Whether Charlie's powers as super refuse man on the outside reeked of the amazing or of the numero uno jailhouse con, the bearded little man who would carve a swastika onto his forehead carries in his marrow the same sort of hatred for his "followers" (and humanity in general) as did Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels, another shriveled, crippled man, whose personal disgust for menchheit reached to murdering millions - even his own wife and children, and finally himself.
Armed with a Goebbels view of mankind, and out of his of twisted past, Charlie Manson piecemealed together a personal Armageddon. Marshalling a league of troopers - a band of garbage people - he unleashed an attack at a world that had not only caged him in a shrunken body, but deposited him like a used bottle in some dark corner while gifted others of physique, of beauty and of talent, basked in the limelight. And it was these others taking the bows that Charlie sentenced to death.
He wanted to kill those that claimed the fame and fortune and the good life that had been denied him since before he knew there the difference between right and wrong - before he knew there was life beyond the whip and the chain.
"Charlie picked out people to be put to death," the ex-follower says, "the same as you figure out a Christmas list. He picked people everyone knew as heroes - like Steve McQueen and Frank Sinatra - Tom Jones, for god's sake, and Elizabeth Taylor, and people that everybody adores and wants to be like. That's how you put the fear into people, Charlie told us, you butcher what they dream of being. You kill off these gilded replicas of fame and happiness, and when you smash these you can go right into the heart of the dark ..."
It is there - "into the heart of the dark," that this revised Amok Books edition attempts to escort the reader. Quotations in this book are from extensive personal interviews with Charles Manson in Los Angeles County Jail, and in later penal institutions. Other statements by Manson were obtained from intermediaries, from court appearances and from convicted Family members now spread in numbers and vehemence through several states and institutions, with a steadily increasing allegiance to the notions espoused by Manson.
Material herein not derived from official records, police files, transcripts and documents is the result of interviews with principals whose names appear throughout the text.
Convicted murderer Robert "Bobby" Beausoleil, charged with the first of the so-called "Manson murders," invited the author to San Quentin to "set the record straight."
Bobby Beausoleil had not been "told what to do" by Manson, he claimed in 1972 while awaiting excecution on Death Row. Beausoleil said he did what "needed to be done," as the culmination of his personal "philosophy" which he calls "the swinging of the pendulum of death." He had his own band of followers, Bobby says, a "philosophy" that paralleled Charlie's, and together, as he would assert, they "brought society to its knees." Everything they did, he says, "was right."
Similar exchanges with other Manson Family members - Sandra Good, the now-high priestess of the "Manson Movement," and Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme, serving a life sentence for the attempted assassination of then-President Gerald Ford - has made necessary this revised publication, now under the Amok imprint.
Some names of those still wishing to remain anonymous have been left fictitious, fearing retaliation by any number of Manson activists: the Aryan Brotherhood factions co-originated by Beausoleil on Death Row, numerous Satanic cults and cells associated with Sandra Good and others, and several neo-Nazi skinhead "action committees" interviewed by the author. This horror story was invented by Charles Manson, and is now rooted in the American consciousness as indelibly as the Kennedy assassinations, the Vietnam War, Richard Nixon, the murder of Martin Luther King, Jr., the surfing sounds of California's Beach Boys, and the Beatles - their own leader, John Lennon, "brought to his knees" by another American murderer.
John Gilmore
Los Angeles, 1995
Caught in a Toxic Culture
About thirty years ago I suddenly could see the change. It's one of the reasons I wrote The Garbage People. Like I was witnessing from one side of a hill the burning of a town; everything that it had been was funneling up in black smoke. I'd been visiting Mansonites Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme, the most direct link to Charlie, Sandra Goode, a kind of high priestess of the weirdoes, and Bobby Beausoleil, then on Death Row for murder, awaiting his seat in the gas chamber.
I was heading back to L.A., where, though everything would seem familiar, it was only props because of the smoke and the fire. "The breaking up of the world" was a phrase that came to mind. I'd touched the breaking up of the world the same as if I'd hoteled on a fault line, floated naked in a poison river.
Everything that had been laid out as gospel for as long as I could remember had been torched and was turning to ash. What would follow wouldn't quite be the anarchy that was going on at the time, but a clear caving-in from within. A quiet implosion, and Charlie Manson had grabbed up the banner.
Nobody was going to volunteer for Vietnam, and if anyone did he'd come back a schlemiel or a schizo - for sure somebody's target for rocks and rotten tomatoes. Richard Nixon was an asshole and everybody knew it. His hands were in the cookie jar and crumbs were falling from his kisser.
Cops weren't giving a shit if you shot the geek next door instead of loaning him the mower, or so it seemed. Everything we knew or had held in our hands was turning to jello and running between our fingers. Politicians were the real scum and what we'd been fed as truth was lies and illusion.
We've come to discover there's nothing on the other planets - dirt, rock, gaseous or frozen wastes. We're apparently whirling around alone in the universe, and the fact we're facing is that in time there'll be nothing. We'll have ceased to exist and what's. left will be dirt - broken rock, nothing else.
From the beginning of human history there has been a so-called generation gap between parent and child. Ancient Egyptians complained, "What are we gonna do with these damn kids? What's becoming of this generation?" Ancient Chinese said the same thing: "What're we gonna do with these damn kids?" Everyone's family (except maybe Pat Boone's!) felt the same way until the Sixties when a cavernous breach split in the earth. The world of rules, standards and regulations structured back in Biblical times rocked violently under the spreading quake. The foundation failed and the old standbys of respectability and morality could not bridge the Grand Canyon of distance.
The youth of today stand before us as aliens, heirs to a garage sale of platitudes and standards that are worthless to them. The children are now on the Internet with instant access to a world of information and experience that didn't exist a few years back and an aptitude to function in that world that few elders understand. They are the future, but they are caught between two worlds - a failing past and an uncertain destiny. We are the past and there's nothing left to learn from the past. Most modes of public education are obsolete. Franz Kafka had it right when he said "Probably all education is but two things: first, parrying of the ignorant children's impetuous assault on the truth and, second, gentle, imperceptible, step-by-step initiation of the humiliated children into the lie."
Our culture has turned to poison - our world a hazardouswaste dump site. Youth has evolved to the point where it knows it's been lied to. We've created a Frankenstein society. We've made our children prisoners to the monster. There's nothing to learn from the past. If the child survives our blunders, wars, neutron bombs and diseases, she will be miraculously washed up on the shores of a new world. The rule that only from the past comes the truth of the future is but one of the platitudes winding up on the rubbish heap. The child faces a world of unexplored territory - it's the Amazon jungle, the Sahara desert. It's walking on the moon. A great wave is breaking and laying bare a new, exciting, promise-and-potential filled world, a virgin world of experience that most present-day adults have no access to. We'll be dead and buried, and good riddance.
The Colorado shootings and the mounting teen suicides, drug use and apathy are only symptoms of our failure. Charles Manson holds
the banner. The "breaking up of the world" really began mid-century. What we've created and handed to youth is a disposable world of throwaway values and empty standards, of clay-feet heroes and expediency, with profit as the only attainable glory. We created the automatic weapons now in the hands turning against us. They attack us not as a deliberate affront to ourstandards, but to fulfill their evolutionary role. A quarter-century back we lost the "war on drugs" as a result of political expediency, and we've emerged in this time and space as relics to our mutant youth. In clinging to our warehouse of standards we've forfeited real communication. We are burying ourselves with our artifacts; our hands struggling out of the sand as we suffocate.
John Gilmore
Los Angeles, 2000
He is standing behind bulletproof glass in the Los Angeles County Jail, a windowless concrete complex bordered by a cement wash and old freight yards. He puts one palm flat against the glass. An odd gesturing. Strange. His bones themselves appear to bend. He contorts his body with the control of a fakir - into a shape not human. His skeleton seems rubbery, unbreakable; mystifying. The small hands, the thin lengthy fingers with long squared-off nails, mash together suddenly. They move protectively across the body, knotting at the chest. Hunching down, his habit for effect, he makes the ugliest face possible: the cheekbones themselves bend up, wrenching as the brows gnarl down in creases and the whole face folds into itself. In a moment the skin has a gum rubberiness, drawing tight, stretching tense as a drumskin. The eyeballs seem sucked inward and the insistent outline of his skull is right there. You are shocked. He is a monster.
This is Charles Manson.
Just as quickly he beams, laughing again with broad expansive gestures. The face has changed from a mask of death to a glassy mirror now while he reveals himself as a self-proclaimed prophet, a seer of souls: his eyes are glistening with an intense shine that makes you wonder if he is sane, or even human.
"I live in my world, and I am my own king in my world, whether it be in a garbage dump or if it be in the desert or wherever it be, I am my own human being," Manson says. And those who traveled with him in the garbage dumps and shadows of the "Establishment" made up the force of the "Infinite Soul" - an "all-seeing, all-knowing" strength believed tapped by Manson and responsible for the murders of actress Sharon Tate and seven others in one spontaneous act that struck society like an avalanche.
He is talking rapidly now, the words strung together with grunts, animal sounds - more grimaces, the joker behind a gruesome "HelterSkelter" murder spree. Any victim could have served as well. The murderers didn't know the victims. The crimes violated all sense of order. He has to be a "madman, a Devil," they say - perhaps even more guilty for the slayings than those "followers" of Manson named as the actual murderers.
"When you talk about me," Manson laughs, "make me a tough guy, the meanest man in the world - make me the Devil."
He shrugs at the legalities. "I'm dead!" he declares.
"I have a race to run and I am the race horse. It doesn't matter what they do with my body. They can move it here and move it there, but they can't get me!"
If one could believe it - the Manson Philosophy - perhaps this small bearded man has a head start toward dematerializing into pure nothingness where the physical world with its physical pain and its physical bodies means nothing. In the new immaterial dimension Manson foresees, who cares how physical bodies are treated? In such a mind trip, everything is reduced to a sequence of meaningless disconnected events as cause or effect, consequence or action, all but the "now" fades to oblivion - no past to hang onto, no future to fear, nothing solid to get in the way. A devil's trick, such "freedom" from the physical body? A new dimension? Or a convenient, programmed response to a lifetime of deprivation, brutality and pain?
Most of Manson's life had been spent behind bars. An unwanted child, he was shipped to foster homes or confined in juvenile centers. No ballgames, fishing trips, brothers or even friends attended his adolescence. Only delinquency courts, reformatories and city jail. He was educated and became an adult largely in prisons or penitentiaries spread across the country, arrested or charged under aliases on forty or more occasions, the crimes filling six pages in the Bureau of Criminal Identification.
His hair straggly and unkempt, Manson strokes his beard carefully, describing a philosophy of "peace" he claims to have found in confinement.
"I've been handcuffed all my life," he says. "There was a picture of me in the paper the other day with my hands crossed and they thought it was a special pose. But it's like instinct, when you see a camera, you cover your handcuffs. That's been my life - a cot, a basin, a wall. In reform school I had a cot, a basin, a wall. I was on the outside. I had a cot, a basin, a wall. I'm not sure how much time I've spent in solitary confinement, you could say that's where I'm from. There and from the line of people nobody wants. What happens is you spend most of your life in reform school, in prisons, in institutions, and you forget what the world is all about. You are the stranger and you don't know how the free world works anymore. Your body, your physical body is locked up, and it's been that way most of your life. But then you understand that your mind is free. I realized I was better off in the penitentiary because I was free! "
Earlier, in the pawning off between foster homes and reform schools, Manson gained a "secret" confidence in what he alone could do, as though he had been singled out by some quirk in the structure of things and left with an awareness he believed to be his alone. It was not something he could willingly discuss, as it were, in words and theories. He wasn't even sure what it was, but he knew its existence as a part of him, no less real than an arm or a leg.
One of Manson's institutions "for correction" was the Federal Reformatory in Chillicothe, Ohio. There, in late October, 1951, he befriended a boy named Toby who spent most of his time in solitary confinement.
Manson later told an acquaintance, "Toby had one of the best voices I'd ever heard that wasn't strictly professional, and he played blues guitar. He could hypnotize with his voice. And he could hypnotize by suggestion. He could have you turn into stone, your hands; you could hold them together in front of you and you could have four people, even six others, divided at each side of you and pulling on each arm and they couldn't separate, couldn't break your hands apart."
Manson learned from the inmate, though for some time, he admits, he feared the man with this strange power.
"He had a power, a real power that was in his eyes, coming from inside him. He had things going that I hadn't even heard about."
Toby, the teacher, was "definitely satanic," but perhaps it was only "natural" that Manson, the pupil, should soon overcome his fear of strange "satanic ways" and find a new appreciation and hunger for power. Just sixteen years old, already long "pushed around" from place to place - insecurely footed, with nothing backing him up and nowhere to turn but to himself - Manson had for some time already been developing a con man's eye for survival, storing up tricks to give a small man the edge. It was a habit he would keep. And in those early days with Toby the excitement grew as he began to comprehend the power and the possibilities of the mind.
"The powers of the brain are so, so vast, it's beyond understanding, beyond thinking, beyond comprehension," Manson says. "People reflect themselves into things they want to believe ... It is reflection and illusion," and Manson's trick.
No one knew where his new trick would lead, but it was a beginning. Manson's own mind was quick, with his IQ estimated at 114. Though during his reformatory years he gained only the equivalent of a seventh grade education, more and more he began turning to the "mind" for survival. Perhaps remembering from Toby, and developing his own powers of persuasion, Manson adapted in a special way to the "ins and outs" of prison life. The ease with which he could control and manipulate inmates aroused authorities. They expressed concern yet believed nothing could divert his will. Manson had discovered the power of the mind. And while using his mind to influence, he also used it to escape. He had
"inclinations" and "feelings" that basically he was not the body they kept locked behind bars - he was something "other" than what they could beat on and cage.
Before being transferred to Chillicothe, Manson had been sentenced for auto theft in March, 1950 to the National Training School in Washington, D.C., "the hard joint," where beatings became a part of his normal environment.
"Any new guy that came in there, was right away they'd come up to him. The prisoners and the bulls, they tried to put fear in you. That was their thing, to make you afraid, to put fear in you. And if they got their fear into you, and you showed that you were afraid of them - eight or ten would jump on him and fuck him and make him suck them off. And when he was in his cell, the big guy will come over to him, he will say, `gimme those cigarettes,' and the little guy will say, `but these are all the cigarettes I got, man,' and the big guy just grabs them from the little one, and says, `I said gimme those cigarettes,' taking them like that. And if you're scared at all, and show it, and let them take what you've got, the others are there, beating on you, and the more fear you show the more they beat. You had to be a tough guy. They had to know how tough you were.
"At the other reform schools," Manson recalls, "the Christian Brothers had whacked us around a lot, slapping us here and there, and I ran away, so they put me in tougher places and I kept running away. I'd managed to escape from one reformatory twenty-seven times. None of us ever had any fathers there, there was no one to look up to. My father is the jail house. My father is `the system.' The cops and the counselors in the reform schools, they were on their own ego trips. All they'd do was try to get everyone to squeal on each other. We'd get in fights over it, over squealers. The counselors got their kicks that way. They liked that, the cops. We'd fight and they got their kicks ... Where I am from if you snitch you leave yourself open to be killed. I could never snitch because I wouldn't want someone to kill me. So I have always abided by that law. It is the only law that I know of ...
Manson: The Unholy Trail of Charlie and the Family Page 2