Featured Image Credit: Manson Girls, Illustration by Daniella Urdinaliaz, via lookcatalog flickr (CC BY 2.0)
I am 12 years old and I am fleetingly obsessed with the Manson family. It is 1995 and I am 26 years too late. Moreover, all of my obsessions are too late too that will follow this: The Monkees, The Beatles, The Edmund Fitzgerald (the actual shipwreck, not the song). Soon, I will be cycling to something else. Soon, I will very seriously attempt suicide.
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I am obsessed with the Manson family because I don’t understand the ramifications of death and abuse yet. It seemed outrageous to me that a man could control women in such a way. I was naïve, clueless. I did not directly witness my dead father abuse my mother but would learn about it later, his jealousy filling lungs and room and house until it popped and floated into the sky; a world I was not privy to yet. Manson reminded me of my father in his ruggedness, his wild. Maybe the wildness is kindness my best friend suggests to me. Aligned, Manson’s eyes and Jesus’ eyes and my father’s eyes all look the same. Maybe its evil, I say to my best friend. She doesn’t disagree.
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Abuse dressed up as love can work in these ways: you begin to believe what you are told and you do what you are ordered, even if it doesn’t make sense, even if you know it is wrong. Abuse has its own moral code and it says if you don’t work for me, you won’t work for anybody. Abuse is a trickster; it makes promises it will not keep. It sells being your redemption because if I can’t have you no one will. If you step outside the circle, the world will destroy you. And, of course, better to destroy it first (the world, together, the same murder of crows).
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My mother and I go to church, a Thursday night. I am forced to go because I repeatedly prove that I am incapable of staying home alone with my brother without physically fighting. My mother is the choir director and I sit in the overflow of the sanctuary, church library lining the walls. Normal religious books: concordances, Bibles, prayer books, How-To-Be-a-Good-Christian books, How-to-Not-Go-to-Hell books, How-to-Give-Money-to-the-Church books, How-to-Be-a-Good-White-Missionary books. I steal two: Helter Skelter by Vincent Bugliosi and Curt Gentry, and a hand-made spiritual guide to teenage suicide prevention.
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Before I stole these books, I hid them in the foyer. During Sunday meet-and-greet with coffee and cookies I would check on them, and every Thursday during choir practice I would hole up in a corner on a loveseat near some stained glass windows and pour over Helter Skelter. I would stare at the cover of the suicide prevention book, but would not open it. The black and white pictures in Helter Skelter were burned into my brain (One of the covers of the book boasts it as “a chilling 64-page photographic record of the victims, the killers, the evidence.”). The days in-between Sunday and Thursday were for imagining myself as part of the Manson family, under mind control of this father-eyed man, writing pig in blood on the walls. In these fantasies, I never fantasied about killing and I was always best friends forever with Patricia Krenwinkel, Susan Atkins, and Linda Kasbian.
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The night before I attempt suicide, my best friend and I have a sleepover. We stay up late talking about writing Manson letters in prison. We play a game called What Would Charles Manson Do?, based off of the popular WWJD bracelets. We wanted to know What would Charles Manson do? Every answer we had to every question we came up with we would scream something about how he would kill someone and we would erupt with laughter. Sixth graders.
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It is 2014, I am 31 years old, I am alive, and so is Charles Manson. He remains in prison for a life sentence because California abolished the death penalty in the ‘70’s. Manson has a fiancé named Star who files for a marriage license. She is 26 years old and Manson, at the time, is 80. Star is quoted saying, “I’m completely with him, and he’s completely with me. It’s what I was born for, you know.” As of 2015, the marriage license had expired and they were still not married.
