Magical Mystery Tour
So much has been written about Charles Manson,
so many interpretations made of what he was, what
he represented in our world, how he became what
he is. During his trial he told the court that
he was whatever the outside world made him; he
was a monster created out of the deepest fears
of the establishment. Perhaps so. That fall of
1968 I know he became what all of us lost souls
and discards in the Family were searching for:
somebody to love. More important, he was somebody
to love us, to teach us, to tell us what to do
with our confused lives.
What can I say about him that hasn't already
been told a dozen times? He was short-five-foot-two-with
a strangely high voice. He was, as some of the
girls put it, always changing. One moment his
movements would be slow, almost trancelike, and
then the next he could be exploding with a violent
energy that shook off him to set everything around
him on fire. He changed his hair and beard constantly,
and with each change he could be born anew-Hollywood
slicker, jail tough, rock star, guru, child, tramp,
angel, devil, son of God. He was a magician; he
charmed-in the original sense of the word-and
he had an uncanny ability to meet a person and
immediately psyche him out, understand his deepest
fears and hang-ups, his vulnerabilities. It was
as though he could see through you with the all-encompassing
eye of God.
Like a cat with one ear cocked even in sleep,
Charlie was always aware, tensed even in stillness,
always picking up the smallest details in any
situation. He told us it came from being in prison
so long-you never knew where a knife might be
coming from. His awareness seemed not only intensive-able
to look inside you and know all that you were-but
comprehensive: holding all the elements of a situation
in his consciousness at once.
His eyes were hypnotic; they could wash you in
love and gentleness or they could terrorize you,
like the face of hell itself. He knew the tricks
he could play with his face and he used the force
of his undivided attention consciously, recognizing
how difficult it is for most people to be the
focus of that kind of energy and powerful quiet.
As for the magical powers with animals which
some of the Family later claimed for him, I only
know that I once saw him walk through a gully
full of rattlesnakes, gliding among them and touching
them gently on the tails. None of them struck.
I think this had less to do with magic than with
the fact that animals of all kinds can pick up
on the fear in a person. Charlie had no fear left
in him and somehow that was calming to other creatures.
All through that strange hot summer at Spahn
Ranch, camped among the crumbling sets of a former
dream, we were children at play, living the fantasies
we made. It was, as the Beatles sang, a "Magical
Mystery Tour," and Charlie was our guide.
We shared a huge pile of clothes among us and,
like Charlie, we'd change roles constantly. One
day we'd dress up as cowboys, the next we might
be Leslie's mountain folk, the day after that
we were cool Hollywood types in soft shirts and
sunglasses. With all the playacting and running
around, it's surprising that any work ever got
done, but it did. One of Charlie's primary rules
was keeping up a good front around guests and
customers at Spahn. A lot of the girls were kept
in semiseclusion on the back part of the property.
If anyone in the Family was visible, he was supposed
to be working, making the place look like a real
ranch, not a commune. We'd groom the horses along
with Juan and the other stable hands, clean up
around the buildings, do odd jobs, and sometimes
the girls would serve as guides on weekends. If
the customers seemed likely candidates for the
Family, they'd find their guides spending a lot
of the tour talking about this fantastic, loving
guy named Charlie. If the visitors were interested
and if they were girls, they'd sometimes end up
sleeping with Charlie or Paul. If the newcomer
was male, one or two of the girls might take him
back into one of the shacks or ravines and give
him a taste of what Charlie's kind of love was
all about.
I still had a fair number of inhibitions about
sex when I came to the Family. My hang-ups hadn't
kept me from wanting and getting all the women
I could. That was excitement enough, and my tastes
were ordinary-I didn't think about more than one
woman at a time or those wilder variations that
were snickered about in college bull sessions.
It was only after I moved up to the ranch house
from the creek that I discovered that the Family's
sexual habits went way beyond what I was used
to. I knew Mary gave herself to me completely
once Manson gave the okay, and pretty soon it
became obvious that the other girls were equally
willing, at least most of them, but I still wasn't
ready for my first experiences of Family group
lovemaking. "That's just your father,"
the girls would taunt me. "That's just your
mother talking." My mother probably wouldn't
have had words in her vocabulary to describe what
was going on.
There was a room in the back of the ranch house
totally lined with mattresses, and those members
of the Family who were free, who felt "at
one" together, usually slept there in whatever
combinations worked out on a particular night.
Since there were a lot more girls than men, the
alternatives were obvious. I eventually got used
to making love to one or more of the women, while
a few feet away Paul or T. J. or Clem would be
involved with some of the others. In time, it
worked out so that-perhaps once a month-the whole
inner circle would make love together, but even
then there were never more than eight or twelve
of us, since a lot of the girls never became free
enough to participate. Contrary to some of the
information published later, even in these larger
groups there were limits to what went on. Despite
some of what has been written about Manson's methods
of breaking down inhibitions, I never saw any
male homosexual activity in the Family; in fact,
I heard Charlie preach against it several times.
I never saw or heard anything about the sexual
initiations that were reported, either-Charlie
supposedly performing perverse sex acts with a
new member while the rest of us watched. Sex was
an important tool in Charlie's deprogramming,
and he did tell us that as long as we had any
inhibitions we still weren't dead, we were still
playing back what our parents had programmed into
us. But he also taught us that women were made
for men to love and to have babies, so some forms
of sexual expression just didn't fit his teaching.
I think some of the more bizarre stories about
sex at Spahn that eventually became accepted as
fact were just exaggerated attempts by Sadie and
others to shock or impress outsiders.
Charlie did occasionally stage an orgy for the
benefit of selected men he hoped to lure into
the Family. Such events were rare and more often
than not they backfired. Instead of being drawn
in by the sexual circus, the visitors were often
driven away-all too aware that it was Charlie
who decided the cast and the action. Most men,
no matter how carefully Charlie thought he had
prepared them, weren't ready to submit that completely.
The lack of sexual discrimination among hard-core
Family members was not so much gross animalism
as it was simply a physical parallel to the lack
of emotional favoritism and attachment that Charlie
taught and insisted on. As long as we loved any
one person more than the others, we weren't truly
dead and the Family wasn't one. We were all certain
we believed what Charlie said and we repeated
it and tried to practice it, but the irony remained
that every one of the girls, at least on an emotional
level, quite clearly preferred Charlie to the
other men and they were all anxious to be his
sexual partners.
Charlie's peculiar sexual power over women was
something I didn't think about at the time and
I still don't understand completely. True, many
of the women he gathered around him were not the
kind that would get a lot of attention from most
men, but not all of Charlie's girls were unattractive.
Some - like Ruth Ann Moorehouse or Leslie Van
Houten-were conventionally beautiful. From the
girls' jokes about the sexual prowess of outsiders
like Danny DeCarlo, a member of the Straight Satan
motorcycle club which Manson later tried to involve
in the Family's preparations for Helter Skelter,
it seemed as if Charlie did not provide the ultimate
in the physical side of sex. The attraction must
have been psychological and emotional, perhaps
even spiritual. Whatever it was, it worked, at
least when it was combined with acid trips and
the pressure of the group.
I think the acid was the key, not just to the
women but to all of us; it combined with Charlie's
diabolically forceful personality and his joint-nurtured
insight to turn rebellious American kids into
pliant slaves.
All your life you had been taught a certain way
to think, a certain set of moral values, a certain
perspective on the world-how it worked, what was
real. Most of these things you never questioned;
it never occurred to you that they were a framework
in your head which you used to understand and
organize the constant sensory perceptions and
information and experience that were being poured
into your brain. You didn't think about this framework
because it wasn't what you thought about, it was
the way you thought. You assumed that all this
programming, this way of looking at the raw data
your mind was given to process, was simply true,
in fact, was truth.
But acid changed all this by letting you see
your familiar little mental world as separate
from the sensory data it arranged in such neat,
conventional packages. Acid shattered the connection
between raw experience and your handy preprogrammed
responses and judgments and categories. It wasn't
just a matter of radically altered perceptions,
though that was part of it. Space and time melted
in your vision to take new forms; common objects
could become monsters or revelations of God. It
wasn't just increased sensory awareness, either,
though when you were on acid you could see microscopic
and riveting detail in the most ordinary things
and you could sometimes hear a whispered conversation
in a building halfway across the ranch. These
changes were only the beginning, however; the
real core of the acid experience was the dissolution
of the thought process itself-suddenly you could
deal with the increasingly intensive and vivid
perceptions your environment was feeding you in
any number of new ways. There were no judgments
to be made (". . . there is no right, there
is no wrong, there is no crime, there is no sin
. . ." went one of Charlie's songs). Things
that had always seemed real were revealed as empty
shells, while fantasies were suddenly substantial,
powerful.
What we didn't realize in all this, but what
Charlie obviously knew (probably more through
his own observation than any real study), was
the fact that LSD also makes a person extremely
open to suggestion and the force of a stronger
personality. We thought we were discovering a
new world, a new truth beyond our senses and the
lie that was given us by our parents and our society.
We never saw that this new world was Charlie's
world and this new truth was Charlie's truth,
made in his image. He had become the creator and
through the acid we became his creation, his true
believers, finally his slaves.
Love was always the key word: love as nothingness,
love as death. Each night the Family would eat
together, smoke a little grass or hash, often
drop acid. Then after the meal we'd all sit in
a circle to listen to Charlie sing his songs and
preach to us. He called it deprogramming, that
is, stripping away all the untruth and ego and
confusion that our parents and our society had
laid on us from the moment we were born, stripping
it away to get back to a purity and nothingness
that was ours when we first came into the world.
His teaching at first seemed complex, its terminology
a strange mixture of Eastern religion, Scientology
and pop psychology, but at its core was a simple,
powerful message. Everything was one, he said.
The programming which our personal histories had
built into us put barriers between us and the
realization of that oneness, kept us broken in
separate fragments torn from our connection with
the Whole. We kept seeing "you" and
"me," when in reality there was only
"it," the one. The only way to break
down those barriers between ourselves (or the
fantasy of self) and true oneness, true unity,
was love.
Charlie defined love as totally giving ourselves
to each other and to him without reservation,
without clinging to anything of ourselves. The
only way to find that kind of love was to completely
kill the ego in us, recognize that we were truly
nothing independent of the Whole, and realize
that the idea that we had some sort of separate
identity was illusion. To become one, we first
had to become individually nothing, undergo a
psychological and spiritual death that burned
out any independent personality within us and
left only a blank, dead head.
Once you were dead in the head, you could truly
love because there was nothing left of you, nothing
but the oneness which was love itself to fill
the void. When you were one it no longer mattered
if this or that part of the Whole died, if you
died or if someone else died, because the Whole
remained. As bizarre as Charlie's teaching might
sound to an outsider, it was compelling to us.
The more acid we took and the more we listened,
the more obvious and inevitable it all seemed.
It was not just a matter of belief, either. We
lived it, we experienced what Charlie talked about.
The time came when we could look into each other's
faces and see our own features, when we could
be sitting together and suddenly all think the
same thought. It was as if we shared one common
brain, when we could project something-a visit,
people bringing up some grass-and it would happen;
the friend would appear, someone would knock on
the door with a lid. You couldn't argue with evidence
like that.
There was no talk of killing, not yet. But Charlie's
theology of death-death in life, death as life-laid
a compelling groundwork for murder. After the
killings, people were shocked and horrified that
we expressed no feeling for the victims, no remorse.
Why should we, if the death and life of any particular
individual had no more meaning than breaking off
a minute piece of some cosmic cookie? Why should
we, if killing the body simply opened the soul
to a new experience of the one-the Whole?
Like any good philosopher, Charlie had other
and more practical teaching as well. A lot of
it revolved around the place of the female. For
someone who attracted so many of them, Manson
had an amazingly low view of women. Women were
the primary source of ego programming; thus no
mother in the Family was allowed to take care
of her own child and the women were always supposed
to talk to the babies in nonsense syllables to
avoid contaminating them. Women built the prisons;
women caused the wars; women upset the natural
order by refusing to keep to their intended place-slaves
to men. Charlie seemed to have a special hatred
for women as mothers, even though he taught that
childbearing was one of their major purposes in
life. This probably had something to do with his
feelings about his own mother, though he never
talked about her, never told us she had been an
alcoholic and a prostitute. The closest he came
to breaking his silence was in some of his song
lyrics: ". . . I am a mechanical boy, I am
my mother's boy ...."
Men, on the other hand, were supposed to be kings.
Our kingship was something he liked to talk about.
He told us we were at that moment in the process
of becoming kings; he was making us kings. As
for the girls, what they needed most was a king
to serve, a king to love them. "That's all
there is," he'd say. "If you don't have
somebody to love you, you don't have nothing."
It was a special kind of kingship he offered
us, however. As he said again and again, we only
became kings by becoming slaves to all. "All"
usually translated as "Charlie." His
domination would begin in small things-not even
direct requests. Usually a subtle indication of
what he wanted was enough. Then it would build
until we were slaves to his every comment, every
whim, every suggestion. Why should we refuse him
anything? Whatever we did for him was an act of
love, love for "God" himself. It was
a privilege to serve.
And it was a curious deity we were serving. While
it meant nothing for a human being to die, Charlie
would fly into a rage if we killed an insect.
While there was supposedly no right or wrong,
only what was, Charlie was a fanatical vegetarian
because, he said, killing an animal or eating
a dead animal was a crime. While love was supposed
to be the meaning of everything, the source of
our oneness together, Charlie spent a lot of his
time talking about fear.
(Will You Die For Me? Copyright 1978, by Ray
Hoekstra. Published by Cross Roads Publications,
Inc. All Rights Reserved.)
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