Big Dreams

by Bill Barich

  The teenagers had little else to do. They had no jobs. They lived with their siblings and their cousins and their parents in crumbling, rat-infested apartment buildings around the city core, unimaginably deteriorated tenement slums that recalled the outrages of another century. Dummy corporations milked those cash cows for every penny, while the windows went unrepaired and the toilets spilled and flowed and the dealers of crack and smack walked the bulbless hallways.

  The families were Latino, they were Asian and black. The recent immigrants among them were afraid to complain to anybody, afraid of cops and authorities. The adults were afraid that they’d lose what work they had. Their jobs were likely to pay them less than $11,000 a year and keep them well below the poverty line. About 18 percent of all the jobs, legal jobs, in Los Angeles paid less than $11,000.

  The prospects for people in the penumbra were not good. They were worse than they used to be, in fact. Twenty years ago, a Latino male had earned ninety cents to an Anglo male’s dollar, but now he earned seventy-eight cents. An American-born Latina earned forty-seven cents of that same dollar, and a Latina immigrant earned thirty cents of it.

  It used to be, too, that the public schools could pave the way into a brighter world, but in the penumbra the schools were frequently just holding cells. The kids did as they pleased as long as they didn’t cause any trouble. Among the nation’s large cities, Los Angeles ranked thirty-second in terms of the maximum salary paid to a teacher with a master’s degree. Jersey City paid its similarly credentialed teachers eight thousand dollars more a year.

  California as a whole had the third-highest high-school dropout rate in the United States.

  When a minority student in Los Angeles managed by dint of supreme effort to make it through the system and get a diploma, he or she often had the educational skills of an average eighth- or ninth-grader. Such students did not go to college, except through affirmative-action programs. If they chose to work instead, they soon found that the traditional blue-collar employers around Los Angeles County, defense contractors and car manufacturers, Hughes Aircraft and General Motors, were laying off people, not hiring them.

  In the eyes of struggling students, then, those who were still hanging on in school and trying to believe that it might be beneficial, the value of an education fell another notch, while the rewards of doing drugs or selling drugs, of gangsterism, of a stuporous resistance to the prevailing con, gained an added luster.

  Sometimes it seemed that everyone in the penumbra was armed. There were shootings of every stripe almost every day. “Man Killed by Gang as He Admires View at Palisades,” read a headline in the Times. “Gunman Kills 4 at LA Birthday Party,” read another headline. “Tucson Man Held in Killing of Actress,” read another, while yet another read, “L.A. Police Stymied by Church Killings.”

  The story went on to tell how a hooded gunman had burst into Mount Olive Church of Christ, had opened fire on about fifty parishioners who were singing hymns, and had murdered two of them.

  Reporters always talked to eyewitnesses in the penumbra. They always filed the same report, the one in which a bystander in shock appears to be mystified by the violence, blurting something like, “How can that happen inside a church? The people there are nice and everything,” as if a church still stood for something, as if it were a fortress.

  Miles of money, money dropping from the clouds.

  In Beverly Hills, in Bel-Air, in Pacific Palisades, in the other half of segregated Los Angeles, the dispatches in the Times were studied carefully, with the scrutiny that soldiers in old Hollywood Westerns gave to bulletins about hostile Indian tribes on the fringe. Among the wealthy, there was ample evidence of a severe lack of faith in the social contract—the badges and the emblems of private security firms, Armed Patrol, Armed Response, that were supposed to afford protection when the cops could not.

  The citizens, too, were preparing to take action, outfitting themselves in vigilante fettle, buying up guns against the gunners. They were ready for the Armageddon that everyone in Los Angeles secretly believed would come someday, the penumbra casting its shadow ever wider as the oppressed stopped murdering one another and rode up into the hills.

  ON A SPRING NIGHT IN 1968, very late, Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys drove home from a recording session to an ersatz log cabin that he had just rented on Sunset Boulevard. The cabin had once belonged to Will Rogers. Wilson was in a floaty phase of his life, recently divorced from his first wife and launched on a long slide into serious drug and alcohol abuse that would eventually kill him.

  Wilson was a friendly, accessible man not given to seclusion. It was not unusual for a fan to track him down and come knocking at his door, but he was flabbergasted by the sight that confronted him that night, his new home awash with light and a full-scale party going on inside.

  Among the revelers, who were mostly young and female, he recognized two hippie chicks that he’d offered a ride to earlier in the day. He had brought them by his place to show them his gold records and had made love to them both—Wilson was a world-class cocksman. He could recall them prattling on about some mentor or other, Charlie something, a great songwriter and a would-be messiah, maybe Jesus and maybe not, but talk like that could be heard daily around L.A.

  When Wilson entered the log cabin, a dwarfish, long-haired man with wild eyes walked toward him, sank to his knees, and kissed his feet. Charlie Manson was fond of the ploy. He had used it before to curry favor, and he needed a favor now.

  Winter had come to Death Valley, and Manson had mounted up the troops and had driven the school bus to Canoga Park and found a house, but the Family was running out of money, and Charlie was tired of eating out of Dumpsters. He was searching for a patron or a mark, and his girls had made a fortuitous connection, because Wilson reveled in the kind of scene that had been orchestrated for him, a tableau of topless babes dancing to a booming stereo while joints and liquor bottles made the rounds.

  He enjoyed it so much, in fact, that he wanted it repeated and invited Manson and the Family to bunk with him. Charlie would act as Wilson’s orgy master, a pimp and a pal to a rock-and-roll star whose influence would help him to get his music recorded—or so Manson assumed.

  Wilson seemed satisfied with the bargain in the beginning, even though it was costing him a fortune in penicillin to treat the gonorrhea that the Family kept passing back and forth. He let them “borrow” his clothes and his cash, fed them, and made no outcry when somebody totaled an uninsured Mercedes. Manson’s school bus, Hollywood Productions lettered upon it, stayed parked beneath the trees.

  For Wilson, the only drawback to the setup was that Charlie continued to push his songs, eager for a recording session. Whether out of fear, appeasement, or admiration, Wilson did introduce Manson to some people in the music business, among them Terry Melcher, Doris Day’s son, who’d sung on a few Beach Boys’ tracks.

  Melcher worked as a producer sometimes and expressed an interest in Charlie. He also ran a salon for trendy young L.A. at his house on Cielo Drive in Beverly Hills, and though Manson never infiltrated it, he knew where the house was and what went on in it.

  Nothing ever came of the contact, so instead Wilson arranged for Manson to lay down some tracks at a new studio at his brother Brian’s place. The sessions were held at night and went fairly well until Charlie freaked out the engineer by flashing around a knife.

  Maybe to smooth things over, Dennis Wilson bought the rights to one of Manson’s songs, “Cease to Exist.” Charlie claimed to have written it to heal the ruptures among the increasingly fractious Beach Boys. Brian had bailed out entirely and now remained in bed at home for days at a time. The group recorded the song on their 20/20 album as “Never Learn Not to Love.” The lyrics were changed, too, so that the refrain became “cease to resist.”

  Manson was apoplectic about someone tampering with his genius, and Wilson had the good sense to avoid him. He was on the road for most of the summer and never really did cut his ties to the Family.
Rather than face them directly, he merely rented another house in Pacific Palisades and left it to the authorities to evict Manson from the log cabin.

  Charlie’s mood was growing sour. Never before had he been so close to pulling off a big score. It was becoming clear to him that he might never be a star himself and might never be as famous as the Beatles. For all his energetic self-inventing, all the dipping into Scientology and the laboring to perfect a rap, California had failed him in the end.

  Forced to move again, he retired with his Family to a dilapidated ranch in Chatsworth, a Los Angeles suburb. The ranch had been used in the past as a set for movie Westerns. Its owner, George Spahn, was eighty-one. Decrepit and almost blind, he had sired ten children by different women and had named them in honor of his horses. Manson ordered Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, who was nineteen, to seduce the old man and keep him in her sexual thrall.

  All the slights and the wounds that Manson had endured in a lifetime were suppurating. He had been expelled from his own peculiar Eden, his credentials rudely revoked. In his fruity anger, he predicted that the race war he’d been longing for was at hand. He even hoped to help ignite it. If he couldn’t live in paradise, neither would anyone else.

  He made careful preparations. To get some weapons, he got involved with a bunch of outlaw bikers and traded them sex and dope for guns. In need of more cash, he hit on a scheme whereby his girls would become topless dancers at a bar, but when they auditioned they were rejected for being too flat-chested. He received it as another blow.

  On the ranch, Charlie conducted warped maneuvers. He taught the Family how to creepy-crawl. They would invade a wealthy neighborhood at night, maybe Bel-Air or Beverly Hills, and steal into a house past the electrified fences, the canine patrols, the locked doors, and the windows honeycombed with alarms. They never robbed anything or made a mess. They just moved an object or two, shifted a lamp or a rug an inch or so to show that they’d been there—and that they could be there again, at any time.

  On August 9, 1969, the Family creepy-crawled their way into the home of the betrayer, Terry Melcher, who had failed to transform Charlie into a rock idol. Melcher had rented the place on Cielo Drive to others, but he could still be taught a lesson. Melcher dead would never produce a Manson album, but Melcher alive and frightened might.

  The new tenants on Cielo Drive were Roman Polanski, the director of Rosemary’s Baby, and his pregnant wife, Sharon Tate, an actress whose most significant role to date was as a suicide in Valley of the Dolls. Polanski was on location in Europe, and Tate had invited in some friends for a quiet evening, Jay Sebring, Abigail Folger, and Voytek Frykowski.

  Manson and his motley crew of assailants surprised them. Ever the orchestrator, Charlie choreographed an orgy of bloodletting, supervising the ritual murder of all four people—rich people, white people, the privileged of Los Angeles. With knives, handguns, and rope, the Family did his bidding enthusiastically. Tate alone would be stabbed sixteen times. Her blood was used to scrawl PIG on the front door.

  To drive the nightmare deeper into the psyche of the city, Manson returned to Beverly Hills the very next night and orchestrated a double murder. It caused the barely repressed fear and hatred bubbling below the surface in L.A. to burst into the open. There were reports of soaring ammunition sales, and of movie stars carrying weapons and taking sudden, transatlantic vacations.

  Manson must have been keenly hysterical after watching his scariest fantasy become a reality. On the lam, he searched out Dennis Wilson again and insisted that he be given $1,500 so that he could head for the desert, for Death Valley and the Panamints. It took the police nearly three months to apprehend him and put him behind bars, where, as he had once argued so strenuously, he ought to have been all along.

  Even with Manson in prison, fear still gripped certain special enclaves in Los Angeles. Dwellers in them still jumped at the sound of a key turning in a lock or a dog barking at night. They were people who would spend the next few years looking over their shoulders, who would come to know panic intimately, who would learn to live with an ever-present sense of menace.

  Somewhere in the recesses of the Beach Boys’ archives, in a basement or a drawer or a vault, there were still some tapes of Charlie Manson’s songs, but Dennis Wilson would not permit them to be played, ever, because “the vibes connected with them don’t belong on this earth,” in this California.

  DENNIS WILSON, a Scorpio, was broke at thirty-nine, ragged, bearded, raspy-voiced from cigarettes and surgery on his vocal chords, strung out on coke, heroin, and alcohol, drinking vodka by the quart, homeless, red-eyed, trembly, and married unhappily for the fifth time to the nineteen-year-old illegitimate daughter of his first cousin, fellow Beach Boy Mike Love.

  Wilson had used it up. He had fucked all the girls, sampled all the highs, and ridden all the waves. There was no more California left for him, no California at all.

  Just after Christmas, in 1983, he could be found wandering from bar to bar in Santa Monica, scabbed and bloody from a recent fight, having fallen out of detox yet again.

  A friend who lived aboard a yawl in Marina del Rey took him in. He tried to contain the boozing, but Wilson soon drank everything around and decided to go swimming. He was fixated on a boat he’d owned, the Harmony, that had once been docked nearby. The boat meant many things to him—a safe harbor, a safe passage, a better time.

  Ignoring the winter chill, Wilson plunged into the ocean clad only in a pair of cut-off jeans. He scoured the ocean floor for souvenirs of the Harmony, lost batteries and even bits of twine. He went under again and again, diving and bringing up trinkets, until he went under a last time and drowned.

  CHAPTER 23

  FIRE SEASON was coming to Los Angeles. You could feel it in the hot, dry Santa Ana winds that occasionally blew down from the canyons to rattle the fronds of the skinny palm trees across from the Sovereign. The fronds tore loose and spiraled toward earth, where they smacked against the cars parked at curbside, leaving little dents and scratches on the gleaming fleet.

  Soon the Santa Anas would blow more often. They would be more raw and blistering and would keep people off the beaches and begin to eat at their nerves. Wives would become so edgy, said Raymond Chandler, that they’d pick up their kitchen knives and study their husbands’ necks.

  In the Raymond Chandler Suite, I was packing my clothes and getting ready for a move. The Gigliottis were off to Europe and had invited me to stay at their house for a week or so before I left for the Mexican border. Already I felt a little dizzied by the prospect. In my months on the road I’d grown unfamiliar with the comforts of a home. The green gloom of Smith River seemed part of another lifetime, a souvenir snapshot from the early days of my journey when I was still blessed with boundless energy.

  Aaron Gigliotti was to be my housemate. He had reached an age of assertive selfhood and didn’t think it was the least bit cool to accompany his family on trips. Cool mattered enormously to him, as it did to most teenagers around L.A., and he went to great lengths to court it.

  Aaron was dark-haired and handsome, bright but not much of a student, sensitive and desperate to hide it. He affected the rebellious attitude of his favorite band, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and liked to wear his baseball cap backward and go shirtless when his parents weren’t around. He was a clandestine smoker of cigarettes and a sometime graffiti bomber who spray-painted slogans on walls.

  He had never been in real trouble, but he’d flirted with it. His father worried about his future, but Aaron saw no cause for that, no cause for it at all.

  I had never shared a house with a teenager before and had certain things to learn. Any food that I put into the fridge, say, was regarded as community property. A six-pack of beer could miraculously become a two-pack overnight. I realized almost immediately that Aaron and I needed to forge a pact to promote our peaceful coexistence. I felt bad for barging in on him and robbing him of his much-hoped-for solitude, but once he saw that I had no interest in being
a surrogate parent, we got along fine.

  Secretly, too, Aaron was hungry for adult company. He loved his father as much as his father loved him, but he believed that he ought to be running wild and free, trying to outpace the responsibilities that lay ahead of him. There wasn’t much innocence left in Los Angeles, and somehow he must have known that.

  The second evening I was at the house, he came to sit with me by the pool while I was writing in my notebook. He had on shorts and was bare-chested. On his right bicep was something I’d never noticed before, an elaborate, multicolored tattoo of an Indian’s skull resting on some feathery peace pipes.

  A tattoo artist in Hollywood had done it in two hours, Aaron said, at a cost of one hundred dollars. The worst part wasn’t the sting of the needle but the slow process of healing. He’d had to apply creams and unguents like Noxema frequently and also had to devise many ruses to keep his scabbed-over skin hidden from everybody. In a family of eight, that had been a challenge.

  The tattoo was really big. “Your parents don’t know about it?” I asked.

  “No,” he said, grinning cockily. “They’d kill me.”

  I imagined all the hidden selves that were dying to burst out in teenage California, all the nipple rings and pierced nipples that were still concealed in bedrooms.

  “How did you pick that design, Aaron?”

  He had told himself a wonderful story and now told it to me.

  “It’s from when I was a baby. My dad used to sing me these Indian lullabies.” He glanced at the tattoo doubtfully, as if he weren’t entirely sure how it had got there. “Anyhow, it can be removed with laser technology,” he said, with a youthful confidence that there was always a way to rectify your mistakes.