Charlie’s eyes roll around a little. He’s going back even further now. “You see somebody fucking somebody in the ass, and they’re looking at you, saying, ‘This is what you want to do. You’d like this.’ It makes you sick to your stomach to see, but then you end up doing that too. You see this shiny white ass and, oh, my goodness. You don’t remember right then where you got the idea to do it, but you learn and you go through changes. I was 17. I asked this guy, ‘Let me stick my peter in your butt.’ He said no way. I picked a razor blade up off the shower floor and said, ‘If we get caught, I’ll tell them I made you do it.’ So, he let me do it. But I don’t know. Maybe he thought I was going to cut him. I didn’t really even get it in but for a second or two and I came all over his butt.”
This is the story of his life. And if that isn’t an explanation of how it’s gone from the very beginning, I don’t know what is.
Star jumps to her feet and starts throwing food wrappers away. Charlie’s poking holes in an avocado with a fork, taking his time, going all the way around, and hands half of it to Star when he’s finished, and they both eat in silence. There’s not much else that needs to be said right now.
One day, I get on the phone with Bugliosi – “Call me Vince,” he says. In the 40 years since Helter Skelter made him a bestselling author, Bugliosi has written 12 other books, the most recent being Divinity of Doubt: The God Question, which makes for a nice full circle. He started off taking on Manson, the Antichrist, and is now arguing that God’s existence can’t be proved. And a good number of these books have been bestsellers. As Manson likes to say, Bugliosi’s a winner. He got over. And these days, he’s still pretty sharp. Like Manson, he does tend to wobble off onto tangents, mostly about various unfortunate medical matters, but, unlike Manson, he always comes back to the here and now.
So what about the Bobby Beausoleil copycat-killing motive, which is the one Manson seems to favor?
Bugliosi dismisses it out of hand. “Oh, that. Well, you don’t stab people 169 times and murder seven people to get someone out of jail.” He goes on: “I agree there wasn’t one single motive, but here’s my view. I think everyone who participated in the murders bought the Helter Skelter theory hook, line and sinker. But did Manson himself believe all this ridiculous, preposterous stuff about all of them living in a bottomless pit in the desert while a worldwide war went on outside? I think, without knowing, that he did not.” He pauses. “I do think one reason why he didn’t participate in the murders is because he thought that’d immunize him or insulate him from criminal responsibility. But, of course, if you’re guilty of conspiracy to commit murder and there is a murder, then you’re also guilty of that murder. This is boilerplate law.”
Later on, while I’m in bed watching The Big Bang Theory on TV, Charlie calls again. I’ve taken to sometimes ignoring him. Maybe I’d rather spend time with Sheldon, Leonard and Penny than with Charlie Manson. Maybe I don’t want to listen to another of his far-out spiels designed, no doubt, to take me someplace I don’t want to go. Star and Gray Wolf have urged me to go with the flow and see where it leads. No way.
Tonight, though, I answer.
“Breath in and breath out, breath in and breath out,” he says. “I’m the last breath on Earth, man. Some people here want me to sign a do-not-resuscitate order. I wrote on it, ‘Why should I?’ A lot of people want me to die. Bugliosi wants me to die before him, otherwise I’ve won.” And so their battle continues, at least in Manson’s mind.