These days, he’s full of bluster about being as free in prison as anyplace else. “You’re the one in prison, man.” But on his 79th birthday, he calls me, the drawl in his voice low and distant, and says, “What do you think? Do you think this story will help me get out of here, only for a little while, before I go?” And right there is the human seam in Manson, split open and leaking, only for a little while, and it does kind of move your heart.
Better than anyone else, however, Manson has always understood that he doesn’t belong in the outside world. Before he was released from prison in 1967, he told one of his jailers that he didn’t want to go. But in 1971, at the end of his trial, with a death sentence looming, he still wanted to have his say before the jury, to mount the kind of defense only he could mount, and he feels Bugliosi somehow cheated him out of it by getting the court to deny his motion to be his own lawyer, and that’s one of the things that still really frosts his kernels.
Today, inside the Corcoran visiting room, Star is wearing a paisley midi dress, looks very pretty, is very happy, while she busies herself with a paper towel, wiping clean a table of the sticky, smelly purple disinfectant that the prison uses. I’m glad Gray Wolf has lost his visiting privileges. He’s kind of a control freak, glaring at Star with his big sunken eyes whenever she says something he doesn’t like. I’m also not sure I like being around them both at the same time. They do whatever Charlie tells them to do, including carving X’s into their foreheads. “Charlie gave us the honor of requesting that we cut our foreheads to make an X, ‘for ATWA,'” Gray Wolf blogged, though how one correlates with the other is anyone’s guess. Once, the three of us went to the redwoods together and tramped into a forest, where they stood near a cliff and kept beckoning me to come closer, come closer, the view is much better here, and all I could hear in the back of my mind was Charlie saying to me, “I’ll take you. Put you in the grave. What’re you going to do about that, jitterbug?” And, of course, it’s not lost on me how much Star does look like a much prettier Susan Atkins, a.k.a. Sexy Sadie, who was the real nut job of the Manson Family. During her trial, she got on the stand and said, “[Sharon Tate] kept begging and pleading and pleading and begging and I got sick of listening to it, so I stabbed her. . . . How can [that] not be right when it’s done with love?” And talking about the murders, Star says, “Sharon Tate wasn’t a movie star. Even now, nobody’s ever really heard of her, even though she supposedly got killed by Charlie Manson, the most famous guy in the world. And that’s the only reason anybody knows who she is. And still nobody knows who the fuck she is.”