Charles Manson Now

by Marlin Marynick

  John created the market for Charles Manson memorabilia, the now-popular nostalgia scene surrounding the stuff of serial killers, true crime, and all things underground. According to Stanton, “John Aes-Nihil is the original swap meet, flea market, smut peddling, bootlegging pirate.” Most important, Stanton said, is that John does what he does for the right reasons, “taking care of people” along the way. “His intentions personally are deeper, philosophical; he wants to carry this information forward into the future, in one of the oldest, truest ways tested: through magazines, literature, books, and archives.” Stanton said he could guarantee that John is the authority on all things Manson, that he “knows all.” His archives have been accessed by virtually everyone attempting to discover or produce anything related to Manson. He owns every piece of video and the rarest photos. He has personally interviewed hundreds of people related to the Manson Family and documented it all. His interest borders on obsession; it’s staggering.

  I made the drive out to the Mojave Desert where John has lived for a while. He has since told me that the desert, out in the middle of nowhere and away from everyone else, is a haven for Satanists. John is pretty soft spoken; he has a deliberate way of talking, as though he thinks about everything first. In a way, he has the composure of an artist and, after spending about ten minutes with him, it was clear to me that this man was one of the being.

  Underworld

  See the underworld, look at everything that everybody else has looked at from inside to out, from up to down. It’s opposite to someone who lives in a basement all their life. So I have a sixty-three-year-old look at everything upside down and backwards. In fact, when my mom got out of prison, she got me out of first grade, made me roll my pants up and beat me all the way home from school on the back of the legs, to impress me. Do you know that…moonwalk, when you see people walking backwards? I’ve been doing that all my life. I was born on the dark side of everything, so I see why Kennedy got shot, because he wasn’t the real leader of the world. Castro was, because the revolution is the leader of the world. That’s when the world started, at the end of the old world. The new world order started with the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. And everybody else got their thing from it. And you learn that in prison because, like, every time you come up with something, if you come up with something different, not necessarily new in perspective to what new is in total and definition, but what is like beginning of a concept or an idea, like credit, you see where it comes from. It comes from the necessity, from the fear of dying. Someone will give somebody credit, so credit becomes a reality to the world, and they’re usingit and they don’t even know what it is or where it came from.

  Hypnosis

  I have met a guy named Doctor Block from Arizona, in prison for five years, and I asked him if he would help me learn self hypnosis. And he said, yeah, he would teach me hypnosis, and he taught me hypnosis. And I used to go to sleep and I’d practice this hypnosis, and I would go to sleep and I sent my soul unto the invisible, into the afterlife, and by and by my soul returned to me and said, “I myself was in heaven, in hell.” Omar Khayyam wrote that, and I said if he can do that so can I, so I would practice the self hypnosis. Put myself in a trance, a sleep, and I would work on it. And I worked on it and I worked on it and finally in the middle of the night I woke up and said, “I sent my soul to the invisible,” and by and by my soul returned to me and said, “Thoughtpatterns are not important.” What? He said, “Thought patterns are not important.” I proposed a question and that’s the answer I got.

  And I ignored it and went back to sleep. And two or three weeks later I woke up and…just thought, thought patterns are not important…. it’s not important, so I went off into the pseudo-intellectual circle of humanity in prison, over on the grass, and I mentioned thought patterns are not important and everyone laughed. “That’s crazy, Charlie, you don’t know what you’re talking about. How else are you going to think, Charles? You got to think in pattern or you’re not thinking at all, you know?” And I said yeah, so I agreed with it. And then about thirty years later, I was sitting on a mountain and I seen the sun come up and the moon go down and looked at both of them, and I had the sun in one hand and the moon in the other and I said, “I’ve got it all, man. I’ve got all the line of the universe of the world forever.”

  Eternally and the pattern of my thought was a joke… ha, ha, ha. The pattern of my thought was programming, man, that’s what someone had told me. I didn’t know that. That was a bunch of junk that was running around in my stupid fucking head like a comic book. You dig? And then I woke up and where I really was, and I seen the starlit sky at night and I seen the moon. I said wow. I’ve been in prison, I’ve never seen anything like that before. I seen it and my mind just went whoop. Ha, ha and I became God. Yeah. I’ll be goddam, man, I gotta hide this. If they find out they’ll throw my ass down and put me in the nut ward, and that’s exactly what they did. The cops couldn’t whip me, so I was knocking cops out in the hallway. So all they could do was gang up on me and then medicate me down to where I couldn’t move and keep me medicated for four or five years, until all the people that were doing that were killed.

  In one way or another, they kind of all died of whatever, you know, so then they said that I was putting juju and I was putting voodoo and causing trouble with all the others because the thirty doctors ended up dying and the last one ended up blowing his brains out in a parking lot because he had got me handcuffed in a shower with two Negroes naked, and his wife ended up in bed with two Negroes. Isn’t that strange?

  I could have explained it, if I was given the position, the platform to explain it, where it could be official, but anything I say at this level is only going to get taken and twisted, make it be into other things they’re not. The truth of the matter could have been explained, but they didn’t want the truth of the matter and they still don’t… they want the hippy cult leader guy. You know why? Because it’s the only way they’re going to survive. I didn’t say it, the spirit of Avalon doesn’t have a name on it, doesn’t have a tag on it, it’s just the spirit of what’s known to be true. It’s like that song I wrote: The moment is ever constant in the mind. Everywhere the blind lead blind. Here’s your chance to step out of time, there’s no reason, there’s no rhyme, it’s just the trouble you bring, it’s the mind that you sing, it’s the thought that you have in your soul, it’s the thing that you know, the cold wind that

  blows, it’s that raven’s wing of death that touches your cheek and the darkness and light when there’s no one there, but your dreams are there.

  What is life worth on earth, what is life on earth worth? All of life on earth or all life on earth, how can you communicate that to people who just will not listen? Stuck in their own little minds, they’d rather die than accept the truth about what is reality. If you’re truly for yourself, then you would truly realize what you really need to do. In the order of self, it’s gotta be air. There ain’t any way you’re going to get off having air. You got to have that air. Anything you’re doing to take that air is killing you. Anything you do that’s destroying the atmosphere is taking your life. If you open up a can of bleach, to bleach some clothes, and you’re putting all that anti-poison…Look in your medicine cabinet and look at everything in there that says kills 99 percent of the germs and figure that you’re one in that 99 percent.

  XII

  WHERE THE TRUTH LIES

  When I thought about my relationship with Charlie, his history was always, to some degree, in the back of my mind. This is a man who was convicted of seven murders. I’d never known much about the murders. The story behind the events of August 1969 has been told and retold and, somewhere in the retelling, the truth got buried and lost. The collection of fact and fiction surrounding the chaos is a conspiracy theorist’s dream.

  I think, on some level, the murder story was something I didn’t really want to delve into. I was apprehensive. I’d told myself, “ Well, he never actually killedanybody,” so
many times, that I managed to justify our relationship, while evading a major part of his past. With time, though, my justification lost its strength. I had to confront the issue. I had to attempt to find the truth. As I started researching the fine details of the murders, I realized that the more I learned, the less I seemed to really know. With so much conflicting information out there, it was a challenge just to figure out where to start. Charlie had once told me there are over one hundred and forty books about him, and he assured me every one of them is a “bunch of shit.” Charlie was adamant when he told me that none of them told the true story, and that no book ever would. He had me convinced. Until, it seems, the truth-or part of it-found me.

  Matthew Roberts told me about a woman named Vicki who had gotten in touch with him after reading one of his interviews; she was convinced that Matthew was Charlie’s son. Vicki wanted to help Matthew find a few answers, fill in some of the areas of a puzzle that seemed to fall increasingly apart with every new piece put in place. The two spoke several times on the phone and developed a trusting relationship. Matthew told me that Vicki first met Charlie when she was just fifteen and visited him while he was in jail after the murders. Oddly enough, Matthew said Vicki didn’t remember much of that meeting. Vicki was friends with several Manson family members and has maintained relationships with some of Manson’s other friends. Through these relationships, Vicki has kept up with what’s happening in Charlie’s life. While Charlie was incarcerated at Vacaville Prison, Vicki began corresponding with him through the mail and the two started talking regularly on the phone. With the advent of the Internet, Vicki spent countless hours researching the Manson case and corresponding with other researchers through several online communities. She blogged tirelessly about her findings, until she came to the realization that there was nothing left to say or, for that matter, to know. Vicki has never given an interview and has kept her interest in Charlie and the family a secret. Vicki is not her real name.

  Matthew and I both agreed that trying to make sense out ofthe Manson story was next to impossible. He advised me that Vicki was a wealth of information and gave me her phone number. I called Vicki and told her I was a friend of Matthew’s and that I had contacted her at his suggestion. Vicki was immediately warm and welcoming and asked me, “How is Matthew? I haven’t heard from him in a while.” Vicki and I talked about our mutual friend. She told me she felt certain that Matthew was Charlie’s son. She also told me that she hadn’t spoken to Charlie in over a year. When I asked her if there had been some sort of falling out, she told me she had worked hard to help Matthew get DNA testing, an effort Charlie was completely against. This, she feels, is why the communication between her and Manson has altogether stopped.

  I asked Vicki if she knew anything about Matthew’s mother and she told me that when Charlie got out of Terminal Island he met Mary Bruner first and the two lived together in an apartment. “There was this girl, she was a runaway, and I can’t remember her name. I believe she was Matthew’s mother. She lived with Charlie and Mary for a few weeks. Mary got kind of jealous and asked her to leave. Charlie didn’t know she was pregnant at the time, so he gave her a bus ticket to get back to Illinois.” Vicki reiterated Charlie’s absolute refusal to give any DNA to test Matthew’s paternity. She lamented the hardships Matthew must be going through and told me how she hoped one day he would be able to find the truth. I asked Vicki if she knew anything about Charlie’s other children. She replied, “One of Charlie’s sons, Charles Manson Jr, went out to see Charlie, and on the way back to his home in Ohio, he pulled off on the side of the road, put a gun to his head, and blew his brains out.” Vicki spoke solemnly about the suicide, almost as though she had just heard the news. “I’ve always wanted to know what happened during that visit.”

  Vicki lived in Virginia and she had a cool southern accent. Our first phone conversation lasted about two hours; Vicki loves to talk. It seemed like the whole Manson thing was such a big part of her and, since she rarely got to talk about it, she was happy to have me as her audience. I asked Vicki to start at the beginning, to take me back to her first introduction to the Manson family.

  The summer Vicki met Charlie was the summer her parents let her travel to California to visit family. She was fifteen. One day, her friends suggested they check out some nearby ranches and maybe do some horseback riding. They spent the afternoon walking around, checking out the ranches and the scenery. One ofher friends pointed to a particular ranch and said, “That’s where they filmed Bonanza[the TV series].” The teens were intrigued and decided to check out the area. “It was like walking into a ghost town,” Vicki said. “It was all run down, not at all like any of the other ranches I had ever seen. There were a lot of pregnant women walking around and some of them didn’t have any clothes on. I thought, ‘This doesn’t look like Bonanzato me.’“

  I asked Vicki to go into detail about the ranch, which she called a commune.“There was a long saloon type building with what looked like a scarecrow on top. I walked inside of it and there were people over in one corner. They were playing cards and there was a television set up, like one in a bar. They did have a bar on the ranch, but no beer license. They called the bar ‘Helter Skelter’ and that was written on all the water bottles, everything inside. It was like a nightclub. It was only open for about four months before it got shut down. Everyone was nice and friendly there; everybody was really neat.

  “There was this plank boardwalk that actually opened into a root cellar, what Charlie and I would call a root cellar because we grew up in the south, and you could crawl down into it, and you could hide maybe three or four people there. If your parents or whomever came to look for you, you could disappear! Many people asked us to stay but I said I’m going to have to get home sometime. I was staying with my aunt and if we didn’t get home, my aunt would kick our butts. So, back down to the city we went.”

  This was Spahn Ranch in May of 1969. When Vicki met Charlie, she had no idea who he was or who he would become. “They were just hippies,” she told me. “They were people with long hair who were smoking weed and living free. You didn’t see that in North Carolina where I am from. I thought, ‘This is so cool; I finally found a place where I can fit in.’“

  Vicki described the ranch as a place in which it seemed no one was a leader, where everyone just did his or her own thing. She told me Charlie had just been one of the people there; he didn’t stand out. Everyone called each other “brother” or “sis.” There was a room the hippies called “the parachute room,” which contained a red parachute used to store keys to their many old, dilapidated cars. “I don’t see how anyone could drive any of those cars. They were in pieces, and tattered, and the motorcycles-it looked like maybe two of them were drivable.”

  Vicki assured me that, during her initial visit to the ranch, the family was living a peaceful, happy existence. The only drug on the property was marijuana. “Then they did LSD and, when speed came along, that was when it all went bad.” Vicki went back to the ranch during Christmas break in 1970, when the Manson Family murder trials were already underway. She described the numbers of people protesting the trial. Many, she said, were her age, while others were a lot older. She described a woman known to the other protestors as “The Cat Lady,” who had “a huge black car” and offered her home to people in the crowd who needed a place to stay. Vicki went back to Spahn Ranch each year through 1976. She told me, however, that it was never the same. Many of its ideals had changed and most of its original inhabitants had moved on.

  Vicki took a few seconds to reflect, and went on to explain that “Helter Skelter,” the idea that Charlie had been the leader of a cult and systematically brainwashed its members into committing crimes, was a defense theory designed to kill the hippie movement. The movement, she explained, was becoming too powerful-it came close to ending the Vietnam War and compelled people to demand equality. In Vicki’s opinion, putting Manson up as the ultimate evil essentially killed the ‘60s: “Everybody knew it was
just a set up. Hippies wouldn’t have done that. Nobody that I hung around with would have ever thought of doing something like that. The government hated the hippies; they hated the drugs, the music, and the rebellion, the protesting. They wanted to put an end to us so people would take less notice of the useless killings in Vietnam. That bullshit Helter Skelter killed us; it was like they wanted to get rid of us, and they had a plan: ‘We’ll just take this Manson, he’ll be the example of how awful these drug-infested hippie protesters are-he’ll show what they can do!’“

  Vicki spoke passionately as she unleashed her theory. I hadn’t heard Helter Skelter analyzed like this before. I had to agree that her ideas made a lot of sense; many historians cite the Manson murders as the end of the hippie movement. Vicki collected her thoughts and continued, “Come on. If you were going to start a race war, would you pick the Beatles? Were black people listening to the Beatles? No.”

  Charlie began to call Vicki and they would talk about the people and things they shared in common. “I told him that when I was fourteen I use to run moonshine; he said he was only nine when he started running cars for his uncle.” Charlie knew Vicki’s Uncle Jack and her ex-husband. Her Uncle Jack told her that Charlie was “crazy” but he was “fun” and would never do something like that [the Tate/LaBianca murders]. “They were into motorcycles, of course, and liked to throw knives into bails.” Of her phone conversations with Charlie, Vicki said he was always nice and sweet. “He always asked about my mom.”