Alternate Gerrolds (19 page)

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Authors: David Gerrold

BOOK: Alternate Gerrolds
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It’s not about getting even. It’s about getting better. Most people never figure that out.
What Goes Around
THE FIRE BLOSSOMS OUTWARD, rosy-petals of orange and black. The bullet spits. The sound pops softly in the sweating August night. Again and again.
It begins.
The door explodes. Horror invades, laughing wildly, screaming with invented rage at invisible monsters, nobody home here, just bodies, it doesn’t matter—rage assaults the nearest target.
The screams become a nightmare chorus. On and on. Outrage and shock. The knives begin to work, plunging, tearing—rending first the clothes, then the flesh, and deeper still, into the heart of the beast, and from there into the fibrillating heart of the species. The wounds go deep.
Bitterly the blades keep biting. Slender arms pump up and down, struggling with the dreadful work. Steaming blood pours forth, the muscles pull and strain. The bodies resist; it isn’t easy—tendons, cartilage, muscles, bone and spurting hot wet blood; a fountain of gore—it isn’t neat, it isn’t pretty. Life fights back, it resists the assault; it struggles, fights, bites, kicks, screams, claws, shrieks, begs, wonders, pleads, gasps and refuses to give up, even as it shreds away with dreadful ripping noises.
The gleeful cries go on and on. The harridans, the witches cackle and
laugh at the audacity of this vicious celebration. “Die, piggie, die!” The walls are splattered with scarlet slashes. Steel skitters along bone. Cartilage resists, then breaks. Bodies jerk, and still the blood pours forth; the baby slides wetly into dreadfulness.
 
Saturday morning.
The maid discovered the bodies. She ran screaming down the driveway to a neighbors. The police arrived in a squadron of gleaming vehicles, black-and-whites, and plainclothes—all with their lights blazing, some with sirens screaming.
The young detectives stood at the door of the sprawling house and stared in at the carnage within—stunned beyond words—reluctant to enter, not knowing where to start. It was like a scene out of Hell. That was the metaphor, but it was insufficient.
“Who lives here?” one of them asked.
Another one turned away, gagging.
A third wrote down license numbers and began calling them in.
Few of them had ever seen anything like this in their careers. They’d heard about crimes of horrific violence; they’d seen the casebooks of a few. They’d never really expected to have to investigate one like this. Their training failed them, overpowered by their instinctive human revulsion.
But then the chief of detectives arrived and started barking orders. He barely glanced inside the house. He knew better. He didn’t want to know. He didn’t want the memories. He didn’t want the dead things clogging up his vision, troubling his sleep.
The young officer came back from his black-and-white, holding his notebook open. “The pickup truck is registered to Charles Manson, white, male, age forty-two.”
“Manson?” said one of the detectives, frowning. “Why does that name sound familiar?”
The chief of detectives grunted. “There used to be a rock star by that name.” He turned to the officer. “Is this the same guy?”
“I don’t know.”
“Find out,” he said—and groaned. Looking past the officer, he saw the arrival of the first carload of vultures. He recognized the reporters from the
Times
. Overhead, a newschopper began clattering through the smoggy air, circling the site around and around. Up the hill, the neighbors
were already out on their porches, shading their eyes against the morning sun and staring down at the tableau below.
The newspapers had a feeding frenzy. Banner headlines advertised the gory event as if it were important:
ROCK BAND MURDERED IN ORGY OF VIOLENCE
. Beneath, in smaller type, the article identified the victims:
Charles Manson and ‘The Family’ Found Stabbed to Death in Manson’s Bel-Air Home
.
The articles described the horror without being explicit:
“Even veterans of the LAPD Violent Crimes Division were stunned by the carnage.
“Although officials at the scene refused to go on record about the apparent murder spree, it is believed that the Manson home was invaded by three or more knife-wielding individuals who stabbed all six of the occupants to death. A seventh victim was found shot to death in his car.
“At present, the police have not indicated whether or not they have any leads in the case.”
The text went on to explain:
“Although generally unknown to the record-buying public, Charles Manson and ‘The Family’ were fairly well known in the Los Angeles underground club scene.
“One club-owner who refused to be identified, said, ‘Yeah, we knew them. They were bad. Loud and bad. That was why we booked them—as a kind of gag. We’d put them in as a spacer between two good sets. The kids hooted and jeered.
“‘Manson ate it up. He loved that shit. He’d get out there and scream at the crowds and they’d scream right back. He was a great warm-up. But, no—he never figured it out that no one took him seriously. You want the truth? Manson was an asshole. And the girls were pigs, pardon my language, but it’s true. They were over-the-hill, overweight, out-oftune and ugly. If Manson liked you, he’d tell his girls to go to bed with you. I hate to think what he’d tell them to do if he didn’t like you.’”
LA TIMES: SUCCESS ELUDED ECCENTRIC GROUP
…The Manson Family made only three albums in their short-lived recording career. Their first,
We Are The Nightmare
, released in August 1969, attracted far more attention for the offensiveness of
its language than for the quality of the music, most of which was shrieked rather than sung.
Rolling Stone
magazine gave it the lowest rating in its history, a 1/4 star rating, and said the album was at best only good for breaking your lease. Nevertheless, the furor over the album’s language guaranteed it enough sales to make it a cult item among radical punk rockers.
Regarding
We Are The Nightmare
, band-member, Charles “Tex” Watson freely admitted, “Hey, man. We didn’t intend this as music. It ain’t supposed to be listened to. It’s supposed to be an initiation into the tribe. You have to inhale this deep into your mind, that’s all. It’s like, you know, a scream of consciousness. We don’t want people sitting around and
listening
to this shit. We want them jumping up and down and shrieking with us. Like the hash-smoking assassins would pump themselves up into a killing frenzy before going out into the world to commit mayhem. Well, that’s us. We’re freaking fucking out.” (Watson was found shot to death in his car in the driveway.)
Manson’s second album,
Die, Piggies, Die!
, received an even worse critical drubbing. Cordwainer Bird, writing for the
Rolling Stone
, opined that he hoped that the title of the LP indicated that this disk was a suicide note. “Anyone stupid enough to buy this whiny piece of enervated bat-guano ought to have their ears ripped off their heads and stapled to the walls where they can at least be useful as ashtrays. This record isn’t even good enough be called crap. It’s an insipid, puerile waste of vinyl, not even of interest to those morbid curiosity seekers who like to stand around and gawk at the scene of a fatal accident.”
Manson was so enraged by that review that when he was questioned about it on KPFK’s late-night
Under The Rock
program, he erupted into a furious tirade. He threatened to cut out Cordwainer Bird’s heart and eat it raw. It is widely believed that “Blind As A Bird,” the first of Manson’s three singles, was written with Cordwainer Bird in mind. The lyrics, screamed in a near-incoherent rage, included these lines:
You don’t know me! You don’t know!
You stupid motherfucking little dwarf, you don’t know shit!
If I can’t make you love me, then I’ll make you hate me!
But I won’t let you ignore me!
The resultant flurry of threats, lawsuits and injunctions, kept the album in the news long enough for it to sell a modest number of copies. Sludge Records (now defunct) even sold t-shirts labeled ‘ONE OF THE MORBIDLY CURIOUS’ to those who sent in ten dollars and a proof-of-purchase certificate.
Curiously, it was Manson’s third and last album that received the best reviews.
The Cage of Life
was released in 1972 and attracted almost no attention at all. Recorded entirely in Manson’s garage, the LP has minimal production values, but the stark simplicity of the arrangements created a sense of the darkness of the LA clubscene. The album’s set piece, a brooding seven-minute dirge called “Life Sentence,” tells the story of a man who has emptied his life of all value and now waits only for death. But by then, even curiosity-seekers had lost all interest in Manson, and only a few copies of the LP found their way into record stores.
The commentators
tsk
ed. They couldn’t quite bring themselves to mourn Manson; there was nothing to mourn. He’d been a failure in life. He was, at best, a footnote; at worst, an embarrassing asterisk, a nothing.
What made him noteworthy now was not his life, but only his manner of leaving it. So they dwelt on that. They alluded to the rumors of mystic symbols written in blood on the walls of his home—his blood, his walls—and wondered who had been responsible and why.
They licked their lips and spent lugubrious tears on the unborn baby of Patricia Krenwinkle. They worried about Susan Atkin’s last terrifying moments. They burrowed through the sordid details of the lives of Squeaky Lynnette Fromme and Leslie Van Houtin.
Perhaps the strange X’s cut into their foreheads had something to do with the albums they recorded. The police spent hours playing and replaying the LP’s. They paid particular attention to Dyslexic Sadie and Smelter Skelter. They studied an underground video of The Family, trying to understand who these people were and why someone would want to murder them.
Cordwainer Bird opined that the list of suspects should start with anyone who loved music.
Charlie was the lead singer, with a voice as thin and unpleasant as February ice. Tex was the axe-man, posturing and posing—he would have upstaged Charlie were it not for Charlie’s riveting, Rasputin-like gaze. The girls danced behind them, backing Manson’s incoherent lyrics and Watson’s pretentious gruntings with a ragged embroidery of artificial doo-wop noises.
In the meantime ... the sales of guard dogs, security devices, alarms, fences, cellular phones—and guns, weapons of all kinds—jumped and kept on jumping. August turned into September and the terror hardened into distrust and bitterness. Whatever was out there remained unknown, unidentified, uncontrolled. Would there be more killings?
 
Brooding late one night in an hour-long soliloquy, Cordwainer Bird devoted one entire show to what he called “the Manson phenomenon.”
“It’s not Manson,” Bird began. “He was a nothing—a gnat’s fart, not worth the energy to talk about. He was one of those little scuttlefish that come out of the woodwork, attracted by the light, but totally lacking any understanding of how to create the light in the first place.
“Yeah, right—” Bird said, jabbing his finger at the audience. “I’m an asshole for speaking ill of the dead, is that your point? What do you think, bunky? The act of dying automatically elevates a human being to sainthood? I got news for you—Manson’s music sucked. It sucked when he was alive, it ain’t gonna get any better now that he’s dead.
“And his personal habits—? I’ll tell you. He smelled. Yeah, I met him. Three times. And you know what? He was afraid of me. All those threats? He just did a little shuffle and jive and dropped his head and wouldn’t look me in the eye. A fucking coward. A yutz.
“You know who he was? He was that skinny kid in the ninth grade, the one who never got any hair on his chest or under his arms or on his balls; the one who picked his nose and ate the boogers when he thought no one was looking; the one who had to be reminded to take a shower once in a while because nobody ever explained to him about deodorants.
“You know all those pictures of him making him look like some kind of scary vampire bat? That was bullshit. He was a scrawny little guy. Shorter than me! Shorter than the average fire hydrant—a shrunken chest, he looked like he was suffering from terminal malnutrition. Yeah,
he had a great stare and he was incoherent, whacked out on drugs and booze half the time, and you think that’s the sign of a serious craftsman? The fact that he looked weird and you can’t understand him.
“Okay—” Bird interrupted himself. “You want me to be compassionate. I’ll be compassionate for two seconds. He had a lousy childhood. He can be excused for being an asshole; he had a lousy childhood. Okay, I’m through being compassionate. That’s so much crap, it makes my gorge buoyant. I had a lousy childhood! Half the people in this room had a lousy childhood. So fucking what! We got over it. We didn’t use it as an excuse to assault the people around us. We got over it. He didn’t.

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