My Life With Charles Manson Chapter the Tenth

Chapter 10

The freak-out changed my relationship to Charlie once again, though its impact, at the time, was more unconscious than conscious. While Charlie blamed the Family and the “uptight” vibes at the ranch for the craziness which erupted, claiming that he had no need to go through such “insanity” just because we did (thereby justifying his own quick and convenient departure), it was clear that he had failed to confront his own uncertainties and fears. He had violated his cardinal rule: “No one splits during an acid trip.” In the meantime, I had unwittingly assumed leadership, moving from a role of passive submission to one of self-assertion. Both the choking scene and the freak-out were experiences I had learned from. I owed that to Charlie, or at least I believed I did. Charlie, on the other hand, had grown increasingly more frustrated, first because the Family scene was not coming together as he envisioned, and second because of his failure to sell his music. He was divided within himself; on the one hand he wanted a spiritual, communal life with the Family, with “nothing to do but make love.” On the other hand, he sought success as a commercial entertainer, and wanted to influence the world with his music. We all believed the trip to the desert would resolve things. Charlie urged us to psyche up for the desert. We did; most of us anyway. All but Kim. For Kim the freak-out proved a violent and impassioned swan song. Shortly thereafter, he left the Family. Two days after his departure, the bus returned from San Jose and we began preparing for the journey.

After completely rebuilding the engine, we bought new heavy-duty batteries, rewired the electrical system, and rigged up large adjustable outside mirrors. We loaded the cabinets with spare parts, tools, and an abundance of dried foods. The girls redecorated the interior, painting the dashboard and replacing the curtains. As we worked, Charlie’s mood became buoyant. Cappy had described her grandmother’s ranch as a veritable paradise of orchards, vineyards, and magical beauty, a place where we might realize our spiritual goals and truly come together. Soon, everyone was sharing Charlie’s enthusiasm. When word got out that we were leaving, the wranglers began coming around to inspect what we’d done to the bus. Benny shuffled in one afternoon, sipping some Jack Daniels: “Looks like a friggin’ whorehouse,” he quipped, removing his hat. “Cops are gonna shit if they pull you over and peek in here.” He had a point; the interior was lavish to the extreme: a two-room salon with plush carpets, pillows, satin curtains, a low-hanging tassel-studded headliner, a gas stove, and a new refrigerator. We were ready.

On the afternoon of October 31, 1968, I observed Charlie sitting on the hillside above the ranch, smoking a cigarette. I waved at him and he waved back. Minutes later – it must have been about four P.M. – he came down from the hill and sauntered into the ranch house, grinning. “Let’s git out of here!” In less than an hour everything was packed and loaded: mattresses, blankets, clothes, musical instruments, food supplies, five cases of zuzus, a kilo of grass, and fifty tabs of acid. We all boarded the bus and Charlie fired up the engine. Tex cheered. “Listen to that baby hum!” Charlie cackled, and gave him a thumbs-up sign. Then he drove down the back road to the saloon and honked the horn. Squeaky and Juanita came running out and waved to us: we all waved back. They were to remain behind to keep an eye on George and the ranch.

Charlie headed along the boardwalk, honking at Randy Star, who was ambling across the road carrying a saddle. “Keep a tight asshole, cowboy,” Charlie shouted out the window. If Randy heard him, he didn’t let on. We swerved to the left and bounced on down the rutted driveway along the corral gate toward Santa Susana Pass. That’s when I spotted a jack-o’-lantern perched on top of a fencepost and realized it was Halloween.

We camped the first night in a canyon somewhere in San Bernardino County, near the Cajon Pass. The following morning we took off at sunup drivin’ north on highway 395. The girls brewed coffee and served it with sweet rolls and doughnuts. The sun was bright and the air began to clear as we drove deeper into the desert. The expansiveness of the terrain after so long in L.A. was a real rush. I sat up front beside Charlie, who was driving and smoking a cigarette. His hair was long and disheveled, hanging across his shoulders in twisted strands as he hunched over the wheel. He was ebullient as Snake handed him a steaming cup of coffee.

He took a sip. “Out here,” he said, swallowing, “we got breathing room… it’s alive. The sun can get to you and there ain’t no hassles with cowboy motherfuckers and city rats. Look beyond that ridge… the way those clouds are… looks like Malibu surf,” he enthused. “Yeah, here it’s breathin’, man; here our music can breathe and our love can breathe, you dig it?… Hey, Paul, we should have come to the desert a long time ago.”

When we got to Ridgecrest we turned west along the Argus Mountain Range to Trona, then down into the Panamint Valley: everyone was at the windows surveying the majesty of the landscape. The Panamints, eleven thousand feet in some places, towered above the valley floor like craggy prehistoric beasts. The sun blazed off the land; heat waves slithered along its surface. I could make out the timberline of pinon pine on the lofty face of the range. An incredible panorama. Gnarled fingers of basalt and granite seemed to cling to the valley floor, claws of sediment clutching at us as we droned through the vast immensity, singing songs and munching zuzus. Cappy had come up front to sit by Charlie and me to point out landmarks.

Catherine Gilles was seventeen, and slightly overweight, with a cute pixielike face and short flaxen hair. From the very beginning, she exhibited a strong commitment to the Family scene. Charlie liked her. In time, she would become one of Charlie’s most capable and sequacious followers – even after he was convicted of the murders.

“What exactly did you tell your grandmother?” Charlie wanted to know.

“I just said me and some friends were going to come up and stay at the ranch.”

“But you didn’t say how many, right?”

“I just said some girls and me, mostly.”

“What if she gets nosy and sends someone up to check?”

“She won’t.”

“Any other places up there?”

“There’s the Barker ranch.”

“What’s the story on that?”

“I don’t think anyone’s there… I’m not sure.”

“It doesn’t matter… we’ll check it out. Hey” – Charlie grinned, putting his arm around Cappy – “this is God’s country out here, you know it.”

Cappy beamed.

“Hey, Paul, why don’t you sing that song of yours about the crazy women in Peru. You know…”

Juan snapped his fingers. “Yes, I like dat song bery moch too.”

Clem tossed me the guitar. Everone clapped. Glancing at their faces, it was hard to imagine the freakout ever happened. Sadie sat near the rear of the bus nursing Zezos; Pooh Bear was asleep. Juan lay sprawled out of the floor, a languorous grin on his face, his stetson pulled over his eyes, a toothpick dangling from his mouth. The others sat huddled together beneath the satin canopy: Clem, Brooks, T.J., Ella, Stephanie, Ouisch, Bo, Juanita, Katie, Sandy, Brenda, Snake, and Tex. The windows were down; the heat was stifling. I took a sip of water from a canteen behind the seat, then sang the song. It was a song written by a high-school friend, Rabbit McKie, one we’d sung together often before dropping out of school.

I am just a stranger here/ I come from down the road

I did not come to ask you all to help me share my load

I came to sing my songs for you

And to tell you where I’ve been

And maybe share a little time before I’m gone again

I was born in California at a very early age

My mother she was beautiful/ my father worked the stage

But I could not seem to go along with all they had in mind

So at the tender age of fourteen years, I left their house behind

Oh, I was free to put to sea and it was nineteen and sixty-two

So I went down a-fishin’ tuna in the waters of Peru

Oh, the sun it was so hot down there, it drove the women all insane

And soon the salt of the seven seas was flowin’ in my veins

Now, I’ve seen the wall in Germany and I’ve felt it in the South

And I’ve heard it said that freedom is just a ramblin’ at the mouth

Yes, your masterminds and their dividin’ lines, why they’re just a passin’ trend

‘Cause freedom is a song of spirit, written on the wind…

It was late afternoon by the time we drove through Ballarat – a one-store outpost in the middle of the valley floor. From there we proceeded south, deeper into the valley toward Golar Canyon, where we would begin our ascent to the Meyers place. Once out onto the alluvial fan, we started a gradual climb toward the base of the wash. The road was strewn with loose rock and in places was scarcely visible. Juan, Ouisch, Sandy, Snake, and Charlie climbed up on the front fenders while T.J. drove. Everyone was singing and drinking soda pop we’d purchased at Ballarant. The valley was incredible – silent and timeless – with nothing around us but the towering monolithic walls of the canyon and an endless expanse of desert. I sat in the back. The bus weaved and swayed; the gold tassels hanging from the headliner danced and reflected in the sunlight. Suddenly our vehicle seemed strangely appropriate for this desert pilgrimage, like riding on the back of a camel. I looked out the rear window at the rock formations, stark against the flat terrain. Joshua trees and mesquite grew in clumps along the base of the mountain; to the left the salt flats were interspersed with poppies, choya, and desert holly. From time to time something alive scurried across the road: a jackrabbit, a kangaroo mouse, and once an animal that looked like a cross between a raccoon and a squirrel. Cappy called it a ringtail cat.

Finally, we arrived at a plateau at the base of the canyon and parked beside the remains of an old ranch house. Only the foundations were visible. On the ground, scattered amidst the decomposition, were rotted jeep tires, hubcaps, scraps of bleached canvas, and several whiskey bottles.

“I don’t think we better take the bus up Golar,” Cappy said, standing beside Charlie. “It’s too rocky.”

“Yeah, looks like one mean-ass drive,” Charlie concurred, gazing up the wash. “We’ll park here and hike in. How long’s it take to get up there?”

“Two hours, maybe three… if it doesn’t get dark on us.”

So the first of many treks up Golar Canyon began. Sadie and Mary carried their infants strapped to their backs. The rest of us grabbed armfuls of supplies – bedding, food, jugs of water, and packs – and started up the wash. A wind from the south had put a chill in the air and the sun was setting. Directly overhead, the clouds had elongated and turned crimson, appearing like disjointed entrails squeezed from the bowels of the sky. Within an hour it was downright cold, and we all put on jackets and sweaters. I was hiking alongside Clem and Snake, with Cappy just in front of us. The others followed, scattered along the trail, some as far as a mile back. Halfway up, the canyon widened out, becoming green with clusters of mesquite. We filled canteens at a deserted one-room shack Cappy called “the halfway house,” then hiked beyond it onto the sloping flatlands where springs flowed in from the surrounding hillsides. The rock formations became less severe, more rounded. In the distance the mountains looked like scoops of melting ice cream. We shouted down the canyon at the others, and they shouted back.

At the top of the wash, we proceeded along a narrow road behind Cappy. She pointed out the Barker ranch off to the right – a low-slung dwelling secluded behind a stand of windblown cottonwoods and fronted by a grape vineyard. But we didn’t stop to check it out; instead, we trudged another quarter mile to the Meyers ranch. Cappy had not exaggerated; the surrounding property was lush with vegetation: salt cedar, tamarisk, fig, cottonwood, willow, and apple trees, and behind the house, a rolling expanse of vineyards and wildflowers. The ranch house itself was small and unpretentious, with a fair-sized living room (fifteen by thirty), a fireplace, two small bedrooms, a tiny kitchen, and an outdoor bathroom just off the back porch. The foundations of the house were made of narrow-gauge railroad ties, taken years before from a defunct Epsom-salts mine, then plastered over with stucco. It was a rustic, cozy little place and we moved right in and built a fire before gathering around to eat zuzus and canned fruit cocktail. By nine P.M. everyone was asleep.

The following morning we were all up at dawn. The girls made hotcakes and a huge vat of coffee and we sat around the fire eating, while Charlie divided us into the scouting parties. All morning we hiked the roads and trails through the mountains above the property. I went with Clem, Sadie, and Snake. Around noon we hiked to a promontory which towered over the ranch, and from which, to our right, we could look out upon the floor of Death Valley. We could see the threadlike road to Shoshone and Tecopa, and beyond it, the highway to Las Vegas; the Great American Desert – three hundred and sixty degrees of tortured, tumultuous, serene, and undisputed wilderness. We couldn’t have chosen a more scenic and strategic location.

Death Valley is starkly surrealistic. Ideas that would have seemed utterly inconceivable to me in West Los Angeles were perfectly understandable on a crystal-clear morning from the peaks of the Panamint Mountains. The desert is a ready-made acid trip. Perhaps for that reason the greatest visions of Indians and holy men have taken place on the desert. There has always been magic in the desert, and a good deal of myth surrounding the ambience of Death Valley. It has been called the hottest place on earth, devoid of animal life, vegetation, and water. Salt-infested pools and deadly gases, it has been said, fill the sand pockets of the valley, together with quicksands that lie across the bottomless salt marshes. Mules, it was once claimed, were the only beasts who could withstand the infernal heat. Not true. There was always life in Death Valley – animal life, vegetation, and human life. As a Family we came there looking for that life, an elemental life with which we had begun to lose contact.

Death Valley actually forms but one part of the Great Basin of the Great American Desert – an incredible arid trough spread over thousands of square miles. There are thousands of streams within the basin, but not one of them ever reaches the sea. The valley itself is actually the sink of the Amargosa River; most of it is below sea level. This is the land where the rivers are upside down, with stream beds on top and water beneath the sand and gravel. This phenomenon always perplexed Charlie, who, from the time we arrived, began speaking of “a hole” in the desert which would lead us to water, perhaps even a lake and a place to live. I remember days, after we’d been in the desert several months, when Charlie and I would walk the valley floor, along the borax flats, dry lakes, alkali washes, and salt sinks, looking for the “hole” – a subterranean world, a cave, a place where we might take the Family and make our home when “the shit came down.” The idea of a “hole” was by no means a completely crazy one, since all water which flows into the valley, only to emerge elsewhere (as springs) out of pure bedrock, must go someplace. The entire mystique of subterranean worlds, infinite space, “magical mystery tours,” “I am you and you are me,” “No sense makes sense,” and so on, was much more palatable in the desert ambience. The cosmic vacuum of the desert was a perfect place to program young minds.

Shortly after noon that first day, everyone gathered at the top of Golar Canyon at the Barker ranch. Barker’s, though less spacious than the Meyers place, was also built in the midst of dense, oasislike vegetation; at the time we arrived, it was in a general state of disrepair and the vineyards had all gone to seed – growing in a tangle around the house and up the latticework along the walls. It had a small living room, a bedroom, a bathroom, and a good-sized kitchen. It did not have a fireplace or electricity and relied on heat from a custom-made oil-drum stove, complete with small burners and an oven. Off to the right of the main ranch house was a bunkhouse made of railroad ties, which reminded me of the outlaw shacks at Spahn’s. In general, the Barker place was funkier, more weather-beaten, and somehow more conducive to the scene we had going. The place was completely deserted except for an amiable, bowlegged desert rat and onetime prospector named Ballarat Bob, who sometimes slept there while wandering around the Panamints.

Charlie was still paranoid about staying at the Meyers place with so many people, particularly since Cappy’s grandmother was under the impression they were all girls. When he asked old Bob if he thought we might move into the Barker place, the old geezer said he thought so, but that it might be a good idea, “jes’ for the record,” to speak with the owner, Ma Barker, who lived down the valley at Indian Springs. Charlie agreed, and the next morning he and I hiked back down the wash and drove to Indian Springs to talk to Ma Barker.

We found her easily enough in a small, weather-tight cabin surrounded by a flaccid chain-link fence. She lived alone most of the time and that morning was seated on her front porch dozing with a newspaper in her lap. Charlie wasted no time in laying his rap on the gray-haired, grizzled old gal.

“It’s like Paul and me are musicians… you know; we done some music with the Beach Boys – and now we need solitude to do our music, get our own gig together. Up there on that mountain at your ranch… well, it’s about as pretty a place to compose music as I’ve ever seen… right, Paul? And if we get lucky and sell some stuff, who knows, we might all get rich.”

The old woman nodded, rocking back and forth in her chair, her eyes half-closed; a scrawny Siamese cat purred at her feet. Like George Spahn, she looked listless and torpid, but she hadn’t missed a thing. She said she was more than willing to let us stay at the ranch so long as we kept her place in order and “fixed what needed fixin’.”

“Why sure,” she said as we were leaving. “That’s fine… you just take care of my property and do some good songs… that’ll be fine.”

Charlie thanked her again and gave her a Beach Boys’ gold record; then we split back down the Panamint Valley, stopping at Ballarat to buy soda pop.

During Charlies’ rap with Ma Barker, I’d picked up the Las Vegas paper and had noted a reference to a racial incident in Haight Ashbury. The article stated that a San Francisco policeman had recently shot and killed a sixteen-year-old black kid who had allegedly pulled a gun on him. I took notice of the story only because the location of the shooting, just off Fillmore, was one block away from a place I had crashed at in the summer of 1967.

I mentioned the article to Charlie as we drove through the valley toward Golar Wash drinking our pop.

“Dig it, man,” Charlie said, gesturing with one hand while steering the bus with the other. “This shit can’t go on forever with blackie… pretty soon he’s gonna revolt and start kickin’ whitey’s ass. I’ve seen it buildin’ up for years. It was bad enough at Watts and San Francisco, but now that they wasted that jive-ass Martin Luther… well, that’s, a heavy number, man. I mean, you gotta figure whitey’s karma’s gotta turn one of these days… it’s just a matter of time. The heavy dudes, though, are the Muslims. I’ve seen those cats in jail. They sit back real stoic like and watch and stay cool, you know. But they’ll be the ones who bring the shit down. Yeah, it’s gonna come down hard… a full-on war. And when it does, we’re gonna be glad we’re out here.

“The trouble with blackie is, he wants to fuck all the white women… turn all the white babies brown.” Charlie jettisoned the empty can out the window. “That brings a lot of shit his way. I mean, it was never meant that the races get mixed; that’s what fucks everything up. That’s what makes whitey mad. But it won’t do any good, ‘cause it’s blackie’s turn. His day, you know. Hey man, we don’t want any part of that. It would destroy our whole scene.”

I didn’t pay too much attention to Charlie’s racial rap; it sounded pretty farfetched. I knew he didn’t like blacks. But with the exception of an occasional offhand slur or an old prison joke, he never really said much about “blackie.” I never dreamed that in time the notion of a racial war between “blackie” and “whitey” would become the core of Helter-Skelter.

It was dark by the time we got back to Golar Canyon, parked the bus, and started our hike up to the ranch.

COPYRIGHT PAUL WATKINS AND GUILLERMO SOLEDAD