by Bill Barich
In effect, Boswell owned and managed Corcoran, another dry, desolate, unredeemable place. Prison families, black and Hispanic, strolled the streets and cashed their checks at a check-cashing outlet painted a shocking pink. They had a new, pork-barrel YMCA and a theater that alternated Hollywood films with movies in Spanish. There was a boarded-up, rust-colored Santa Fe Station where the trains didn’t stop anymore.
When the Department of Corrections had chosen Corcoran for a prison site, they had bought a parcel of land from J. G. Boswell—land that was maybe not quite so useful for farming anymore. It was a few miles from town in a belt of cotton fields furrowed with irrigation ditches. In the standing water, in mosquito-dense clouds, avocets were wading and feeding. The soil was grayish and dotted with cotton bales.
In the distance, behind a chain-link fence topped with concertina wire, loomed the prison complex. It bore a strange resemblance to a power-generating facility. The prison building proper was a concrete block with slits for eyes, and what the eyes looked out on was so much nothing. Even sounds were in limited supply, rationed like every other tactile sensation—cars coming and going, the clank of a flag against a metal pole, birds chirping obliviously under a gnawing sun.
How remote the prison seemed from anything having to do with California, I thought. Few Californians would ever see it, much less know that it existed, and yet, increasingly, our prisons and all that they represented were becoming more and more integral to life in the Golden State.
At a guard station, I identified myself and the purpose of my visit. After that, I sat for a while in a sterile waiting room in the prison’s reception area. The room had a hospital feel, an antisepsis meant to disguise all the festering illnesses within. A sickness of the soul was the chief complaint at Corcoran, and those who suffered from it were supposed to be just as invisible as AIDS patients or the victims of terminal cancer. We had given up on trying to heal the soul’s complaint.
Correctional officers marched through the waiting room at intervals, going at a military clip. Their combat boots rapped against the clean, unscuffed surface of the glossily waxed floors. They were dressed like commandos in green camouflage uniforms. They looked rugged, solid, and devoid of all sympathy, particularly the younger ones, who seemed years away from making a compassionate gesture. Not a few of them had grown symbolic moustaches, as boys do when they’re sent to war.
The guards didn’t appear to be the sort of men who’d have much in common with the prisoners. Instead, they projected a soldierly apartness. You could have dropped them into any foreign jungle and put them to work killing guerrillas. Doing time at Corcoran, out in the vast reaches of nowhere, would not be easy.
MOVIES HAD CONDITIONED ALL MY NOTIONS ABOUT PRISON WARDENS, so I expected to find Bernie Aispuro closeted in a dark little bunker smoking a cigar and barking orders over a loudspeaker to armed guards on a catwalk, but he was in a modern, efficiency-oriented office that could as easily have housed a tax accountant.
Aispuro was a gregarious, outspoken man. His suit was an inoffensive bureaucrat’s suit, but he also wore a Navajo bracelet and a turquoise-and-silver belt buckle. When I inquired about his ancestry, thinking he might have had an Indian father or mother, he chose not to respond. He did this slyly, in a spirit of fun. He seemed to like his secrets. There was a flare about him that he kept under wraps.
For Aispuro, the challenge of a warden’s job was in trying to maintain his dignity in the face of overwhelming odds. He wanted to be seen as fair, as a decent guy, as someone who took no more bullshit from his bosses than necessary, while at the same time refusing to be manipulated by any of the prisoners and their whining.
He shared a common background with many of his inmates, being a poor kid. He had grown up in Gonzales, a farming town near Soledad, and had known hard work from an early age. As a teenager, he had stooped in the fields to pick vegetables under the grueling valley sun and had learned that the price of the labor was to wake in the morning with hands so stiff and sore that he almost needed a crowbar to pry apart the fingers.
It did not take long for Aispuro to decide that the fields were best avoided. He signed on at a milk plant when he was a few years older, but the work was almost as bad. He froze his butt through the winter in an unheated brick building. Then, at twenty-two, he took a job as a correctional officer at Soledad State Prison, not for the badge or the gun but because it was the best-paying job that he could find.
Conditions at the prison were abominable at the time, Aispuro told me. The inmates slept in bunkbeds squeezed into cramped and fetid rows, and he had to listen through the night to their weeping, their farting, and the grinding of their teeth, consoled only by the size of his salary, more money than he had ever thought he would make.
It was okay with him if the job was rough, he said. He had never anticipated an easy life or dreamed of getting something for nothing. His mother had always kept him in line. Every year, at the start of school, she would go to his teacher and give permission for her son to be smacked if he fooled around in class, which, in consequence, Aispuro seldom did.
The prison world had changed substantially since January 3, 1949, the day that Aispuro had first punched in at Soledad. Prison technology was much more sophisticated, and guards had to graduate from a rigorous academy.
Corcoran was a state-of-the-art institution, the warden said. It consisted of six interracial mini-prisons. Designed to house 2,900 men, it currently housed 4,200. In its cells were some of the most malign convicts around, Level Fours so dangerous and volatile that they were under perpetual lockdown and were granted just ten hours outdoors each week.
Aispuro considered himself a realist. Over the years, he had accepted the hard truth that many convicts really were bad guys. They were bad right to the core, and they were their own worst enemies, as well. A prison sentence in California was not that horrible compared to one in, say, Alabama, he thought, but still the cons complained. The state gave its wards clean bedding, three square meals a day, and some peace and quiet, and yet they were always on one another’s case, fighting, bullying, scamming, and raping each other.
No matter how decently you treated the men, Aispuro believed, somebody would always file a grievance. Somebody would always claim to be abused or not fed properly—this in a prison that occasionally served a half-chicken per plate!—and however outrageous the claim might be, some liberal bleeding heart on the outside would swallow it whole and offer to help.
“Not every prisoner can be saved,” Aispuro instructed me firmly. “That’s one lesson that the public needs to learn.”
Some men at Corcoran, he continued, were so callous that it seemed to be their very nature to commit heinous crimes. They had no idea what else to do, having been thrown into the slam as juveniles and having come to maturity behind bars. In prison, they understood the order of things and could rise to a position of authority. They could join a prison gang such as the Mexican Mafia or the Aryan Brotherhood, or they could gain protection by playing the punk to a strong-armed lover. Out on the streets, the same men were walking ciphers, while in the joint they had a measure of cool.
Aispuro was astounded by how indolent his prisoners were. If they hadn’t done something wrong, they’d probably be on welfare. ‘They’re too dadgum lazy to look for work,” he said in disgust. The prison offered them counseling, education, and job-training programs, but they diligently avoided all help. It upset him that the state spent an average of twenty thousand dollars a year to clothe, feed, support, and confine each prisoner. “Why not just send them to Stanford for a couple of semesters instead?” the warden suggested. “It would be cheaper.”
Corcoran was filled with criminals going nowhere, big fish in a little pond. Charles Manson was a prime example. Aispuro had talked with his most famous inmate a few times, but he hadn’t been impressed. Yet some prisoners were still afraid of Manson because of his juju reputation. He was a con’s con, a real pro, sucking in the other inmates with his Rasp
utin stare and his scrambled philosophy.
To the warden, though, Manson was merely another product of the system, somebody who had spent thirteen of his first twenty-five years in cells before lighting out for California and his own peculiar transformation.
Once a young man got caught in the revolving-door syndrome, bouncing from one institution to the next, you had no chance with him, Aispuro felt. The cycle had to be broken very early, but that was getting harder to do. The population in Youth Authority camps, schools, and pens had doubled in the last decade. Under the auspices of the state, a boy was tossed in among the already ruined and was taught such esoterica as how to eat a meal in seven minutes, how to conceal and use a shank, and how to sodomize.
Aispuro was concerned about the growing lack of parental supervision for children.
“Mothers are out there working now,” he said, a touch of irate-ness in his voice. “What’s going to happen to all the latchkey kids? Parents ignore their children. The way it is, kids have every opportunity to get into trouble.”
Prison, I saw, was the last step in a process that began much earlier. I went back in my mind over other parents I’d met who’d expressed a similar concern, Emma Black in Herlong and Bruce Anderson in Anderson Valley, and thought how simple it was for a child to take a fall in our California paradise.
At the end of our meeting, Aispuro showed me to the door and gave me a hearty good-bye. He was a man at peace with himself, about to be finished with prisons and gone, for all I knew, to a fishing hole or a casino somewhere.
As I was leaving Corcoran, the wives of inmates were lining up for visiting hours. Their children were bathed, combed, powdered, and beribboned. Sometimes the women were in pairs or in threes, and they seemed almost frolicsome as they approached the prison door, giggling as if they were headed for a party. Surely it was just nervous tension, a final surrender of effervescent humors before they passed through a security check and entered a universe of pain.
AT THE SHILOH INN IN CORCORAN, I stayed up late reading about Charles Manson. He was the wrong kind of Californian, somebody whose leap toward self-invention had taken a strange left turn and had led him down byways that nobody ought to travel.
Manson had made his first stab at reaching the Coast in 1951 by running away from an Indiana School for Boys and pinching a series of cars to speed him on his way. He and a couple of merry pals pulled juvie stickups at gas stations across the West until they had the misfortune to hit a roadblock near Beaver, Utah, where the cops were looking for somebody else, and they were busted at last.
Charlie was sixteen. He was gnomelike, musically gifted, and of average intelligence. Psychiatrists described him as intensely anti-social.
He was sent to Washington, D.C., and bounced from institution to institution, losing a chance at parole by raping a fellow inmate while holding a razor blade to his throat. That got him classified as a violent homosexual in need of close supervision, and he was not set free again until 1954, when the court released him to an aunt and uncle in McMechen, West Virginia.
Manson’s mother lived in Wheeling. She had robbed gas stations, too, and had once done some time in a state penitentiary for knocking over a till and banging a poor fuel jockey on the head with a Coke bottle. They were peas in a pod, Charlie and his mom. He went to see her often in Wheeling, and there he met a waitress, Rosalie Jean Willis, and married her.
Shortly after the wedding, he started boosting cars with a renewed vigor, including a 1951 Mercury that became his magic carpet to the Coast. He drove the Mercury to Los Angeles, where he was arrested for car theft and ordered into his first California state prison, Terminal Island in San Pedro. He languished cellbound while Rosalie gave birth to a son. She divorced him before his parole in 1958, disappeared, and never contacted him again.
Manson, now twenty-three, began to diversify his operations. His skills as a con had sharpened. He moved to Malibu, roomed with a bartender, and took to pimping, working a stable that consisted of two girls—a sixteen-year-old off the streets and another girl from Pasadena, who was overweight, rich, and dependent.
Charlie controlled them. He had learned to locate the soft spot in people and to play on their fears. In his little ménage, he must have seen great promise, a vision of his future Family, but he was uncomfortable and barely functional in society and soon committed a simpleminded offense, presumably to get back inside.
In 1959, he tried to cash a forged check for $37.50 at a Ralph’s Supermarket in L.A. After his arrest, he must have had second thoughts about returning to prison because during an interrogation, he grabbed the evidence when the cops turned their backs, tore it up, and ate it. He had a genius for such things.
By the time the court hearing rolled around, Manson had recruited a hooker friend to lie on his behalf. She claimed to be pregnant, virginal, and deeply in love with him. Her performance aided and abetted Manson’s earnest and yet wildly disingenuous vow to go straight, and a judge who may still suffer from nightmares set him free and kept him in circulation.
The sixties were about to happen, and Manson was ready for them. His dreams had inflated and he had acquired a Dolby soundtrack. Bit by the Hollywood bug, he created a phony entertainment company, 3-Star-Enterprises, and printed up some business cards naming him as president. There were always pretty young things around Los Angeles who could be foxed with the usual promises, and Manson sold them on his “Nite Club, Radio, and TV Productions.” He knew that almost everybody in California ached to be discovered, to be in the limelight just once. Foolish girls invested their savings with him. One of them he drugged and raped. Another he blessed with an ectopic pregnancy.
In supreme violation of his parole, he transported prostitutes across state lines. The feds indicted him under the Mann Act and nabbed him in Laredo, Texas, after which he went into McNeill Island, a U.S. penitentiary in Washington, for a serious ten-year term.
To McNeill Island, Manson brought all the trappings of his new incarnation as a Californian. He told the other cons that he was a religious person, a Scientologist. His auditor, he said, had registered him as a theta clear, someone whose plate of karma was absolutely clean. From Scientology and L. Ron Hubbard, Charlie had borrowed abstruse ideas wholesale and had built his own demented vocabulary of apocalypse. The Bible, especially Revelations 9, was another of his favorite sources.
In the privacy of his cell, he spent hours strumming his guitar and imagining the masterly career as a singer that was in store for him when he was released. He had gotten a whiff of the music business and had realized that it was just another con. Everything was a con in the end.
Manson listened unstintingly to the Beatles and grew obsessed with their music. Would he ever be as famous as they were? Were they sending him coded messages in their songs? Alvin Karpis, a triggerman from the old Ma Barker gang and a longtime McNeill resident, taught Charlie to play the steel guitar.
In the summer of 1966, Manson was transferred to Terminal Island prior to his release. He was so frightened by the prospect, believing that he could only function in prison, that he begged the authorities to keep him inside, but they turned him loose the following spring. From Los Angeles, he went immediately to the San Francisco Bay Area and rented a place in Berkeley, supporting himself by plying the spare-change circuit around Sather Gate and the university.
The new world of hippie flower children was an ideal match for Manson’s talents as a necromancer. His years behind bars had hardened him, making him more cynical and giving him a chance to perfect his rap. In Berkeley, there were thousands of innocent, gullible young people who were searching for their own personal guru, and Charlie, sensing an opportunity, was happy to oblige.
One afternoon, while out panhandling with his guitar, he chatted up a chubby, homely librarian who was taking her poodle for a walk. He met with such success that before long he was living with her. She objected when he brought home another young woman to stay with them, but Manson wore her down, and soon there w
ere many lost souls in residence, both girls and boys.
Charlie became the great orchestrator of lost souls. He relied on a potent combination of hallucinogens and hokum to induce them into orgies, where the goal was for them all to peak at the same time—to “come together,” as John Lennon had sung, “right now.” The mega-orgasm never happened, but juices were spilled, and the seed of the Family was smeared and spread in a fleshy binding. Manson had them where he wanted them, he was in control.
In 1967, the Summer of Love, the loveless one felt bad vibrations in the Haight-Ashbury. His intuition told him that the entire scene was crumbling under the attentions of the police, the FBI, and other sinister forces. Somehow he got his hands on an old school bus and ferried his children away from the city, down through the San Joaquin and into the desert west of Bakersfield.
ALONG HIGHWAY 99 BOXCARS ROLLED, Union Pacific, Western Fruit Express, Pacific Fruit Express, Burlington Northern. Hydra-Cushion for Fragile Freight, Cos Petroleum Transport. A train against the western sky looked blameless. It suggested continuity, links made and retained over time, life as a purposeful journey from cradle to grave.
I was glad to be leaving Corcoran and Avenal, that stunned stretch of backcountry smack in the middle of the state. I passed Elk Bayou Ditch and Railroad Ditch and Tulare Canal, where egrets stood white and contemplative, the most patient of fishers. Outside Tipton, there was a Sunkist plant with two brimming, green gondolas parked nearby, oranges sweet and juicy.
Then came Pixley, a town named for Frank Pixley, who had founded the Argonaut, a barbed literary quarterly of the late nineteenth century. For a while, the wicked Ambrose Bierce was a columnist, but he and Pixley didn’t get along, so Bierce switched to the San Francisco Examiner and wrote a column called “Prattle” for William Randolph Hearst. On Pixley’s death, he supplied an epitaph. “Here lies Frank Pixley—as usual,” he wrote.