The Straight published the interviews I had done. I believed they were important, and sent a copy to Jann Wenner, publisher of Rolling Stone magazine. He wrote back saying everyone at their offices in San Francisco enjoyed the articles in the Straight. He said that they were preparing a special edition themselves about The Family. Their future issue was devoted almost entirely to different aspects of the crimes and the members of the group. It won a journalism award from Columbia University, but with Manson on the cover, it was their worst selling issue ever.
I also sent a copy of our issue to the people at the Ranch. They sent back to me home photos of themselves, a tape recording of talk and songs, and a letter written to me by two of the girls. Also a typed letter indicating it had been written by Manson.
I also began to lose interest in my work. I spoke with local musicians, like Terry Jacks and Tom Northcott, but was no longer caring about any of it. The real story was back in the hills of a Californian canyon.
From March until June there were many events for people of like mind to enjoy in the Lower Mainland. A rock festival was a big draw in Aldergrove, as was the annual Be-In at Stanley Park. The Be-In was a perfect occasion for people to try a tab of LSD. Music, and the fellowship of kindred spirits amidst the majestic trees of a forest as large as city itself was thought to be an ideal setting to acknowledge that it was great to be alive in this world. I took a tab and was soon overwhelmed by the stress and tension I was experiencing.
I sat in a car trying to avoid crowds as I experienced what could only be called a state of heightened shock. With me was a young girl also experiencing the same drug. She seemed to be handling it better than me, and was quite talkative. I noticed that I could not bring myself to look into her eyes. I dared not. If I tried I would immediately be confronted with a powerful reflection of light from the enlarged pupils of her eyes, that would cause immediate vertigo. And I was dizzy enough as it was. It reminded me of the unusual moment when Manson's eyes had connected with mine. And I remembered that I had still felt some of the peyote in my system when I first saw Charles Manson, and that it was likely true, that LSD was being smuggled in to the prisons for the family members there, as easily as putting a small piece of blotter under a postage stamp. Manson was definitely tripping on something when I had seen him.
I was quickly growing bored with everything, and could produce nothing tangible to benefit the paper. Dan let me go, replacing me with another aspiring rock columnist. He would in turn be replaced by Bob Geldof, who was later knighted for producing the Live Aid benefit concert.
I didn't feel I really lived here anymore anyway. I decided to return to California and learn more about the fascinating lifestyle of the Family, the most intriguing story I had ever encountered.
My father gave me bus fare to get to Portland, Oregon, and from there I hitchhiked to L.A. and Topenga Canyon. When I arrived at my destination I walked directly into the main house, the only house, of Spahn Ranch and sat down at the kitchen table, next to two girls and the owner, George Spahn.
For a man past 80 years he was very alert and was soon asking me where I was from, and so we talked for a while.
When the girls and I were alone, it became their turn to ask questions.
They wanted to know what I might have brought with me. Money? A car?
No, nothing, I answered. But it didn't seem to matter for very long.
My plan was to stay for a month and experience life inside the Family, and try to write about it. The lifestyle being practiced here seemed to be the natural extension and epitome of all things Flower Power.
But it wasn't long before I found it impossible to write at all. Each day became like a pleasant but ever increasing form of sunstroke.
There was an air of innocence throughout the warm Californian summer, in the hillsides and in the young people gathered here, each for their own lost reasons. Seeking truth, or a place to be more fully alive, a place both inside and outside themselves. Someone to belong with, and young enough to still just want to have fun.
It may have been the casual yet consistent use of drugs, or the absence of concern about what tomorrow might bring, let alone the future, but reality was certainly different at Spahn Ranch. A very unique reality in the minds of everyone there in the way they interacted with each other and with the outside world, as everything and everyone else soon became.
Ingesting LSD was a regular activity at the Ranch. By referring to it as "acid", the generic slang term, it would also indicate that you didn't exactly know what it was that your body was absorbing. Most often, people had no idea what they were letting themselves in for. The Canadian and U.S. governments had used it experimentally to induce schizophrenia in prisoners and unsuspecting mental patients. Now it was out of the lab, and readily available on the streets of any city in North America. Even academics such as Timothy Leary were urging people to "turn on".
For many, using mind-altering drugs was just another risky joy ride on a Saturday night with nothing else to do. For others, it was an escape from pain and sorrow, perhaps a hoped-for fix from the hurt of having your parents disown you, because they just didn't understand you anymore. For seekers of truth, drugs were one avenue to search for evidence of the existence of a personal God.
The drug would intensify all of the senses, in a bewildering and debilitating few hours, and the beauty and horror of the world would be apparent like never before. It stopped your journey in the universe of where you were at that moment. Its toxicity would peak after an hour or so, keep you wired up for several more, and gradually dissipate after a good night's sleep. With little desire to control your body, much of the time in an episode was spent in awe of your surroundings, and wonder at your own responses to everything from the smallest detail or particle to long-held beliefs and ideas. Under it's influence you were confronted with a complex and dangerous existence that overwhelmed you, and from which there was no escape. It was you and life face to face, and you knew you weren't in Kansas any more. It was bewildering, sometimes extremely so, and a few users didn't survive.
Its powerful and profound effects seemed of little concern to anyone in the group. Most were committed to simply floating through time and space anyway, and yet here, by luck and chance, they had found friends who finally seemed to really care about them.
Living without money, living with your only possessions being the clothes you're wearing, living on love, music, acid, and donations and found articles, without a care for tomorrow. And in time without a care for your own life.
Because your life didn't belong to you, it belonged to the family. The Family. The family of Man. The family of man's son, the family of Manson. Eventually none of the words mattered anymore, it was a narrow and "other worldly" rhetoric that became constant word play with everything. It was a consistent practice to turn a phrase or sentence on its head, viewing ideas and statements as opinions only and always unreliable.
Your personal likes and dislikes, the influence of your parents, and pretty much anything you had thought before joining the group was now not only irrelevant, but to be disdained. Overcoming fear, especially fear of death, was the constant challenge.
It was all part of one theme. Dying. Dying was a word used more frequently than the word family, and second only to the word love. Everyone in a family was expected to die for each member of that family. Sacrifice yourself for others as Jesus Christ had done on the Cross. Dying to oneself, ones desires and hopes, hang-ups and fears, was the constant dogma of the day. I was already dying for the girls, but couldn't honestly say that I was prepared to die for anyone else in the group.
Everything, absolutely everything in the world had sexual innuendo. Phallic symbols existed everywhere. Engaging in sex was a form of death. Having an orgasm was equated with giving up, dying, a kind of mini-death, but not an unpleasant way to go.
Initiating sex was done with a signal, simply a matter of lightly stroking or touching the skin of the person you wanted to make love to. When sex is readily available every day, it looses its urgency and importance, much like in a typical marriage.
The easy, unhurried and undemanding lifestyle I was enjoying, meant that more than once I would forget the signal. In truth, my activities as a Casanova were more like that of a dud than a stud, I suspect.
We were surprisingly free of jealousies, as there was plenty of affection to go around. One girl, however, did find it necessary to carry on a very vocal campaign on how best to please a woman.
I never did participate in any orgies, and probably just as well. Each time we cross a line of personal morality or an inhibition it makes the next one easier to cross as well, until you have no morals left about anything.
The girls were nearly all the same ages and pretty. In all humility, so were the boys. And with the world's attention turned on them, some had become the stars they always dreamed of being. These, the last few remnants of a once strong cohesive group led by one man, now in prison. But who could say what tomorrow would bring. North America was in a cultural and political upheaval, with Richard Nixon in the White House and the war in Viet Nam still taking lives. Even one of the oracles of the present cultural revolution, John Lennon, was somewhere in the city nearby re-evaluating himself by undergoing Primal Scream Therapy.
The central theme was love. All was love, and love was all. And love and hate were the same thing. Also that you should love what you hate to do. By doing so you would be freed of the hate, and thereby have overcome something you were insecure about. Overcoming fears, overcoming attachments and past memories, overcoming any objections you had about something, any and all aversions, in the yearning to become pure love. In theory, though you might one day be required to make it a reality, you could kill someone as an expression of love.
It reminded me of a conversation that I'd had a year earlier with Lou Reed, the lead singer and songwriter of his group The Velvet Underground. They had been playing for several days at the Retinal Circus on Davie Street, and my friends and I had met up with Reed and his fellow band members in a hotel room at English Bay. He was into astrology in a big way at the time, and also made reference to having read Ouspensky.
During one moment in the interview, Reed had stated "All that really matters is how you end up. Anything that gets you there is good, including your faults."
I challenged him to prove his remark by taking into account the horrors of life.
"Supposing I killed Dan ...(McLeod, who was present in the room)".
"Supposing you did" Lou responded," Maybe he goes to a higher level quicker, you don't know. Everything that happens is good."
"Maybe that might cause a lot of people grief, not the least of whom might be Dan", I had argued.
"You're not extending it far enough", he replied, "From your point of view it might be bad, but for all you know he might be running around up there saying 'Thank God they got me out of there quick.'"
He was intriguing to listen to, very self-confident, and almost charismatic. A complex thinker, yet his rationale was also similar to the kind of reasoning that could help you justify killing someone you've never met before. Apparently, you might in fact be doing them a favor.
The young men and women that comprised the part of the Family that I now lived with, behaved more like boys and girls in a new chapter of Huckleberry Finn, with plenty of black flies around from living next to a herd of horses..
Oddly, and somewhat confusing to me, was that there was no equality between the sexes.
Women were to serve the men in any way demanded of them. It was sometimes heartbreaking to see the amount of responsibility they were burdened with each day. But they were apparently willing victims so long as they were cared for and honored during the more private moments.
Fewer possessions the better, was the going economic policy. If you needed a change of clothes, there were racks to choose from whatever fit and struck your fancy. Nothing really belonged to anyone anyway. With one necessary exception. All the young men and women had their own knives, which they carried in leather sheaves attached to their belt. Girls barefoot in summer dresses, each with a knife around their waist. It gave them a "don't mess with me" look, and made everyone who saw them feel uneasy, as was intended. It was mostly bluff, and only rarely did I see the knives used, mostly to practice throwing.
The girls did everything relating to the household duties, cooking simple but delicious meals, sometimes only French Toast for supper, and washing the clothes.
The babies I had seen months earlier were gone, either into hiding or the custody of a state child protection agency.
The boys did whatever inspired them to attempt to paint or repair. It was a real and functioning ranch, a few dozen horses, well-built stalls for all of them, and a large corral area. The animals were fed and brushed daily, as long as somebody felt like doing it. Visitors to the Ranch could rent horses and go trotting along on narrow trails through the hills that once served as background to the TV shows, Rin Tin Tin and Hopalong Cassidy. The fact that dangerous hippies were saddling up their horses did not seem to faze the few tourists that came by. And it meant extra money for gasoline and toilet paper.
I quickly chose a chore that I thought would be useful, and to spare others the unpleasant aspects of it. I cleaned out the horse stalls with a shovel and hose and lay down fresh straw for a few hours each day. The water came from a well and it could not always be relied upon. Personal washing meant showering with cold water in a jerryrigged set of boarded-up outdoor closets.
My work, and being alone, gave me a chance to consider some of the principles the others espoused. The work in front of me seemed to be an example of doing that which I did not want to do. Dying to my dislikes and myself. Facing that which I found unpleasant and difficult to get myself to do, and thereby overcoming something that had held me back, and so becoming less afraid of life. Whatever it may be, just hold your nose and do it, and if you do it often enough, you won't need to hold your nose much longer.
Anything was possible if you applied the will and fearlessness necessary to do it. Whatever was requested of you was to be carried out without regard to obstacles, either those outside or those within you. Ask a girl to fetch you a camel, and she would supposedly not return, even if it took months to get it at any price, until she returned with that camel. Even without money to use in the journey and to make the trade, the girls always had one remaining asset.
And they would use it cheerfully, if necessary.
Apart from tending to the horses and the property and exploring the outlying hills, many days were spent doing nothing. Absolutely nothing.
One evening, I made a special trip to the outskirts of Los Angeles. I was being given a chance to speak with the girls in prison. One of their lawyers will take me with him during a visit. Only one of the girls from the ranch, myself, the lawyer, Paul Fitzgerald, and the three girls on trial will meet in a large quiet room. We wait. The girls enter. Patricia Krenwinkle, Leslie Van Houton and Susan "Sadie" Atkins. They are as carefree and maybe more so than half the people I see on the streets outside. They seem so out of place, so out of context. We sit across from each other at a long table with small dividers separating where each person faces, the three prisoners on one side and us on the other. So close we could have held hands. Susan Atkins, the more photogenic of the three and more of a celebrity in this case than the others because her bragging to a cellmate had tipped off the police, sits across from me. She's really quite beautiful. She actually put a knife into another person until they were dead.
There's only one thing I can think of to say.
"I wish you were at the ranch."
Susan smiles peacefully, and says, "I am there."
Yes, I guess you could say that, I thought, and I knew what she meant. One body, many parts. All the same.
To look at her here and at this moment, no one could have guessed in a million years what this person was facing. A smiling, cheerful young woman, probably soon to be given the death penalty.
There wasn't a lot more to say between the two people looking at each other this night, with one destined to sit in that room forever, while the other was just passing through town.
Back at the Ranch, each day was similar to the next.
