Charles Manson Now

by Marlin Marynick

  I’m Safe Here

  The safest place on Earth is right where I’m at. I got a prison built around me, man. Got a bunch of dumb people who think that this is their house. They’re working to protect their slave masters. They’re slaves, man. More locked up than we are. So should the associate warden or program administrator who can’t do anything. He can’t not do anything. All he does is come back and get a cup of coffee and a piece of paper and walks around with it all day. So he can take his paycheck back to his wife, who is his warden, she tells him what to do. The whole thing is locked up in mother. It’s not really loving, there’s no one there, just how much is that doggie in the window. You keep the dog in the window, like that’s supposed to be me, that’s my reality; everybody’s pissing on me and everything’s okay. As long as they pee on me it’s all right. I could tell you that a flash of blue light’s gonna come across the sky, and a flash of blue light will come across the sky and you wouldn’t say Charlie said that. You’d say Al Gore said it. You’re afraid of who you’re kowtowing to, and I don’t have enough of your fear. In other words, I need more fear. I need enough fear to bow you down. That’s the only way you’re going to do it. You ain’t going to do it standing up. You’re too proud. The world has a prison body. And I’ve been in the prison body of the world since the ‘40s.

  Civilizations

  Well, the kind of mind I have is I was making little paper balls and hanging them in my cell from string off of the ceiling. And somebody come by and said you know that’s the exact configuration ofthe galaxy, da, da, da. Whatever I’ve been trying to figure out the Stonehengefor a long time, man, and I tell my mind if in my mind I was there, and I’m a part of this forever, I should know how that was done and I figured out how it was done. There could be no such thing as personality. You’ve got to give that up. All that personal thing. You know, that’s why that Stonehenge, it was put there by everybody. Everybody did that. Everybody at that time. Everybody had a part in that, a place in that. That’s why it was done; it was done by a group effort. It had to be. There’s no way in hell they could have done it any other way. It’s the same thing with the problem that we have with the world today. If it’s not everybody, it will not work. It’s got to be everyone, and if it isn’t everyone one way, it should be everyone the other way, and I feel that the intelligent life forms should probably, all the people that won’t go to work, go somewhere else, another world somewhere, fly them on a rocket ship.

  It’s the only way it could have been done. We got a civilization of ego maniacs, you know, those type of individuals didn’t have all that ego, they were more like ants. You know, look at an ant. If we were as powerful as an ant, look at what an ant can pick up. The same thing with a mouse, a little tiny mouse. I was in a cage with a mouse for a long time and that goddamn mouse is tough. I mean he could do things that if I had his strength and power I could tear the door off the fucking cell, you dig? There’s only one thing that matters. The air right now. That’s it. Without that, the rest of it don’t mean a shit. There’s only one way to do it. There’s only one way to do it. And it’s got nothing to do with personalities.

  And every son of a bitch has been doing all this shit that they’ve been doing. They have no idea what the devil’s going to be like. None. Ifyou tell them, they’re going to want to take it out on somebody else.

  Go down and look at the museums of Mexico and you see a whole different perspective towards the sun God. They was up on the orbit of the sun long before NASA. Those guys weren’t stupid, and you look at some of the stuff they built down there and some of the stones they were just shoveling around like nobody’s business. They’re moving 3200-ton stones without cables or ropes, without wheels, you know, and it was, like, that was a pretty strong-minded people. See these people that are stuck in this time mode, that’s going back and forwards with hypothesis of who built the Stonehenge. I told them I built it, and they said, “How couldyou?”I said, “I used my dog, T-Rex. He carried the stones around for me. Because I had the brain over his just like I have the brain over yours.” Ifyou don’t want to accept that, then fuck it, I don’t give a fuck. Do what you want to do but just get the fuck out of my way, because if you’re in my way and you’re doing what you think you’re doing, you’re not doing anything because I’m not doing anything. The weather’s doing it.

  XI

  NEW RISING SON

  I learned about Matthew Roberts the way I learned about most people linked to Charlie: a frantic phone call from Kenny.

  One evening, Kenny called to inform me that Charlie was “flipping out”; he’d received a letter from an editor at Details magazine, inquiring about his DNA. Kenny told me he didn’t have all the details, but he’d learned there was “some rock star” somewhere trying to prove he was Charlie’s son. Kenny gave me the name and phone number of the editor and asked me to call him. I didn’t, even though I’d grown accustomed to Kenny calling with names and contact information for me to investigate. He has referred me to countless people: prison staff, authors, researchers, friends of his. I often explain to Kenny that I hardly have time to keep in touch with my own friends.

  At that point I had no idea if Charlie even had any children. The thought that he could have children out living and functioning with the rest of society had never even occurred to me. Charlie is sensitive and protective when he feels he needs to be. I find it extremely uncomfortable to bring up issues such as this when we’re talking, and have learned it’s much easier to let Charlie bring up the personal stuff. I asked Kenny what he knew of Charlie’s alleged children. He told me about one of Manson’s sons, Charles Manson Jr., who had hung himself in Texas when he was in his thirties. Kenny then cryptically dispensed a number for “Candy,” a woman he said could tell me more of the story.

  Intrigued, I called Candy right away and introduced myself as a friend of Kenny’s. Candy spoke with a strong, comforting southern accent in a voice that was warm and inviting. She told me she’d heard all about my friendship with Charlie and laughed as she explained her unusual name. Charlie, it seems, could never remember Candy’s real name. So, because she’d once worked at the Kraft candy factory and Charlie loves caramels, he initiated a new nickname. Candy’s words were lively, and Kenny had told me she strongly resembled Liza Minnelli, so I could almost put a face to the voice I heard over the phone.

  Candy said she hadn’t known much about Charlie before she reached out to him in a letter. She was far more interested in Charlie as a personality, she said, than in Charlie as a criminal. Two years before, she’d extended her first thoughts to Manson in a simple note. “I just told him I do not feel that anyone who behaves so bizarrely is really that nuts. I said he had a pretty good act going on. I wanted to know why the act was there.” Candy doesn’t think Charles Manson is really the character he portrays. She professed a love for psychology and figuring people out. “I’m sixty-five years old. I can remember seeing him on TV for the first time, and the more I’d see of him, the more I’d wanted to talk to him because I knew there was a deeper story there. Never, in a million years, did I ever dream that would happen.”

  Candy didn’t think Manson would even read her letter, but a week after she sent it, she received a reply. Since then Manson has called her over seventy-five times. “It’s kind of a mixed bag of emotions whenever you have a conversation with him; you don’t know which one is going to rear its ugly head.” Candy told me sometimes Manson is funny and happy. Other times he is the kind of man with whom she’d never want to be in the same room. And yet other times he is confounding, perplexing, preaching and proposing the sort of ideas that make her question, “Wow, where did that come from?” No matter which side of himself Charlie reveals during any given conversation, he is never, Candy believes, the Charles Manson the world sees. “He’s asked me a hundred times if I’m recording our conversations, and I always say, ‘Why on Earth would I ever do that?’ He’s told me, ‘Well, you are talking to history.’“ Though she feels cre
ating actual voice recordings would violate the trust she shares with Charlie, Candy does keep a journal in which she documents the discussions and writes about the feelings they arouse. Assessing her inventory of conversations, she can see absolutely no comparison between the Charles Manson that does interviews on TV and the Charles Manson that talks to friends on the phone.

  I asked Candy what she and Manson talk about. “I didn’t have the greatest life growing up, and people like that can usually pick each other out of a crowd. So, that was sort of the first place I went with him.” Candy described Charlie as a kind of comrade and confidante. They identified with each other’s upbringing because neither was “brought up in the greatest of worlds.” Manson told Candy he wished he’d never left Indiana, where he’d spent time at a school for boys. “He loved Indiana and said if he had stayed he would have ended up being a farmer there, for God’s sake!” Candy chuckled at the seemingly improbable idea. The Manson portrayed in the media seems an unlikely farmer. “But just talk to him,” Candy insisted, “and you’ll learn he knows a lot about farming: crops, cattle, horses.” As well as she’s gotten to know Manson, Candy is continuously surprised by the way he thinks, speaks, and reacts. For instance, Manson’s mother is commonly thought to have been a neglectful, abusive parent, but when Candy once mentioned the woman (she can’t remember exactly what she said), Manson jumped down her throat. “Don’t you ever talk bad about my mother!” he’d screamed, though Candy says her intention was never to speak badly about a person she’d never even met. “My mom done an armed robbery to pay for my tonsillectomy,” Charlie continued to rant. “Never talk bad about my mom. She spent five years in prison, he’d gone on to say, for that offense alone.

  I told Candy I’d talked with Kenny briefly about the death of Charlie’s son. And she began to tell me about a man who’d worked with her in the candy factory and who had looked just like Charles Manson: “He had long hair and piercing brown eyes and displayed a great deal of pleasure every time someone said, ‘Hey, you look like Charles Manson.’ He would smile and say something like, ‘Yah, far out; thank you.’ The guy had a bizarre personality. Eventually, he committed suicide.”

  When Candy began communicating with Manson she started to research her new friend. When she stumbled across an article about an alleged son of Manson’s who committed suicide, whose description coincided with that of the man she knew at the factory, she started to put the pieces together. The man had been born in Kentucky, in an area where Charlie had once lived. Candy asked Charlie where he was during May 1951, about the time the man would have been conceived. “He said, ‘I was in jail; why do you ask?’“ All that Candy knew about Charles Manson Jr. was that he died somewhere in Colorado. The mystery remains unsolved, but Candy has a good idea that her suspicions are correct.

  I thanked Candy for all the information she shared with me. She wished me luck with my book and graciously asked that I call if I ever needed anything. As I got off the phone, I was aware of how differently people, even those closest to him, perceive Charlie. It seemed as though Charles Manson connects to various people on distinctly different levels, so much so that it’s easy to see why the world is filled with such conflicting information about him. Maybe, I thought, by surrounding himself with such an eclectic group of friends and admirers, he is better able to cultivate different sides of himself, able to wear various hats. Talking to Candy, I got the sense that in her life Manson plays the role of big brother.

  I started researching the topic of Charlie’s children and discovered several conflicting reports, none of which has ever gone public. One account described the method by which Charlie delivered babies at the ranch. On one occasion, he allegedly chewed through the umbilical cord and, with blood covering his face, handed the baby to its mother. It was easy to picture Charlie in such a surreal scene. Later, when I got the chance, I told Manson what I’d read and asked if it were true. Charlie laughed and asked if I’d ever seen a dog deliver pups. “It’s no different than that,” he said. “You just help the baby come out and tie it off with an old guitar string or something.” I asked Charlie how many babies he’d delivered. “I don’t know, a couple,” he’d answered casually, and then moved on to something else, as though the topic weren’t worth mentioning, as if it were not that big a deal.

  In March 2010, Details published an article about Matthew Roberts, an aspiring writer, musician, and DJ who spins at LA strip clubs a few days a week. The article was compelling: Matthew linked his conception to a 1967 San Francisco LSD-laced hippy orgy in which, his biological mother claims, Charles Manson participated. I was intrigued by Roberts’ description of the “hellish” night terrors he routinely experienced as a child, by the comparison the writer made between Roberts’ biological mother, who continued to drop acid well into her pregnancy, and Mia Farrow’s character in Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby, who, post-conception, ingests a vile concoction intended to create the Antichrist. I discussed the article with Stanton LaVey, who said he knew Matthew Roberts, gave me his number, and urged me to talk to him. Stanton and Matthew became close friends when they once rented a “shitty ass motel room together on LA’s skid row.” The two were simultaneously experiencing hard times, “fucking really getting to know each other.” Stanton told me that Matthew is complicated and composed of many intense layers: a “really deep cat.” I asked Stanton about the possibility that Matthew might be Manson’s son. “As far as I’m concerned,” he said, “he is Charlie’s son: there’s no two ways about it. There are so many mannerisms, weird little ticks, things that Matthew does that he’s not even conscious of that are totally Charlie.”

  I called Matthew from my hotel room and left him a message explaining who I was. Matthew called back almost immediately. We talked for a bit and made fast plans to get together in the following few days. Meanwhile, I was able to research more of his story through various other interviews he had given. My initial impression of his motivation for doing such press was that he wanted to find out, either way, if he was indeed Charlie’s son.

  Matthew and I eventually met at a Thai restaurant near his apartment. Based on what Stanton told me about Mathew’s likeness to Manson, I to notice an expected to see an immediate resemblance. But, looking at Matthew, who is built tall and solid, with long, wild hair and deep, wide-set eyes, I was reminded more of a friend I knew in Regina than of the masses of photographs I’d seen of a young Manson. Matthew seemed reserved, and quiet, in contrast to Manson’s lively, often flamboyant style. We introduced ourselves and took a few minutes to get acquainted by talking about LA, music, traveling. He struck me as a person more interested than interesting, a quality I value in others. I felt as if I was immediately on the same level with Matthew. We share a love for music, psychology, nature. We both feel drawn to Manson; we wanted to help each other figure out the mystery. Our initial conversation was a feeling out process: while I tried to figure out if he was sincere, he tried to predict whether or not I would twist his story around to make him look like an attention-seeking idiot. It turned out we both had nothing to worry about. Matthew exuded honesty, and I immediately felt his commitment to speaking his truth.

  Over dinner, I asked Matthew how all of this hysteria began. He assured me it had nothing to do with self promotion. “So I’m at a party in downtown LA and I’m drunk and I’m telling this guy my story. He just happened to be a freelance writer and he asked if he could shop my story around. I said go ahead. So he got it in Globe.” At the time, Matthew had no reason to take the man seriously, no clue to the kind of contacts he had. Matthew said that, once his story hit Globe, he felt like a part of the butterfly effect. “The butterfly flaps its wings in China and it becomes a tempest in the United States. The story went from being in Globe to being the number one Googled story over Thanksgiving weekend. Over two hundred million people searched me and I never made a single phone call trying to pitch this story.” Matthew told me he immediately took heat for self promotion from everyone, including tho
se who wanted to promote the story themselves. “People would call me to do a story and at the same time accuse me of trying to advance myself or promote my band or whatever. I’m like, dude-you called me.” Matthew assigns a lot of meaning to the fact that his story received intense international attention after a single, simple conversation at a party. “I had nothing to do with it, literally. So, to me, this is a story that wants to be told. It’s got a life of its own.”

  Matthew isn’t exactly in an ideal position to uphold any allegation. He acknowledged, “Can you imagine how I’m going to look if I get the DNA back and it’s negative? I’m going to look like a complete idiot.” For a burgeoning artist, garnering attention for falsely claiming to be the son of Charles Manson is not a smooth move. Matthew admitted that after buying Details magazine it took him three days to stomach reading the article. “I kept thinking in my head, ‘What the hell am I doing? What am I getting myself into?’“ He could have told the man at the party he didn’t want his story told. The fact that he didn’t is something, Matthew says, he wrestles with every day.

  He may not have said no because of his overwhelming desire to know the truth.

  “That’s it. Ultimately, I want the DNA. I want the proof and I can’t do it on my own. The truth is like God to me; that’s the most important thing in my life because I’ve been lied to so much.” Matthew assured me he could never lie about who may or may not be his father. Because he believes the truth is the truth, whether one likes it or not, even if the truth turns out to be the worst thing in the world. “It’s the truth,” he insisted. “You got to suck it up and live with it.”

  “I’ve never, ever, ever claimed to be the son ofCharles Manson - not once.” Matthew believes all he can do is field questions honestly and encourage people to make up their own minds. He resents headlines like “Man Claims to Be Son of Charles Manson” because he’s become acutely aware of how the media tweaks a story to sell it. And Matthew has more than misrepresentation to worry about. Once, a reality show production company contacted him to buy the rights to his story and thus prevent him from speaking to any other media. “They wanted to own my publishing rights, they wanted to own my life story. For five years I wouldn’t be able to do a single article, I wouldn’t be able to mention the name Charles Manson. Basically, their intention was to shut me up and shut me down. It felt more like the FBI owned the company and they were trying to silence me.” Since declining that offer, Matthew’s felt as if he’s been under surveillance. “It’s like they’re trying to set me up on shit or whatever, trying to get me on some kind of fucked up crime I didn’t commit. I’m probably being a little bit paranoid, but who knows, man.”