Manson: The Unholy Trail of Charlie and the Family

by John Gilmore;Ron Kenner

  "I remember the bathroom - orange, this bathroom. I was naked. I had this multicolored towel pressed to my face and I went into another room with all this purple in my head. The colors of the towel came alive.

  "There was this altar bed in an alcove, closed in with these blue velvet curtains, drapes of velvet and flowing robes of color. I was on the altar bed naked and receiving great cosmic jolts. Everything around me was swimming on fire. I could hear Kenneth chanting magical words, and the sounds of his preparations as he read from the Crowley book. He was doing the Invocation of My Demon Brother, with all the fires of hell surrounding me. When the fires were pouring up over me, suddenly a great shaft of light above drove down and penetrated my chest. It kept pouring over me, this great shaft of white light. It was changing me. I died.

  "It became everything, and I was like obsessed, experiencing all there was - all the blood and the killing, I was being killed. I was swimming in all death and destruction ...

  "I could hear the fires around me, raging, I was covered with this cape of blood. There were a million moving things - all the death and destruction. It was in my mind, in the environment. The voice of the magician kept on, and each word he said was the crackling of fire.

  "I had no fear. There was no fear in me as I went through the most horrible deaths in the world. There was no fear, I knew I was the Devil ...

  "I was being born into all the events of my life - everything that had been was dead, and I was being reborn, being baptized by the tongues of fire. Great demon eyes were glowing above me, huge, vacant, no fear in those eyes. I was complete, all was complete, there was a great shattering completeness in the cosmic forces . . . And born into this Flash Gordon world, there was I - wielding the great golden sword of the Vikings."

  From that point on, Bobby says, "Kenneth Anger was taking pictures of me - filming me in Lucifer Rising- the Birth of Aquarius." Everything he did, he says, was "automatic - in tune with the Devil's energy."

  The first music group he put together after his relationship with Kenneth Anger began was called The Magik Powerhouse of Oz, formed to do the soundtrack for Lucifer Rising. "We were more insane than the other group. It was supposed to represent all the howling, the shrieking music from the pit of madness - each sound to represent elements like fire, wind, a baby crying, dogs howling, crazy laughter ... And I was death. I was on the throne wearing the crown of death."

  The blade was in his hand - that Viking sword. He was prepared to do the Devil's bidding.

  But things were falling apart. The same energy vibrating through Bobby's body was no longer being mirrored on the streets. The legend of Haight-Ashbury was disappearing with each day, like smoke following a fired gun. "Christmas of that year," Joe Brockman says, "was a mess. Most of the people I hung around with, except Charlie Manson and some of them, were either in jail or had headed somewhere else. I woke up Christmas on a bad trip in a cellar with rats and stinking pipes all around me ..

  It was over. The San Francisco City Supervisor made an announcement: "The real hippies of last summer are gone." And Time magazine was saying, "Love has fled the Hashbury."

  Claiming he could see the collapse of Haight before it came, Charlie Manson says, "Being in jail so long as I had, it had left my awareness fairly well opened to what was coming, to what was going on around me and with the people I knew, those close to me. So I'd seen the bad things that were coming into Haight, the wild problems and the people all around me getting bugged and harassed in the doors of their own places. And there were all the problems on the streets. Wherever we gathered, the policemen were coming with their sticks and their guns and their badges, and they were running the kids up and down the streets like cattle being chased. It was chaos. Everywhere we walked, or tried to go to the parks, every time we tried to sit somewhere and talk or just sit and be and play music, the Man was there, breaking it up with his sticks, his guns, his badges, and he was there, he was everywhere ..

  Manson and his group of followers left San Francisco on April 12, 1968. During the year on Haight, an "admirer" had given Manson a piano on which he composed many of his songs. Later he traded the piano for a camper and this, in turn, he used as partial trade on an old green and white school bus converted to include makeshift living quarters.

  Joe recalls, "Charlie said that's what he wanted. I'd looked around, even over in Oakland, but I saw this bus on Turk Street. The thing was for sale and the owner was in Sacramento somewhere. They had it stored in the garage."

  Manson says, "We got ahold of the school bus and I just wanted to get moving, to travel around. A road is the best place to be on ... Just keep moving from one place to the next with nothing else in mind but just going on the road. I asked everybody around who wanted to go. I said, Anybody wants to go can pile in the school bus. We got plenty of room - we can eat and sleep and do our thing in here. Like it's not mine. This bus belongs to everybody, to anyone. Look, we'll put the pink slip right here in the glove compartment and that way the bus doesn't belong to anyone, dig, because the bus will belong to itself.' So what we did, we just turned off our minds and got the hell out of there. We traveled, just going around looking for a place to get away from the Man ..."

  Susan Atkins, one of the first to board the bus, explains, "There were four girls, one was Patricia Krenwinkel who I knew as Katie, and there was myself, along with three or four males. Just some of the men that came along, and we started traveling south."

  Joe says, "They were all singing. Just going along singing songs Charlie'd put together." The bus was rolling and where it would end up none of them knew. "Pretty soon," Joe adds, "I was singing too."

  One girl, Marie, was pregnant and slept through the first part of the journey, then took over the driving.

  Another, known as "Skip," kept her face close to the window, staring at massive trees that seemed to pass by in "giant bundles of green gauze." She'd planned on being a poet and had majored in English literature at a junior college in Torrance, California. But in the middle of it, Skip recalls, "I split for the Haight. I got there, I was very straight, lived in a hotel. I even got a job in a furniture store which gave me a grubstake ... But I was afraid of being alone. I was afraid of everything."

  She got into the hippie scene, stayed with some other girls she'd met there and together they set up housekeeping. "We'd gone to the woods up in Mendocino and lived in a cabin there. We never messed around with speed, just acid and grass. What happened was that I lost all track of time. It just ceased to exist ..."

  She was on the old bus singing songs that Charlie'd dreamed up, stopping at nights to build a fire, then singing around the warmth. Part of a poem she wrote on the bus: "The nights reveal the whole universe in motion before your eyes - the magic of infinite pictures in multicolored dots - pin-prickly, thickly visual sensations that set you to laughing to image-making and then to drifting - to sleep with your mind projected, afloat in full emptiness ..."

  For Manson, "It was just a trip ... When your mind is free there is really nowhere to go, and nowhere to be coming from, just grooving on the road because the road seemed to be the only place where you can be free when you're moving from one spot to another. I wanted to be able to breathe, just breathe! On the road like that you have the freedom of your movements to take a breath. There was nowhere to go. We were already there; but everywhere we went we kept running into the Man and the cops. We traveled to Seattle, Washington, and there was problems with the cops there. We went down into Texas and into New Mexico, too, and it didn't seem to matter where we went, the Man was everywhere ..."

  The girl Susan knew as Katie was to stay the duration of the "trip." Katie's parents were divorced. She had graduated from University High School in Los Angeles, then went to live with her mother in Mobile, Alabama. For a short time she attended Spring Hill, a small Catholic college in Mobile, then she returned to California and got a job as a file clerk.

  "Until she met Manson she was a stable, conservative young woman," th
e father, an insurance agent, said. She met Manson one afternoon during her lunch hour. She boarded a bus with him, abandoned her own car in a parking lot, and did not even return to work to pick up her paycheck. Her father says, "She seemed to have vanished ..."

  Two weeks later, he received a letter from his daughter, postmarked Seattle. Katie wrote, "I have to be away from all of it . . . I am going to find myself."

  She had found Manson and felt, as Skip said, that "he is magnetic. His motions were like magic. It seemed he gave off a lot of magic. Everyone was always so happy around him. But he was sort of changing. He seemed to change every time I saw him. He seemed ageless."

  Katie's father was able to contact his daughter once again. He received a call from his former wife who related that Katie had called her and wanted $100. The mother gave him an address for their daughter in Sacramento, and he was able to reach Katie. He told her he would send a ticket for her to get back to her mother. "She said no, she wanted the money," he remembers. "I said I wouldn't send any." He was "convinced" Manson was "some kind of hypnotist. It was all so spontaneous." A long time would pass before he would hear from his daughter again.

  The bus continued on its uncharted journey. But everywhere they stopped they were confronted with "the Man."

  Susan says, "We traveled on and off for a long time ... We went all up and down the coast to California, to New Mexico and Arizona, and then to Nevada ..."

  Joe says, "I lost about seventeen pounds. It might've been more. It all had started out as a fast, going on a fast. I felt better at first but then the fasting just went on and on, and then the people on the bus would get off and some others would get on. We had babies and dogs and a goat once. We picked up hitchhikers. Mostly young girls would get on . . . They'd stay for the ride or wherever we were heading. We'd ball at nights on the grass or just sleep on the hillsides.

  "But the bus kept breaking down, and Charlie and me would be under it, doing things. He was really very mechanical, able to figure out right away what was wrong, almost by intuition. And if we couldn't fix it right off we'd just sit in the grass or fool around. Pretty soon someone would come along and be able to fix it up. Usually truck drivers. You could tell they figured we were creeps, that's what they thought. But I guess the Man had told them, `If you see any dirty hippies along the road, get `em moving as far over the county line as you can!'

  "I'd begun now to believe completely in Charlie. It came especially when the transmission seemed to sort of plop down out of the bus, and we were really stranded. I think it was somewhere in New Mexico. Susan had left with some guy - oh, that was after Marie had had her baby. Charlie delivered the baby himself, but Susan had helped and all ..."

  Susan would later say, "He didn't actually deliver Marie's baby, I did, and the baby was born breech birth but in perfect health."

  Joe went on, "It was after the baby, and we hung up there with the bus. Charlie told me, `Put it in your head that we'll be moving soon. See it right before your eyes that a guy's going to come along and he'll be able to get us moving - he'll have the tools.' So I sat on this big rock, smoking some grass, and waiting for the guy with the tools. What happened was the guy with the tools came along about sundown ..."

  Susan became pregnant in New Mexico. It was not by Charlie, but by the man she'd met and spent the day with.

  "We were all called Charlie's girls," she explains. "But Charlie often told us, in fact every day he told us, `You people do not belong to me, you belong to yourself.' But I personally thought that I belonged to Charlie. He had sexual intercourse with all of us girls. In the beginning I was jealous until I came to an understanding that he was only making love to the girls for the purpose of love and also to give them back to themselves. We - the girls - had sexual relations with each other. There was no limit to what I'd do for him. I was in love with the reflection and the reflection I speak of is Charlie Manson."

  All of the girls were in love with Charlie, Susan believed, and they tried to prove themselves to him, though Susan says she cannot speak for the others.

  "I did attempt to prove myself to Charlie and every time he would see me trying to prove myself to him he would say, `You don't have to prove yourself to me. You don't even have to prove yourself to you ...' They all did what Charlie wanted them to do, but if we didn't it's because we didn't want to ..." Susan admits, however, that she did whatever Charlie wanted, because "Charlie is the only man that I have ever met - I'm not taking away from any other man - on the face of this earth, the only man that I ever met that is a complete man. He will not take any back talk from a woman. He will not let a woman talk him into doing anything. He is a man ... He has more love to give to the world than anybody I have ever met. He would give himself completely to anybody."

  In a small beach town south of Santa Barbara, Joe met an old friend, then traveling with a motorcycle group. He recalls his friend couldn't recognize him, was puzzled over his appearance and at moments thought he was "crazy. "

  Remembering the day, Joe says, "There was this hamburger stand and he was there with some bikers, he had a chopped Triumph. Right away I put it on him for some grass or acid, even some pills if he had any. He said he had grass up the beach, so we rode. Charlie was getting himself strung out behind one of the other bikes, oh, I think it was a Harley, all chrome, and we went up the beach a ways. When he got back with the grass the girls were painting the bus. They had black paint, everybody was splashing it on the bus, the bikers were helping them ..

  The trip was being financed then on the credit cards Katie had brought with her - but how far were they going to go? How long was it going to last? These questions were not asked - it was completely up to Charlie.

  "Why did they all do what he wanted? We had all left our old selves," Joe says. "I never thought about my old man or the rest. Oh, maybe a passing thought but - like Charlie said, `It doesn't originate from where you're at, at the time you have thought. It's reflex to vibes in the air.' My head was clear and I was to the point where Charlie said he was, no thinking, no thoughts about what was happening. Charlie gave me to myself - whoever I was ... It was happening and we were happening. I mean, out in the hills, I reach my hand out to pick a leaf or some berries, and I am my hand. There was nothing else to get in the way. And there were some times when we were all together that we didn't say anything or even talk to one another, I mean, about ourselves or what we were doing. It was, in all senses, that we were one big body together. And when I'd think of something funny, or when it would occur to me, something funny, I'd laugh and everyone else would laugh, and it wasn't just a catching-on laugh, because they knew what was funny and it was funny and it was funny for everybody. Shit, there were some times when I felt that nothing in the world could bother us, get in on our thing. Nothing could affect us because we were real and outside of us was not real ..."

  It all seemed vaguely clear to Joe. But there was nothing vague in Manson's ideas - he had rejected the "outside" world and was now making one of his own - even collecting inmates.

  The bus was on the road again before the black paint was dry. Joe says the paint "looked like a weird velvet, with the dust and stuff blown up from the other cars on the road all stuck to the bus ... I was very stoned and Charlie was singing. I looked around and saw some bikes following us and behind them, maybe a half mile, was the cops. They didn't have their lights going. We'd smoked all the grass so there was nothing to find. Just checking it out. Everywhere we'd been the cops checked it out - paranoid bastards."

  Later, the right rear wheels of the bus sank into the soft shoulder in a weed patch south of Oxnard, California. The bus was out of gas, but even with gas the bus would have to be towed out of the slope. Instead of "sweating the situation," the group camped off the road.

  "It was nice country," Joe recalls. "Charlie and I and Marie hiked about a mile. We found berries and stuff and took them back. As we were going back, I remember Charlie was smiling and he said, `I'm going to cut a record in Los Ange
les,' just like that. By then anything Charlie said to me made a lot of sense.

  "We found a small snake and Charlie picked it up. He kissed it on its face, then he handed it to me. I kissed it, too, and then put it inside my shirt so it could get warm on my skin.

  "The next day, I was sleeping with a girl in the shade behind the bus, and I guess the others were out and around. A big fat foot was pushing my leg and I looked up. Wow, it was the Man. The chick sort of yelped and put something over her tits. The Man in his big sunglasses got me up and against the bus, checking in my shoes and around my balls. I told him, `There ain't nothing there but what ain't my personal property.' He said, `Shut your mouth, scum."'

  The bus was listed on the sheriff's records as stolen, so Manson was arrested on the spot. Marie was charged with endangering the life of her baby, others were held for disorderly conduct. But few were charged officially. Joe said his name was "Tim Leary." Both Charlie and Susan were fined ten dollars each for possessing a fake driver's license. The sheriffs learned the bus had been recovered and resold, and then Charlie was released. Marie's baby was returned to her and everyone was warned to clear out of Ventura County.

  Joe says, "Before we left town, Charlie and I scrounged up two orange crates of grub, and after the sheriff's boys got us out of the ditch, we drove across the county line and stopped again. We made a big fire out near the beach and sang around it, and I put a lot of potatoes in the sand, under the fire. We roasted marshmallows, too."

  Sometime later near Los Angeles the bus broke down in the Topanga Canyon area where more than a hundred "hippie squatters" had spread throughout the hills.

  About that time, astrologer and actor Robert Aiken was working on a movie shooting in the hills and washes of Topanga. "It was a period picture," Aiken says, "and I was playing the part of an Indian Chief's son. The hills all around where we were filming were spotted with the hippie tents and rundown shacks.