Bottom Lines
I see the bottom lines on everything. I see the bottom of it. Richard Nixon had the top of me. Richard Nixon is my divorce court. He’s my Elvis Presley’s testicles. I go to court and I’m standing in court. Court wouldn’t be there had I not been standing there. So the court rides on what I’m doing. The judge gives somebody a position to represent me. The district attorney takes a position to represent me. That goes off into the sheriff, goes off into the psychiatrist and the doctors and the cops and the sheriffs, and the highway patrol. Probably when I’m standing in that courtroomfor stealing a car there’s probably 150,000 people representing me. The National Guard is representing me. The park rangers are representing me. All the prisons are representing me. The boys’ schools and reform schools are representing me. I’m the king of crime. I’m the criminal. I’m the juvenile delinquent, the rebel, the outcast, the unwanted. I’m everything that everybody looks down on and is standing on, spitting on, cursing and calling names, and hating, buying and selling all the different things.
Pretty soon it just gets to be a part of my mind and my life, get everybody working me and doing whatever they can get away with and whatever they can get from me. So then I call that “my me,” and I get outside and I look at everything you guys are doing in your life out there. See, I got a life in here and everybody that comes in here is feeding on my life. The psychiatrist wants to come in like he’s helping me, and the sociologist and the penologist and the criminologist and all the “ologists,” and make rules. They’re going to make rules and wait for me to do something crazy and then they can come in and playact like they’re sane. Then they want to handcuff me because they need my hands for something so they’re representing my hands with it. They’re representing my heart for that and they’re representing my head for those things. They’re cutting my hair and selling it for something and making pictures and books and changing my name and saying they’re me in another perspective. They’re my divorce court. Pretty soon I see where everything’s going and it’s all in my life, man. Have you ever considered what it would be like for a human being to be kept in cages and prisons for sixty-three years?
Krishna
They did a training class over here and most people don’t realize why they did the training class. They think it was because of something that they were told. But actually what it is…all the microphones are over here. You got the whole world hearing but they wont admit it. You know, that’s why as soon as I got a cell phone, they went right to it, got it quick as they could because they knew that a cell phone is a threat to all these microphones, because they got their own private lines on what’s going on. Because the whole world is right here. But you don’t see that because it’s been coming for years and years and years. It started… when Krishna Venta blew himself up in the fountain of the world in Box Canyon, California. Krishna had a cult and they were based on the water and there was the Feather River project that just started. Land was fifty cents an acre at that particular time.
Now the same land is 50,000 dollars an acre because what they did, they went out and they took the water holes and put them in a tank and put them in a pipe and brought them down in a river and brought the river down and sold the water to the city. And all the animals died. They didn’t care about that, you know. They didn’t care about the wildlife and whatever, the snakes, they just took all the water off the land and put it in these artificial rivers and it dried the land up, man. And Krishna seen it because he had a big fountain in his cult area and when it dried up it stopped, and he said, well, you can’t buy and sell the water. The water’s for everyone. If you start buying and selling the water, man, you’re taking the animals off the earth. There will be no animals left. ‘Cause the animals can’t afford to buy a drink.
People wanted to send Patty Hearst to the graveyard and it came to me, like what should we do. And I said we’ve had enough trouble. No, yeah, she was right on but she was not right on. She was there and she just got involved with some bad people, you know, and in other words they had her. See, what should have happened is Patricia Hearst should have been with me to start with. If she had been with me to start with, she wouldn’t have had to go and prove the things she went through, and we could have had some say with the water at this particular point. See, because what happened is, the thought I’m here in, right now, at the end right now, was started on this level in the State of California by Krishna Venta when he sacrificed his life and the life of nine women. I think it was nine, maybe it was fifteen, but what he did when his fountain turned off, he put dynamite under his house and blew everybody up. But the thing, he didn’t know that what we learned from that was the people that pick up the mess they don’t tell the truth. In other words they lie. Them guys didn’t die the way they said they did.
No way in hell are you going to convince me that those people laid in that fire and they didn’t jump up and say ouch or run or do anything. That’s bullshit. That was all put up. Yeah, that was the FBI, that was the system trying to get around for what we’d already done. I was in reform school when Krishna came on TV, that he had blown himself up with all his women, but you know as a child, I wasn’t impressed. That was just another movie. So when I ended up over there at that area, with all his women thinking what the hell am I doing here? You know it’s like the spirit of everything had brought me there, you know, and there was just, like, the spirit of my life is what brought you here. And the spirit of your life will bring somebody to your book. Yeah, just follow. You know now I’m taking credit for something that’s really not my play, but you know it was in the spirit of what I was doing.
My Fans
Want to hear another perspective? The people that did all this stuff, you know, they were my fans. They weren’t my family, they were fans and they wanted to get me over and that’s why they did it. That’s what the whole thing was created for. Susie came to me with a butcher knife and blood up to her elbows saying, “I love you so much and I love your music so much and I just killed myself for you. I give you my life.” I told her, “All you’ve done, witch, is put me back in the penitentiary for the rest of my life. You haven’t done me no favors.” All that was supposed to be for me. You know, they did all those murders for the love of me. It wasn’t love of me, it was love of their own life that they seen in ATWA. When I seen what I seen and I woke up to what I woke up to, I communicated that to them and they seen that, and when they seen that they said wow. This is our life, where, you know, Charlie can save us.
The Beatles ain’t going to save us. They looked at the Beatles. The Beatles wasn’t our heroes. The Beatles were punks, poobutts, rumpkins. They were doodads. They wasn’t saying anything. The music was good but what they were saying was nothing. It was just Rocky Raccoon and a Bible set against a Bible and all that shit. I mean it was nice but when you’re talking music to God, man we’re not talking… Marilyn Manson, we’re talking Moses, we’re talking angels, we’re talking zodiacs, we’re talking universal love. When I got arrested, and I got busted, all the people there were going to start an E.L.F: earth, love, and family. That’s what I got convicted for, being the earth, love, and the family. Fucking Susie gave her whole life for those people, man. They didn’t show her one minute of mercy. They played on that girl. That was their little playground, Susie. Like it doesn’t bother me. I never lived in that society anyway. I’ve always lived over here in the basement. At the bottom, wherever that is. Does that make sense? Susie gave her own life, man, for ATWA. She may have snuck out the side door, I don’t know. I don’t believe nothing they say, you know that.
VI
FROM THE INSIDE
Prisoners on Corcoran’s PHU are issued two sheets, a pillow, and either a cotton or a woven wool blanket, the former usually preferred over the latter, which itches and sheds and “gets crap all over the cells.” TVs are allowed, and so are three main appliances, an appliance being a radio, musical instrument, lamp, hot pot, or typewriter. What flies in terms of acce
ssory appliances depends solely on how strict the guards are at any given time. Prisoners are technically allowed either ten or twelve books each, but the few who read as avidly as David are usually given leeway to store more. An inmate’s total accumulation of personal property, everything from tennis shoes to clothes to chess sets and decks of cards, should occupy no more than six cubic feet of cell space.
David believes you can tell what sort of man a prisoner is by the way he keeps his cell. An unstable and insecure person is likely to stack and hoard property in his space, as though his belongings anchor him to his sanity. Others, like David, accumulate very little. “Other than a couple of personal photographs and letters, you could set fire to my cell and I wouldn’t care.” Other guys are less attached to stuff. They have almost nothing in there purposely. Those are the guys that live with a lot of deprivation, been through different prisons, they just don’t want to have all their stuff taken away from them, they’re not leaving themselves open to being ripped off. Or suffer any kind of loss that they don’t have any control over. You can do a lot of things to maintain privacy and control over your immediate environment and what’s going on around you. There are inmates who possess almost nothing, seemingly on purpose as a means of control. Because what you don’t own can’t be taken from you. Although, prisoners on PHU are subject to a lot less theft and are required to hand a lot less contraband over to authorities. There are punitive cell searches, during which “they tear your crap up,” but far fewer than on other units. David told me, “This unit is sort of like a stupid step child, tolerated by an apathetic step parent. They will come in and do a spanking but usually they just prefer you to not be their problem, so they’d just as soon ignore you if they can.”
I asked David what Manson’s cell looked like. “Lived in,” David said. Fortunately, he was willing to clarify further his assessment and described Manson’s space as “cluttered” but organized, in that there is a home for every possession. “He’s not fastidious, but he’s not a slob either.” All in all, David sees Manson’s living space as a reflection of Manson’s (relatively) active lifestyle; on any given day, the things that are out of place are those he’s used for that day’s projects and activities.
The area outside the cells is filled with tables and chairs for the inmates to eat, play cards, and just hang out. There are a TV and a few large fans, a table at which the overseer sits, a bookcase and two showers (one on the bottom tier and one on the top). David cites a main difference between PHU and any other prison unit: “Unlike mainline, where it’s ‘five minutes in the shower and then get the hell out,’ these guys [PHU inmates] seem seriously inconvenienced ifyou ask them to get out within twenty minutes.”
Getting along with the guards in PHU is about knowing the patterns and tendencies associated with an officer’s specific background. Those that start off or have spent a lot of time on PHU generally have good relationships with the prisoners; they are quite familiar with each man and treat him accordingly. But those guards that have consistently worked in crowded and violent units, those that have had to worry about, as David says, “somebody trying to spear them through the door, throw shit and piss on them, spit on them, or scream at them -’You did this!’ or ‘Where’s my fucking mail?’ or ‘I know you stole my stuff!’ -” generally approach work on PHU with a lot of hostility. It is a gradual process, getting to know the inmates and the system, to realize that PHU isn’t an ordinary unit filled with ordinary prisoners. At any given time though, David says, he deals with three types of authority: the cops that “start out as assholes and stay true to those colors,” those “who are fair and even handed” from the first minute they step onto the unit, and those who “will smile at a man on Tuesday and then look at him on Wednesday like ‘who the hell are you?’“ The latter, according to David, is the most difficult type to get used to.
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 aw
are 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.”
Charles Manson Now Page 9
