James Ellroy - Silent Terror

From a deep part of my Q. & A. vault a question took hold, and before I could revert to verbal sparring, I asked it. “What’s it like to kill somebody?”

Manson got up and walked over to the bars. I saw that he came up to just below my shoulders, and that his “mesmeric” brown eyes had the sheen of the far-gone psychotic. It would be easy to pluck them out and squash them into goo on the catwalk floor. “I never killed nobody,” Charlie said. “I was framed by the Establishment.”

“By the Institution?”

“That’s right.”

“Then use your free mind to break out of here.”

Manson laughed. “Jail’s my karma. Teaching know-nothing jailhouse cynics is my energy. Tell me, unbeliever, what do you know?”

I squatted so that my eyes and the eyes of the sawed-off Satan were at the same level. Shroud Shifter jumped into my mind, making pantomime motions that spelled out SEIZE THIS MOMENT. With the most quintessentially cool voice I had ever willed, I said, “I know that people kill and take what they want and don’t get caught; and if they do get caught, they don’t rationalize their failure with mystical jive talk to make themselves look big; and they don’t blame society, because they had free will from the gate. And I know that there are people who kill by themselves, who don’t send doped-out hippie girls to do what they’re afraid of. I know that real freedom is when you do it all yourself and it’s so good that you never have to tell anyone about it.”

Charlie hissed, “Pig,” and spat in my face. I let the spittle settle, astounded by my eloquence, which had seemed to spring from deep nowhere of its own volition — as if that statement, not Manson’s answers to my questions, was what I had been waiting for with my blank mind these past weeks.

When I remained immobile, saliva dripping off my chin, Charlie began singing: “Hey Jude, don’t make it bad, let Helter Skelter make it be-et-ter. Remember, make the pigs get out of your mind—”

Shroud Shifter interrupted the music by superimposing CASTRATE HIM across Charlie’s forehead. I reached for a deep draft of cool and said, “I fucked Flower and Season at your place by the Strip. They were lousy fucks and even worse recruiters, and they used to laugh about your little one-inch cricket dick.”

Manson hurled himself at the bars and started screaming; I picked up my broom and began sweeping my way down the catwalk. Hearing clapping on the tier above me, I looked up. A group of deputies were applauding my performance.

A pleasant weight embraced me in the following weeks. I knew it came from my confrontations with the loading-dock trusties and the cut-rate Satan, and it felt like a reprise of the old invisibility. My bodybuilding obsession started to feel callow; running brain-movies palled before the simple scrutiny of what was going on around me. My dreamless sleep continued, and as my release date approached I started looking forward to gaming probation officers, employers and my daily parade of workaday acquaintances. A potent notion simmered on the back burner of my brain: I could live anonymously and on the cheap, without nightmares and dangerous drives, and possess my own mesmeric power.

Charles Manson’s power over me diminished and fizzled out, until his jailhouse celebrity was nothing worse than a nuisance, like the swirl of a mosquito who deftly avoids squashing. The eloquence of my attack on him faded also — until, three weeks before kick-out, my fictitious masters degree was noted, and I was assigned to the library, with one specific task: chronologically file forty large cartons of news magazines recently donated to the L.A. County jail system.

The cartons contained issues of Time, Life and Newsweek going back to the forties. I was left alone in a storage cellar with them for eight hours a day with a bag of sandwiches, a Thermos of coffee and a Swiss Army knife for cutting cardboard and twine. The job was peacefully methodical until I hit a spate of recent issues featuring articles on Satanic Charlie, and read non-hyperbolic prose that summarized him as awesome.

I put those issues aside, enraged that high-paid writers could be duped by a pseudo-mystic drool case. With the Manson prose stuffed into a mildewed corner of the cellar, I abandoned my collating job for five days running, spending my work time reading through the old magazines for accounts of stupid killers who were ultimately caught, convicted and squashed like bugs. I read only the stories on L.A.-area killers; and as I recognized street names and locations, I felt the murderers’ self-destructive pathology enter me and become utter disdain for the limelight. Then, when my history of fatuous violence extended back to 1941, I got out my knife.

Juanita “Duchess” Spinelli, the murderous leader of a robbery gang, hanged at San Quentin, 11/21/41 — slash, slash. Otto Stephen Wilson, triple-woman slayer, gassed at Quentin, 10/18/46 — slash, slash, slash — one for each victim. Jack Santo, Emmett Perkins and Barbara Graham, immortalized in the movie “I Want to Live,” but fried for their bungled robbery-murders on 6/3/55 — multiple slashes. Donald Keith Bashor, burglar-bludgeon killer who plied his trade just east of my old neighborhood, executed 10/14/57 — stab, gouge, and rip for being so stupid so close to me. Harvey Murray Glatman, the sadistic T.V. repairman who “offed” three women after photographing them bound and gagged in agony — “snuffed” by the state on 8/18/59 — slashes of contempt for his whimpering on the way to the gas chamber. Stephen Nash, the toothless drifter and self-described “King of Killers,” terminated a week after Glatman on 8/25/59 — gentle knife thrusts for spitting at the chaplain and sucking in the cyanide gas with a grin. Elizabeth Duncan, who hired winos Augustine Baldonado and Luis Moya to kill her son’s wife, earning all three of them trips to San Quentin’s green room on 5/11/62 — numerous page-rippings for the drunken, parsimonious unprofessionalism of the job.

And on and on up to Charlie Manson, fate as yet undecided, but limited to two choices: the gas chamber or the rubber room at Atascadero — stab, slash, gash, rip, and urinate on his face beaming up from Newsweek.

When the mound of paper was reduced to confetti, I buried it behind some abandoned milk cartons and thought of how sweet and peaceful my anonymous life would be.

Over the next four years I metamorphosed into an object.

I became a depository for images; a memory bank. In essence, 1970-74 were my years of interpreting the human scene around me, but not fantasizing it into sexually gratifying variations. I know today that that hellishly stringent restraint is what finally caused me to burst.

I was released from jail on July 14, 1970, and went immediately to Uncle Walt Borchard’s apartment building and picked up my bankbook and safe-deposit box keys. The woman Borchard left my belongings with tried to hand me a big bundle of old clothes, but I smelled defeat clinging to them and said, “No.”

With interest, my savings account held a balance of $6,318.59, and my safety-box swag was still intact. I withdrew three thousand dollars in cash and the contents of all three boxes. From there it was only a hop, skip and jump to Cosmo Veitch’s pad off the Boulevard. I sold Cosmo my entire stash of watches, jewelry and credit cards for $1,500, and from there it was just a simple hop to a Ford dealership on Cahuenga and a “Summer Clearance Sale” on used vans. I purchased a ’68 Econoline, steel gray in color, paid $3,200 cash for it, and drove to West L.A. to look for a safe, innocuous place to live.

I found an apartment on a quiet side street south of Westwood Village, and paid six months’ rent in advance. The building was mostly inhabited by older people, and my three-room dwelling was cool and painted a restful gray similar in shade to my van. All that remained to be accomplished in my return to society was to report to my probation officer and get a job.