"There was a guard there who liked to push me around a lot and beat on me whenever he got the chance. Once I knocked over a piece of machinery by accident and he hit me about fifty times with this big wooden paddle, like a big stick. He was a sissy, like that, and really got a kick out of beating me. And that night I had to go to the associate warden and let him beat on me with a leather strap. So that was what I knew, that's what had been home for me ... I'd been in a lot of bad violence and I showed them how tough I was by putting on a bad face. You couldn't treat them with any sort of feelings of love. If you did, or if you ever expressed that you were not a bad one, they'd think you're really afraid of them, and that's what they wanted."
Manson put on his mask. It seemed the "real" Manson was never to appear again. After awhile he learned to push aside fear, to be as "tough" as they come. He was, after all something "other" than what they could beat on and cage, and more and more he believed that his mind could not be imprisoned. "In jail there is a whole new attitude, a whole different way of thinking," Manson says. He admits he doesn't think like people in the "outside world," people who put importance on their lives.
"My life has never been important to anyone, not even in the understanding of the way you fear the things you fear and the things you do ...
"Now," he says, "I'm dead, but so what? I have no fear of dying, because I'm free." And he doubles his fist and places it against his chest. "These others are not free. I am, and when I get tired of this little game I'm going to pick the time to die, pick my own time out of it. I'll know when and I'll know when it is my time," he smiles. "I'm going to lie down, put a little white tag on my toe with the name Charles Manson on it and then I'm going to lay back and die."
He was born out of wedlock on November 12, 1934, in Cincinnati, Ohio, to a teenage alcoholic prostitute. Charles Manson was unwanted. He was not born a devil, though a friend was later to rumor that he had been baptized in hell. His sixteen-year-old mother, Katherine Maddox, later married an older man to give the child a name. But the man disappeared soon after the wedding and the boy was never to see his father. He would remember him only as "Scotty," though he might not have been the real father. "So from birth," Manson would say, "I'm a five-and-dime bastard ..." There was no proof that Scotty was his father, and in the future it would make little or no difference when Manson himself was to become the "father image" in his relationships with others. Particularly young girls. But for Manson the "universe" became the father, a substitute father with deeper roots yet, supplanting the more personal guidance he never found. And, Manson asserts, when the universe is father, God and the Devil and all become one, all is as it must be and all is perfect and nothing matters.
"There is no good and no bad," he says. "There is no difference between you and I. There is only one thing and that thing is everything. I am the father. You are the father. And I understand the universe through me. The truth is, and that's all. It doesn't matter what words you use, millions of words. The truth is what it is - that's the truth, what's here and now. I go there and I'm not here anymore. And now I come back and I'm not there anymore. Deductive logic says this, comparative logic says that," he continues. "Just what's here and now is what counts. It's infinite and it's nothing. It's all there is and it doesn't matter what you do - it's all perfect and the way it is supposed to be."
Telling a story, he elaborates: "There were these two kids - everybody thought I was cruel because one day the youngest boy fell in a three-foot ditch. There was a lot of bushes, the slope was three or four feet above the ditch. Down there it was muddy and he was crying. Others standing around said, `Help him out,' but I didn't. I said, `Watch.' About twenty minutes passed or so and he stopped crying and started to climb out on his own. And the second time he tried to climb out he fell back down, but kept on climbing out more. Finally when he made it, climbed out, he was really tired, and stood in front of me and smiled. I pushed him back in the ditch again."
Manson says he showed his followers "the best I could what I would do as a father, as a human being to be responsible for themselves, not to be weak and not to lean on me. And I have told them many times, `I don't want no weak people around me. If you are not strong enough to stand on your own, don't come and ask me what to do. You know what to do.' I said, `Let the child go down. If he falls that is how he learns, that is how you become strong, by falling ...' And when the boy came out the second time I told him, `I am not your father. The universe is your father. It's the universe."'
So the universe is the father and everything is perfect. But with Manson the universe is never the mother. His own mother, long since but a shadow in Manson's memory, was arrested and sent to prison when he was four years old. Along with a brother, she was convicted of assaulting and beating men she hustled along the riverfront, and the problem of Manson's custody was transferred to reluctant grandparents in McMechen, West Virginia. Then the elderly woman became ill and the boy was sent to live with an aunt and uncle in Illinois, in a declining neighborhood of frame and stucco houses with untended yards. The household was one of constant tension, and while his mother served her sentence the boy found little affection or guidance. At times his aunt was harsh, and as if to "soften the blows" his uncle would give him pocket money for movies or ice cream, sometimes even taking him on trips around the countryside. For Manson, though, it was a cold, unreal place where grown-ups spent their lives. He was a stranger to his immediate surroundings within that larger, "perfect universe" he was later to praise.
A neighbor remembers the child as being "very quiet, keeping to himself most of the time and giving the impression of being scared. At other times he'd be as peaceful as you could imagine. They didn't have no trouble from the boy."
By the time Manson's mother was released from prison, his uncle had developed respiratory trouble and it was decided the boy should be returned. His mother complained, however - he was a responsibility she couldn't handle. There was no money, she said, and soon found ways to relieve herself of his custody. There were foster homes - there was always an orphanage. Whenever the boy returned as his mother's "responsibility," she would disappear for days at a time in the heavy-drinking, fast-moving crowd she followed. One bartender recalls her as "in and out of the place. She had a drinking problem," he said, "but as long as she's got the money she's entitled to live as she likes." Manson vaguely recalls a climate of remorse that would often follow these sprees. The young woman would make stern promises to "be a good mother," but each vow would be broken by subsequent binges of liquor and men. She constantly moved. Manson's childhood spanned "what seemed like a hundred" dingy apartments and rooming houses. "I was always waiting in a room somewhere for someone to return." He found momentary playmates on the streets, passing strangers or straggly neighborhood children. "There was nothing but emptiness and violence ..
If he wasn't being beaten at home, he was being beaten on the street or seeing others being beaten. "I don't know how big I was," Manson says, "I wasn't big, I know that, and I stopped on the sidewalk and watched these guys beating on this other guy. I didn't do anything except watch this big guy that was doing most of the serious beating, and I was worried he'd go after me with that stick or club and I'd run or get busted up. He whacked the guy across the face with it and the guy's teeth came out. They just popped out like you'd flip a coin in your fingers, popped and hit the sidewalk right in front of me. I wanted to tell someone about it but there wasn't nobody to tell it to."
His mother was as much a stranger as the different foster parents, administrators, streetwalkers, policemen and sleeping tramps in all-night movie houses. In most of the rooms where his mother took him to live, the boy was the brunt of aggravations, and an eyesore to his mother's visitors - "the johns and tramps she'd drag in off the street," he says.
He kept to himself. Though friendless, his young mind bypassed the loneliness of his surroundings. He watched, listened, pretended his imaginative resources knew no limit. And he began to steal, as if to
hold onto something that continually flew away. There was a consistency and permanency to the habit of stealing and it became easier. With everything transient, the thefts and goods he carried with him offered a sense of stability, a kind of reward. An object owned gave identity to an owner, an identity that had yet to be acknowledged.
He finally accompanied his mother on a trip to Indianapolis with a traveling salesman. The man made promises, but instead of security his mother found herself stranded. Again she turned to foster homes or distant relatives. "I'll be back for him in a couple of days," she'd say, but weeks would pass. The scenery continued to change but the boy played little part in the decisions made.
"He just didn't fit anywhere," a relative says. "Going back and forth like that he didn't have any practical sense of where he belonged. I suppose soon enough he didn't care."
Manson continued to steal, was finally caught, and was sent to reform school. "When I was nine years old I was sent there. One of the kids that nobody wanted, that society didn't want, so that's where I was sent ... What they gave me there was a room - a wall - a wash basin."
He was caught stealing again three years later, declared delinquent and sent to the Gibault School for Boys in Terre Haute, Indiana.
"They show the front of a reform school, show some old lady smiling that is supposed to be helping the kids. All the old rich bitches. Then they take little Joey and Skinny Frank who ass-kiss all the guards, and put them out front `Look how happy these kids are!' But they don't show the kids in the back. No, they don't show the ones that're in the back of the place, the ones that don't ass-kiss with what's going on out in front. They're the ones that aren't going to be used up front for the programming and whitewashing, for the old ladies that want to see how good it is there and how happy the boys are. But what about the ones in the back? Nobody wants them, nobody's got any use for them."
Manson was in the back, an outcast. At home now with the incorrigibles, the "tough guys," they became his "own kind," and branded by his own needs and by his surroundings he was to remain an outcast for the rest of his life.
"The first time I'd been in reform school it was for a year, the second time it seemed like a hundred. And when I got out, I hit the street by myself like that with nothing happening, no breathing down my back. I hadn't ever dialed a telephone in my life. I'd never gotten on a bus and rode one. I wasn't ready for the world of society - I didn't know anything. All I knew was that in reform school I'd had a basin, a cot, and. a wall, and I'd learned that whatever hand you're dealt, that's the one you got to play."
He tried to live life on his own terms, not returning to his mother or other relatives. He found a messenger job and rented a small room in a downtown flophouse. Those who knew Charles Manson then reached similar opinions: "There was nothing discernibly bad about him but there wasn't anything especially good in him, either. He was a personable young boy, but there just didn't seem to be anything backing him up."
Too young and ill-equipped to assume the adult role in the "outside world," Manson sought to impress his will on whatever situation he was faced with, to use reality as a tool he'd learned to handle effectively only in confinement. Secretly, he preferred the life in reform school and already regarded himself as a "stranger" to society. He began to live on the outside as though he were still in jail. "At times I'd wake up somewhere,' he says, "not knowing where I was. Am I locked up? Am I on the outside? I didn't know whether I was in or out. And then I'd find I was outside - and I'd open the door. I used to get a kick out of the door handle. I could feel it and put my hand around it and open and close the door. People thought I was nuts and they'd say `hey, you dummy kid, quit opening and closing the door,' and then I'd think - shit, I hear them saying that and I wish I was on the inside and not here to listen to their bullshit ..."
At fourteen, fired from various odd jobs when they'd discover he'd lied about his record, he further developed a painful sense of hostility against the "free world." The third time he was arrested for theft, his mother acted quickly, fearing a parental neglect complaint. She now believed she could permanently unburden herself of the boy. By declaring him "errant" he'd be sent away, and the authorities would have full charge over him. In her desperation to turn the boy over - to get rid of him - however, she was forced to reveal her own background as well as her son's and was charged with adultery. She fled the county to avoid prosecution, but her plan had not backfired. Manson was made a ward of the Marion County Juvenile Center.
What was this Center life? More beatings, more fear - more overcoming pain and trying on the tough-guy role.
A reverend who served as a chaplain for the Catholic boys and visited the juvenile center almost daily recalls making a "wholehearted attempt to get to know and understand the boy ... He attracted my attention because he didn't have anyone who ever came to see him or cared much about him, so I kind of took over and tried to be sort of a daddy, I guess. And he certainly had a great need for people in his life. So I'd take him over to my mother's - she remembers him very well as a kid that sort of followed her around the house and when she was fixing supper he'd be standing right there, wanting to help her. He was a very dependent type kid who craved attention and affection, and never got it, except in antisocial ways." So the priest saw Manson as "a lovable young boy who needed lots of attention - a very genuine lost little boy." He continued to visit Manson at the Center, hoping to break through "the callus" the boy was gathering between himself and adult authority. The priest then made an effort to generate community support to send Manson to Boys Town in Nebraska. The priest regarded the effort as "a very good way to bring to the attention of the people in Indiana what was going on, how boys like him get stranded in centers and cannot get out of them."
The reverend's attempts were successful in 1949. He personally accompanied the boy to the bus for Boys Town, U.S.A. An Indianapolis newspaper carried a photograph of Manson in a suit and tie, with a story captioned, "Boy leaves `sinful' home for new life in Boys Town."
But Manson had long since formed ways of his own. He wasn't "fresh fuel," as he recalls it, for propaganda. He stayed only three short days in Boys Town. On the first day he met another recent arrival who shared his distrust for team efforts and for the absence of hatred and fear. Two days later both boys ran away, stealing a car, then a motorcycle, on their way through Illinois. There, after a day of "nothing to do" and ready to show the "world" how tough they were, they pulled a robbery of a supermarket for more than two thousand dollars.
In April, Manson was committed to the Indiana Boys School in Plainfield, but during the next six months he escaped several times. His "runs" soon reached a sleight-of-hand perfection. He thought, "Could it be possible to make myself unseen? Could I be invisible by some kind of power? To be there but not to be there ..."
In the years to follow, it would become almost second nature to Manson to believe in secret passageways, hatches, trap doors, exits that all others were blind to. Years later, charged with the toughest of all crimes - murder - he would lay claim to being the only one knowing the whereabouts of a "secret river that runs beneath Death Valley, right under the ground."
Though records at Plainfield indicate "frequent escape attempts," Manson was paroled to live with relatives in West Virginia. "I'd rather spend another six months here," Manson told an inmate on the day of his parole. He reached the home of his uncle in July, convinced that his relatives resented his parole and that by nowhe was a "different breed" of man. "They wouldn't look me in the face while they were talking to me," Manson recalls. "They were afraid."
A shopkeeper near the residence remembers Manson as "a very ingratiating youngster who'd walk right up and shake your hand . . . Talking about how you felt and if you were fine or not. Never did it dawn on me that he might pull a gun or something of that kind."
But beneath Manson's facade, "the kind of nice young man" he resented at Boys Town, he was generating a "dynamo" full throttle. He could barely sleep - barely stand sti
ll until he was on the run again. It came a month later. He left his uncle's home, having stolen $90 and a pistol, and the fact that he fled broke his probation. Charged with parole violation, he was returned to the boys school in Plainfield. Greeted back by "fellow delinquents," Manson felt more comfortable there and entered the grounds almost with a sigh of relief.
"Charlie believed," a boy recalls, "that what was on the outside was getting greyer, and meaner, and colder than anything we had in Plainfield." But unknown to Manson, the more time he spent behind bars the more the "outside world" shifted in perspective.
Manson's ability at making quick friends revealed more than a personable nature. Officials observed that he possessed an unusual gift for taking command as a leader, and was beginning to be consulted daily by younger boys for advice. He impressed many with a trick he'd developed - "feeling no pain." He'd burn himself with cigarettes or thread needles into his skin, claiming he felt nothing. Not that he was "insensitive" or had no nerve endings, but that he could "will it away" - as though nothing could get to him.
About seven months after his return to Plainfield, Manson escaped again, this time with two other boys. They stole a car and made their way to Utah where their capture was accidental - a roadblock set up to intercept two bank robbers ended the journey. The boys were held in Beaver County Jail to await federal officers for having driven the stolen car across the state line.
"Boy," a law officer said to him. "You're too hot for us - you're a federal case now, you know that."
Manson, a true stranger to the "outside world," was to spend so much of his life behind bars, in institutions and prisons, that eventually he neither knew nor wanted any other way of life.
Manson: The Unholy Trail of Charlie and the Family Page 3