I laughed. And then, thinking things over, I frowned. “Ah, Trish. I don’t know. Haven’t heard. In fact, the way we left things wasn’t so hot. She told me she felt that we used her…you know, as private nurse and taxi service. Then we dropped her.”
“That wasn’t polite. But don’t let disgrace dampen your spirits,” he said. “I’m sure you’ll be forgiven. She liked you a lot.”
“I hope so,” I said, drifting off again.
“Why don’t you write her?”
“I know who you’re talking about,” Andy jumped in. “We didn’t use her, Peter. You did. Speak for yourself. If she’s the one I think you’re talking about, she was a pest. She got in our way at the track and the hotel? We were supposed to be there to work, remember?”
“Well,” I said, “we did call her up whenever we were stuck for a ride. I know it turned into a bit of a holiday for me, Andy. I’m sorry. If I messed things up, you can blame me for that. It wasn’t her fault. So please don’t go trashing my more noble distractions.” Everyone, including me, laughed at how absurd all of that sounded. Even on the residual effects of the previous night’s psilocybin, I thought, which remained in my bloodstream.
“You needn’t be so defensive,” Andy said. “What’s wrong? Lighten up.”
But I carried on all the same.
“Yeah well…you needn’t be such a grump either, you know. I like Trish. I think she’s hot. So does Buck.”
Buck nodded in agreement.
“She tried to help out and showed us around LA. Peter’s right. She was a good sport, and, judging by the look of him, she had to put up with a lot.”
I continued the fore-check.
“In fact,” I said, “it was Trish who took us to that bookshop you liked so much, Andy. The one in the Westminster Mall.” Andy just shrugged and looked out the window. The snow was still coming down.
I didn’t stop. “The one where you were so happy you found a copy of Auden’s A Certain World,” I said. “I remember that clearly. Because that was the same day Trish made me a present of Bugliosi’s book, Helter Skelter. Have you read it?”
Andy looked decidedly bored. But that didn’t discourage me in the slightest.
“It took me days to read,” I pressed on. “But I couldn’t put it down.”
Looking at Buck, I asked him, “Do you remember when we kept Gord Stewart’s rental? That Mustang convertible? You, me, Dave Watt and Louise Walker—we went driving around Bel Air with the top down...”
“Right. You took us to see the places where those Manson murders happened. You had the maps in your book.” Buck was enthused, so I soldiered on.
“We eventually found the gate at the end of a cul-de-sac way up Benedict Canyon,” I remembered.
“You couldn’t see the house from the road,” Buck said, “but you could tell that the hillside was haunted.”
The others were rolling their eyes.
“Let’s change the subject,” said Andy. You could tell he’d been patient enough. Cynically, he added, “If it’s blood you want to look at, let me show you the sink where I cut myself shaving.”
Then, he changed the subject.
“Look, I have a meeting to go to with Gerard Mach. You all have work to do. I’ll see you at the track after lunch.” Then looking directly at me, he added, “You want to go with them or wait up so we can talk later?”
“Sure, I’ll wait,” I said, tossing paper cups into the trashcan. “I’ll be down at the end of the hall in the library. I can work there until you get back.”
So, I took my schedules and notebooks to my favorite bay window enclave and pretended.
For a while I just lay there staring out at the college circle, watching pedestrians dodging the gauntlet of traffic in back of Queen’s Park. There was an attractive brunette sitting on one of the ox-blood leather library couches. When she got up to leave, she left pages of yesterday’s Toronto Star scattered behind her. I gathered them up and tossed the business section and advertisements in the wastebasket. Then I went back to my cubbyhole and arched on my forearms to read the more interesting parts of the paper.
The second I turned the page to A-13—Tuesday, December 28th 1976—it felt like my breathing had stopped. So what if it was just another random coincidence? It still mattered. Time is infinite after all. To me, this experience was more akin to Jung’s concept of Synchronicity.
Printed above the caption headed: “Ex-Manson girl returns to court with new image.” “Then and now” photographs of Leslie Van Houten captivated all my attention. The image on the left was of Leslie then, in 1971, with her head shaved and a scared “X” carved into her forehead—pure madness. But the picture on the right was of the ex-Manson girl now, neatly dressed with dark bangs and hair that hung straight down to her shoulders. Even though she looked understandably weary and worn, I found the picture of the now Leslie alluring.
The six-paragraph column reported that Ms. Van Houten had entered a plea of “not guilty” for the August 9, 1969 slaying of Leno and Rosemary LaBianca. Her previous conviction for first-degree murder in 1971 had been overturned. The court felt she should never have been tried alongside Charles Manson and his co-conspirators in the first place. Since Ronald Hughes, her lawyer at the time of the first trial had died during the original proceedings, his replacement, Maxwell Keith, didn’t have adequate time to prepare a defense. The California Court of Appeals ordered a new trial on grounds that she hadn’t been properly represented the first time. That was a new twist to the story.
I folded the page from the paper, tucked it away in my notebook, and wrote down the name of her lawyer. Hours later in the day after indoor track practice at the CNE, Andy tried (though in vain) to have a serious conversation with me about my career in teaching and coaching. But he could see how distracted I was. Whatever he suspected the reasons for this were, I never revealed them. I simply went with the flow, as they say, and ducked away early to stop by the Robarts Library on my way home. I’d gone there to look up the mailing address of Maxwell S. Keith, Attorney-at-Law, in the City of Los Angeles telephone directory.
Eager to get back to my flat and dig right in to the copy of Vincent Bugliosi and Curt Gentry’s Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders that Tricia gave me—I brewed a full French press’ worth of coffee to help me get started. It took me a couple hours and three joints of marijuana to highlight all eighty-five pages with reference to Leslie Van Houten in the index. I intuitively thought Mr. Bugliosi’s depiction of her was inexplicably wrong. Plainly, she was a special case that should have been tried apart from the others. And, although the grand inquisitor seems to have gone out of his way to paint each of the co-defendants with the same blood, what he had to say about Leslie just didn’t add up.
From the newspaper photo of her, I sensed something sincere and profound about Leslie. I wanted—I needed—I found myself yearning to find out what the truth was. Besides the physical evidence found at the crime scene, just exactly what happened still wasn’t clear from Bugliosi’s account. It seemed to me he based his suppositions on the hearsay of others who hadn’t been there. Frustrated by his logical fallacies and inconsistencies, I put the book down and closed it. Surely there had to be better explanations that I could get my hands on? I felt the need to find out what it was about Leslie Van Houten’s vulnerability and mistaken identity that I so strongly connected with. And why didn’t the so-called definitive account by Bugliosi and Gentry not ring true entirely? One should never ignore one’s instincts or intuition.
Images of what the now Leslie Van Houten might be like raised in scenes from inside my head. Rather than wrestle and box with my blankets and pillows, I finally gave in to the muse and stayed up half the night writing pages of notes and questions for Leslie. I addressed the envelope c/o Mr. Maxwell S. Keith, Lawyer, Security Pacific Plaza, #282
0 - 333 South Hope Street, Los Angeles, California 90071. No sooner had I sealed the first letter, then I immediately started another.
I wasn’t writing to the girl with the ‘X’ on her forehead. I was writing to the beautiful young woman with the dark hair, pouty lips, and wide-eyed good looks. When I read about Leslie getting her second chance to be free of that madness, I felt duty-bound to let her in on my own journey for freedom and independence. I felt sure she’d have one hell of a story to tell if I met her. Try as I might, I could not fall asleep right away. This was my second restless night in a row. I cut out the newspaper photo of Leslie and propped it up on my desk where I could readily see it. When I woke up in the morning, the first thing I did was to re-read the “Ex-Manson Girl Returns to Court with New Image” Toronto Star clipping, then reviewed the “then and now” photos and dog-eared pages from Helter Skelter.
I had the distinct, hedonic sense that I was about to seduce somebody famous.
2
Lovers and Lesser Men
It’s been suggested that if you awaken slowly, you will have a better chance of recalling your dreams than if you are awakened by alarm clocks or explosions. Monday morning, the second week of the New Year, I awoke to a phenomenon meteorologists call “thunder snow.” Temperature and turbulence pelted gobs of wet snow at wind gusts up to ninety kilometers an hour. Positive and negative electrical charges divorce and lightning bolts even the difference. Krrrack—an’ kapow! You’ve got to love being awakened by sonic booms that rattle the windowpanes—with flashes of light hotter than the sun’s surface.
I was already practiced at writing my dreams down and could sometimes record three or four at a time. In my last dream that morning, I started out with a female stranger for a companion. Then she became the familiar image, more-or-less, of my steady girlfriend Gabrielle Adler. In this dream, Gabe, and who or what I assumed to be “me,” started out house hunting late at night. Every place we looked at resembled a bombed-out ruin, like the set for a production of Samuel Beckett’s Endgame. Wrecked cats and stray dogs, but also less savory primates, inhabited the neighborhoods we were lost in. Lightning struck and the rest—whatever it might have been or become—never happened.
Dream traces fade quickly, don’t they? That’s why I scribbled mine down in a diary. I had to force myself to scratch them out right away upon waking, before they evaporated back into the ether they came from. I finished my notes, rolled a couple of extra joints to keep for later on in the car, and turned to CHUM-FM on the radio. They were playing Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams.” I’ve always loved that song. It gave notice to the fact that love affairs are sure to blow up in your face at one point or another.
Lines like “Dreams unwind, love’s a state of mind…” I saw as bases for a new kind of theoretical physics. Romances collapse all the time, or so I would have liked to believe. Whatever doubts I had about most things, I pretended to hold no illusions about the nature of things between men and women. Only that wasn’t true. Deep down at the core I was a romantic. I’d soon have to face up to the cold fact of that “deep perfection.”
My apartment on Madison Avenue was on the second floor of an old red brick mansion with two great stone arches out front. It was still very early. I smoked a joint on the porch and quickly finished my latté. Brrrr…it was cold. The wind, the sleet, and the snow changed my mind about going for a morning run. Instead I went back inside to continue my newfound obsession with Leslie Van Houten—marking up pages of Helter Skelter with a highlighter and making pencil notes in the margins.
Hated having to put her aside and ready myself for work. This was the second week of my “practice teaching” assignments that term. This stint was at the Stephen Leacock Collegiate Institute in Scarborough. (One of the requisite hoops one had to jump through to obtain an English teaching certificate in the province of Ontario.) I’d already spent the first week of this duty “observing” my supervising teacher demonstrate how teaching was done in this jurisdiction. I put on a costume of navy blues (cotton button-down shirt under a wool pull-over sweater), black slacks, and shoes.
I packed my books and workout gear in separate bags and carried everything out to the car. I kept my things up front on the floor by the heater vents instead of the jump seat. Cold damp air made the car hard to start. Once she did fire up, I turned the heater on full tilt and got out to scrape the slush off the windshield and windows. It took a while for the MG to warm up, so I sat in the cockpit looking over my notes. The class on Macbeth I had down cold—having done it a dozen times before. But what I had enthusiastically planned for the day’s lessons on contemporary poets was sure to be something out of the ordinary.
Stephen Leacock Collegiate is on Birchmount Avenue, right across from the Tam O’Shanter Golf Club. It was a typical suburban, middle-class jigsaw of concrete slabs with a few narrow windows for looking out of. Like a lot of high schools built in the seventies, it wouldn’t be hard to imagine the place as a penitentiary. All a film crew would need are a thousand yards of razor wire for the fencing, a few painted signs for the cages, and badges to sew on to the guards’ uniforms. In any case, the flags waving out front by the drive-thru entrance could stay the same and no one would notice a difference.
My supervisor at Leacock was a woman named Cynthia Kressler. She looked kind of cute in that tame, unadventurous way some women have, which is presumably why I didn’t take closer notice. In sum, my first impression of her was that she was honest and smart. I wondered what she thought of me. Very soon I’d find out.
She told me she’d been teaching English at Leacock for a couple of years and finally felt settled in. The first week, I watched her teach classes on Macbeth and Mordecai Richler’s The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz. She was okay. Although in my estimation she gave Duddy’s character too much credit for just being clever. The second week it was my turn to handle one or two classes a day so that Kressler could complete a formal evaluation of my teaching. Without your supervising teacher’s okay you were usually toast in terms of finding a job in the province. The outfit could chew you up and spit you out if they wanted. They kept a surplus of rookie teachers for exactly that purpose.
I’d reached a deal with Cynthia to put Richler’s Duddy Kravitz on hold. In place of that, she was letting me teach this series of lessons on “Canadian ballads and verse.” That day, I thought I would introduce the class to Irving Layton and Leonard Cohen, if they didn’t already know of their work. It wasn’t an academic lesson as such—more a demonstration of theater than theory—something I felt sure would interest several of these students.
“It’s not in the board’s curriculum guidelines. But I guess it’s okay if you try it,” Cynthia counseled.
All I told her was that I planned to read a selection from The Energy of Slaves and Lovers and Lesser Men and discuss them. These were two of my personal favorite books of poems at the time. Something for which I had a real passion. I went into the classroom a stranger that day, feeling sure I would leave hoisted on the shoulders of the crowd. The class was sure to be shouting, perhaps cheering, or so I imagined. I’d structured the lesson to end with a bang not a whimper. Paraphrasing Irving Layton, I ended with thunder.
“Wilder and wilder I sang…and my loins wrinkled like the brow of a sage.”
I meant it to be a romantic anthem of wisdom and fun. No such luck.
Some gasps, some laughter, and a few not wholly unfriendly groans. It was the quiet ones you needed to watch for. Soon the bell rang to end the first round. I could see from her expression that Ms. Kressler wasn’t happy. She curled her finger towards her and led me straight to her office. She closed the door, pointed to an empty chair, slapped her notebook on the desk and sat down with a thump. I remained standing and waited for her to draw the first blood.
She asked, “Won’t you sit?”
I didn’t respond but rocked back and forth on my heel
s and my toes. If I didn’t like what she was saying, I could always make a break for it. I was already poised and waiting for her to release me.
“Clearly, you have a narcissistic thirst for showing off, don’t you, Mr. Chiaramonte?” she said, pausing to catch her breath between syllables.
She nodded toward the vacant chair once more and this time I sat, but not politely. At this point, I wasn’t so much angry as hurt.
Flipping the pages of her notes, she added, “Peter, you are obviously a competent and charming teacher. But you have to be careful how you present yourself to these kids. And the material, my goodness. That was reckless. It wasn’t approved. Some of the girls looked practically frightened.”
“More than half the class seemed to like it,” I defended. “I’m sure they know satire when they hear it. Why not give me a break?”
Admittedly, this was a pitifully rude remark. Lame defense. An unlikely tactic for gaining much ground with authority. Yet that’s where my impulses led, and I followed out of some remote instinct.
“You shocked them. The whole class. And ‘half’ is not the point. One of the girls—this isn’t funny!” she snapped.
I had started to smile, having taken that last remark as a compliment. But then I snapped back.
“Why then were so many kids nodding ‘yes’ and smiling? There was occasional laughter. Or was I imagining that?”
“Because that’s what kids do when they’re nervous!”
“Yes,” I said. “And the reason they’re nervous is why I read them these particular poems in the first place.”
Cynthia put both palms flat down on her desk.
“You really think this is funny? The job isn’t to make students laugh.”
Pause. I wasn’t laughing.
“I’m late for a meeting,” she said. “We’ll talk after school. Please choose some…some other poems for this afternoon’s class. How about let’s have more ballads and less raunch, shall we?”
No Journey's End: My Tragic Romance with Ex-Manson Girl, Leslie Van Houten Page 2
