For some time Manson had followed the news of the "flower children," who they were and where they were. So, with a guitar across his back, fancying himself a sort of wandering minstrel, he drifted around San Francisco, eating where he could, moving whenever he felt like it.
"I never thought about being a hippie. I don't know what a hippie is. A hippie is generally a guy that's pretty nice. He will give you a shirt, and a flower, and he will give you a smile, and he walks down the road... I found myself in Haight-Ashbury and I got to know a young kid who carried a sleeping bag he said he lived out of. He didn't work and, in fact, he said nobody he knew worked. I wanted to know how he managed to live that way and he said, `Come on,' and he'd show me how. He put his arm around me and we went off like that `There's no sweat,' he said."
The boy introduced Manson to life on Haight. For awhile they slept in parks, went to the Diggers for meals, attended the Sunday Feeds, existed from day to day.
"We just lived on the street. The weather was beautiful and everybody there was living on the street ... I started playing my music and those on the street, they liked it, and they had smiles that were real, and they would put their arms around me, and anything I needed was there in front of me. The whole thing just grabbed me up and sent me spinning. I couldn't get over that these people were so real. Their minds were there, buzzing, everybody was making music, and we grooved on it, and it was as simple as that ... I didn't know anything and yet I knew everything because I had one thing, and that was an infinite, pulsating thing inside me that was me, and yet it wasn't me in any special sense, it was everybody. Everywhere. It was love because it was all perfect. My hair was growing longer then and all the people around me had beards and were giving out love. It buzzed, it made you tune in with it and once you were in with it you saw it was everything ... We sat in the park and smoked grass together and just felt living inside of us. We sang and made music and were alive and what we were."
A young girl named Nancy Hart, a would-be folk-rock singer, remembers when Manson settled in San Francisco. She was "hanging paper," forging checks in order to support a drug habit, or "balling for cash" just often enough to pay her keep. She moved with the group through the park and the free-feeds, and "made the Free Clinic scene every week for VD checks, along with everyone else. Most of them had syph and it was something I had no use for at the time ..
While sleeping in the park one night Nancy met Manson, who crawled into the bundle of "blankets I'd scored from the Diggers and the Salvation cat." Charlie said he was cold and asked could he warm up with her, "because, he said, I was giving off this tremendous heat ..."
She had "acid" from Owsley, a well-known basement manufacturer and distributor of LSD, whom she "balled" along with a rock group "when I was still a groupie," and that was when she turned Manson on. It was his first experience, "at least he told me it was," and he claimed to have received a great message under the acid influence which was how powerful he could be if he got his whole thing together and let it groove with what was happening." Nancy says, "Charlie wasn't a great lover, but acted out the role of it, and he was a great con artist, perhaps the best I have ever seen or come across in the business. He went around with me and hung paper around San Francisco and he'd rap on all the con tricks he'd gathered. What he knew could blow minds ... "
He talked to Nancy about his "mentor," as he called "Creepy" Karpis, "bad man number one," who dug Charlie's music. "We'd ball and he'd get bored with what we were doing, so he screwed me with a broom handle after he got tired and had me do it with a Coke bottle, both sides, and to myself so, while he jerked off. And he had me rap it all, like relating to him how I was experiencing and what it was that I felt from him - from his nearness, if you can dig it. On the acid it was that especially," she remembers, that no contact thing and his relating what was happening."
She said she didn't want to do some of the things Charlie'd suggest, but did them anyway, she admits, because he had her sort of hypnotized.
Manson admits that. until meeting Nancy he had not been involved with hard drugs. She turned him on to LSD, saying, "You're already there, you don't need it, but it'll help straighten the currents."
Charlie says, "My awareness after acid of what was going on became that much more enlightened. I was with them, part of them. We were all really a part of one another."
He liked that part he was playing, if it was a part he was playing, Nancy says. "He was a chameleon. He looks one way and then the other, and it is no longer the other you are seeing, but one that you have not seen before."
In a poem, she wrote of Manson, "Smilingly the face you saw and lost so many minutes before has averted, Ah! shines again."
Nancy says she gave Charlie $150 and lived with him in a room in Berkeley for about "four days and one hundred nights" before she was arrested in downtown San Francisco for possession of narcotics.
When she was in jail, Charlie moved on. "What really made me alive," he says, "was just the kids walking up and down the streets. They'd give you anything they had and wanted nothing for it ... I just fell in love - it was all that perfect, I loved everything."
The "civilization" of cold concrete and institutions, of indifference and formalities that had smothered Charlie for thirty-three years had somehow changed. It seemed to him that not only was his mind free and self-perpetuating but so were those surrounding him - "these wild flowers that had sprouted up everywhere."
But Charlie was a late-comer. He did not know that he had missed the warmest days on Haight. The "flower children" he met were only the die-hards of a disappearing scene. And then there were those that came to take what was left, like hyenas and jackals. One such person was Joe Brockman. Later, in a small, dingy motel on U.S. 99, a mile south of Madera, California, Joe would recall the events that led to his friendship with Manson and to later becoming a member of Charlie's "family."
Twenty-two-year-old Brockman would sit on a rumpled bed, shoulders hunched as he squinted through dark prescription glasses at the surface of a small table. He'd focus on a razor blade between his fingers, then pressing down through the center of a white tablet coated with a yellowish color.
"You see," Joe would say, "no one that wasn't straight could see what was happening up on the Haight. The whole scene was jammed, no one could even get through the traffic in the night time." Referring to the summer of 1967, he explains, "If you could stand on the roof, and looking down, you were seeing into a kaleidoscope. It all moved the same as colored glass does. Wow, it was beautiful. Being alive was a groove because the same thing in the air was being felt by everybody. They were there from all over too, they'd come in on buses and even old broken-down bicycles."
Looking up from his task of quartering the halves of the pill, Joe remembered he was "one of the first to really turn Charlie on to really good acid. It was Owsley acid the first few trips, the biggest load Owsley'd produced before his major bust. And it was being distributed like water, so I hoarded. I made ten thousand dollars in three months on the Haight ..."
Joe believed Charlie was an artist, "in the real sense, or like a priest, but then I saw that I couldn't hack his way. I got to be free, on my own terms and not on someone else's bag, no matter who they are. I guess it's that Charlie had started his Jesus thing going and I had dope."
It was in San Jose that Joe first met a girl named Susan Atkins. "And mind you," he says, "this was before Charlie Manson ever knew her. She'd been in jail, I think on a stolen car thing, and had already been in and out of Frisco, and even Los Angeles. I'd never been to L.A., and she rapped on it for me. We all got smashed on hash, and I dropped some pills. I didn't know what they were.
"This friend of mine had been going up there on his bike and seeing her. I really dug her, and I believe I told her, `If I had enough bread I'd buy you what you want.' And my buddy said, `She doesn't know what she wants and if she did it wouldn't be you buying it for her.' So I said, `Cool.' If you really look at her close, she doesn't look like sh
e does from across the room or someplace - like when you meet her. She seemed to be forty years older than the rest, not that she looked it. She was fine. She told me she wasn't going to stay in San Jose, that she was heading back to Frisco. I said `That's where I'm going one of these days,' and she said, `Well, it's just- an out-of-sight place and it's the only place to get your head.'
"Time passed and we went back up to San Jose to see the girls, but by then Susan Atkins was already gone. `She's working in San Francisco,' her friend said ...
"And then a year later, when I was in San Francisco, I saw her, but under acid Susan's face was like two feet tall, but really pretty. Some of the others I knew already, and there was this girl named Marge Smith, I guess she was with Susan.
"Marge stopped and looked at someone, her face just going open like this - as open as a window when you open it in the morning, a good morning. Just looked like that at this guy. And then she said to me, without looking at me, `This is Charlie, like I told you so.' He looked at me, and said, `Oh, I know you.' I said, `No,' but he said, sort of shaking his head slow-like, `Yes,' meaning he knew me. It was a put-on, I said to myself, so all right, and I shook my head, too ... You'd never forget his face.
"Later we had a mutual respect for one another. We shared ideas. We shared what we had, whatever it was. I laid bread on him ... other people laid bread on him. We shared and made some kind of trade deals and I never burned Charlie and he never burned me. I don't believe he had it in him to burn anybody."
According to Manson, "This guy up in San Francisco, he said, `Here is five thousand dollars.' I told him, `I can't take five thousand dollars, man, what do you own, five thousand dollars' worth of my life, how much is that?' He said, `No, man, I just want you to have the bread. You just be you, no strings to it.' He laid it on me and I took it and gave it away to kids on the street. I did it with a girl. It took about two days to give it all away. I bought some candy bars, a couple keys of grass, we all got high. One guy, I bought him a truck he wanted, and this other guy was down on me, telling me, `How could you give it to him - he is a bad one. I'm the good one, give it to me.' And lots of people said that I stole the money and that I wasn't any good ..
Joe says he wasn't a joiner, and that neither was Charlie Manson. "Like he went that way, joining nothing but being everywhere, if you know what I mean."
Another young man who met Charlie at this time, Carl Shapiro, kept his distance. "I was going to school - I hadn't dropped out, but I'd turned on, man, but this guy was fooling around with people's heads. He was tricking them like you train a dog by substituting what it needs for something else so it thinks what you're giving it is what it needs ...
"One night he had this conversation with me about guys getting fucked in the ass. He wanted to know if I'd been fucked in the ass, and he went into a long thing about guys taking it up the ass in prison ... He meant against their will, like being raped and how it was approved of by the institutions because, he said, it kept a .kind of `governor' on things, it gave control and power to people doing time, and created a world within a world that was not governed by the Establishment."
Joe Brockman says, "I don't remember which night it was, oh, we went down and I saw this guy I knew. The other one was a cop and they were in front of the drugstore. The guy was listening to some dude that Manson said was a `nark,' and I said, `No shit,' and turned around, you know, heading the other way. But Charlie took my arm sort of gentle and said, `No, man, don't let him put any of his fear in you. It's the only way he can go around, by laying his fear on you ... And then he's got it out of himself and likes to corner you, having put his fear in you. And he reacts to that, your fear which was really his, you dig?' And then Charlie walked up to the `nark' and he said, `Man, you don't look so good. You look down. And can I turn you on? Maybe you should be turned on to what's happening - you should smile.'
"The nark looked at Charlie and said, `Fuck off, willya.'
"I can't say what the living was," Joe says. "It was a motion, going all around and getting into all kinds of things. The groups were all joined by something bigger."
He said a few days passed, then he and Charlie drove out in a pickup to where Joe kept a "brick" of marijuana stashed behind a 7-Up billboard. "Then, we were at Charlie's and he was sitting on a beat-up Turkish rug, rapping to these girls," he said. "He looked like a lion as he talked. I could hear his words but the way in which he was saying his thing, or had them put together, was far out."
He recalls laying the "brick" before Manson. "And I felt in the center of the scene, like I'd made an offering to their gods.
"They all grooved. Bullshit,' I said. I busted up the brick. They just sat and watched the pile of grass grow bigger and bigger.
"What was sort of freaky was Marge Smith. She was as smashed as anyone, and on a trip I couldn't groove with. I wanted to ball her.
"Charlie said, `ball her,' and I - the rest were tripping on what he was saying and I suppose I should've been too, but I wasn't - I kept flashing. `This is some con. Like number one.' What did he have, I asked myself. Even asking myself that while I was balling Marge that Charlie gave me, on the rug there ... which was a trip, because Charlie reached out his hand and put it over, the palm of it, over the chick's eyes and forehead while I'm balling her. She laughed and came on like someone talking - someone speaking tongues."
It seemed almost as if controlling the act of sex with the palm of his hand, or by mental association as it was earlier with Nancy, was more important to Manson than the physical contact he might have. As Nancy had said, "On the acid" it was "that no contact thing and his relating ..." It seemed Manson's intent was to get into the girl's mind, to learn to control her.
During this time, Joe managed to obtain several plastic baggies of "Owsley gold" and glimpsed the "freaky power" Charlie possessed.
"There was this picture of Jesus, like the one that's on the book jacket cover of The Prophet, hanging on the wall. Charlie was squatting in front of it, his back to it, rapping, and I was going up faster than I'd ever gone up, a tab and a half, probably because I hadn't eaten in a couple days, just dropping a lot of bennies and shit, and there was this merging ..." Joe brought his fingers together, entwining them.
"The picture of Jesus on the wall and Charlie's face in front of me ... Both began to sort of melt in a funny way, I guess like plastic or something, Manson and Jesus, merging on this trip and into one and the same. I said, `Wow, that's how it works,' not really knowing myself what I meant."
Joe realized then that "if you've had enough acid, Charlie could, at will I guess, turn himself into a Jesus." And this caused Joe to grope with thoughts of the Devil and reincarnation. The picture of "Charlie as Jesus was branded into my thoughts, and I was like in a movie, or watching a long movie. Charlie was the hero, and the more I stayed stoned, the more of a hero he was ... But it was a painful thing, too, because I still had my resistance going and I knew I couldn't just sit in that movie for the rest of my life, and I knew I couldn't submit to whatever it was the idea of Charlie as Jesus expected of me. I only knew the man was playing heavy games. Charlie could plant that in a person's head, or create it, the same way a magician creates a bunch of flowers in the air ..."
Marge Smith lived in the Haight during its era, and knew many in the Manson crowd, though mainly she knew Susan Atkins and lived with her in San Francisco. Marge says, "I was very hung-up on Susie at one time, we had a girl-chick thing going between us for some time; oh, it was earlier than when she met Charlie. I had known Susie for maybe a year and she had come and gone off a few times. That was her habit to do that, and every time she came back we had a sharing thing, and it was as though she was emptying herself of whatever it was that had bugged her, brought her down so. So we had been involved with one another. I mean there were a couple of times - we had been high together so often ... like there is a complete blending-in of two people - two persons' bodies into one. So there is an equal balance of the mind, and of the soul. Becau
se, being as high as we were and not just on drugs, but on love as well and the whole physical nature of it, the soul or the soul and mind which is the same would be so locked up together as to be one. This happened especially after Charlie came into our lives and both of us, Susie and myself, had made love with Charlie and then with each other as we had in the past. But Charlie made it much different, made it more real between us whenever it occurred ... By more real, I mean more locked in with it. That's all.
"Before Susie split the scene we were on I got busted on pills," Marge recalls. "Then I was busted on a really foul bit of bullshit on the part of the cops there. I was picked up for soliciting. Imagine, soliciting. I have no need for money, no need to keep it or save it like they do," she explained. "We were the same, Susie, Charlie and I and those that were grooving with us. The cash, the more it kept flowing the better it was; the more it was worth whatever it was. Nothing had any other meaning except what we gave it."
When Susan met Charlie in San Francisco, she thought she had found what she'd been looking for in life, that there was no need to look any further.
"Before I met Charlie I felt I was lacking somewhere," she admits. "He didn't show me how to become a real woman, he gave me me - in other words, I gave myself up to him and in return for that he gave me back to myself. He gave me the faith in myself to be able to know that I am a woman."
Born in San Gabriel, California, May 7, 1948, Susan and her family moved to San Jose soon after, where she later attended elementary school. She took part in the church choir and Sunday school regularly, although her home life, "with many ups and downs," was not an easygoing one. She had one older brother and another brother younger than herself. When she was in the fifth grade, her family moved again and she entered another school. On the surface her life appeared relatively stable until she reached adolescence. She was fifteen years old and had entered high school when her mother was diagnosed as having terminal cancer. Oddly enough, the dying mother's presence in the home didn't seem to disturb Susan deeply.
Manson: The Unholy Trail of Charlie and the Family Page 5
