I change the subject, the way you sometimes have to do with him, bluntly, with no social niceties, and tell him I’m suffering from a bad case of poison ivy. He brightens right up and admonishes me to go soak my blisters in apple-cider vinegar. “I had fungus on my feet and tried everything and nothing worked until Star sent me this apple cider. It’s some miracle stuff, man!”
Then he’ll get irritated about something and start shouting, “I’m an outlaw, I’m a gangster, I’m a rebel, I’m a desperado, and I don’t fire no warning shots,” which always makes me smile, because it’s a pretty comical thing to say about yourself.
You may not want to know about his sex life, but he’ll tell you anyway. “You think I’m too old to jack off. You think, ‘He’s too old to fuck his pillow.’ But I’m not. I’m still active with my roscoe. I’m still me.”
He reserves a goodly amount of venom for Bugliosi. “He knows I’m too stupid to get involved in something of the magnitude of Helter Skelter. So how could he convince himself of that for all these years? He made the money, he won the case. He’s a winner! He got over! He’s a genius! He took 45 years of a man’s life for his greedy little grubby self. And he’s going to go to his deathbed with that forever on his conscience? Is there no honor in him at all?”
And then he’ll go on again about how he has no sympathy for any of the TateLaBianca victims, especially not Sharon Tate. “It’s a Hollywood movie star. How many people did she murder onscreen? Was she so pretty? She compromised her body for everything she did. And if she was such a beautiful thing, what was she doing in the bed of another man when that thing jumped off? What kind of shit is that?”
Finally, he’ll pull out the old time-tested Jesus trope and say, “I don’t think you understand the gravity of the situation, man. How can you interview Jesus when He’s dying on the cross?” Or he’ll say, “Don’t ask why they crucified Christ, ask why are they crucifying Christ.” And if I scoff at that, he’ll get all puffed up again and say, “When you come face to face with me, you’re only you. I don’t give a fuck what you are. I’ll take you. Put you in the grave. What’re you going to do about that, jitterbug? Who’s protecting you, sweetheart?”
This is how he spends his days. This is how he will spend them until the end.
“Well, I got to go,” he says. “Get back with you later.”
And then, grudgingly, he’ll talk about the murders, not a lot, not all at once, but enough that over time, as the months tick by and one year turns to the next, you can piece together some kind of rudimentary narrative.