Charles Manson Now (12 page)
For David, the most difficult relationships to navigate on PHU are those he may or may not form with other inmates. For starters, even though most of the inmates are serving life sentences, the atmosphere in PHU remains transitory. Inmates can be transferred on the spur of the moment. Even Sirhan Sirhan, who seemed to be a permanent resident of PHU after serving almost two decades behind its walls, was transferred to another prison suddenly in 2009. Says David, “You get real close to somebody and then they’re gone. That’s a reason why you don’t bother to get to know somebody: because you’re probably not going to know them more than a few years.”
There’s another, more sinister reason to be careful with the bonds you forge in PHU. Letting a person get close to you
and exposing too much of your personal thoughts or feelings is dangerous because that person is highly likely to use that information against you. So most of the unit’s inmates are rightfully reserved, closed off to most any personal connections in order to keep themselves from becoming vulnerable.
In prison, you could keep completely to yourself and still end up accidentally acquiring or dispensing enough information seriously to endanger your life. That’s how David ended up on PHU in the first place. Once, in federal prison, he unwittingly became a walking target. One day, he was in line for the phone on the second tier of his unit, waiting at a distance for the man in front of him to finish his conversation. David was leaning on the railing overlooking the unit’s first tier when, from a full bird’s eye view, he witnessed two men in army jackets enter another man’s cell and strangle him to death. David knew all parties involved, the victim and the men that killed him, and he was aware of how easily his life could be threatened if he so much as batted an eye. So he kept his mouth shut, even through a complete FBI interrogation. “No,” he said. “I didn’t see anything; I don’t know anything; I was probably sleeping; I didn’t hear any noises.” He played it cool and kept a straight face, hoping the incident would remain unresolved and he could feel somewhat safe again. But the two murderers were arrested the next morning and thrown into the hole. Someone had squealed. A few days later, another inmate interrogated David. The inmate said he knew David had seen everything and asked if David “had a problem” with what had happened. David assured the man that everything was fine. But a few days later, on his way out to racquetball, two men tried to stab him from a blind spot in a dark corridor. If he hadn’t been
carrying a racket, he most likely wouldn’t be talking to me today.
Most likely, if an inmate isn’t trying to pull you down, he’s trying to use you to pull himself up, according to David, who spoke to me extensively about “a certain inmate” we both knew who would schmooze and scheme to work his association with Manson for all it could possibly be worth. This inmate would tear a page from the PHU rulebook and threaten to point out another inmate’s misbehavior if he didn’t respond to bribery and blackmail. “It’s jealousy, insanity,” David said. “He’s not getting anything from Charlie, so he goes over and threatens and threatens and threatens. Charlie is seventy-six years old. You don’t threaten somebody who’s that old because stress is the number one thing that kills people that age.”
Once, Manson asked David to interpret a postcard he’d received that had supposedly been “returned to sender.” The front was embellished with a Warhol-esque collage of four pictures in four different color filters plus a forged Charles Manson signature. When David flipped the post card around, he saw Manson’s name and address written in a loose, scrawled handwriting similar to Manson’s own. David asked, “Did you send this?” Manson shook his head. “Naw, I didn’t write that.” And then David noticed a small message intended for someone on the outside, instructing him or her to “take care of” a certain inmate on the unit. “It would be pretty altruistic of Charles Manson,” David laughed, “to send postcards with only the concern of protecting someone else.”
All systems operate under a specific set of codes. Prison is no different. As I talked to David, and then to Manson, I realized
the great level of mutual respect they have for one another. They both know how to do time. Their cells are right beside each other, but both seem aware of each other’s need for space. They both appreciate art and will sometimes work on projects together. And there is a certain degree of give and take. I learned Manson is teaching David how to play guitar. And David, who studies law, helps Manson negotiate the barrage of legal issues that crop up almost daily on a prison unit that seems to run on paperwork. I got a strong sense that David is not one for name-dropping, and that the fact that he’s never tried to cash in on Manson’s fame is the cement of their bond.
Too, David and Charles have similar, broken backgrounds. Manson’s childhood was so dysfunctional it’s become the material oflegend and lore. It’s been said that Manson’s mother, just sixteen when she delivered her baby boy, once tried to sell her child to a waitress for a pitcher of beer. Manson never knew or was able to identify his father, and was ultimately rejected by his mother and placed in a court-appointed school for boys. David tells a similar story of childhood abandonment before Hooker adopted him. David claims that his mother allowed his father to leave her only as long as he “took the little fucker with him,” the father was an apathetic parent. Like Manson, imprisoned in juvenile facilities most of his adolescence for a string of burglaries, David resorted to petty crime and spent a lot of his early life “locked up.”
David described himself as a member of the “suspect class.” He grew up hanging out with bikers and belonging to the outcast crowd, which made him an easy target to the sort of people who are always looking for someone to label. Living on the fringe, a person experiences all sorts of underground cultures. “I’ve
seen all kinds of stuff, well, Satanist stuff,” David explained, “but someone who calls himself a Satanist is not necessarily anti-Christian; Satanism is an aspect of Christianity. Those kids are just going for shock value or trying to express a darker feeling of exclusion.” David explained that society frowns upon the expression of darkness inherent to Satanism or other alternative cultures because “someone from ‘regular’ society sees that and he sees it as completely different from himself. Most people living a ‘normal’ life are denying their darker thoughts and urges, but they’re human-and they’ve got them.”
I could immediately identify with what David was saying. I’ve always belonged to various subcultures on the outskirts of society. Music was usually the only thing that brought the kind of kids I knew together. Within the music community, a person can find an understanding, a sense of belonging, the kind that’s so important to adolescents trying to figure themselves out. In the ‘80s, if you wore an SNFU shirt and you came across another kid wearing the same shirt, there was an immediate connection, and you had found an instant friend. It felt as if you already knew one another, because you had already been introduced to the same ideals, ethics, beliefs, whatever. Outside of the music world, inside the walls of what are all too often overly conservative high schools, you could expect the complete opposite reaction to your long hair and rock music and dark clothes. I never acted out in high school, never gave anyone any reason to believe I was a danger or a threat, but I can remember the intensity of students’ and teachers’ reactions to me. Once, a bunch of worried parents even held a meeting to discuss how to deal with my influence on their kids. They believed I could introduce them to drugs.
Of course, not one of those parents ever approached or talked to me. People fear what they don’t understand. Had any of those men and women bothered to get to know the kid they intended to vilify, they’d have been shocked to discover I’d never done a drug in my life.
David told me that you could see the extent to which people project their fears onto a single person, and the effects of this phenomenon, in the case of Charles Manson. “Look how they vilified Charlie by putting all that crap on him. I’m sure it’s changed the way he projects himself outwardly, especially during major media interviews. In the past, you would see him on TV and he’d act like he was thinking, ‘I know you expect me to be this, so I’ll show you this; I’ll show you all about what you’ve got going on in your own stupid head about what you think I am.’ But he sure is not going to go ahead and unburden himself of his darkest thoughts and deepest beliefs in that kind of venue. Some people end up getting very much the wrong idea.” One clip from a Manson interview has gone viral on the Internet, racking up millions upon millions of views on YouTube alone. It shows Manson, dressed in an orange jumpsuit and sitting in front of an American flag, responding to the prompt, “Tell me, in a sentence, who you are.” Manson literally leaps at the chance to answer, lurching forward into a series of erratic facial expressions and gesticulations. He shrugs his shoulders, cocks and contorts his brows, rolls his eyes, and sticks out his tongue. After almost ten seconds of this, his shoulders rise futilely one last time and he shakes his head as he replies with all conceivable sincerity, “Nobody.”
“The public persona is something created outside of him.
He wasn’t any of that. That was the newspapers and magazines and news broadcasts trying to sensationalize the story; they made the Manson Family sound like they were all a bunch of rabid dogs feasting on babies.” Because of this, David said, people are all too eager to jump to the conclusion that Charles Manson is a master mind, a mind reader, a manipulator capable of directing the masses to do his dirty work. “The last thing he’s trying to do is control somebody or get somebody else to do things.” The man David calls his friend is an “unassuming” inmate who’s been in prison the majority of his life and is, therefore, expert at doing time. And part of doing prison time is knowing how to keep most people at arm’s length. “So many people have tried to fuck him over, and rip him off, and use
him
for one thing or another.”
Hearing this, I had to ask David if he felt Manson was at all accountable for the Tate/LaBianca murders. And he answered me confidently, “Whatever they were doing, I don’t think Charlie gave them guidance; I don’t think he said, ‘Go to this address, and perform these specific acts.’“ He qualified his answer further when I pressed him. “At the time, there were all these radical things going on. I could see that he could get paranoid and say, ‘Hey, look, do what you need to do,’ but, beyond that, I don’t think he sent anybody anywhere with instructions to do any specific thing, including not murdering anyone.” David attributed the murders to “happenstance” on the part of all people involved. And he vehemently denied the possibility that Manson brainwashed his family members. “You can’t make someone do something they don’t want to do,” David said. “That’s absolute bullshit.”
I asked David how he and Charles met, the series of events leading to their eventual friendship. In fact, before he was
transferred to PHU, David didn’t know much about Charles Manson. “I was born in ‘62, so I was pretty young [during the Mason Family murder spree]. I remember hearing his name a lot as a kid, but I didn’t really pay a whole lot of attention.” Charles was in the hole when David arrived on the unit in the late ‘90s, and so David’s initial introduction to the notorious inmate was though the incessant rumors he heard circulating in different parts of the prison system. “They’d say that if someone got transferred to PHU, they could end up making millions of dollars from the Kennedys for killing Sirhan or from the Folgers for killing Manson.” David, who’d been transferred to PHU in the first place for “knowing too much,” was simultaneously reluctant to hear this gossip and intrigued by the thought of how a man with such a large price tag over his head survived in such a system.
“When Manson got out of the hole, he’d been here for a while so he knew everybody. He came in real comfortable with his environment and we were talking to the same people, so we ended up meeting each other pretty quickly.” David said the two started “slowly getting to know each other.” Though neither was particularly interested in making new friends, the two began “bouncing off each other,” sharing life experiences and ideas about music, literature, and art. David said that the two felt like kindred, creative spirits in a place filled with the ill tempered and uninspired. “You kind of gravitate toward people; if you’re not full of shit you kind of gravitate toward people who aren’t full of shit.” Ultimately, though, David claims their friendship is really founded on trust. “Like I said, the guy does his time; he kind of stays to himself, partway for privacy, partway because a lot of these guys are snakes and try to burn anything that they can
because he has resources on the outside through all the people that contact him. Rather than being one of the flies trying to suck blood out of his ear, I’m just another cow in the field. I’m trying not to be too involved, trying to just kind of do my own thing. He influences other people by his thinking, his philosophy on certain things. Charlie has a “let it be” kind of an attitude. Other people’s interactions with him, don’t impact the way he thinks, the way he acts, or the way he believes things. They end up by their demands, and wants placing pressure, intentional or not, on him. That’s how they impact him most, the outside forces, but it’s not so much outside thought. He is pretty much locked into his thoughts and beliefs, and the way he sees them.”
Knowing more now than I ever thought I’d know about his home, it intrigued me to imagine the kind of art Charles Manson produced in prison. I’d learn from David that Manson deals mainly in the abstract: lots of squiggles, circles, and color. He will get to work on a new piece whenever he can get his hands on new pencils, crayons, markers, or colored pens. Art supplies are pretty difficult to get a hold of in PHU. Manson rarely finishes his projects and he will often start something, move on to something new, only to return to work on something he began long before; he sees everything as a “work in progress.” Though somewhat dissipated, distracted, he evidently puts a lot of time and effort into his work.