Taming the Beast: Charles Manson's Life Behind Bars (12 page)

“I swung around to see who stabbed me. I was surrounded by three men with long, sharp, ice-picklike weapons, probably made out of bedsprings. As I turned, Jesus stabbed me in the chest. I felt the pick go deep, right through my ribs. I staggered back. ‘Why?’ I gasped.

“They didn’t answer. They just kept stabbing. I twisted and turned to fend off the stabs, trying to deflect the blows. After a minute or so, I collapsed on the floor and tried to kick them off. Bulldog grabbed my legs and fell across my lower torso, putting all his weight on me. At the same time, Tummy began stabbing me in the neck and face. I closed my eyes, hoping he’d miss them. Jesus kept stabbing my lower intestines. All of a sudden, I felt the worst pain in my life. Bulldog had stabbed me in the balls! It felt like I was on fire from my scrotum to my upper thigh. The pain was so severe, I reared up enough to turn on my side and almost got to my feet. Tummy grabbed me and threw me back down. I tried to get up again, but couldn’t.

“I screamed for the guards at the end of the hall. By now, they were aware of what was happening. My lungs collapsed and I couldn’t make another sound. The officers started yelling at my attackers to break it up and get back inside their cells. That’s all they did, yelled. The guards refused to open the grille gate and come out on the tier to help me. The officers weren’t armed and were afraid to enter the area until help arrived. I could hear the alarm blasting, but the guards just stood there like statues, watching me die.

“The inmates ignored the officers and kept stabbing away. As strange as it seemed, they started singing ‘You Belong to Me’ while they hacked away. After what appeared like an eternity, Bulldog stopped stabbing. I found out later that he couldn’t get a grip on the knife because my blood was all over his hands. I managed to roll over and started crawling toward the grille gate where the officers were shouting. Bulldog and Tummy each grabbed one of my legs and dragged me back down the tier next to Frank’s cell. They lifted my body and pushed me up against his bars. Bulldog handed Frank a pick knife and said, ‘Here, brother, it’s your turn to make your bones.’

“Frank, my old boyhood pal, started stabbing my back and neck through the bars of his cell. As he did, Jesus began asking different inmates if they wanted a piece of the action. I heard someone say, ‘No, man, you did a number on him already. The dude’s dead. You’re wasting your time.’

“Frank stopped stabbing and gave the weapon back to Bulldog. Jesus then said, ‘Okay, fuck it, man, the dude’s dead.’ Bulldog and Jesus defiantly faced the guards and challenged, ‘Do any of you punks want some of what he got?’

“Bulldog and Jesus marched to their cells, leaving Tummy alone to get in a few last licks. Tummy straddled my stomach and stabbed me in the chest and neck. For some reason, I began to think clearly at that point. The guards were still too cowardly to enter the tier, and Tummy wasn’t going to stop until I quit moving, so I had to think fast. I faked convulsing my body, went rigid, gasped, closed my eyes, fell back and laid there loose as I could. I played possum and prayed, ‘Please, God, let this guy think I’m dead.’

“As I lay there, I counted the stab wounds. I lost count at sixteen. None hurt anymore. Strangely, I recalled the sound the pick knife made as it cut through my body and nicked the concrete floor beneath me. It struck me kind of funny that the noise the knife made when it hit the floor sounded like the chirp of a small bird.

“Tummy finally got off me and lumbered over to his cell. Once he was inside, an officer threw the locking device, securing all the cells. Still, there was no rush to come rescue me. I slowly turned my head and peered down the tier to make sure they had really locked everyone down. They had. Relieved, I wondered if anyone cared enough to get me to the hospital in time. Obviously, nobody was breaking his ass to save my life.

“I tried again to get to my feet, but fell on my face. A few inmates started shouting, Hey, man, look! The dude’s gettin’ up.’ I could hear them placing bets on whether I’d make it to my feet. Finally, as if to reward those who bet on me, I climbed up and began staggering like a zombie down the tier. Some of the inmates clapped and cheered, enjoying the show. I fell twice, but calling upon my last ounce of strength, I reached the grille gate where the guards waited. It was still locked. I wanted to yell, ‘Open the fucking gate you cowards,’ but my lungs were shot. I clung to the grille, pleading with my eyes. Blood was pouring from my wounds. Finally, an officer casually opened the gate. I stumbled into the foyer and collapsed on an old mattress laying on the floor. It was covered with semen stains and reeked of urine, but it was better than the cellblock floor.

“After another insufferable wait, the guards hoisted the mattress and began carrying me at a leisurely pace to the prison hospital.

‘We should get a move on it,’ one guard said.

‘Why bother?’ his partner cracked. ‘He’ll never make it anyway.’

“At the hospital, the shock began to wear off, signaling a return of the intense pain. I remember a doctor examining me and shaking his head. ‘There’s nothing we can do for him,’ he announced. ‘You better call the prison chaplain.’

“A few minutes later, a priest arrived and began reading my last rites. ‘I’m too young to die,’ I kept thinking. I wanted to scream, ‘Do something! For God’s sake, help me,’ but I couldn’t utter a sound. A lieutenant appeared and started grilling me about naming my attackers so they could use my death statements as evidence. The lieutenant did this even though a number of guards watched the whole thing.

“‘I won’t lie to you, Smitty, you’re going to die,’ the lieutenant said. ‘Before you do, I want you to shake your head yes or no when I ask who stabbed you? Did Bulldog stab you? Did Jesus stab you? Did Frank stab you?’ I kept shaking my head no. I wasn’t going to snitch, not even on the men who had just mutilated me. I simply wanted someone to try and save my life!

“The prison doctors couldn’t do much. Miraculously, two heart and lung specialists were called in from the nearby town of Salinas. They immediately chased the lieutenant out and took charge of the prison medical staff. One of them looked me in the face and said, ‘We’ll do what we can, kid.’ With that, I closed my eyes. My last conscious though was, ‘Am I ever going to wake up?’”

I sat there stunned, overwhelmed by the agony Manson’s friend Pin Cushion had endured. I was also amazed by the vivid detail of the account. It was almost as if Pin Cushion relished telling it, like it was a badge of honor with him. What chilled me the most, however, was the reality of knowing how close everyone inside a prison is to suffering a similarly gruesome fate. This goes for both the prisoners and the correctional officers.

“Yeah, boss,” Pin said, putting the finishing touches on his story, “that’s how they’ll come at Charlie. It won’t be a one-shot deal. It’ll be a group, and they’ll let everybody on the tier get in on it so all the guys can tell their grandchildren they helped kill Charles Manson. Guys who actually like Charlie won’t hesitate to carve off a piece of his ass for posterity. When they finish with him, there won’t be anything left to scrape off the floor.”

Knowing Pin was prone to exaggeration, I double-checked his story with the files. Sure enough, he’d been stabbed more than forty times that day and had come within a hairsbreadth of dying. Both his lungs had collapsed, and his entire upper body had required extensive surgical repair.

As I lay in bed that night, I couldn’t shake Pin’s story from my thoughts. Can people really be that cruel? Aside from the outside doctors, there were no heroes to be found in Pin’s experience. The corrections officers and prison medical staff appeared just as inhuman and heartless as the ruthless felons. I knew the reason. You work in a violent environment like San Quentin, day after day taking abuse from lifers with nothing to lose, and little by little a sense of numbness takes over. You can’t care about everyone, so you end up caring about no one. I whispered a prayer that I’d never harden to that extent—not even about Charlie.

Pin’s savage tale didn’t help much in my efforts to gain insight into how to protect Charlie. All it told me was that if he was going to be attacked, it wasn’t going to be pretty. Plus, if I tried to get in the middle of it, I’d probably go down with him. That posed a troubling dilemma. If push came to shank, would I give my life to try to save Charles Manson? Tough question. I couldn’t imagine anyone, aside from a few bleeding-heart liberals, viewing me as a hero for taking such an action. In truth, I’m sure a large segment of the public would be overjoyed to learn that Charles Manson’s twisted light had been violently snuffed out in a savage prison brawl. “Serves him right,” the sentiment would go.

It was a sentiment I didn’t share. Regardless of what he had done, Manson’s death sentence had been legally commuted. That meant I was among those responsible for making sure someone didn’t find a loophole.

The more I studied the situation, the more I realized that keeping Charlie alive wasn’t going to be easy. The array and sheer abundance of weapons found in prisons greatly disturbed me. If I was going to protect Manson—protect everyone in my keep—I needed to know everything I could about them, but especially how to spot them, and how to avoid giving the prisoners the materials used to construct their homemade arsenals.

Sergeant Gilbert Rowley had been at San Quentin for ten years. I figured his brain would be a good one to pick. “If someone was going to go after Charlie, what do you think they’d use as a weapon?” I opened.

“Could be anything,” Rowley responded after a deep sigh. “Bedsprings, toothbrushes, pencils, razor blades, nail files, scissors, fingernail clippers, nails, wood, melted and molded plastic, bones, anything rigid that can hold a sharp edge and take a good grip. The grip is critical. Without a good grip, a cutting weapon is useless because the hand will slide down the weapon, slicing the attacker’s fingers. That makes the culprit easy to identify.”

“How do they get that stuff in here? It seems impossible,” I marveled.

“That’s nothing. They use paper clips, staples, needles, religious medals, neck chains, wire, glass, small pieces of gravel to serve as shrapnel in prison-made grenades.”

“Grenades? Someone could toss some kind of grenade right into Charlie’s cell? How do they make those?”

“By smashing match heads into powder, packing them into plastic containers like bottle caps, and sealing them with melted plastic from shaving-lotion bottles, toothpaste tubes, or toothbrushes. A small path of powder leading to the center acts as the fuse. They can explode with terrific percussion, scattering shrapnel like bullets. When they go off in the middle of the night, they scare the shit out of you.”

“Are they deadly?”

“So far, they haven’t been. The inmates usually make grenades just to scare people. They can put out an eye or cut someone up, but they’re probably not going to kill anybody. Here, let me show you something.”

Sergeant Rowley took two pieces of typing paper and rolled them tightly around a pencil, forming a paper barrel. He secured it with the kind of clear tape inmates routinely use to post family photos on cell walls. He packed the paper barrel with powder made from crushed match heads. Using the bottom of the pencil to seal off the breech, he faced the pointed side toward the opening on the opposite end. A pinhole was poked in the base, just under the sulfur. The sergeant then lit a match and held the flame under his weapon. Boom! The device fired the pencil with such force that it flew across the room twelve feet and embedded itself in the wall.

“Just like that, no more Charlie,” he cracked as I sat stunned, mouth agape.

“Wow! That’s amazing. You did that so fast!”

“It’s easy. And everything I used, the courts require us to give the prisoners. The paper and pencils are for legal work. Matches, so they can smoke. The only thing we remotely control is the tape.”

“Yeah, but they get that too, don’t they?”

“That’s right. But it’s not that bad. Like the grenades, they don’t always explode on time or with enough force to be fatal.”

Sergeant Rowley went on to enumerate the more dangerous weapons the prisoners build: spray cans used as flamethrowers, paint-thinner firebombs, sharpened mop-handle spears, blowguns, darts, slingshots, and various maiming devices made from the basic tools used by work crews.

“We’re always fixing stuff around here, so the work crews are in and out. Electricians, plumbers, painters, people like that. They lay down a screwdriver for a second, and zoom, it’s gone. The prisoners just beat us. It’s a given and we know it. They’re gonna beat us.

“The most common weapon, the kind that can kill, is fashioned out of flat metal stock about an inch wide, cut and sharpened into pointed shanks. The source of the stock is smuggled in from welding, sheet metal, plumbing, or the machine shop. Often, the cons cut the metal shanks right out of the fixtures already in their cells. Using fingernail clippers, a standard-issued item, the cons scour a pattern on the iron of a bed frame or on the back side of a stainless-steel toilet. They retrace the pattern thousands of times until they can break it loose or punch the piece out. The blade is sharpened, using the concrete floor like sandpaper, then fit with a firm grip.”

Rowley went on to explain that once an inmate constructs a weapon, he can hide it from searches by moving it around the cellblock and trading off with other prisoners during trips to the yard, shower, doctor, barber, or dentist. Often, a cadre of inmates will work together, one group distracting the guards while the other transfers weapons. An especially intriguing way of hiding a weapon is to tie it to a “fish line” made from thinly torn sheets and burying it inside their toilets. Weapons and other goods are transported from cell to cell this way because a row of inmates share the same sewer pipeline. Similarly, clever cons toss lines out their windows to deliver packages to the cells below.

Listening to all this, I remembered what the Aryan Brother leader said when I asked him if his gang had it in for Manson. “If we wanted him, he’d have been dead a long time ago.” At the time, I laughed it off as macho posturing. Now, it suddenly wasn’t so funny. The guy was telling the truth. The simple fact was, despite all the security, isolation, and special treatment, Charles Manson remained among the living simply because nobody at San Quentin wanted to kill him badly enough. If and when someone did, there probably wouldn’t be a thing anyone could do about it.