James Ellroy - Silent Terror

Charlie was a street-smart manipulator of directionless young people, a good dope scrounger, well-versed in rock and roll, science-fiction, religious thought and the plethora of social movements impressionable youths were susceptible to, and, obviously, he had evolved his own ethos from them — one that was seductive to rootless kids. That was impressive.

Yet, as a criminal he was a complete bungler, trusting people who ultimately informed on him;

Yet, when interviewed, he came across as a mindlessly sloganeering psychotic;

But, he had created a fiefdom that revolved around his most extreme sexual fantasies; but people had murdered at his command; but he had the power to usurp my late-night mirror rituals, transmogrifying them into agonizing question-and-answer sessions.

Was there some dark cosmic reason why you crossed this man’s path?

His sexual power resulted in your one aborted coupling and thence a year in jail. Does that mean something hideous?

Intellectually and physically, you are capable of snapping him like a twig, but he was on the cover of Life magazine while you haul laundry bags as a criminal nonentity. What does that fact bode for your future?

I knew those questions were unanswerable, rendered as such by my bottom-line sense of powerlessness. I bludgeoned the line as best I could, shutting down all thoughts featuring Charlie and me as the symbiotic twins of celebrity and failure by hauling heavier and heavier loads on the dock, then doing hours of calisthenics in my cell, creating my own world of physical primacy and exhaustion. But that stratagem was always undercut by Manson headlines, Manson stories, Manson gossip and speculation. Trusties talked about Charlie on the dock, and I almost jumped out of my skin; a T.V. documentary on “The Family” featured interviews with Season and Flower, and I felt like ripping the set off the catwalk wall. Then, his grand jury and arraignment proceedings completed, the “Hippie Satan” was transferred to the High Power Tank at New County, and we were living under the same roof.

I knew we were converging; that fate was planning a rendezvous, and that all I had to do was continue my present course and my questions would be answered by the mirror man himself. So I wrestled super loads on the dock, knowing it was fear and doubt driving me; I lay on my bunk after work, worried that the body I was achieving would ruin my psychic invisibility, that I would be singled out for the rest of my life as a brick shithouse for other men to test themselves on. I began to perceive my dilemma as visibility or invisibility/screaming selfhood or the subtle power of anonymity. The pluses and minuses equaled out on both sides, made all the more cogent by knowing that my destiny was uniquely different and bold. Although I had never avowed a belief in God, I began to pray every night for him to get me to Charlie, so I could confront his brown eyes and see what they boded for mine.

The road to Manson started on a rainy Wednesday morning a week after he transferred into High Power. I was lugging cartons of canned goods from the dock over to a protective overhang when I heard, “Catch, showboat!” and caught a crate of lettuce square in the back. The blow stunned me and dropped me to my knees; I heard shouts of “Grandstanding motherfucker!” and “Come on, muscle-man!” Then, getting to my feet, I picked up a distant echo from Flower and Season’s fuck pad: “Lock, load and fire between their eyes.”

From my knees I assumed a sprinter’s crouch, then pushed forward and ran head-on into my accusers. Startled, the men made no move to separate. I hit them like a pile driver, and when I saw a flabby bicep directly in front of my eyes, I bit it, swallowing the small piece of flesh I was able to tear off.

Now the group dispersed, and my own momentum carried me back to the ground. I got up again and whirled around, seeing a group of outsize men standing shock-stilled, with amazement on their faces. Holding my ground, I listened, picking out whispers: “He bit me,” “... fucking Dracula,” “Not me, man!” Then the T&F jailer walked over. My point made, I let myself be handcuffed and led back to my cell.

I was given five days’ solitary confinement in the Adjustment Module — a row of one-man cells with no bunks and only a bucket to urinate and defecate in. No reading material was allowed, and nourishment was six slices of bread and three cups of water per day. If the jailers considered the Spartan accommodations to be a hardship, they were wrong; the decreased caloric intake purged my body, and the dark eight-by-five crawl space was the perfect habitat for the perfectly blank mind I willed for the length of my stay. When my cell was unlocked and I was walked out to my new “home” — the custodial trusties module — I felt relaxed and calm. Assigned to a cell with three other men, I was told my job: push a broom up and down the cellhouse catwalks ten hours a day, six days a week. I had only one question: “Do I ever sweep out High Power?”

“Sooner or later,” the module jailer said.

It was somewhere between the two; indeterminate hundreds of hours and thousands of catwalks and corridors down the line, with what felt like millions of miles of pushing my broom behind me — always blank-minded, with the mirror man’s questions sealed off, but ready to be hurled at a second’s notice. I don’t even remember what day it was, but when the custodial detail jailer said, “Plunkett to High Power,” I grabbed my broom and dustpan and walked there on automatic pilot, stopping only to read the inmate roster at the front of the module.

And there it was in black and white: Manson, Charles, cell A-11, and the California Penal Code number for First-Degree Murder — 187 PC. — next to his name in red.

The jailer racked the gate, and I entered the A-tier catwalk and looked down it, seeing the narrow-barred enclosures of one-man security cells. No noise was coming from within them, and I counted eleven over and marked the point in my mind. Then, as if I had all the time in the world, I pushed my broom down the catwalk, pivoted and said to the bars of A-11, “Hello, Charlie.”

Darkness seemed to throb inside the cell; I thought briefly that the mirror man was gone. I was about to grab the bars and strain my eyes to see in when a soft tenor voice sang, “You tell me it’s the in-stit-tu-tion, we-el-el, you know, you better free your mind instead.” There was a pause, then the voice said, “I can see you, but you can’t see me. You believe that song’s message, trusty?”

I laid my broom against the bars and squinted into the cell; all I could see was a shape on the bunk. “Yes, and I figured it out a long time before the Beatles did.”

Charles Manson snorted. “You just think you did. Saint John and Saint Paul got it from me, you got it from them. Cause and effect, karma coming back to roost. Now we’re both here. You groove the energy?”

I snorted back. “It’s a convenient interpretation. Tell me about Helter Skelter.”

Manson said, “Listen to the White Album and read your Bible. It’s all there.”

The shape on the bunk took form; Charlie looked frail and old. “Tell me about Helter Skelter .”

Manson laughed. It was a liquid sound, as if the hippie Satan were expelling drool. “You, me, God’s outcasts, on Harleys and dune buggies. The niggers rising up. The land reverting to me.”

“In your padded cell?”

A dry chuckle this time. “Ye men of little faith. If you knew the Beatles’ message, you wouldn’t be here.”

“You’re here.”

“My karma, trusty. My energy directing me to the people who need to hear my message most.”