Geoff Nicholson - Still life with Volkswagens

Here is Charles Manson living at the Spahn Movie Ranch; a permanent, though rundown, movie set in the style of a cowboy town. It consists of one main street, with the façades of a jail, a café, a funeral parlour. Occasionally the set is used by makers of TV commercials or moderately ambitious porn movies. The only things that look out of place here, and not at all cowboy town, are half a dozen or so stolen Volkswagen dune buggies parked a little way off the main drag.

Manson has moved his whole extended family out here, and they receive a lot of company; mostly outlaw biker types who belong to chapters with catchy names like Satan’s Slaves or the Straight Satans. Manson is free with his food and dope, and the girls in the family will do just about anything he tells them; ‘anything’ meaning, in general, that they’re extremely willing to have sex with unhygienic guys they’ve never set eyes on before.

Out here at the edge of the desert, Manson has decided that things are going to get fairly Apocalyptic before too long. Helter Skelter is on its way. There’ll be an armed uprising by the blacks, who will slaughter millions of white folks, take over America, and then not too much later, realise they’ve been damned fools, recognise that Charles Manson is both God and the Devil incarnate, and invite him to become their leader.

In order to lie low during those years of conflict and turmoil, Manson has arranged a hideout in Death Valley, at the Barker Ranch, but he needs a means of getting there when all Hell breaks loose. Until now he has always favoured old school buses à la Ken Kesey as family transport, but he knows that not any old vehicle will make it through the rough desert terrain to the hideout. He needs something special, namely a fleet of Volkswagen dune buggies.

There are all sorts of practical reasons for choosing Volkswagens. They’re rugged and reliable, and they’re small enough to get through tight gorges and caverns where police vehicles can’t follow. With special outsize gas tanks they’ll have a range of a thousand miles or so, and if the going gets really tough, they’re light enough that two or three people can pick them up and carry them. Manson imagines a whole fleet of them, some loaded up with food, some with dangerous drugs, some with ammo. He sees them charging through the desert in V formation, himself at the front like Rommel, churning up the earth, a cloud of thick dust obliterating the world behind them.

But there’s more. Manson, not usually much of a reader, has been studying his Bible, and it’s all in there, all this stuff about the significance of the dune buggy, right there in the Book of Revelation. The dune buggies are going to have breastplates of fire, in other words they’re going to be horses of the Apocalypse, you dig? And the Beetles, who’ve recorded the song ‘Helter Skelter’ for their White Album , will be the horsemen. And there’ll be a fifth Beetle, no not George Martin, but Manson himself. And of course in England a Volkswagen Bug is called a Beetle, so you see it all makes sense, right, motherfucker?

♦

Manson starts to live out more of his fantasies. He sets up a production line behind the Spahn Ranch, which he calls the Devil’s Dune Buggy Shop. Volkswagens are stolen from town, taken to the ranch, stripped down, converted into vehicles of the Apocalypse. Some of them can be bartered for drugs and weapons, and he hopes they’ll be useful in some of his other fantasies, like kidnapping busloads of schoolgirls, raiding a military arsenal, murdering a few rich pigs.

Pride of the fleet is Manson’s own Command Vehicle. It is one Hell of a dune buggy. It looks both futuristic and ancient. There is a ‘magic sword’ sheathed in the steering column, locks of human hair tied round the roll bar, a sleeping platform, armour plate, a machine gun mounting, a fur canopy. It has been recently resprayed, then desert sand thrown onto the paint while still wet, to form a kind of camouflage.

When the whole shooting match is over, this Command Vehicle will be displayed at a car show in Pomona, California, and get a lot of admiring attention from the custom Volkswagen fraternity.

It is July 15, 1969 and Officer Breckenridge of the Los Angeles Sheriff Office is making a routine helicopter patrol flight over the desert, looking for…well, for anything that doesn’t look quite right. And he passes over the Spahn Movie Ranch and sees three Volkswagen floorpans lying below in the desert. It looks to him as though somebody down there is seriously into car theft and stripping down. He makes a note to take a closer look at ground level before too long.

But a few stripped Volkswagen chassis out in the desert, well it hardly looks like the crime of the century. It will be a month before he organises a police raid, quite a hectic month for the Manson family, a month in which the Hinman-Tate-LaBianca murders will take place. Manson and his family will indulge in murder, in the slashing and shooting and strangling of seven Los Angeles ‘piggies’. There will be pierced lungs, lacerated necks, the death of an unborn child. Words will be scrawled on walls in the blood of the dead. It will all be the devil’s business. People will talk of Satanic murder, as though there might be such a thing as Godly murder.

♦

And here in the aftermath, when every newspaper and magazine and television channel has covered the murders, is one Mrs McCann thinking about her missing daughter whom she knows was a member of the Manson family. To Manson, the daughter was known as Malibu Brenda and she was with him all the way from the beginning to the end of the madness. Mostly Mrs McCann prefers not to think about all the things her daughter must have done while in that man’s clutches. That it involved weird drugs and weirder sex she has no doubt; and she knows that violence, Satanism and murder were also on the menu, but there are limits to how much chapter and verse she can take. However, when Manson makes the cover of Life magazine, even she finds it hard not be interested.

Her relationship with Brenda had always been a difficult one, but she always tried to understand, to be, you know, permissive. She didn’t even mind too much when Brenda relieved her of her ocelot coat; after all, she might need it for those cold desert nights.

But suddenly, here’s Mrs McCann perusing Life magazine and there are pictures of Manson and the family and of the Manson Command Vehicle, and she sees with horror that the vehicle’s canopy is made from the very fur coat that her daughter stole from her. She is speechless. Her heart suddenly hardens. There are some things, many things, you might forgive a daughter, but turning your best ocelot fur coat into a canopy for a dune buggy of the Apocalypse is surely not one of them.

That same fur canopy is another of the relics that is supposedly to be found in Carlton Bax’s locked room.

On the shores of Loch Ness a junior road safety officer parks his maroon, 1971, Beetle, gets out, locks up and ambles down to the water’s edge. For a long time he scrutinises the ripples puckering the loch’s surface and concludes that he does not believe in monsters. He decides to return to his Volkswagen and feels in his trouser pocket for the keys. They are not to be found. Maybe he’s dropped them, or maybe he’s left them in the ignition and locked himself out of the car. He doesn’t want to admit this second option so starts searching the ground at his feet, thereby missing the sight of his car exploding; although he certainly hears it, and a flying wing mirror narrowly misses his left ear.

At a DIY warehouse on the ring road outside Norwich, a fifty-five-year-old ex-merchant seaman, now an Inspector of Taxes, parks his gold and black Beetle and enters the store to buy tiles, grouting, a new set of screwdrivers, five litres of brilliant white vinyl emulsion and a pair of dimmer switches. He likes to browse, and also has a debate with himself about whether to have plain white dimmers or to go for the brass versions. Consequently he’s in the store a good forty minutes, and when he comes out there’s very little left to see of his exploded Beetle.