of being a good Samaritan because I was helping a lot of those kids on the streets. On more than a couple of occasions, if kids were down and out and had decided they would rather go back home, I took them back to their parents.

  I did have a lot of association with several of my old jail-house partners, some of whom were still very heavy into guns, holdups, and anything at all to make a dollar. What they did away from me was their business—I was enough of a con not to talk about them—but when I was around I made it very clear my bag wasn’t robbing or hurting anyone for the sake of a dollar. If they dug me or the girls who traveled with me, guns and all the bullshit that goes with guns were out. For the record, there is one instance when an ex-partner of mine gave me his whole arsenal, two pistols and a carbine, which I took and dumped into the bay. The guy had given them up willingly enough, but he was a little pissed that I had dumped them in the bay when they could have been sold for two or three hundred. My answer was, “Look Danny, if I’d have sold those guns, they’d have been used just like you were planning to use them.”

  I’m not sure if it was happening when I first hit the Haight, but as the months went by and I got deeper into what was going on there, I could see the district getting ugly and mean. One night I came out of a friend’s pad on Lyon Street. I had parked the van on another street a couple of blocks away. It was a cold night and I was moving pretty fast when I rounded the corner of the street where I had parked, so fast that I almost collided with three guys beating the shit out of someone. Just as I pulled to a stop, one of the three shoved a knife in their victim’s stomach. He fell to the sidewalk and didn’t make another sound. I backed away and the three guys started to make a move on me. “Hey guys, I didn’t see a thing. You don’t need to take me out,” I hurriedly said. They gave me a look, glanced at each other, and then one of them said, “Okay, split, sucker—and remember, you haven’t seen anything.” I turned and left—under the circumstances I didn’t mind having to circle the block to get to my van.

  On another occasion, Lyn, Mary and I were walking up the street, and I noticed a policeman about five yards away, behind us. Suddenly a big commotion broke out in front of us. Six guys were in some kind of hassle, yelling “motherfucker” and “you dirty bastard,” when a gunshot ended all the conversation and a guy fell to the ground. Everyone started disappearing. I turned around to look for the cop just in time to see his back going around a corner. Fuck, if everything was getting so bad that even the cops didn’t want to hang around long enough to do their jobs, Haight-Ashbury was no place for me and my girls. We started spending less and less time in that part of Frisco.

  A few weeks after we got the van, Mary either got fired or quit her job, I’m not sure which. But with none of us holding down a steady gig, there were no strings or limitations to our travel. I had to check in with my parole officer, but he was all right and went along with most of what I told him. Somehow in the fall of ’67—I think Lyn was the instigator—we ended up spending some time in a pad in Santa Barbara, a place some of the people we met in our travels turned us on to.

  Santa Barbara is not all that far from L.A. and the three of us would cruise down there pretty often. On one of the trips, we went by a pad in Manhattan Beach that belonged to a guy I had done some time with. He already had a visitor, a girl of about twenty-one. She wasn’t a prizewinner for beauty but, like Lyn and Mary, she had smarts, and the more I talked to her, the more she interested me. Her name was Patricia Krenwinkel, and she also lived in Manhattan Beach. Before leaving, she gave us her address with an invitation to stop by any time. “Any time” was just a few hours later.

  She shared an apartment with her older sister, a hard-core heroin addict. Pat was no cherry in dope or sex, but she resented her sister’s dependency and all the activity that goes on around a dope fiend’s pad. Pat’s trip, besides a secretarial job she didn’t like, was a little pot and sex in the dark. I spent three or four days with Pat at her apartment while Lyn and Mary took care of some other things.

  On the surface, Pat was full of self confidence. At one time she had been pretty deep into the Bible and believed that everything in the world was as mom and dad described it. When Pat was seventeen her parents divorced and the real world started exposing itself to her. After attending high school in L.A., she went to Mobile, Alabama, for a semester at a religious school. She wasn’t into staying any longer and returned to Manhattan Beach to move in with her sister, whose activities added to her total disenchantment with what she had thought growing up was all about. From our first hours of conversation, it was easy to see she didn’t believe in herself as much as she wanted others to believe.

  Pat’s sister was in her own little world, and even when she was home it seemed like Pat and I had the place to ourselves. We played and listened to a lot of music, stayed pretty well stoned on pot and made love. The pot and the music were a natural stimulant for passion, but when it came time to undress she had to have the lights out and be under the covers. I was sensitive to her inhibitions and began things her way. Pat had hang-ups about her body, which was actually a very good body but, in her eyes, covered with too much hair.

  I wanted to tear down those things that stopped her from liking herself, so I was extra tender and careful. Sex can be a little bit of everything. It can be low-key and tender, or sensual and violent. There are those who delight in a certain amount of pain, and there are those who, if hurt, lose the edge of a climax. On this first night with Pat I wanted more than a sex trip, I wanted to free her mind of those hang-ups as well. Nothing was hurried. I didn’t come on hungrily and savagely, and I was totally conscious of what my movement and words brought forth from her. We spent five hours in conversation, sex and complete fulfillment. Before we went to sleep, Pat put her head in my lap and cried, telling me, “Charlie, you’ve given me a new world. Anything you do has to be right. Take me with you wherever you go.”

  That was the last time I ever saw Pat cry, and her self confidence became more than skin deep. She left Manhattan Beach with Mary, Lyn and me in the little van. She didn’t even stick around long enough to pick up her last paycheck or sell her car.

  In the next few weeks we just about wore the van out. Between four people—sometimes more—living inside it and all the miles we traveled, it was an amazing vehicle. Thank you Dean Moorehouse.

  I gave a lot to the girls in the way of attention and conversation. Just three or four months earlier the talk would have been bogus convict bullshit, but the more I got into laying it out and realizing all that I was saying, the more I saw it working. And the girls were giving me as much as I was giving them—not just passion trips, but new thoughts about life. The four of us had so much harmony and love, the words became honest and real to us all. We shared more than simply doing things together. We looked at things through the same eyes, thought as one, lived as one. We were all one.

  I had a lot of pride in those girls, and to say I didn’t want to show off because of our togetherness would be a lie. So, speaking honestly, some of the traveling we did was not to see a new place or a search for an experience, but to show off my good fortune, and maybe make some of my old partners envious of me. With all my talk about getting rid of the ego, I guess I couldn’t live by all I preached. The desire to put myself where I knew a lot of other guys wanted to be never did cease to exist in me.

  From Manhattan Beach, the four of us headed north. We stopped in Santa Barbara long enough to gather any gear we had at the house, and then went on to Frisco to spend a few days dropping in on different people around the Haight. We went on
a few acid trips and partied a lot. It is amazing the amount of attention one guy and three girls pick up when they enter a place. A guy alone with car trouble can sit on the side of the road for a week and nobody will stop and give a hand, but let there be a girl and you get plenty of help. With three girls, people are so anxious to stop and give you a hand that they have wrecks. Walking down a street or going into a party, restaurant, or nightclub, you immediately get some attention. And in the right spots, if you can play a little music and the girls join in, the party becomes yours. With things shaping up as they were, the party was mine everywhere we traveled.

  From Frisco, we took the coast route up through Mendocino, Eureka, Oregon and into Washington state. For money, we’d cut a few weeds, mow some lawns, wash a few dishes or haul someone’s garbage off to the dump. That is, if we got desperate we’d take those routes. For the most part, playing music in a park or on a street corner provided pretty well for us. If we got really desperate, Pat still had her dad’s gas credit card. In the areas where grass was being cultivated and pills being manufactured, the growers and manufacturers were pretty generous. Sometimes, for a couple of hours of music, we’d not only leave with enough grass and pills for a few weeks, but all the connections needed to score any time we wanted. It wasn’t unusual for one connection to open the door for us further on up the road.

  It was on this particular trip that we first met Bruce Davis. Bruce was from Louisiana, had a couple years of college behind him and had come west a year or two prior to our meeting to live it up with the hippie generation. He was about twenty-five or -six, and he’d done jail time. Nothing like the time I had done, but enough to relate to some of my past. He’d had a passing interest in Scientology and was a good musician. I liked his company. The girls had become so much a part of me, talking to them was like talking to myself, so though he didn’t travel with us all the time, it was nice to have another guy around when he did.

  Five people traveling in the van was no problem, but when you consider the five of us had all our worldly possessions tucked away, tied on the roof or hanging from any available space, things got pretty crowded. Using that vehicle for a home was like five people trying to set up housekeeping in a phone booth. During the summer traveling up and down the coast in California had been comfortable enough because if too many bodies were around, the weather permitted sleeping outside. But up there in Oregon and Washington, things got damp and uncomfortable in the fall. So we headed back south.

  There were some guys I wanted to look up in Nevada, so instead of taking the coast route we traveled inland. When we got the Reno area, I headed for Mustang Ranch, hoping to locate an old prison buddy. Mustang Ranch was one of Nevada’s legal whorehouses. When I got there, it wasn’t a house at all, but several large mobile homes assembled in a love pad spacious enough to accommodate rooms for at least twenty girls. The fees started at twenty dollars and quickly rose to five hundred depending on the pleasures and time wanted by the customer. The parking lot was open, but a cyclone fence with an electric gate kept out unannounced guests. Passage beyond the gate was controlled by an inside switch, permitting only those who had been observed by the madam or house man. Naturally I went in alone. Once inside, all the girls that weren’t active at the moment were called into the lounge for my review, and there were some way-out girls for selection. Five or six months earlier, I might have emptied my pockets and sold all my possessions just to get lost between the legs of some of those girls; now the whole scene was amusing, and I was enjoying the fact I wasn’t one of the needy customers. “No, no,” I told the madam, “I got a whole world of girls out there, I just came by to see a friend.” The madam sent the girls back to their rooms and told me my friend wasn’t around.

  I spent a few days around Carson City looking for old pals and earning a few dollars. I sat in on some poker games, testing my old skill as a joint card shark, and got lucky without having to cheat. We left Nevada with a lot more money than when we had arrived.

  Back in California, just outside Sacramento, we saw the answer to our cooped-up existence in the van. With some skillful negotiating, some dollars from Carson City, and the owner’s pleasure in eyeballing the girls, we traded our little van for a spacious school bus. Sacramento was a hang-out for a lot of the people we knew from the Haight, so we had a lot of places to fall out while we converted our school bus into a home.

  A friend of mine was also living in Sacramento. Besides being a jail-house acquaintance, he had been a friend and working partner when I was trying to make it as a pimp in the late 50s. He was one of those guys I looked up to in the joint, and even when we were working together on the outside I was inclined to follow his advice. He used to tell me: “To your face, everyone is your friend, but if you really want to test a guy’s character, turn your back on him for a few minutes around your old lady. If he don’t try to fuck her, he is a pretty tight friend. But if the guy tries to make it with the girl the minute you turn your back or get locked up, cut the guy loose. He ain’t no friend.” For all my friend’s advice, every time I turned my back on him or got locked up, he was one of the first to try nailing one of my broads. But I liked the bogus son-of-a-bitch and enjoyed his company. There was added enjoyment when I dropped in on him with those young pretty girls. When he saw how they busted their asses to make me comfortable, he made no bones about wishing he was in my shoes. He kissed my ass to get closer to the girls, and my head may have grown a little bigger because of it.

  Living in the bus was like going from a one-room cabin to a mansion. It was our house, our studio, our love pad, as well as our transportation. It soon became one of the most popular vehicles along the coast. Everyplace we stopped, someone wanted to join us. Countless people had experiences in that bus they will remember as long as they live. Freedom, love, and music were our thing, and understanding—each always willing to honor the feelings and thoughts of others—tightened our circle.

  My music reflected the happiness of our lives. Everything was coming together. With that thought in mind, I remembered the studio contact who’d been out of town when I was in L.A. I again tried contacting him. When things are going good, it seems like more good things fall into place. He accepted my call and said: “Sure, come on down, we’ll give a listen and if there’s something there we can set up a session.”

  I told my P.O. what was happening and he made the arrangements for parole supervision to be transferred to southern California. Before heading south we spent a few more days around the Haight, and Susan Atkins came into the picture. I was in one of those old houses in the Haight where it was constant party time. Normally, it was the type of place where people are in and out between acid trips and loud music, but on that particular day the activity was at a minimum. Several people were sitting around a room, smoking good, mellow grass. I was playing the guitar and singing. The door to the hallway was open and from time to time people from other rooms would stop at the open door or come inside to listen. Susan, who later became Sadie to all of us, was one of those uninvited but welcome guests. After I put away my guitar and all the other people were gone, Susan introduced herself to me, saying how much she loved listening to my music. I politely thanked her and the conversation continued. A few minutes later we were up in her room making love. The scene with Susan wasn’t finesse and persuasion, but a battle of the bodies to see who was the strongest and the more talented of the two. I wasn’t about to let no broad out-do me, so I gave her all she wanted and more. Her big thing was to be on top, not just in position, but in rhythm and control. She wanted to dominate and she was an exciting challenge, but when it was all over she was as limp as a rag, whispering, “Charlie, Charlie, Charlie, oh my God.”

  In the course of our earlier talk, I had mentioned I was heading south for a recording session. Before I left the bedroom, Susan had asked to come along. She brought two of her girlfriends, Barbara and Ella. Both were pretty girls and just as game for anything as Susan was.

  As we started for L.
A., the mansion on wheels was getting smaller. Bodies and possessions were everywhere, but there always seemed to be room for one more. And the particular “one more” I wanted was the preacher’s daughter, young, innocent Ruth Ann Moorehouse.

  Shortly after I traded Dean’s piano for the van, I had lured Ruth Ann into visiting Mendocino with me. There she provided me with perhaps the most memorable and rewarding experience of my life. While the whole scene may seem gross and immoral to some readers, I have never felt anything but gratified for taking a gift that was denied me in my youth.

  To be in Mendocino with me, Ruth Ann had to run away from home. So we decided I would say goodbye to her and her folks, she would stick around the house for another day and then meet me at a place not too far from her home. That done, we drove to Mendocino. During the trip to the coast, we were very much like father and daughter, she full of curiosity and questions about life and everything she saw, me answering and explaining. At the coast she got a big thrill out of running barefoot along the beach, and I thrilled at watching her. I admired the beauty of her body and her youthful energy as she chased the out-going waves.

  When she tired of her play along the beach, it was natural to go inside the van to dry off and relax. On entering the van, the father-daughter relationship became one of boy and girl, youthful lovers out for their first experience with sex. You can resent my making that statement, but at that moment the significance of what was about to happen erased the difference in our ages. I was as young as Ruth Ann, and the act was even more meaningful to me.

  I didn’t push any grass or pills on her. I wasn’t forceful or demanding. Once inside the van, I put my arms around her and kissed her lightly on the lips. She responded with equal affection. We exchanged kisses and embraces with mutual emotion. I treated her like the most delicate flower on earth. My love and desire for her was expressed with all the sincerity in my possession. She didn’t struggle against my kisses or my hand at her breast, nor did she pull away when my hand slipped inside her panties. All her responses indicated she wanted me as much as I wanted her. When I started to remove her panties, she made the slightest effort to escape and said, “But my daddy . . .” Before she could say more, I whispered, “Forget your daddy. I’m your daddy. Doesn’t this feel too good to be wrong?” She let me remove the panties and the rest of her clothing and lay there watching me as I removed mine. We went back to the soft passionate kisses, my hands exploring her body.