Sure, Charlie, You Can Kill Me
The point of the long knife pressed against my
chest, the blade angled to slide between the ribs,
into the heart. All it would take was one quick
thrust.
"Will you die for me, Tex? Will you let
me kill you?"
It was night, one of those dry, chilly desert
nights that can come even while the days are still
blistering. We were sitting around a fire.
"Will you let me kill you?"
His voice was soft, very gentle. His eyes seemed
to be full of love. I thought of the first time
I saw himon the floor of a Pacific Palisades
mansion, surrounded by his girls, playing his
guitar. "This is Charlie," someone had
said, "Charlie Manson." He had looked
up with the same dreamy smile he was giving me
nowover a year since that meetingnow,
late August 1969now, with a knife in
my side, tripping out in the California desert
on the edge of a valley appropriately named Death.
"Let me kill you."
We were camped by the mouth of an abandoned mine
shaft in Golar Wash, a rocky scar that slices
up into the southern end of the Panamint Mountains.
Like Death Valley beyond it, Golar Wash could
be some bizarre Martian landscape, or the back
side of the moon. At night, with flames reflecting
raggedly against the jumble of boulders, it might
even pass for hell.
It was a perfect setting, and Charlie knew it;
he had an intuitive sense of drama. As he showed
later at his trial, he also knew how to play to
an audience, and we had an audience that night.
Besides the two of us and Bruce Davis, another
Family member, there were three outsiders, guys
who'd been with us off and on over the past two
weeks, hanging around the edges of things, traveling
between Los Angeles and the desert camps.
That day one of them had stolen a dune buggy
for us and when we got back to the camp we'd each
taken a couple of tabs of acid. They were anxious
to please Charlie; they wanted to be part of what
we all seemed to have together. I don't think
they were ready, though, when he pulled out the
knife and turned it slowly back and forth to catch
the light of the fire.
"What would you do if I took this knife
and started toward you and were going to kill
you?" he'd asked them, one by one.
They each had answered the same way, grinning
nervously, not sure how to take him. They would
fight back, they said; they would try to stop
him.
"What about you, Tex? Would you die for
me? Would you let me kill you?"
I didn't even have to think about it. "Sure,
Charlie, you can kill me."
I meant it. Like some mystic, so filled with
the love of God that nothing is too great to ask,
I was filled with Charlie. He was God to me. A
few days before, I'd gone to a pay phone in Olancha-one
of the scruffy towns on the highway from Los Angelesto
make a longdistance call to my parents in
Texas.
"You've always been wanting me to be religious,"
I had told my mother. "Well, I've met that
Jesus you preach about all the time. I've met
him and he's here right now with me in the desert."
Charlie was Jesus. He was my messiah, my savior,
my soul. It had been true then; it was even more
true now. He could ask anything, even my life,
and it was his.
And it wouldn't be any great thing, giving him
my life, because I knew everything but my physical,
animal body was already dead anyway. My ego was
dead; anything that asserted I, me, or mine was
dead. My personality had diednow I was
only Charlie, and Charlie was all of me that mattered.
I thought that was beautiful.
"Sure, Charlie, you can kill me."
As I said it, I knew that Charles Denton WatsonallAmerican
boy, letterman, Scout, Future Farmer of America,
twice voted "Campus Kid" at Farmersville
High Schoolthat Charles Watson was totally
dead. I knew it. I had proved it beyond any doubt
two and a half weeks before, when in two successive
nights I'd killed seven people for Charlie. To
do that I'd had to die.
Manson had understood that. He realized that
once my own life meant nothing, no one else's
life would mean anything either.
The first five killings took place on Cielo Drive
in Benedict Canyon, Beverly Hills, just after
midnight on Saturday, August 9, 1969. Twentyfour
hours later, two more innocent people died on
Waverly Drive in the Los Feliz section of Los
Angeles near Griffith Park. I had never met any
of the victims until a few moments before their
deaths. I felt no remorse for the murders, no
revulsion at the incredible brutality of the killings.
I felt nothing at all.
...not even fear of what might happen if I were
caught. Because, like the rest of the Family,
I knew a secret: The next day or the day after
that (at least sometime very soon), Los Angeles
and all the other pig cities would be in flames.
It would be the apocalypse, the deserved judgment
on the whole sick establishment that hated us
and all the other free children, the establishment
that had cheated Charlie out of his genius. While
the rich piggies lay butchered on their own manicured
front lawns, we would have found safety. Charlie
would have led us through a secret Devil's Hole
into the Bottomless Pit: an underground paradise
beneath Death Valley where water from a lake would
give everlasting life and you could eat fruit
from twelve magical treesa different
one for each month of the year. That would be
Charlie's gift to us, his children, his Family.
If anyone back in the Sunday schools I'd attended
in Texas had ever mentioned that the Bottomless
Pit was one of the biblical names for hell itself,
I'd forgotten it.
Even without hopethe certaintyof
escape, there was nothing to be afraid of. In
the months before the murders, Charlie had worked
with us patiently, lovingly it seemed, until we
had touched all our deepest fears, experienced
them as completely as we ever could, and gone
past them to come out clean on the other side.
Charlie had made us see that once you die to your
ego, once you strip yourself down to a perfect
beingall body, like some monkey or a
coyote free in the wild, not thinking, not willingonce
you do that, fear doesn't exist anymore. You've
already died, everything except that animal body
of yours, so even death can't frighten you. You
are free. Free to live, free to die. Free to kill.
The whole world had seen it, the result of that
freedom of ours, splattered across their newspapers
and magazines and television screens. Half a city
had been terrorized, waiting for another night
of blood that never came because we had run to
the desert.
"Sure, Charlie, you can kill me." Why
not? He stared at me with those incredible eyes
of his and slowly lowered the knife. He'd made
his point. Nobody said anything for a long time.
The slaughter might not have ended with just
two nights of murder if my mother hadn't been
worried about her son and called a friend of mine
in Los Angeles on August 10, the day after the
killings at Waverly Drive (actually the day of
the murders, since they took place after midnight).
She knew nothing about a butchered actress and
her friends, or a market owner and his wifethe
deaths weren't creating the mass paranoia and
obsessive interest in Texas that they were on
the west side of Los Angeles. And the only news
that had ever interested her much anyway was when
I had been featured on the sports page of the
local Farmersville paper. All she knew was that
I hadn't contacted my family in over six months.
But I couldn't know that. When my friend called
Spahn Movie Ranch where the Family was living,
up in the rocky Santa Susana Pass behind Chatsworth
(those hills anybody who ever watched old Westerns
know like his own backyard), I assumed the F.B.I.
or the police had found a fingerprint at Cielo
Drive and identified me. I imagined federal agents
knocking on my parent's screen door in Copeville,
Texas, and telling them their son was a mass murderer.
I asked Charlie what to do.
"Call her," he told me. "Find
out what's happening."
But I couldn't. Even though I wasn't afraid,
somehow I didn't want to know if what I suspected
was true. And I didn't want to hear my mother's
voice. Several months before, I had reached the
place where I could no longer visualize my parents
or my sister and brother. It wasn't just that
I didn't think about them; I actually could not
create in my head an image of what they looked
like. Like all the rest of my life before Charlie,
they were dead. I couldn't handle picking up a
phone and reconnecting with that past I'd burnt
out of my consciousness.
So I lied to Manson, one of the few times I can
remember doing so. I claimed I had called home
and that my mother had said that F.B.I. men had
come to the house looking for me and had told
her I was involved in some killings in Los Angeles.
As I made up the story for Charlie, I was hoping
he'd decide it was time we headed for the desert
and started looking for the entrance to the Bottomless
Pit. In a few days he did. Now I sometimes wonder
how many more nights we might have been sent out
with weapons and dark clothing, how many more
deaths there might have beenif it hadn't
been for that telephone call from Texas.
We'd been to the desert before, late in the summer
of 1968, checking things out. We knew eventually
we'd escape there, when the judgment started to
fall on the city. Even though Charlie said that
the secret door to the Abyss and the lake was
in Death Valley, we'd spent most of our time just
west of the Valley itself, over the Panamint Mountains
a few miles south of the desert town of Ballarat.
Charlie was especially attracted to two isolated
ranches at the top of Golar WashMyers
and Barker. The Washeven by day, without
LSD and a knife in your ribswas hellish,
unbelievably rugged. It could take a good half
a day to work your way up on foot, and even the
toughest jeep would have a hard time against the
boulders and narrow turns. The ranches themselves
were about a quarter of a mile apart. Myers Ranch
came first and was in very bad condition, rundown
and vandalized, but Barker Ranch had a solid little
stone ranch house and a swimming pool, even sheets
on the beds. Later the place would be described
as derelict and dilapidated, but we had less exacting
standardsit was part of being natural
and free from the uptight programming our parents
had laid on us.
Charlie liked Barker Ranch so much he even contacted
Arlene Barker to get her permission for him and
a "few" of his friends to camp there.
She was living at another house down in Panamint
Valley and I don't think she had any idea how
many of us there were or how long Charlie was
planning to need the place. People who live in
a place like Death Valley are pretty tolerant,
and Charlie was always good at a conit
was something I think he'd learned in prison.
He laid a line on Mrs. Barker that he was the
manager for the Beach Boys rock group and, to
prove it, gave her the gold record they had received
for selling a million copies of The Beach Boys
Today album. Dennis Wilsona member of
the group who accidentally became my link with
Mansonhad given it to Charlie when some
of Manson's girls were living in Wilson's mansion
on Sunset Boulevard. Whether she bought the story
or not, Mrs. Barker said we could use the place.
But now, strangely, Charlie didn't send me to
Barker or Myers. Instead, he decided I should
stay at a small ranch outside of Olancha, twenty
miles across the Panamint Valley from Golar Wash,
at the base of the Sierra Nevadas. The place belonged
to a young dude who fancied himself a cowboy and
had been with us on and off at Spahn Ranch for
several weeks. Charlie told me to go there, at
least for a while, so the cowboy and I loaded
up the Family truck with some supplies and a dune
buggy I'd been working on and headed out for Olancha
with Juan Flynn, one of the ranch hands at Spahn.
Juan was from Panama and had never become part
of the inner circle of the Family, but he hung
around with us a lot, even after Charlie threatened
to kill him several times.
About two miles down the highway toward the desert
we were pulled over by a county sheriff's car.
My first rush of adrenaline subsided when it became
clear they had nothing more on their minds than
a search of the truck for stolen property. When
they found out we were from Spahn Ranch, several
other cars were called in. Even though the Manson
Family was not as notorious then as we soon would
be, local law enforcement in Chatsworth was aware
that quite a congregation of hippie types was
living up at the old movie ranch in the pass,
and there were suspicions we weren't paying for
all the vehicles and spare parts that kept appearing
in the gullies and washes behind the rundown
sets and stables.
When the officers questioned me, I told them
my name was Charles Montgomery. It was not an
alias I pulled out of the air. Montgomery was
my mother's maiden name. My second cousin, Tom
Montgomery, was the sheriff of Collin County,
Texas, and four months later he would receive
a call from the Los Angeles County District Attorney's
office telling him I was wanted for murder. I
suppose I thought it was a pretty good joke, using
my pig cousin's name to fool pigs. The real irony
of the situation didn't come home to me until
much later. Within three days of the grotesque
murders that were at that very moment being spread
across the consciousness of America, lawenforcement
officers had the primary culprit in custody and
they let him go. They didn't even discover the
two stolen Volkswagen motors we had stashed in
the back of the truck!
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