Charles Manson Behind Bars (5 page)

Despite my experiences with other infamous prisoners, I noticed that upon meeting Charlie, and befriending him, that he was no ordinary celebrity behind bars. This celebrated criminal was clearly unique and treated differently from all the others I had met. This was burned into my consciousness when those around me began to treat me like a celebrity. The first instance was when a prison guard, one who had previously ignored me, engaged me in a conversation in the yard one day, “He’s got lots of stories don’t he?” The pause and the open stare after this comment made it clear to me that he desired some tidbit of information, or even a full story, he had not yet heard. Perhaps he would share it with his family around the dinner table or with his buddies over a beer. Others noticed that I was the one Manson spent much time with, and their estimation of me rose. Apparently, Charlie was not a mere name to be dropped. He was a celebrity’s celebrity.

I got to know Charlie through our frequent conversations. We often spoke for three to four hours in the morning. Many nights, we spoke for another two hours after the lights had gone down. We always followed the normal procedures for communicating. We didn’t want to disturb or disrespect any other inmates—at least I didn’t.

There is an art to communicating on the tier. Some inmates are better at it than others. It usually takes a few months of incarceration to learn the dos and don’ts. Many convicts will stay very quiet for the first weeks as they get their bearings and find their place within the prison hierarchy. Even the simple exercise of conversing with someone in another cell must follow protocol, unless the talker wants to be “disciplined” during his next visit to the exercise yard. After a few weeks, even the slowest inmate will discover to the correct way in which to communicate with others.

If an inmate desires to talk to a person in the next cell, he merely has to call out, but he has to do it in a soft enough voice to not disrupt other conversations. Charlie would regularly ask me to speak up, probably due to a loss of hearing brought on by age. I spoke as loudly as I could without disrespecting other inmates who were engaged in talking. Conversations between neighboring cells happened regularly all over the tier. Because we were housed one inmate to a cell for protection, in Building Four, these types of conversations were frequent and therapeutic.

For long-range conversations, to keep the peace, an inmate would call out his need to share and the cell number to which his words were to be directed. First, he needed to clear the tier of all other conversations by shouting, “Excuse me on the tier.” This is the signal to interrupt all conversation to allow someone to send a long-distance message. The speaker would continue with a cell number. For instance, he might shout, “Cell 27.” This would signify that the speaker wanted to converse with a particular inmate, in this case the man in cell number twenty-seven, inviting all other conversations to take a momentary pause. The inmate would then say his piece and wait for the other party to respond. Since it involved the inconveniencing of other prisoners, these long-range conversations usually remained brief. Ones that didn’t quickly terminate raised the ire, and sometimes the nastiest of comments, of those waiting to resume their talks. If a recipient could not hear a long-range message or could not hear it clearly, it would be repeated by someone who was celled closer to the intended target. Often Chinese telephone lines were formed, requiring a message to be relayed multiple times. I do not remember any instances of these messages being corrupted, but it had to have happened.

All inmates were expected to cooperate in these relays and follow the set procedures. Those that didn’t became marked men. Whether due to the threat of being punished, or a desire to fight back against the prison system, most inmates eagerly participated in the verbal exchanges. At all times, it is a good idea to aid other inmates, since you never knew when you might need their assistance. Those who didn’t help knew that they couldn’t count on the help of others. Most of the time, everyone worked together. We all liked to help each other and gain an advantage over the system. It made life easier for all. The truly anti-social in prison, the one who would not give assistance to a fellow inmate, lived a harsh, lonely existence.

The long-distance messages concluded when the originating inmate shouted, “Thank you on the tier,” allowing all other conversations to continue. The transition from one long-range dialogue to many cell-to-cell conversations usually flowed quite smoothly.

It is a little more complicated to send notes and packages between cells. Inmates over the decades have devised, and perfected, a simple tool, called a “fish line,” to aid the delivery of physical items. Every inmate that I ever knew possessed a piece of string or fishing line with a weight on the end of it. When someone was preparing to receive a note, food items, artwork, or contraband, he would grasp the loose end of his own fish line and toss the weight (called a “car”) to the other cell. The other inmate would then tie the items to the car and signal that the line was ready to be retrieved. Often bags were affixed to the car to enable items some protection for the journey. For long distance delivery, several relays were often required. Participants were well advised to mark the items so that their bag of chips or box of cookies was not consumed along the journey. My first contact with Charlie included a rather large “welcome basket” of dry soup packets, energy bars, and powdered Kool-Aid. The old man was well known on the tier for his large and unexpected gifts to those he liked, with no expectation of repayment or any other form of indebtedness. Some inmates developed a real proficiency at sending and receiving notes and parcels with their fishing lines: these ones were eager to assist the free flow of goods through the tier systems. At all times of the day, slips of paper and chocolate bars could be seen zipping their way across the floor like purposeful mice scurrying to their next place of shelter.

For a few weeks, I was helping Charlie communicate with Sirhan Sirhan. Because I was closer than he to the cell that housed the man convicted of assassinating Robert Kennedy, I would relay notes from Charlie to him with my fishing line. I became a go between when Sirhan Sirhan would send a note back. Frequently, Charlie received food items such as coffee from him. He would often share these goodies with me. Due to the number of attempts on his life, and his paranoid character, Charlie would rarely eat anything given to him from another inmate. I was grateful to receive these items and prized them. I never knew of any poison attempts on Charlie’s life, and I told him that he might be overreacting. He assured me that it was better to be safe than sorry. Because I received a constant flow of food from him, I never tried too hard to convince my friend that he might be acting overly paranoid.

When I exchanged notes with Charlie through the fish line, I usually found a few hairs and some dirt that originated in his cell. This told me that Charlie was not obsessed with cleanliness; his cell must have been pretty gross. In fact, Charlie was not a clean inmate. Often prisoners take great pride it their homes, despite the size and nature of their housing arrangement. This is one area of life that a prisoner can control. Some inmates choose to serve their time with endless washings of the floor, walls, and bars. A pretty good wipe down can usually be done in a matter of minutes; a thorough cleaning will never take more than an hour. With all of the bodies in close proximity, men who had been doing God-knows what, passing goods that had been God-knows where, many inmates worried about germs and the spread of disease.

Charlie never worried about germs, but he did worry about pollutants in the air and in his cell. He had good reason to worry because some guards meant him great harm. I saw a guard try to poison him—and it nearly killed him.

It began when a child molester in cell twenty-one started causing trouble for the guards. He banged on his back window until it broke. He threw food items all over the tier. He smashed an apple and flung the bits out of his cell. He broke packets of mustard and ketchup and scattered their contents. To these, he added mayonnaise packets, Kool-Aid powder, and some syrup. The man may have lost it psychologically, as sometimes happens behind bars, or he may have been gunning for a transfer to another prison or to the hospital. Whatever his intension, the result was a horrible field of destruction. After his tantrum what remained in his cell and across the tier was a sticky, gooey mess.

The next shift of guards was tasked with cleaning up all of the inmate’s debris. Two of the guards gathered brooms and mops, and set to work. One of these guards, whom we nicknamed, “Strawberry,” truly hated Charlie. He looked for opportunities to annoy him or psychologically harm him. Everyone was aware of his dislike for Charles Manson. Likely, he resented Charlie’s notoriety, as some of the guards obviously did.

As part of the cleaning process, Strawberry, so named because his head turned a bright red when he became angry, fetched some powdered soap and sprinkled it throughout the tier. A small amount of soap would have been helpful, at least in the area of the mess. Strawberry’s distain for Charlie was evident when the guard threw piles of the soap right in front of Charlie’s door even though there was no need for it there. He then had buckets of water brought in to rinse the soap away. Knowing full well that Charlie does not like soap, knowing full well that cleaning chemicals hurt the old man’s smoking-damaged lungs, Strawberry purposefully left behind the powder surrounding Charlie’s room. Everyone saw it; everyone knew that Strawberry had done it on purpose to harm Charlie.

For weeks, the soap deposited by Strawberry irritated Charlie. The breezes that circulated through the tier blew it around and into his cell; guards and inmates who passed his cell, tracked the powder and accumulated scum across the tier.

I told Charlie, “One day if you or I get a chance to mop the floor, we’ll get that soap up. I will try my best, Charlie, to get it up before I leave this place or you leave. That’s my word to you, Soul.”

Somewhat comforted by my words, he replied, “Okay, Boxcar. I’m gonna keep my word and you do the same too, Soul.”

“Charlie, my word is my bond and my bond is my life,” I promised.

I received the nickname, “Boxcar,” from Charlie during one of our long conversations. The name, “Willie,” reminded him of Willie Nelson, the famed country singer who sports the same nickname. As a friendly gesture, Charlie just started referring to me as, “Boxcar.” I did not need to ask him where he got the idea. I later came to see that he had great respect for the old singer. Because he had so much admiration for Nelson, in addition to a great deal of jealousy toward his success, I took the nickname as a great compliment. Occasionally, he called me, “Boxcar Willie.” I wore the name with great pride because I knew that he gave all the members of the Manson family pet names, either a color or a reference to something endearing.

Manson once instructed me how to position myself to speak with him so that we could share easily and confidentially. I was told to put my face between the sides of the tray slot or by the bottom of the door and turn toward his cell. On numerous occasions, he asked me to put my head between the bars when it was already there, or told me to speak up. On more than one occasion, he told me to place my head in the tray slot even though it was already there. It was evident to me that his hearing was deteriorating. Few people have ever asked me to speak up.

He wanted us to talk in such a way that the guards could not hear us, and other inmates could not interrupt us. With his hearing going, we couldn’t speak as softly as he would like, and as he used to be able to do. Still, I never got the impression that anyone heard us. We kept silent when guards wandered by; usually, other inmates were preoccupied or not interested in our conversations.

Sometimes, we talked for hours, long past lights out. Other times, we shared words for a couple of minutes before proceeding to other activities. On three occasions, we were angry with each other enough to break off speaking for a day or more. Whatever these tiffs were about, we were always able to overcome our differences and continue our talking. A few times, it appeared that Charlie really needed to talk.

Charlie went by many different names during the time that I knew him, depending on his mood or upon who was referring to him. He could be called Charlie, Charles, Chuck, Manson, Mac, killer, pimp, hustler, father, Satan, Jesus Christ, convict, soul, love, hater, joker, singer, artist, or doctor. There were other names inmates devised from time to time that probably elude my memory. It seemed that he could gain a new handle with each passing week. Most of these were said in the spirit of respect, even admiration for the man’s fame and notoriety. Occasionally, an angry inmate would shout obscenities at him. Some of these names were downright insulting, but I never paid attention to them so I don’t now recall any of them, except “killer,” and, “baby killer.”

Our conversations could last three to four hours at a time. We spent long stretches of time pushed up against that cinder block wall in conversation, since time was something we had in great measure. I found him easy to talk to. He was an older brother or father figure to me. Charlie, in fact, reminded me of my homeboyback in the early 1980s, when I first started running afoul of the law. Because I was new to the incarceration game, this older inmate took me under his wing to coach me. When I returned to jail on a subsequent arrest, he was there again for me. We looked out for each other and protected each other from whatever harm we faced. We were able to share information and provide a front of two to anyone who would pose a threat.

Charlie was much more than this homeboy ever was to me. He protected me without ever raising a finger, and he shared with me as a mother would with her only child. Once others knew that I was part of Charlie’s inner circle, they seldom tried to disrespect me again. The only abuse I received was when someone was trying to offend Charlie, to pick a fight or disrespect him.

Charlie shared an insight with me one day. It was apparent to him that I was going to be famous now, famous because of him. We weren’t separate people anymore, and I would be known to the world because of my association with him. I felt like a disciple of Jesus when he said that. He invited me to be a living platform for the truth, the truth as he would explain it to me. I eagerly accepted the new role in my life: I would be an ambassador for good, for righteousness, and for Charlie.