Charles Manson Now

by Marlin Marynick

  If you’re highway patrol and you’re molesting people on the way to school, one of the parents is going to get upset when their little girls come back with blood all over their dresses. That’s what I learned in Mexico. In Mexico, if you transgress against another man’s family and he comes and he takes your life, they don’t take him to trial. They give him an apology for the behavior of an asshole that didn’t abide by the rules and regulations that he should have abided by. Then if you come up and you won’t snitch, the Mexican cops will beat your motherfuckin ass and make you tell. They’ll hook you up to electronics and bury you in shit, if necessary. You’re gonna get right, or get wrong, so it’s just the same thing. It should be like that everywhere but it’s not. You come across the border; they’re rats on this side of the fucking line, man. It’s one big fucking snitch-out. When I got back from Mexico I was put in prison for white slavery, and smuggling guns, and, uh, unlawful flight to avoid prosecution. I was sent to federal prison for ten years, and she filed for divorce. We wasn’t even married, but they granted her the divorce. Remember when Nixon jumped up and said, “Manson is guilty?” Well, that’s because he was standing in that divorce court, because he was riding on my criminal court. A lot of people don’t know the way a court works. See, the civil court and the divorce court run on the criminal court. Different chambers of justice, and honor, run like upside down, and backwards.

  III

  NOTHING TO LOSE

  These days, I’m employed as part of a crisis response team, performing emergency outreach work for the mental health clinic in my city. I do a lot of community assessments and take a lot of phone calls, most of them from people who are overwhelmed, anxious, or depressed. In these cases, it’s my job to reacquaint patients with the present, help them prioritize their lives, and encourage them to work through their troubles. Many people tend to live in anticipation, agonizing over what may happen next in their lives, obsessed with that over which they have no control. In simplest terms, people suffering with anxiety are consumed by thoughts of the future. Those overwhelmed by depression often dwell too much on the past. Of course, some find themselves tossed back and forth between the two, preoccupied with the past, in constant dread of the pending.

  The longer you perform crisis work, the less you perceive people’s circumstances to be problematic. It becomes easier to see that everything is the way it is, because that’s the way it is. And you come to recognize a sort of perfection in the way life exists, in the acceptance of the things that can’t be changed. You come to appreciate the power of a simple shift in perception, realize that if only people could see things from a slightly different angle, many dilemmas would cease to exist. You learn to assess problems without regarding them as such, because in naming something a problem, you give it power. Acceptance is the most difficult thing to achieve, but my work has taught me it’s most vital to life.

  A few years ago, my life was lined up perfectly. I was in love with an amazing girl, I had the best friends in the world, and my band, Plastic Bastard, was working on doing a Canadian tour with my hero, Alice Cooper. I remember at the height ofmy happiness driving back from seeing the Groovie Ghoulies in Saskatoon with my friend Brian. The Ghoulies were one of our favorite bands and they even let us write up their set list that night. With Brian fast asleep in the passenger seat, I drove under some low lying fog and felt alive, energized. Through the fog, I witnessed the brightest falling star I’d ever seen. But as I thought about making a wish, I felt a twinge of dread that everything good was going to change.

  I have a deep love for everything odd, especially those gems once possessed by my idols. It’s easy to see, then, why eBay has become one of my favorite time killers. I’ve collected artifacts owned and worn by my heroes since I was a kid. When I was nine or ten years old, my Uncle Ernie used to take my friends and me to Stampede Wrestling matches, where we’d try to meet all the wrestlers and ask them to sign our programs. When I got into music, I’d jump at the chance to see the bands that toured through my city, especially those that hosted in-store record signings. I began accumulating autographs scrawled on records, photos, set lists, anything to which you can take a pen. I probably own well over a thousand signatures.

  I own clothing worn by Kiss, Alice Cooper, Randy Rhoads, Kurt Cobain, The Ramones, and Hank Williams, and there is a story behind each piece I’ve acquired. I own a lounging robe worn by Marilyn Monroe, a garment she generously gave to a maid who complimented her on how beautiful she looked in it. I own three of the locks Houdini used to train for his elaborate underwater escapes. I’ve amassed quite a few exotic movie props-swords and shields from great epic Hollywood productions, like Ben-Hur and The Ten Commandments. My home is a tribute to these legends, a cross between a Ripley’s museum and a Hard Rock Cafe.

  While surfing eBay one day, I came across a vendor selling some of the more select celebrity items I’ve discovered on the Internet: a shirt that had supposedly been worn by Elvis Presley, a snip ofJames Dean’s pubic hair, and several letters and postcards from Charles Manson. Even by my standards, these things were pretty fucked up. I couldn’t believe the authenticity of the listings, so I emailed the seller to ask how he’d obtained such unique items. In no time, he wrote back and assured me that he knew all the people whose relics he sold, that he was writing a memoir about his Hollywood relationships. He wanted to pass these artifacts on to someone who would appreciate them. He was also hoping to earn a few extra bucks to buy an urn for the ashes of his beloved terrier, which had recently passed away.

  The seller wrote that he had limited Internet access and asked me for my address so he could explain his story more efficiently. Fascinated, I complied, and a week later I received a neatly typed, sixteen-page letter from Donald Taylor, a man who claimed to have had sex with more than five thousand men, among them Elvis Presley,James Dean, Lenny Bruce, Orson Wells, and Charles Manson. In his letter, Donald went into great detail about his escapades; his story was completely over-the-top. Interestingly, he also mentioned he had been friends with Betty Grable and Marilyn Monroe. Donald’s package included his phone number, and the first time I called him, our conversation lasted well over two hours. Of course this was, according to most people’s standards, a strange and somewhat suspicious introduction to a very strange and suspicious man. Donald was eager to talk to me, perhaps a little too eager. I believe that timing is everything, and so he wrote, and I called, and he met me when he had finished writing his memoir without a clue how to publish it.

  I found Donald fascinating; he possessed a wealth of information and told the most amazing stories. During one phone conversation, Donald told me his existence was sort of “serendipitous.” He said he had worked his whole life in the service industry and, thus, met many celebrities. Since he was “a world class slut,” he took whatever opportunities he could to meet and mingle with the stars; he was essentially a groupie. Donald relayed his story in a soft-spoken, southern accent. His facts were consistent and extremely specific. I got the impression that he was pretty lonely, which seemed to make sense for a man who had attempted to associate almost exclusively with famous figures, now all either dead or distanced. Donald loved to talk about his adventures and he seemed thankful I was such a receptive, interested audience. He assured me that he knew his story sounded unbelievable and that he had trouble believing it himself.

  I then learned that Donald had found a San Francisco publisher interested in releasing his memoir, minus the material surrounding his relationship with Manson. Donald refused to scrap the Manson story because he believed that Manson was one of the most important and influential people he’d ever met. When we began communicating with each other, Donald promised to send a completed manuscript to me in no time at all. He was counting on my opinion. And three weeks after that conversation, I received a package from him in the mail.

  I began reading the enclosed manuscript immediately, but I could get only about four or five pages in. I was stunned to find that the book
was composed almost exclusively of some of the most disturbing, poorly written gay porn anyone could possibly imagine. The author’s voice seemed in stark contrast to the personality I had talked to so extensively on the phone. In the letter he sent me, Donald talked about the general nature of his relationships and the impact they’d had on his life. But his book was geared only toward shock value, filled with tasteless, graphic accounts of incest, coprophagia, and rape that functioned to disturb instead of enlighten.

  While Donald’s manuscript was a disappointment, his correspondence with Manson was fascinating. Don sent me several letters, postcards, and photos he’d received from his infamous friend. He hoped that, since I worked in psychiatry, I would find them “interesting.” He’d tried in vain to sell the items together on eBay, hoping to acquire “at least” fifty dollars for everything. But eBay pulled the auction before anyone could bid, citing strict guidelines around selling “murderobilia.”

  To hold Manson’s writing in my hands, the paper he’d handled and entrusted with his most personal thoughts, was nothing short of amazing. It felt as if the letters had been lifted from another time and place; Manson had written them from his jail cell, a world contained within a world I could hardly imagine. Atop the stack of letters sat a postcard with a picture of a Gambel’s quail on the front. I carefully turned it over and read the first words:

  “Always is always, always and that’s forever in ALL WAYS.”

  I let the words resonate in my brain. That line had the qualities of a riddle: tempting, taunting. “Always is always, always”: a circular arc of thought, which ran like an idea falling onto itself. The subtle word play intrigued me; it seemed more like wisdom than nonsense. I read on:

  “Whenever I think of what you think you are, and are not -I could never say more, because you already know why, and never less because you’re on that side of the top, under and around the all of all ways and forever even when I don’t spell it or tell it - it’s in my own words.”

  I was struck by the lyricism ofthese lines and the immensity of the ideas they contained, like the thought that one person could read another’s mind. I’ve met mystics who have experienced themselves as everything and perceived life as happening for them instead of to them. I wanted to pass Manson’s ideas off as the products of sheer insanity, but they seemed so thoughtfully, deliberately cryptic that I couldn’t dismiss them.

  Naturally, I had assumed that anything written by Charles Manson would be written out of anger. But as I read through the stack of letters, I was shocked to find no trace of the fury I had come to associate with the notorious face. I had perceived Manson to be misanthropic; I believed that he truly hated people. But, if this were true, it would make no sense for Manson to write letters at all. I realized how little I knew about him. I began researching and reading other things Manson had written, keeping in mind that the man had a grade three education and had spent most of his life in prison, most of his life sentence in solitary confinement. As I learned more, I started to realize how complex Manson was. I wanted to explore how ideas, which sound so philosophical, could come forth from the mind of a guy who referred to himself as a “stupid hillbilly,” a man the rest of the world deemed criminally insane. His words seemed like carefully constructed answers to some of life’s most difficult and complicated questions, yet they were free-written, at the spur of a moment, according to whim. I got the sense that the heaviness, the density of his writing came naturally; it was simply the only way he could communicate with anyone.

  The post card was signed “Gone, EASY.”

  Marilyn Manson once said, “When you are alone, you write; when you have friends, you form a band.” This is exactly what I have experienced in my own life, exactly what I have witnessed others experience in theirs. It’s useful to add that writers and musicians are, for the most part, not exactly the most stable people. It takes a certain level of abandonment to create meaningful art. So, it’s easy to see why, when you work in psychiatry, you encounter an incredible amount of creative expression. I’ve seen a lot of extremely bizarre pieces of writing throughout my career. I was once asked by a psych patient to “hand deliver” an elaborate scroll he had constructed, complete with a red ribbon, to the Queen. The calligraphy on this piece was amazing. I’ve seen five-page mathematical equations intended to illustrate the nature of the universe. I worked with one man who wrote complete books of poetry and left them in the local library’s after-hours drop box. He was frustrated because he couldn’t understand why the work he submitted wasn’t being published and stocked on the shelves. When I inquired about him, the confused librarians showed me a large stack of his manuscripts, which they had compiled over the previous few years. They had no idea what to do with it.

  One of my schizophrenic clients, Barry, completely rewrote the Bible in his own hand writing eight times; he was halfway through his ninth edition when I met him. He was well enough to receive treatment at home, but he was often non-compliant, so he was placed on a community treatment order, which legally obliged him to receive an injection of antipsychotic medication every two weeks. My job was to follow him into the community and give him his injections when they were required. As we got acquainted, he told me he found his work peaceful, that the process gave him better insight into the word of God. He was completely obsessed. The only thing that mattered to him was that he had enough paper and ink to work on his writings. He would often isolate himself, forget to eat, grow weak, and deteriorate. His manuscripts filled boxes upon boxes, stacked on top of each other on almost every surface in his apartment. When I accepted a new job, I took a trip to his home to say goodbye and wish him well. He opened the door, looked at me, and then quickly glanced at the baseball bat in the corner before returning his gaze to my face. I made a quick exit, and Barry landed himself back in the hospital.

  I showed Manson’s letters to my friend and colleague Dr. Kumar, a psychiatrist. He described the letters as “disjointed and nonsensical,” and even though he was unable to utilize them in making a diagnosis, he felt that Manson must suffer from some sort of psychotic disorder. As I became increasingly acquainted with things Manson had written, I was reminded more and more of a particular patient with whom I’d had the privilege of working.

  It’s been about five years since I’ve seen Dwayne; he eventually ended up in long-term care, a sort of group home setting. He was a brilliant man, an engineer, but he suffered what is commonly known as a “nervous breakdown” when his wife left him. He couldn’t cope, and his life started to fall apart, most visibly at work. His colleagues tried to compensate for the deficit in his performance, but it eventually became too obvious that Dwayne wasn’t well, and they had to take him to the hospital. Dwayne didn’t respond well to psychiatric medications. On them, he would arch back like David Lee Roth, a fixed grimace on his face, and bellow so violently that sometimes he couldn’t catch his breath.

  I can still remember watching him write from the table in his hospital room, papers everywhere. I would often have to wait a few extra minutes for him to finish. He wrote on any and every surface available, mostly messages about what it meant for people to be kind to one another. He often put words together in ways that made no apparent sense, yet sometimes the combinations just clicked, and, after reading a particularly lyrical phrase, I would sometimes find myself thinking, “This would be the perfect name for a band.”

  It is very difficult to accept being diagnosed with a mental health disorder. Very rarely do people with mental illness seek help. When they do, it is normal for patients to start a prescription, begin feeling better, stop taking their medication, and relapse. A lot of this has to do with the terrible side effects associated with these medications. I can remember going to the psychiatric unit to take Dwayne out on a pass for a cup of coffee. Dwayne had just received his medication, and the nurse had to make sure he took some water with his pills because Dwayne was an expert at “cheeking” them. Immediately after, Dwayne excused himself to go to the wash
room. Outside the door, I could hear him hacking and coughing. I knew what he was up to. When he came out, I asked him if he’d taken his medication. He looked at me, confused. “Of course not,” he said. “What do you think I am -crazy?”

  People with mental illness or emotional problems often have difficulty explaining their experiences; it is hard for them to find someone in which to confide, someone who understands them. So I often encourage patients to journal in order to express what they would ordinarily internalize about their illnesses. But Manson’s writings, like Dwayne’s, were completely devoid of any acknowledgment of mental illness. Both of their writings functioned, not as coping mechanisms, but as tangible discourse with a world they expected to receive and appreciate their ideas, even though their values differed starkly from those commonly held by most people. My fondest memory of Dwayne stems from his return to the psychiatric unit after being away on a pass. In his hand he held a fresh, crisp, brand new five-dollar bill. He asked the nurse at the desk if he could use the pencil sharpener, something he’d done at least a dozen times before. When granted permission, Dwayne rolled the bill up, tightly, pressed it into the pencil sharpener, and watched as the machine ground the money into fuzzy bits of green dust.