Taming the Beast: Charles Manson's Life Behind Bars (3 page)

“I’ve been charged with waking up the world. But why should I? I tried that before and look what you did to me? The people, they’re not worth the trouble! Humanity as a whole isn’t worth shit. You could search the earth before you could find five honest adults. A few individuals out there understand and touch life, but the rest are spineless predators trying to get over on someone else to justify their own existence. The ego gets so big they don’t realized their dick’s gone soft.

“So why should I care anymore, even with my knowledge? The people don’t care enough about themselves to listen! No one wants to do it themselves, man. They all want to follow a leader who tells them what to do. Believe me, I know that trip. If there’s anything I know, it’s that. Everybody wants to be saved, but they won’t take the first step necessary to rescue their damned souls. They’re out there in their little churches waiting for Jesus to come back and save them from the doom and gloom of their meager existence. But Jesus already came! He left his message two thousand years ago. Wasn’t that enough? Hell no! Greedy paycheck whores want him to come back. They missed him the last time, so they plead, ‘Please come back during my time.’ That’s crazy, man! You know what I tell these people? How many fucking times do you want him to come back? Every time he comes back, you turn on him like rabid rats and give him nothing but shit—just like you’ve turned on me! He came back in Germany during the 1930s and people are still bitching about that. The Iron Cross replaced the wooden one. Millions of people died trying to put order in the world, and when the forces of greed and evil rebelled, the truth was lied about and covered up.

“What if he don’t come back at all anymore? What if he sees what you did to me and says, ‘Fuck you all. You don’t deserve it.’ Humans need gods. God don’t need humans. That leaves us on our own, man. All we have is our mind. But that’s all we need! The mind is everything. It’s Christ, Buddha, the devil, it’s God himself. It’s where the music plays and the passion simmers. It pumps the energy of life up from the heart.

“People say I’m bad. I’m evil. I’m a beast. But what do they know about good, bad, and evil? They know nothing! There’s no good or bad in my world, just ‘is.’ It doesn’t make a difference what I’ve done, what I want, my hopes. Good or bad has nothing to do with it. A wolf jumps on a precious baby squirrel and swallows it down while the mother watches in horror. What could be more horrible than that, watching a mangy wolf eat your child? But is the wolf bad? Is the wolf a monster? No! The wolf’s only doing what nature has programmed it to do. Nature put it on the earth and said it has to eat to survive. Baby squirrels are on the menu. Even the mama squirrel eventually comes to understand this. The only ones who don’t are humans. People don’t understand the order of nature. All they know is how to screw it up. A dog wags its tail and plays fetch because humans give it food and water. But take away the humans and their handouts, and those sweet little puppies will turn into snarling beasts tearing apart rabbits and cats and small children and eating their bloody carcasses to survive. And those are our beloved pets that share our homes and beds. What makes us think that we’re any different? This innate human arrogance is why I’m in a cage and the animals are in cages in zoos and all of you are on the outside blighting the planet.

“Humans are worse than dogs because it wouldn’t even have to come to survival. If people knew they couldn’t die, if they couldn’t be punished for anything they ever did, what do you think would happen? Absolute evil. Strip away the concept of retribution, bring down the walls of fear, and the true evil nature inside humans will gush forth. To keep control, we are schooled, taught and programmed against our own natures by the fear instilled in us by grown-ups and authority figures. And it’s all a lie! We are warned not to lie, that it’s bad to lie, but the people who are telling us that are lying to us all the time! You see, doing good, that’s easy. Being good is a breeze, man. Just stand in line and do what everybody else is doing. Doing evil, that takes effort, work, and creativity. The hardest part is afterward, when you have to step back and deal with the rewards. And one of the most important rewards is that you can never truly understand good until you’ve done evil. That enlightenment will lead to a perfect universe within oneself and a balance between good and evil.

“You may be free in what your tiny, schoolbook minds know as freedom, but you tell me who’s free. Are you more free than me? I’m a hundred different things. I’m a glass of water, a rock, a grain of sand, a guitar, a rattlesnake, a young girl, an eagle, a cactus in the desert sun. I can be all of that, but you can be nothing but the one simpleton human that you are. You have no thoughts of your own, just what others have programmed in you.

“I confess! I’m not human! People have cried that derisively, tried to sear me with that stinging brand, but they’re too lost to know how right they are. I am beyond human. I am everything and everybody! Because of this, you think I’m insane. You tag me as crazy. But it’s you who are crazy! You don’t have the intellect to understand an entity that is a cobra, a wolf, a scorpion, or sometimes, nothing at all. I’m just a reflection of what you are thinking at any given time. Yet, you can’t see the beauty there. You can’t see the power. You think I’m insane because I’m angry about the lies of this world, the greed, the lust for money, the rape of the earth, the pollution, the mass confusion, and the relentless inbreeding of fools with no intelligence whatsoever.

“Even locked in here, I can see what’s out there better than you! Selfishness! The whole world is awash in a black plague of selfishness. Everybody spends their every waking second chasing after what’s best for them and them alone. They’re all lost! A total lost cause! How long can I scream that this is the true insanity? How long can my followers keep screaming the truth? Our very existence lies in the air, trees, water, and animals. Ignore this, and we all die. Not just me. You’ve condemned me to death in your corrupt courtrooms, but I’m not going out alone. You’re all sentenced to die with me. And even while you’re dying, you continue to reach out with your shriveled fingers to grab little green pieces of paper with dead people’s pictures on them.

“When the end comes, and chaos rules, and the ordered world you’ve created crumbles to dust, you won’t know how to survive. You’re weak. You’ve depended upon your own corrupt universe instead of the natural order. You’re, chasing your tail, and it will lead you into a black hole worse than anything you’ve accused me of.

“So what do you do? Instead of listening, you hang it all on me, Charles Manson. You want me to fight all your fears and die all your deaths. You’re trying to kill me over and over, but I won’t die. You tried to march me into that gas chamber with the preacher on each side and the pigs in front and back, but you couldn’t do it. My power was too strong. You couldn’t extinguish the light! And you know why? Because deep inside every one of you, you know I’m right. You have the proof. An ex-con comes out of jail, and all your children, the children of your doctors, lawyers, Harvard grads, they come flocking to me for the answers. To me! Not you who raised them, but to me, a man with no formal education. And I told them to go away, not to follow me. I told them to go home and ask their moms and dads. And you know what they said. They begged, ‘Please, Charlie, don’t send me away. My mother and father won’t let me come back. They hate me. They don’t understand. Only you understand. Please, Charlie, let me stay.’ So I let them stay. And people say that terrible things resulted. Whose fault was that? Mine? You can’t hang that on me. You can’t even hang your hate and revulsion on me. How do you feel about the murders? That’s all that matters. Not what anyone did, but how the rest of you feel about what your children did. It happened in your world, not mine. Nothing like that ever happened among my people. Strange how that was lost on everybody. It’s like this prison. Terrible, savage men in here, did brutal things on the outside. But what they all did combined wouldn’t equal what would happen if you opened these bars and left them to themselves for a few hours. The blood and savagery against each other would be unspeakable. It wasn’t like that in the desert. My children lived in perfect harmony. Do you think I would have tolerated any bullshit like that among the kids? We weren’t about murder! We were about fucking and blow jobs and eating pussy and playing music and getting high and doing our thing and having sex all day and night. It was your world that wouldn’t leave us alone. It was your world where the sickness and madness existed.

“What is murder anyway? There’s no murder in a holy war. That was a holy war. Everything’s a holy war. You don’t draw a line and say killing these people in Germany and Vietnam is okay, but killing these people in Hollywood isn’t. That’s the height of hypocrisy.

“How can you pretend to know me and my motivations when you don’t even know yourself? Our brains are like spaceships from another planet that the best scientists in the world can’t figure out. It’s ten thousand light-years beyond mortal comprehension. There are five computer chips to grow one fingernail and ten fibers just to let you take a shit and a hundred million satellites to move thoughts around. It’s operated by flies, snakes, beetles, mice, and cockroaches. Yet, take the brain of a human and put it in a maggot’s head and it will go crazy. It will convulse and die from the horror of human thought.

“After all this, all this hate, greed, madness, violence, and murder festering inside you, your children still turn to me for deliverance. And let me tell you something. By the time you assholes wake up and find your father God, I’ll be too old and beaten down to piss on you to put out the fire that is destroying your souls. So wake up. The only chance this planet has is to unite as one world under the last person. I am the last person. You will do what I say or there will be nothing!”

My head was spinning so wildly that it took me a while to realize that he’d finished. Actually, he hadn’t. Charlie capped the glorious oratory with what I would come to experience as a typical incongruity. After going on about his supernatural force and mystical abilities, specifically about his powers to persuade and control—powers that were obvious to me from the moment we met—he suddenly remembered where he was and whom he was talking to. Backpedaling, he tacked on a totally conflicting epilogue, repeating his standard cop-out for the Tate-LaBianca murders. He blamed his followers for what they did and professed to have no influence over them whatsoever.

Inconsistencies aside, it was a spellbinding performance, one of his best. After he finished, I fought the urge to stand and applaud.

*   *   *

It took about a month for Squeaky and her cohort, Sandra Good, to make their most defiant stand at the prison gates. “They’re demanding to visit Charlie,” the gate officer radioed. “I told them they can’t because they haven’t been approved. Now they say they’re not leaving until they talk to you.”

“I’ll be right down,” I said, eager to meet the two main Manson groupies after having jousted with them on the phone for weeks. As with everything involving Charlie, the meeting was a trip. The pair, original Family members and Manson favorites who had not taken part in either set of murders, were standing together like Technicolor monks draped in full-length hooded robes. Squeaky’s was red, Sandra’s blue. I knew the colors stood for something—everything with Charlie stood for something. (I later learned that he had dubbed Lynette “Red” and given her the task of saving the great redwood forests. “Blue” Sandra was responsible for the air and the water.)

From the moment I laid eyes on Squeaky, I wanted to reach into her soul, push some inner reset button, and get her back on track. How could this soft, frilly creature worship a cretin like Manson? To have once fallen under his spell was understandable. He had found her right after a bitter falling-out with her father. Charlie took her in when she was lost and alone. But why hang on now? They had been separated for more than five years. He was trapped in a wretched prison, and would be forever. What was the point?

I studied the pair up close. Lynette and Sandra were the stereotypical girls next door. Squeaky was cute, freckle-faced, with chestnut eyes and fiery auburn hair. Sandra was softer, more feminine. Her blue eyes matched her robe, and her striking sandy hair was the kind of mane most women would kill for. Both were attractive women with definite sex appeal. Neither wore a trace of makeup, which gave them an innocence that belied the truth.

As they spoke, I could sense their darker sides emerge, slowly at first, then with a cascading force. Squeaky started right in with her veiled threats, implying that unpleasant things would befall me if anything bad happened to Charlie. I brushed that aside, explaining for the umpteenth time that it was extremely doubtful that she would be approved to visit or write Charlie if she maintained that attitude. Seeing them now, I knew the decision would hold. It was obvious that the pair were programmed to do anything Charlie wanted.

“Mr. George, don’t you know your life depends on it?” Squeaky said, her birdlike voice eerily conflicting with the menacing message.

“Are you threatening me?”

She did a quick soft-shoe. “What I meant was, if Charlie isn’t allowed to be free, we’re all going to die. He’s the only one who can save us from the destruction, save the earth, the air, and the water. When that’s gone, we’re all going to die!”

Nice rebound. Charlie had taught her well. It didn’t serve her purpose to infuriate me. Like it or not, I was the only conduit to her master. And I’d treated her with a measure of respect, better than most. Shrewd as she was, she shared another trait with Charlie that didn’t serve her, or his, best interest. Although neither was foreign to lies, they could both be painfully honest, usually at the wrong time.

“Would you help Charlie escape?” I asked.

“Yes!” she answered, as if the question were more about her loyalty than her desire to break the law.

“There you have it,” I sighed. “How can you expect me to approve a visit or a letter when you admit you’d help him escape?”