Charles Manson Now (10 page)

Change For a Dime?

I went into the bus station when I got out of prison in Ohio and I asked for change for a dime. The shoeshine man said, “What you want change for a dime for?” This was before they had nickel phones. I said, “I want to make a phone call.” He said, “By God man, where you been, on the moon? Phone calls ain’t been a nickel for years. Phone calls for a nickel?” In my mind, they were a nickel and every time I call somebody long distance, my mind just seems to go back to where phone’s just starting and how marvelous the technology is. I mean, I know it’s way ahead of that but in my mind it’s like I’m still primitive. In phone calls and stuff like that. So I think, I mean talking to Canada, that’s far out. It really is if you think about that, you could dial a number, and talk to somebody on the other side of the world. That’s pretty far out. I suppose we can do a whole lot more wondrous than that, I mean, you know. It looks like we have the intelligence to stop the damn pollution. It shouldn’t be a big thing. It should be just a very small minor thing. And I’m going to tell you straight up, in my mind if I had the power I would take all the people it would take to do that job and do whatever I had to do with them in order to do that job.

V
A CONCRETE CAGE

I’d been sucked into a whirlwind. Over the next few weeks, I talked to Manson several times, although he never actually called me himself. Kenny would dial my number and quickly press the receiver into Manson’s hands. I’d believed and continue to believe that Charles Manson is one of the most complex characters that ever lived. And though it could take several lifetimes to understand fully both the depth and distortion of his thoughts, it takes only an instant to become completely immersed in his delivery.

Charles is a natural storyteller and his voice ebbs and flows according to his own unique inventions in rhythm and rhyme. He is lyrical; his words lilt and form both verse and chorus. He snarls and growls. He is often breathless with enthusiasm. He speaks of himself in the third person. During a typical phone call, an occasional howl will escape from the mysterious backdrop of the Corcoran PHU and flood the phone line. But Manson is never fazed.

When we talked, Manson was sometimes engaging, sometimes defiant, sometimes both. He could be funny, candid, even vulnerable. And he could be angry, perverse, and threatening. During our first few conversations, I tried to work up the nerve to request an interview for my book, but I never knew which Manson I might end up talking to from moment to moment. I quickly learned, from talking to other inmates and intuiting from Manson himself, that the two most important rules for having
any kind of relationship with him are: (1) Never ask him for anything, and (2) Never allow yourself to be dependent on him. Manson explained to me that at least ninety percent of the letters he receives are from people wanting something. People all over the world want his autograph and his art; almost daily he receives requests to fill out and sign questionnaires from students writing various papers. He gets a lot of mail from musicians. There is so much mail that one man could not possibly read half of it. Kenny told me Manson sometimes opens an envelope just to see if there are stamps inside; he couldn’t care less about its other contents. He once covered an entire wall of his cell with postage stamps.

Those early phone calls were amazing. I feel as ifwe both went through a feeling-out process, Charles testing me all the way. My challenge was getting past the fixed idea of Manson with which I’d grown up: the famous, legendary face of evil. Manson, on the other hand, was struggling to determine my intentions. It became clear that the man isn’t capable of trusting anyone. He inquired over and over again what my “real motives” were and had trouble accepting the truth: that I was interested only in communicating with someone I found fascinating.

When I finally found the nerve to ask Manson if he’d do an interview, he seemed surprised I hadn’t already tried to take his words for my own purposes. “What, you’re not recording this?” he asked. I assured him I wasn’t and then, once he seemed willing to listen, I explained the concept of my book and what I wanted it to accomplish. Charles thought the idea was cool. He liked philosophizing about non-duality, oneness, the deeper truths. He gave me permission to record everything and said our conversations could constitute my interview. I realized then that
Manson couldn’t call on a whim whenever he wanted to talk to me. I hadn’t given him my phone number, hadn’t even written him a letter. Kenny had been mediating every aspect of our relationship, because I was “technically” Kenny’s friend. He had found me. There was no way he was ever going to “give up” my phone number. So I wrote Manson for the first time and gave him my number, to call whenever he liked. And he wrote back on a sheet of his own stationary, personalized with a header typed in a wobbly rainbow-colored font. “MARLIN,” the message began in large, carefully constructed capital letters, each traced upon itself over and over with what appeared to be a curious combination of doubt and certainty.

“As soon as I catch up with nothing - I can be myself and relax and be, being, be, free to relax the inside of just being becomes itself in always of all and everything just becomes music.”

I wouldn’t receive many more letters. He would often send signed pieces of paper or postcards, but rarely did he ever write. When I asked him why he’d lost interest in writing letters, he said he didn’t have the time anymore. And he claimed that, by simply sending postcards and putting his name to a piece ofpaper, he was “keeping the lines of communication open.” But communication with Manson was sporadic at best. Sometimes he would call two or three times a day. And then, without warning, his calls would stop, and I wouldn’t hear from him for a couple of weeks.

In the interim, I continued to talk to Kenny almost daily. He routinely asked for stamps and envelopes. He wanted to be taken
care of and felt he needed some sort of outside advocate. Kenny always had a problem-his mail was held up or his property was confiscated-and he’d constantly request that I call or write the warden or property clerk on his behalf. I’d usually give in and do what he requested; Kenny could be relentless.

I’d begun talking to Manson, learning his personality, acquainting myself with the way he spoke and thought. But I was craving to learn more about the deepest, innermost level of Corcoran, the dark black hole of the PHU from which Manson thought and wrote and served his time. My Internet research yielded not one single photograph of Corcoran’s PHU. It’s fairly easy to obtain picture of cells in other units of other California state prisons, but the nature of Charles Manson’s unit seems an intentionally well kept secret. My conversations with Manson were infrequent and intermittent; they were on his terms and therefore dealt mostly in the abstract, the philosophical, the ideological. When I tried to talk about what it was like in prison he would sometimes deny he was even there: “There is no prison. That’s all in your mind.” Other times, he could only vent his frustrations about being incarcerated. I was never really able to get a feel for his environment. I wanted to commission someone to paint a picture in my brain of Manson’s habitat, the tiny eight-by-twelve concrete cell he’d occupied for twenty-one years. Kenny tried to help me understand, but he wasn’t particularly insightful; similarly, the other PHU inmates I talked to were pretty easy going, simple, not very forthcoming or able to describe their surroundings in any consistent, meaningful way.

I knew quite a bit about Corcoran’s general history. Corcoran is a small city of 25,000 people, initially built on agriculture in rural California. Today, it is world renowned for its prison. Corcoran Prison was built in 1988, as a state-of-the-art facility designed to house some of America’s most dangerous and troublesome inmates. The prison was initially intended to hold 2,916 inmates; today more than 5,000 inmates, or one-fifth of the entire city’s entire population, call Corcoran Prison their home. More than half of these inmates don’t stand a chance at getting parole. They live out their lives in a quiet, often desperate solitude, a most primal existence. Their every move is heavily monitored and controlled. The Protective Housing Unit is where the most “famous” of these inmates are kept. At its inception, PHU housed forty-four inmates, but today its numbers have dwindled to just fifteen. These inmates are known informants, “celebrity” criminals, or prisoners charged with offenses so serious and disturbing that they need to be protected from the general prison inmate population.

Corcoran has been credited, shamefully, as the most dangerous and dysfunctional of California’s thirty-two state prisons. Just eight years after Corcoran opened its doors, it had already lost more inmates to fatal guard shootings than had any other prison in the country. Based on analysis of interviews and documents surrounding these deadly incidents, some have concluded that many of those shootings were unwarranted and resulted in the deaths of inmates who were “innocent” in the pursuit of those who were unruly. Corcoran is notorious for its “gladiator days,” a period of time during the late ‘80s and early ‘90s in which prison officers actually staged fights between inmates. When a major
news network broadcast footage from such a fight in 1996, the California Department of Corrections launched an investigation of the prison, which ultimately found no evidence of a conspiracy to intentionally kill prisoners.

This is all I knew of Corcoran, until I started talking to David Hooker. David was different from all of the other inmates on PHU. He was able to describe the unit to me in a way I could understand, and with an honesty that was, at times, brutal. He had a determination about him that was inspiring, especially since, unlike the overwhelming majority of PHU inmates, David will come up for parole. David’s insights into Corcoran Prison were especially interesting to me, because he and Charles Manson consider themselves brothers.

David was serving twenty-five years to life for the “murder” of his father, Thomas Warren Hooker, a highly respected and heavily decorated retired LAPD cop. In April 1993, an early morning fire broke out in the Hooker’s Los Angeles three-bedroom home, and while Hooker’s adopted son David and his third wife Joy were able to escape uninjured, Thomas Hooker, blind and deteriorating from diabetes, wasn’t so lucky. He died from smoke inhalation in his bed. Out of respect for David, and the fact that he is preparing for his parole hearing in 2012, I won’t go into any of the details of his case.

The first time I talked to David, he was very upset. Of course, Kenny had initiated the conversation. He’d called me and said, “Hey, Marlin, you’re pretty good at talking to people; could you help this guy out?” When David got on the phone, he told me that he’d planned a visit with a friend that day and the visit had fallen through. He was devastated because he’d looked forward
to the visit for a long time. Visitors are infrequent at Corcoran PHU.

As I talked to David, I was impressed by how polite and articulate he is, even when upset. He is extremely respectful at the same time that he is open and honest. David has an easy nature about him; he sounds like an older biker, laid back and casual, yet he speaks carefully, considerately.

David would call me again, and I really enjoyed our conversations. It became apparent that he was not like most of the other inmates on PHU. He is at peace with the solitude and is generally optimistic. He is an avid reader and learner. And, even though he deals with chronic, debilitating back pain, he never complains. Unlike Kenny, David would call me only every few weeks. He made it clear that he valued our relationship too much to risk becoming an inconvenience. But David never felt like a burden to me. Getting a feel for Manson’s home, through David’s eyes, was a revealing and fascinating experience.

David told me it would be difficult to reproduce artificially, outside ofa prison, that feeling of”I am absolutely stuck. Changing my situation is completely hopeless, This is it, so I’ve got to deal with this.” It’s something you have simply to accept and move on. Most people cannot imagine existing in an environment such as PHU without going completely insane, but there are circumstances (an egregious disability, a terminal illness) even a complacent prisoner couldn’t imagine enduring. Yet, for anyone living through anything undesirable, reality eventually becomes normalcy to such a degree that it can be painful to return to the “real world.” David, who will be eligible for parole in two years, maintains that release from prison can be just as traumatic as
entry. “When I got out the last time I had to wait for somebody at a mall, and looking at all those people, it was like ‘holy shit, it’s like the bar scene in
Star Wars;
where the fuck am I?’“

David explained, “You have to kind of adjust your frame of mind to ‘Okay, I’m here, I live in a box now and I’m going to have to figure out a way to remain sane and have some kind of life that isn’t completely empty.’“ But that’s difficult to do in a unit in which creative and intellectual outlets and opportunities are dwindling by the day, and those who succeed at maintaining their sanity are the exception and not the rule. Inmates on PHU escape the usual prison pitfalls; there is no overcrowding, no gangs, no drug wars, no sexual predation. But there are also no self-help group, no AA, and no educational program. David was taking college courses before the prison completely cut the curriculum.

David told me that most of the other inmates can’t deal with being in prison “they are loud, run-around bothering other people, hanging themselves, or doing some other kind of acting out. You have to learn how to deal with mental pain, without letting it drive you crazy. Charlie does that and I think I do that too, for the most part. It’s weird, I mean especially a place like this where most of the people are here because you know they’re just scumbags, they are, they don’t care basically. If they’re not sociopaths, they got serious psychopathy going one way or another. They couldn’t live anywhere else so they end up here, so Charlie deals with that too. Signs of serious depression abound; most inmates grossly oversleep and have trouble maintaining rational thought and reasonable temperament. Well, you see the different signs of depression all the time, people sleeping, over sleeping, people being real testy and just ill tempered,
when normally they’re kind of rational. We’ve had a couple of people kill themselves since I’ve been here both manual and mechanical strangulations.”