Happy in Hollywood
I realized how much I'd changed by the expression
on Rich's face when he picked me up at the Topanga
Feed Store. Cleancut Charles Watson was now Manson's
child-Tex-with a scraggly beard and long hair
and grubby clothes. All the way into town I kept
talking, even though I knew what I was rattling
off probably didn't make any sense at all to Rich.
I had to talk about it, had to try to catch up
with the confusion that chased me from one end
of my brain to the other.
Rich and his brother Willis, the aspiring actor,
had a place in Highland Park, a Chicano district
northeast of L.A., and when we got there I found
they'd managed to save a few of my things from
the Malibu house before Charlie and I cleaned
it out and gave everything away. It was strange
to see things that were mine again; I'd forgotten
what ownership was like and somehow it was reassuring.
If there were these physical objects that belonged
to me, then "me" must exist, must be
different from all the other "yous"
around me. They fixed up a bed for me in the corner
of the living room, and suddenly I'd come full
circle: I was back staying with the Carson brothers
just as I had been a little over a year before
when I'd first come to Los Angeles, determined
to be free and alive and different.
The only practical thing I accomplished during
the week we waited for our army physicals was
to go to the doctor who'd operated on my knee
after the accident and get a letter saying I had
a disability and should be granted a medical deferment.
The letter (and a little faking on my part) worked.
I was granted 1-Y classification-but Rich passed
the physical and went ahead and enlisted the same
day rather than wait around in limbo until he
was drafted.
With Rich gone and Willis at work most of the
time, I got pretty bored. I'd arranged to buy
a kilo of grass from the dealer who'd been supplying
the Family-he fronted the dope with a vending-machine
company and people said he was with the Mafia-but
I'd sold what wasn't used, so there wasn't even
grass to keep me company.
Finally I called a stewardess I knew in Dallas
and arranged to spend a Saturday with her the
next time she had a layover in Los Angeles. When
I appeared at her hotel in the old 1952 Chevy
that Rich had left me, with my wild mane of hair
and old jeans and boots, she and the girl friend
she had with her were stunned. She must have assumed
I'd made it big in California-she didn't even
work very hard to hide her disappointment. I drove
the two of them around town, trying to make up
for her embarrassment by taking them to Dennis's
house, Beverly Hills, Bel Air, the Strip, and
by talking about all the show-business people
I knew. These two Texas girls were not impressed.
Finally I decided I'd take them to meet Terry.
We drove up Benedict Canyon and for the third
time I went into that gate at 10050 Cielo Drive.
There was no one home and as we drove back to
the airport I realized that they probably thought
I just made up a story about knowing people in
Hollywood or being friends with the celebrities
who lived at the top of Cielo Drive. Even the
lunch I'd bought them in Beverly Hills hadn't
done the trick.
For the first time, I was embarrassed by how
I looked and found myself wanting to go back,
back to what I'd had and been before I met Manson,
back to all the things I'd worked so hard to get
rid of in the Family. I wanted to look sharp and
have nice things and money and be with beautiful
women like these, women with a little style, instead
of all the hippie girls that followed Charlie.
I decided to call up an old girl friend of Rich's
who lived in Hollywood. Her name was Luella and
I'd gotten to know her casually while Rich and
I were still living at the house on the beach.
During the week we were waiting for our army physicals,
he'd taken me to see her once and, even though
they were still sleeping together until he left
for boot camp, I felt she'd been especially friendly
to me that day. Right now I needed a friend.
I got a lover. The first time I hitchhiked over
to her apartment I ended up moving in. Luella
was like a lot of goodlooking, hip (but not hippie)
women living in Hollywood at that time. She didn't
have a real job; she kept herself going by dealing
a little grass and LSD among her friends-nothing
big time but enough to get by. She had an old
Hollywood-Spanish apartment with eucalyptus trees
all around and a patio that overlooked the driveway
to an exclusive private club for professional
magicians and entertainment stars. Sometimes we'd
sunbathe on the deck, drinking beer and smoking
grass while we watched all the big limousines
drive up for parties,'dumping out beautiful people
whom we could never quite recognize.
It was an easy life that Luella and I fell into.
Combining her contacts with mine, we found we
could sell a lot more dope than she'd been doing
on her own. We charged $15 a lid on grass that
we bought from our vending-machine friend in $95
kilos (2.2 lbs.) and then broke up into 36 lids.
We discovered affluence: a new stereo system and
records (one of the first albums we bought was
the Beatles' White Album, and we played it over
and over until I knew it by heart), expensive
clothes, clubs and restaurants where you laid
down five bucks just for a beer. I even had my
hair cut and started getting it styled by a friend
I'd known back in my wig-shop days. And there
were parties. As our dealing got more extensive,
I ended up keeping different batches of grass
in numbered olive jars, since each kilo had its
own distinct taste and high, and when people came
over to party we'd give them a choice, eventually
all the way from number one to number eight. I
made a gigantic "bong"-a water pipe-out
of some bamboo that grew on the property. As we'd
sit around that huge pipe, sucking the water-smoothed
smoke of some choice Colombian gold, I'd lean
back and tell myself that this was really the
life. Whatever had made me think I wanted to spend
my time out in the hills someplace-with Charlie
telling me what to do?
Yet it was unnerving; every time I turned around
I'd be reminded of him. The people we met, the
people we sold to and partied with, all of them
seemed to fit what Charlie had told us about how
people-especially Hollywood types-really were.
It was as if everyone I came in contact with and
everywhere I went, Charlie had already been there
before, already met them and laid it all out for
me: the shallowness, the plastic, the willingness
to rip you off, the concern with masks and self
and money. Sometimes I felt as though he were
always with me, thinking my thoughts for me-or
his through me. Every situation seemed to bring
up some fragment of Charlie's gospel and sometimes
I'd feel ashamed for letting my ego come to life
again so easily, for getting caught in money and
things so quickly.
Playing it happy in Hollywood was not without
its problems. Luella had fallen in love with me.
After what I'd experienced in the Family, I wasn't
ready to limit myself to one woman and although
I thought I probably loved her, I couldn't mean
it in the exclusive way that she did. I kept seeing
and sleeping with other girls, eventually including
another one of Rich's old lovers who took me up
with her to visit him in Fort Ord and then took
me to bed. While Luella lay on the Hollywood deck
by herself, watching the limos roll up the drive
to the neighboring club, the three of us parked
out next to Rich's barracks at the fort, smoking
dope and passing joints through the windows to
his buddies inside. While Luella sat home and
listened to records and got stoned, I'd be out
on the town with other women. I finally convinced
her to start dating other guys as well, but she
was never happy about it, not even when I tried
using some of Charlie's lines on her.
Except for improving her drug business, it seemed
that I was pretty much bad news for Luella. After
we'd been together for a while she had to go to
Mexico for an abortion that was messed up so badly
she ended up spending a week at the U.C.L.A. Medical
Center. Then, when I decided to show her a special
good time, just for the two of us, and took her
on a trip down through Mexico and back up to Palm
Springs, we got caught in a dust storm in the
desert and I smashed her VW into the back of a
truck. The car was totaled and she got a bad gash
on her head. But she didn't throw me out. We kept
dropping acid and making love and having late
breakfasts in the seedy restaurants on Hollywood
Boulevard and spending those short winter afternoons
on the sun deck watching the limousines.
I think she could tell I was getting more and
more restless. No matter how many times I told
myself that this was what I wanted, that this
was where I belonged, I knew Charlie still had
a hold on me. The conflict wouldn't let up: Luella
and dealing and Hollywood and money that would
get you whatever you wanted-or Charlie and the
Family and self-denial, rejecting money, wearing
old clothes, and eating whatever you could scrounge
up a good deal of the time. As ironic as it sounds
now, the moral choice seemed to be Charlie (even
though he said there was no right or no wrong).
My self indulgent world in the city never gave
me peace.
It was as though Charlie kept pulling me back,
slowly but persistently, even though we'd had
no contact since I walked out the back door of
that Topanga Canyon cabin. I tried to fight it,
but it was no use; he wouldn't let go of me. He'd
seen the world I was living in and he'd warned
me, and I found it just what he'd said it would
be. Even though a part of me liked it, enjoyed
all the things I'd been denying myself, it wouldn't
work-I couldn't make it work. Nine months with
the Family had made too deep a mark on me. Finally
one day I picked up the phone and called the ranch.
Even before I dialed, I think I'd decided to go
back to Charlie.
(Will You Die For Me? Copyright 1978, by Ray
Hoekstra. Published by Cross Roads Publications,
Inc. All Rights Reserved.)
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