Charles Manson Behind Bars (24 page)

“I went and got a bucket of hot water.” Charlie continued. “I showed it to each one of the trouble makers. I threatened to throw it in their faces unless they stopped what they were doing.”

Charlie was almost giddy as he narrated these events. “When some of them thought I was bluffing. I had to use one of them as an example. I grabbed him by the hair and smashed his face into a door. I cleaned up the mess after they stopped and never had any trouble on that unit again.”

Charlie must have wanted to talk. He moved on to a new story to share other events at CMF as I listened intently to his tales. “I was always in my cell prior to getting a job in the chapel,” Charlie explained to me. “One day Babo Sosa, the leader of the Nuestra Familia, and two members of his gang opened my cell with a screw driver. I thought they were going to kill me. They explained that I would be safe with them because they had no problems with me.”

Despite his position as the leader of the notorious gang, Babo Sosa was replaced, Charlie told me. When his effectiveness waned, a younger leader was raised to take his place in the early 1990s. For Sosa, this was no 401K retirement plan. When you leave this type of an organization, you usually do so in a casket. He was only able to survive by the protection of some of his loyal members. His health caught up to him, however, during a prison transfer when he suddenly died. While his death certificate declares the cause of his demise to be a heart attack, many aren’t convinced that he died naturally.

Charlie then told me about a deadly situation in CMF that could easily have ended his life. He began: “Hey Boxcar. In Vacaville, there was a chair I used to sit in on the tier. It was red. This new kid came into the unit from the hole. The whites found out he wanted to be part of their crew, and wanted to really earn his bones. They sent him to kill me. I sensed that this kid had some fear in him, and really didn’t realize what he was getting into, or exactly who he was sent to kill.

“I seen he had a knife in his pocket,” Charlie bragged, “and I asked him to show me the knife. He showed it to me, and I told him to give it to me, and to explain to me why he had it. He told me he was sent to kill me in order to be a part of the Arian Brotherhood, an ally of the Mexican Familia. Well, this kid was as harmless as a butterfly. After handing me the knife, and telling me what I already knew, he was deemed ‘no good’ by those who had sent him. He couldn’t go back to be with them in the hole or be a part of their gang!”

A few days later, I saw an inmate spit on Charlie’s window when Charlie was only a few inches from it. I could feel the pain in Charlie as he dealt with it. I could tell that it hurt him, even though Charlie knew how to deal with it from his years of incarceration. The guilty party, not a friend of anyone in the tier, had shouted after he spat. “You’re a piece of shit, Charles Manson. You’re a baby killer. Rot in hell you son of a bitch.” The outburst may have been a reaction to the clan outfit that Charlie had worn on the tier. More likely, the man was crazy or he was bitter over Charlie’s notoriety. Perhaps both.

Charlie yelled back at the guy at the top of his lungs. “You can’t hurt me! You haven’t done anything to me that hasn’t already been done to me. I’m not P.C. They got me locked behind this door to protect YOU. They put me in P.C., not P.C. in me. I’m Charles Manson, a serial killer, death row, dead man walking three times. I’m already dead. You can’t kill me or hurt me. I am no one. I’m lower than a bug. I’ve been doing this since I was a juvenile.

“You mess with my water, my air, my food, my clothes, my blankets, my sheets, my socks, my boxers, my mail, my visits,” Charlie continued. “You tell my visitors not to visit me. You steal my mail, steal my music, tell me I can’t draw pictures.” By this time, it appeared that he was yelling at the whole prison system, perhaps venting a diffuse rage at all mankind.

“The Justice Department has told me that I can’t have money because its ‘illegal business practice,’” Charlie went on. “I got people lying on me: they send the Secret Service to talk to me and say I asked them to help me kill the United States President. I ain’t said none of that. They just want a get-out-of-jail-free card. Your spit don’t bother me. So what you gonna do now?”

The tier got quiet, as it often did after a Charles Manson outburst. If the inmate who spat took issue with anything Charlie said, he didn’t vocalize it.

Sometimes, Charlie would put on what I called his, “mad man mask.” He would scream at the top of his lungs. He would do this even for visitors who could only see him, and not hear what he was saying. To this sound, he would add the visuals of someone shooting a pistol in the most menacing fashion. He would yell, “Bang, bang, bang,” while pulling the imagined triggers, as though he were holding real six-shooters. I sometimes wondered how much fear he put into those prison visitors who came by just for a look.

Most inmates were good at tuning Charlie out during one of his rages. We would listen to the first few lines, and then busy ourselves with reading, writing, watching television, or whatever we were working on. I often put earplugs in my ears to filter out his voice. It was understood that we all have blow ups from time to time. After a while, Charlie would cool down and life would go on.

It didn’t bother Charlie to disturb others with loud noises, sometimes even in the middle of the night. Why others didn’t object to this act of disrespect, I never understood. I suspect it was because of his notoriety. Maybe, they feared there would be retribution if they objected to Charlie’s obnoxious behaviors. I just ignored him as I ignored other inmates who were disrespectful. I have found that objecting usually doesn’t help. I wait for other, more menacing inmates, to keep disruptive people in line. My days of being the enforcer of a tier are long gone. I don’t want the conflict or the attention I craved in my earlier days. I suppose Charlie is responsible for helping mellow out my behavior. Ironically, he more than anyone else benefited from my new passive attitude.

One night, I was wakened at about two o‘clock in the morning. I heard the drum beat of someone playing his sink like a set of bongos. At first, I couldn’t determine from where the sound was emanating. Eventually, I recognized the voice that was singing along, and was able to locate its source. It was Charlie. He was chanting while playing bongos on his steel sink. He showed some talent, too. I would love to have heard him pound out a beat on a real set, just not at two in the morning.

He played slowly, then fast. He was able to vary his beat across two distinct sounds: low, low, low; high, high, high. It would sound terrific as part of some group of musicians, I thought. Eventually, Charlie drifted off into the silence of sleep and allowed me to resume my slumber.

Charlie was not always noisy. When he was depressed, he could get really quiet. I would become so concerned sometimes that I would check on him from time to time, just to make sure that he was okay. When he thought about being denied visits from children, or the freedom he once enjoyed to pass out gloves to the tower guards, he would become melancholy. Sometimes, he would make self-destructive threats:

“I should just hang myself,” Charlie said somberly to me one day, “so I don’t have to deal with all this mess about my visits, mail, or being able to roam in the prison. I used to walk around passing out the latex gloves to all the units on 4-A yard. I planted flowers and grass, and now they spray me with mace, take my tennis shoes, jeans, food and tell me I can’t write my music or paint or play my guitar!”

I knew that Charlie was too mentally strong to actually kill himself. After all that he had been through with his difficult upbringing and his run-ins with the law, I knew he would be brave and face his difficulties like a man, like the true inmate he was, one who knew how to handle his responsibilities. Still, I worried. I would call to Charlie from my cell on regular intervals to ensure his safety. I wanted to be able to notify the guards if he did in fact attempt harm to himself. Each time I went to yard or shower, I would glance at him through his window to ensure he was in good shape. Eventually, he would get over his melancholia. He always did. Usually, it ended with a request for a talk.

“Boxcar,” Charlie would say quietly. “Are you busy?” We would then launch into a long discussion that told me that Charlie was himself once again.

Some people love Charles Manson; many more hate him. Some are drawn to him because of a fascination with the horror of his crimes. Others detest him and are glad that he was tried and convicted for those exact same crimes. There are also those who want nothing more than to kill him. How many nobodies have achieved infamy by killing or attempting to kill some well-known celebrity? Everyone, including Charlie himself, knows that the name of the person who ends Charles Manson’s life will go down in history and be forever linked with his. Many who cannot achieve attention from him, and who have no life of which to be proud, would love to kill him and thus be immortalized. If it were not for the murders of certain famous people, we’d never have learned the names of Mark Chapman, Lee Harvey Oswald, or John Wilkes Booth. Charlie lives with the knowledge that his death could be the ticket to someone else’s fame.

I came to love Charlie because of who he is as a person. Personally, I do not like people who hurt women and children. I especially despise those who harm people who are the most unable to defend themselves, such as the elderly and the disabled. If Charlie were guilty of such crimes toward the weak, I wouldn’t want to associate with him. There have been many child killers and those who preyed upon the elderly that I have refused to befriend. In my opinion, Charlie did not harm those in need, regardless of any jury verdict. He helped the weak.

I wasn’t attracted to Charlie because of his fame. High visibility draws its share of stalkers, whether the celebrity is an actor, sports figure, or politician, but I am nobody’s follower. It wasn’t the crimes that held any attraction to me either, the kind of attraction that draws others to a fascination with the lives of serial killers like Jeffrey Dahmer, John Wayne Gacy, or Ted Bundy. My decision to associate with Charles Manson was made only to give the man the benefit of the doubt. As I held off on my judgments of him, I began to see an interesting and very complex individual, one who is talented yet horribly wronged by society, one who therefore is capable of much good and much bad.

Charlie repeatedly told me that he was innocent of the wrongs for which he was convicted. Now, I am no fool. I would have to be completely gullible to believe a prisoner at his word. I know that most inmates proclaim their innocence. I did. Even in the face of overwhelming evidence, much of it found on my person at the time of my arrest, I claimed that I had been wrongly arrested and falsely convicted. I was found guilty of fourteen felonies in the aftermath of two separate crime sprees, including grand theft and attempted murder. There is now no need to uphold the charade of my innocence. I am not proud of what I have done, but I am prepared to take responsibility for my actions. With all my appeals expended, there is not much point in denying the obviousness of my guilt. Charlie’s case is another matter, however.

I gave Charlie a chance. It’s not that I accepted his plea of innocence. I didn’t, at least not at first. It has been said that if you released all the prisoners who proclaimed their innocence, there would be no one left to guard. This statement is probably true. Most inmates who have spoken with me about their crimes either minimize their crimes or deny any guilt. I suspected that the old man was doing that with me also. Still, I wanted to know him for who he was, and not for what had been written about him throughout the years. I had heard the stories and listened to news reports. Since I know that today’s media will report something (or hold something back) irrespective of its truth, and since I know that our justice system wrongly claims that someone is innocent until proven guilty, I decided to get to know the man and form my own opinions.

From what I gleaned from my conversations with the old man, I believe that Charlie was not in the Tate house when the murders were committed, and that he is innocent of those crimes, as well as the murders at the La Bianca residence. Even if he is guilty, who of us is without sin? How can we convict him, keep him in prison all his life, while we participate in the same violence through our television and through our military? Perhaps society is guiltier than Charles Manson. Maybe the system in which we all live is guilty of creating Charlie.

I considered Charlie for months, pondering who he is and what his presence beside me meant. After hours of reflection, I finally arrived at peace about Manson’s identity. He is hard to classify since there is no one like him. He is a celebrity, and his notoriety has become a feedback loop. Many people have emerged who think he’s great simply because of his unusual beliefs or his bizarre behavior. They are likely hoping to obtain something out their contact with Manson. Because there are so many people around him who are fascinated by him, others can’t help but notice. He is a celebrity because he is a celebrity; people are interested in him because so many people are interested in him. Even with his connection to the horrendous events at two murder scenes, even with his life spent mostly in one institution or another, many attribute to him godlike characteristics, and want no more than to receive some kind of attention from him.

Regardless of his notoriety, his fans, and the players hoping to exploit him, I happened upon Charlie completely by chance. I never requested a living arrangement that left me open to his manipulations. It could be argued that I deserved it, that I had found my place in the world by my own anger and stupidity. Yet, I had to believe that there was some deeper meaning in my serendipitous path that crossed Charlie’s. I have come to understand Charlie as the complex mix of a cult leader and an organized crime boss. He embodies both identities. To see him as any less is to not appreciate the force of his character.