Taming the Beast: Charles Manson's Life Behind Bars (40 page)

Long before this move, I warned Charlie that if he didn’t stop threatening officers, dealing drugs, and operating illegal businesses (selling autographed photos of himself at $50 a pop), he was going to end up at Pelican Bay. Naturally, he didn’t listen.

I almost feel sorry for him now. Pushing sixty-five, Charlie is starting to show signs that Father Time and the prison system have finally worn him down—something he vowed would never happen. He complains of an ear problem “eating up my brain, man,” and writes that his eyes are dimming to the point that he sometimes stumbles and falls. I don’t completely buy it. Charlie’s whined before, and in the next moment he can hear like a rabbit, see like an eagle, and throw a tantrum with enough volcanic energy for a half-dozen men.

His recent letters and conversations wander into fantasy and utter confusion—but then again, they always did.

How Charlie will handle the isolation and oppression of Pelican Bay at this stage of his life is anyone’s guess. I sense that he will die there. However, as Dylan Thomas wrote, he will “not go gentle into the night.” Charlie is sure to “rage against the dying of the light.”

EPILOGUE

“You can try to kill me a million times more but you cannot kill soul. Truth was, is, and will always be. You have beaten me, broken my neck, knocked my teeth out. You’ve drugged me for years, dragging me up and down prison hallways, laying my head on every chopping block you’ve got in this state, chained me, burned me, but you cannot defeat me. All you can do is destroy yourselves with your own judgment.”

—
C
HARLES
M
ANSON

AT HIS 1986 PAROLE HEARING

W
HEN I WAS
a small boy, the highlight of the week was a Sunday afternoon walk with my father. We lived in the geographical center of San Francisco near a hill that people called Mount Olympus. The name was not a tribute to the mythological home of the gods. It was a politically incorrect joke on the local milkman. The guy had a bad leg and was known as “Old Limpy.” He dragged that leg up the hill so many times everyone began referring to it as Mount Olympus.

My dad and I used to spend many wonderful hours hiking the winding road to the top. There was a magnificent statue set high on a pedestal overlooking the city and the Pacific Ocean. The statue held a torch high over her head in one hand, and a sword ready to strike in the other. It was a riveting piece of art that never failed to captivate me, no matter how many times I saw it.

“Do you know what it means?” my father asked.

“No, Dad, what?”

“It’s the statue of light. She carries the torch of truth over her head. The sword is there to protect the torch from those who want to put it out.”

Six years later, after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, my father was called into the service. He and other soldiers set up a lookout post on Mount Olympus, scanning the coast for enemy ships and submarines. I was ten then, and used to go up there with him. We spent long hours together looking into the ocean on the night watch. The whole city was blacked out, and the view was glorious. When I couldn’t keep my eyes open anymore, I’d curl up at the foot of the statue, braced from the whistling wind, and fall asleep. Those were the best of times.

My father was eventually transferred to the battle front overseas and never returned home. No, he didn’t die, but he might as well have as far as a young boy was concerned. He met another woman in a foreign land divorced my mother, remarried, and moved away. I was devastated.

For years afterward, for decades, I returned to that hill, remembered my father, and fed a pain that wouldn’t go away. When I came home from college a grown man, my car mysteriously headed for the old statue. I married and became a father myself, six times over, and still kept coming back. Finally, I arrived one foggy day to find the statue gone. It stunned me, depressing me further, but did nothing to stop my lemminglike treks. Year after year I came, staring up at the empty pedestal, trying to heal a wound that would never stop hurting.

One night, a dream carried me to the haunting spot. I climbed on the pedestal and stood facing the wind and ocean. Suddenly, my limbs froze. I looked down. My arms and legs had turned to stone. The rest of my body hardened as well. Unable to move, I watched as a parade of fathers and little boys came to see the magnificent statue on the hill. Tears were burning into my pillow when I awoke.

The dream was so unnerving that I immediately embarked upon an almost frantic search to find out what had happened to the statue. A trip to the library and some old news clippings directed me to a dank city warehouse that served as a retirement home for broken-down sculptures. Searching though the rubble, I found it. She stood alone in a corner, vandalized almost beyond recognition. Her torch and arm were missing, the sword broken off, her head gone. I wondered at that moment if there was a heaven for statues that no longer served a purpose.

I stared at the battered remnant for over an hour, remembering all it had meant to me. Once, she had been a proud landmark for sailors entering the bay, guiding them safely to shore. For a half century, she stood tall as a symbol of truth. And most important of all, she had been a little boy’s bond to a father who abandoned him.

Charles Manson lost his father in a similar fashion when he was four, a fact that he continues to try to hide from the world to this day. For all his bluster and uncaring ways, it’s a pain that he’s never been able to face. How much of what he became, of what he did, of the rage that never dies, can be blamed on a mother who decided to leave town one day to search for greener pastures, and gave no thought to a sad little boy who was forced to leave his beloved father behind? A sad little boy who was later dumped by that same mother, and became a horribly abused, institutionalized teenager who used to get down on his knees and beg God to send someone who loved him.

From my experience, I’d say virtually all of it.

NOTES

Chapter 1

1
. This name is a pseudonym invented by the authors.

Chapter 3

1
. Jackson’s attorney denied smuggling in the weapon for his client. In 1985, he was acquitted of murder and conspiracy charges in connection with George Jackson’s failed prison break.

Chapter 5

1
. Pseudonyms have been substituted for the names of Pin’s Attackers.

Chapter 7

1
. In 1977, “Geronimo’s” murder conviction was overturned on appeal, and he was released on bail pending appeal of the reversal of his conviction.

APPENDIX I

T
HE
T
ESTIMONY OF
C
HARLES
M
ANSON,
N
OVEMBER
19, 1970

THE COURT: Do you have anything to say?

MANSON: Yes, I do.

There has been a lot of charges and a lot of things said about me and brought against me and brought against the co-defendants in this case, of which a lot could be cleared up and clarified to where everyone could understand exactly what the family was supposed to have been, what the philosophies in regards to the families were, and whether or not there was any conspiracy to commit murder, to commit crimes, and to explain to you who think with your minds.

It is hard for you to conceive of a philosophy of someone that may not think.

I have spent my life in jail, and without parents.

I have looked up to the strongest father figure, and I have always looked to the people in the free world as being the good people, and the people in the inside of the jail as being the bad people.

I never went to school, so I never growed up in the respect to learn to read and write so good, so I have stayed in jail and I have stayed stupid, I have stayed a child while I have watched your world grow up, and then I look at the things that you do and I don’t understand.

I don’t understand the courts, and I don’t understand a lot of things that are brought against me.

Your write things about my mother in the newspaper that hasn’t got anything to do with anything in particular.

You invent stories, and everybody thinks what they do, and then they project it from the witness stand on the defendant as if that is what he did.

For example, with Danny DeCarlo’s testimony. He said that I hate black men, and he said that we thought alike, that him and I was a lot alike in our thinking.

But actually all I ever did with Danny DeCarlo or any other human being was reflect himself back at himself.

If he said he did not like the black man, I would say, “Okay.” I had better sense than tell him I did not dislike the black man. I just listened to him and I would react to his statement.

So consequently he would drink another beer and walk off and pat me on the back and he would say to himself, “Charlie thinks like I do.”

But actually he does not know how Charlie thinks because Charlie has never projected himself.

But maybe the girls and women in your world outside … Being by yourself for such a long time when you do get out you appreciate things that people don’t even see, you walk over them every day.

Like in jail you have a whole new attitude or a whole different way of thinking.

I don’t think like you people. You people put importance on your lives.

Well, my life has never been important to anyone, not even in the understanding of the way you fear the things that you fear, and the things you do.

I know that the only person I can judge is me.

I judge what I have done and I judge what I do and I look and live with myself every day.

I am content with myself.

If you put me in the penitentiary, that means nothing because you kicked me out of the last one. I didn’t ask to get released. I liked it in there because I like myself.

I like being with myself.

But in your world it’s hard because your understanding and your values are different.

These children that come at you with knives, they are your children. You taught them. I didn’t teach them. I just tried to help them stand up.

Most of the people at the ranch that you call the Family were just people that you did not want, people that were alongside the road, that their parents had kicked them out or they did not want to go to Juvenile Hall, so I did the best I could and I took them up on my garbage dump and I told them this, that in love there is no wrong.

I don’t care. I have one law and I learned it when I was a kid in reform school. It’s don’t snitch. And I have never snitched. And I told them that anything they do for their brothers and sisters is good, if they do it with a good thought.

It is not my responsibility. It is your responsibility. It is the responsibility you have towards your own children who you are neglecting, and then you want to put the blame on me again and again and again.

Over and over you put me in your penitentiary. I did not build the penitentiary. I would not lock one of you up. I could not see locking another human being up.

You eat meat with your teeth and you kill things that are better than you are, and in the same respect you say how bad and even killers that your children are. You make your children what they are. I am just a reflection of every one of you.

I have never learned anything wrong. In the penitentiary, I have never found a bad man. Every man in the penitentiary has always showed me his good side, and circumstances put him where he was. He would not be there, he is good, human, just like the policeman that arrested him is a good human.

I have nothing against none of you. I can’t judge any of you. But I think it is high time that you all started looking at yourselves, and judging the lie that you live in.

I sit and I watch you from nowhere, and I have nothing in my mind, no malice against you and no ribbons for you.

But you stand and you play the game of money. As long as you can sell a newspaper, some sensationalism, and you can laugh at someone and joke at someone and look down at someone, you know.

You just sell those newspapers for public opinion, just like you are all hung on public opinion, and none of you have any idea what you are doing.

You are just doing what you are doing for the money, for a little bit of attention from someone.

I can’t dislike you, but I will say this to you. You haven’t got long before you are all going to kill yourselves because you are all crazy.

And you can project it back at me, and you can say that it’s me that cannot communicate, and you can say that it’s me that don’t have any understanding, and you can say that when I am dead your world will be better, and you can lock me up in your penitentiary and you can forget about me.

But I’m only what lives inside of you, each and every one of you. These children, they take a lot of narcotics because you tell them not to. Any child you put in a room and you tell them, “Don’t go through that door,” he never thought of going through that door until you told him not to go through the door. You go to the high schools and you show them pills and you show them what not to take, how else would they know what it was unless you tell them?

And then you tell them what you don’t want them to do in the hopes they will go out and do it and then you can play your game with them and then you can give attention to them because you don’t give them any of your love.

You only give them your frustration; you only give them your anger; you only give them the bad part of you rather than give them the good part of you.

You should all turn around and face your children and start following them and listening to them.

The music speaks to you every day, but you are too deaf, dumb, and blind to even listen to the music. You are too deaf, dumb, and blind to stop what you are doing. You point and you ridicule.

But it’s okay, it’s all okay. It doesn’t really make any difference because we are all going to the same place anyway. It’s all perfect. There is a God. He sits right over here beside me. That is your God. This is your God.