Manson in His Own Words Read online

  When I was about six years old my mom had dropped me off by my grandparents for what was supposed to be just a day or two. Several days later, I remember my grandfather asking me to go for a walk with him. Once outside the house, he became softspoken and kinder than I had ever remembered. As we walked we played games and ran races, and he would let me outrun him. He put me up on his shoulders and carried me while I pretended I was a giant and taller than anyone alive. After a while we sat down to rest. He put his arms around me and, fighting back tears, told me, “Your mother won’t be coming home for a long time.” I don’t know if the lump came in my throat because my grandfather had begun to cry or if it was because I realized what he was telling me.

  My mother and her brother Luther had attempted to rob a service station in Charleston, West Virginia. The story goes that they had used a coke bottle as a weapon to knock the attendant unconscious. They were caught and sentenced to five years in the Moundsville State Prison.

  At Moundsville she lived in the women’s ward of the prison, but her work assignment was near Death Row. It was her job to clean an area that included the scaffold (West Virginia was a hanging state). Mom tells a story that one day as she worked, she saw the guards escorting a man to the scaffold. Normally, on a hanging day no one but the officials and the person to be executed are supposed to be in the area. By accident or oversight, they forgot to inform Mom a hanging was to take place that day. Afraid she would be in trouble for being there, she hid in a broom closet by the scaffold. When the trap sprung, the velocity and the guy’s weight caused the rope to sever his head, and as Mom peeked out the door for a firsthand view of the hanging, the head rolled right to her hiding place. She swears the eyes were still wide open and that death literally stared her right in the face.

  Twenty-seven years later, when I was first placed on Death Row in San Quentin, I looked at the gas chamber. The room’s two viewing windows looked like two huge eyes of death. Instantly my mind flashed to my mother, and I had a vision of her looking into the eyes of death. During that moment, I understood more about my mom than at any other time in my life.

  While Mom was doing time at Moundsville it kind of fell on my grandmother to take care of me, want to or not. So there I was in the same household that my mom had run away from six years earlier. Strict discipline, grace before each meal and long prayer sessions before going to bed at night. Don’t fight, don’t steal, and turn the other cheek. I believed and practiced all that my grandmother taught. So much so that I became the sissy of the neighborhood.

  After a few weeks at Grandma’s, it was decided that I would live with Mom’s sister Joanne and her husband Bill, in McMechen, West Virginia. My uncle Bill had opinions about how young boys were supposed to act, and being a sissy and afraid of everyone in the neighborhood wasn’t his ideal of a male youth. I remember him telling me to stop crying at everything and start acting like a man or he was going to start dressing me and treating me like a little girl. I guess my behavior really didn’t improve that much. Right now I can’t remember what particular thing made him do it, but on my first day in school, Bill dressed me in girl’s clothing. I was embarrassed and ashamed. The other kids teased me so much I went into a rage and started fighting everyone. Turning the other cheek, as Grandma had always wanted me to do, was forgotten. I took my lumps and shed a little blood, but in that school I became the fightin’est little bastard they ever saw. It must have pleased Uncle Bill, because from then on I wore boy’s clothing.

  Joanne and Bill were good people and tried to do right by me. In their home I lived what you might call a normal life, but it’s hard to describe where my head was emotionally with Mom in jail and me living with a couple I didn’t belong to. Hell, I don’t know what kind of thoughts were going through my head then. Their treatment of me was fine. I got my ass-kickings when I deserved them and my rewards when I did something right. I was trained in proper manners and taught to wash my face, comb my hair, brush my teeth and believe in and respect God—like any other kid. But if you don’t belong, things just aren’t the same.

  I can still remember hearing grownups refer to me as “the little bastard” and the kids I played with telling me, “Your mother’s no good; she’s a jail bird. Ha ha ha.”

  One year shortly after Christmas, I got even with some of those kids who were laughing at me. I had spent Christmas with my grandparents. My only present for the year was a hairbrush. A Superman hairbrush. As I opened the present, my grandmother said, “If you brush your hair with it, you will be able to fly like Superman.” Young fool that I was, I carried that brush around with me for days and was constantly brushing my hair. I’d jump off porches, anything with a little elevation, and really expected to soar in the air like Superman. I never did fly and to this day that was the only lie that my grandmother ever told me.

  The kids in the neighborhood rubbed things in even more by showing me all their presents. They had toys of all kinds: wagons, trains, cowboy hats and chaps. Even now, I’m not sure if I just resented being laughed at or if I was jealous of what they had and I didn’t, but one day I rounded up all of their toys I could find and carted them home with me. I stacked up some wood and threw the toys on top and started a fire. The kids were mad—some cried, others threatened me, and their parents called the sheriff. And though I wasn’t taken to jail, it was my first encounter with the police. I was seven years old.

  Mom was released from Moundsville when I was about eight. The day she came home is still one of the happiest days of my life. I think she missed me as much as I missed her. For the next few days we were inseparable. I was her son and she was my mom and we were both proud of each other. I loved it! I guess my mom did, too. But a twenty-three-year-old girl needs more than an eight-year-old son to complete her world. If Mom had some catching up in her life to do before she went to prison, she was really behind now. It’s a lifetime too late to think about it, but things might have been a lot different if Mom had gone her way and left me with the aunt and uncle. She didn’t—and I was glad.

  It was some trip living with Mom. We moved around a lot and I missed a lot of school and blew a lot of what my aunt and uncle had been trying to teach me. Mom and I definitely did not live a routine life, yet I dug every minute of it. I only wished I knew if the next day was going to find me with her or pawned off on someone else.

  If I couldn’t be with Mom in the city, my next favorite place was at Uncle Jess’s in Moorehead, Kentucky. My stays with Uncle Jess would vary. Sometimes I’d just be there for a week or two, other times I might stay for a couple of months or more. Uncle Jess lived in a log cabin elevated several feet off the ground by poles. Jess was hillbilly from his heart, with beard, bare feet, bib overalls, moonshine, hound dogs and coon hunting. Family could do no wrong, and Jess would protect them no matter what. But if one of the family gave him any back talk it was their ass, because he was king.

  He had four daughters. They were pretty things as mountain girls go; I saw Jess bring out the shotgun more than once to send guys running down the road. The girls might sneak around, but when Jess was there to say something, they jumped. I found out why they were so willing to mind when one day I pushed one of Jess’s dogs off the porch. “Son,” he told me, “that hound wasn’t bothering you. You got no right pushin’ it around. Don’t mistreat no animals.” That said, he proceeded to give me a beating I’ve never forgotten. He wasn’t much of a talker, but when he spoke, people paid attention. He sometimes warned people, “Don’t take them kids off the land.” He was right, for almost everyone who left the land lived to regret it or died because of it. Uncle Jess himself died on his land rather than let someone take him away from it. The law came down on Jess and his moonshine still, but Jess foxed their asses. He blew up the still—and himself.

  To return to the story, before being sentenced to Moundsville, Mom had become a pretty street-wise girl, but she really learned all the ropes doing her time. She even added a new dimension to her sex life. I didn’t learn a
bout it until years later, but while she was at Moundsville some of the older dykes showed her that sexual pleasure didn’t only happen between men and women. Of course, back then gays were still in the closet so Mom was pretty discreet when it came to making it with another broad. Dummy that I was at that age, I didn’t mind sleeping in the other room if she had another female spending a few days with us.

  With her gameness and prison education, she had all the answers and could hustle with the best of them. Trouble was, she was a fiery little broad who liked her booze and wouldn’t take any shit from anyone. Consequently, we might leave a place in a hurry. I remember one night Mom came running into our little old one-room apartment and jerked me out of bed, saying, “Come on, Charlie, get up! Help me get our things packed. We gotta get outta here.” She had been working as a cocktail waitress at the Blue Moon Café in McMechen. One guy wouldn’t keep his hands off of her. Mom told him to cool it a couple of times. When he didn’t, she grabbed a fifth of booze and busted the bottle over his head. He was still on the floor when she left. “Hurry up, Charlie! I just flattened one of the Zambini brothers an’ I ain’t waiting around to see if he’s dead or alive. Either way, I’m in trouble.” The Zambini brothers were two of the town hoods and everyone was afraid of them, including Mom. We’d moved around some, but that is about the fastest we ever left a place.

  The next couple of years saw us in Indiana, Kentucky, Ohio, West Virginia and probably a couple more states and who knows how many cities. By the time I was twelve I’d missed a lot of school, seen a few juvenile homes, and no longer believed all my mom’s lovers were “uncles.” In general, I was cramping Mom’s style. Some of the “uncles” liked me and others didn’t. But the feeling was more than mutual—I didn’t like any of them. I guess my jealousy and resentment of those “uncles” sleeping with my mom was pretty close to the surface, and it began causing trouble between us. When I was twelve, my mom’s current lover brought things to a head. Unlike Mom’s usual two- or three-day romances, this guy had been around for a few weeks. One night I was awakened by the sound of their booze-leadened voices arguing. The words I remember most were his: “I’m telling you, I’m moving on. You and I could make it just fine, but I can’t stand that sneaky kid of yours.” And then Mom’s voice: “Don’t leave, be patient. I love you and we’ll work something out.”

  Poor Mom, we’d long ago worn out our welcome with the relatives and friends who were willing to keep me for any length of time. I’d become spoiled and was accustomed to doing pretty much as I pleased. I’d been tried in a couple of foster homes but I just wasn’t the image those parents felt like being responsible for.

  A few days after I’d overheard the argument, my mom and I were standing in front of a judge. My mother, in one of her finer performances, was pleading hardship. She told the judge what a struggle life was and that she was unable to afford a proper home for me. The judge said, “Until there is capable earning power by the mother and a decent stable home for Charles to return to, I am making him a ward of the court and placing him in a boys’ home.” At that moment, the words didn’t mean anything to me. I was angry at Mom and didn’t want to live with her and her friend. I wasn’t depressed or disturbed. The shock was still a day away.

  The court placed me in a religious-oriented school, the Gibault Home for Boys in Terre Haute, Indiana. I felt all right while being registered in the school office, but when all the papers were completed things started going wacky in my head and stomach. By the time I was escorted to the dormitory I would live in for the next ten months, I felt sick. I couldn’t breathe. Tears ran down my cheeks, my legs were so rubbery I could hardly walk. Some invisible force was crushing my chest and stealing my life away from me. I loved my mother! I wanted her! “Why, Mom? Why is it this way? Come and get me, just let me live with you. I won’t be in your way!” I was lonely, lonelier than I had ever been in my life. I have never felt that lonely since. I wasn’t angry at her anymore. I just wanted to be with her, live with her, under any conditions. Not in some school locked away from everything.

  After the initial shock, the following days weren’t too bad. The Catholic brothers who ran the school were good enough to me, but they were stern in their discipline. The answer to any infraction of the rules was a leather strap, or wood paddle, and lost privileges. Since I had a problem with wetting the bed, it seemed like I was getting more than my share of whippings for something I had no control over.

  At twelve I wasn’t the youngest boy there, but being under five feet tall and weighing less than sixty-five pounds, I was one of the smallest. I was easy pickings for those who were inclined to be bullies. Gibault was not considered a reform school, but aside from the religious teachings it operated in a similar manner. And though guys there were not necessarily juvenile delinquents, they did share the same resentments against parents, the law and confinement as those in reform schools. I was exposed to a lot of things the average kid doesn’t experience until a much older age. It never happened to me there, but I saw kids forced into homosexual acts. I was told about all kinds of ways to beat the law, and I learned how to keep my feelings to myself, because if you care too much about a part of your life and personal habits, others will take advantage of it and ridicule you. Gibault taught me friends can be cruel and enemies dangerous.

  Mom would come to see me sometimes, but not all that often. If she said she’d see me next week, I’d be lucky if she showed up in the next couple of months. When she did come, she’d tell me, “It won’t be long before I have a steady job and a nice place to live. Then I’ll come and get you and take you home with me.” We’d talk about how nice it was going to be when we were back together. I was starting to grow and was definitely older in mind. I felt I could be a big help to her if she would take me home. It all sounded great and I was eager to start living the life we talked about. She’d leave and I’d run back to my friends, telling them, “Pretty soon I’ll be going home. My mom said so.” The next visit would be the same. “Pretty soon, Charlie,” were my mother’s words. I waited and waited. It didn’t happen.

  Sick of Gibault and tired of waiting, I ran away. Naturally I went straight to Mom’s. I thought I could show her how grown up I was and how I could help her. There was no guilt trip in my mind about running away; I was sure my mom would throw her arms around me, as glad to see me as I was to be there with her. She’d take me down to the judge and tell him she was in a position to take care of us. Everything would be all right. God, was I dreaming! She turned me in and the next day I was back at the Home for Boys. But I didn’t feel like a boy any longer. There were no tears. At least, none that ran down my cheeks. I didn’t feel weak or sick, but I also knew I could no longer smile or be happy. I was bitter and I knew real hate.

  The trip back to Gibault was a waste of gas and time. I split the very first chance I got. Goodbye Gibault. Goodbye Mom.

  CHAPTER 2

  I HAD LEARNED my lesson. Thanks to the memory of my own mother rejecting me and turning me in, my philosophy was trust no one and depend on no one. As for a place to run to, I felt my chances of staying lost and out of sight of the police would be better in a big city rather than a small town. Indianapolis was my choice.

  Terre Haute and the Gibault School for Boys are about a hundred and sixty miles from Indianapolis. Once safely away from the school, I knew better than to try reaching my destination by way of the roads and highways. I trudged through fields and over hills, staying out of sight. I walked the railroad tracks some and hopped a freight train for a short way. I slept in the woods and under bridges. I met bums, winos and hobos, who shared their meals with me. Most people place all those derelicts in the same category, but I found there is a definite distinction between them. A bum is a guy who is down and out, maybe one who is too lazy to work and survives by begging. A wino has become so hooked on his booze that he is a social outcast, he cares for nothing but the lush and how to acquire it. A hobo is on the road because that is his chosen lifestyle. S
ome are honest and survive by their wits, also doing a little work here and there. Others are into doing anything that will provide for the day’s needs, and stealing and lying are as natural as breathing to them. I lived and ate with these guys until reaching Indianapolis, and through them I learned an awful lot about survival without the luxuries of a house and modern conveniences.

  When I got to Indy I slept in the alleys and old sheds until the night I got a bonus while burglarizing a grocery store for something to eat. The cash register change for the next morning was in a cigar box under the counter. When I opened the box and saw the money I thought I was rich and didn’t even bother to cart out any of the groceries I was stealing. It was a little over a hundred dollars, more money than I’d ever had in my hands before. I rented a room in skid row, bought me some clothes, ate as much as I liked and spent the money like there was no tomorrow. A few days later I was broke and hungry. I started making my way on the streets any way I could. I’d sweep store fronts, wash windows, clean garbage cans, anything that might earn me a few cents. I’d also steal whatever I could get my hands on, and sell the goods to anybody for any kind of price. I doubt if I averaged a penny on the dollar for the value of what I sold, but for a snot-nosed kid, I was feeling pretty chesty and thought I was getting up in the world. I was getting by without starving, had my own room and was my own boss.

  I had accumulated a wealth of experience and I thought I really knew what the world was all about, but my run-away from Gibault only lasted a few weeks. I had stolen a bike for the joy of having one, as well as for transportation. It was that bike that got me caught. When the police arrested me, the juvenile authorities couldn’t believe that a twelve-year-old kid could be living by himself. It took them a few days to discover that I was a runaway from a home for boys. Once they knew that, they located my mom. She appeared in juvenile court with me, but she was still unable to tell the judge that she could take me back to a good home.