Free Taming the Beast: Charles Manson's Life Behind Bars by Edward George, Dary Matera Page A

initially out of place and a decade behind the times, the bold new psychedelic world appeared like a carnival. Everyone dressed funny and people were doing drugs right out in the open! Going with the flow, he dropped his first tab of acid and went to a Grateful Dead concert, joining in with the frenzied dancers and wondering if he’d died and gone to heaven. Best of all, instead of being treated like an outcast because of his lack of roots, he was welcomed. Everybody was homeless in the Haight. Homelessness was hip! When night fell, people crashed wherever they happened to be. Charlie had suddenly become cool!
    Using his con’s instincts, he quickly discovered that many of the lost, aimless youth gathered around him were ripe for his antiestablishment, antiparents rap and were desperate for a leader. Listening as well as talking, Manson refined his prison tirades into a more polished and socially acceptable philosophy. Mary Brunner, his first recruit, influenced him greatly. Brunner, a librarian at Berkeley, was an environmentalist who preached the need to save the air, water, trees, earth, and animals. She gave Charlie a place to stay, and later became the mother of his third son. He rewarded the college-educated twenty-three-year-old by bringing in a young lover off the streets and laying down a “nobody belongs to anybody” rap. Brunner accepted it and became point zero in what was destined to be the strange and overflowing Family.
    Thanks to Mary B, Charlie’s new sermons went something like this: “The system that corrupted and caged me is corrupting the world. People have given up God to lust for money. Jews, the rich, and those in authority are destroying the planet by polluting the air and water. The black man is growing in power and polluting the races.”
    Manson found that Mary’s “green” side, the environmental issues, was especially appealing to the longhaired, colorfully dressed hippies. The prison elements began to fade as the needs of the outside world took a firmer hold on his consciousness. The destruction of the environment was pushed to the forefront.
    “It’s not my world, it’s yours,” he lectured. “You let your parents destroy the earth while I was in prison suffering in darkness. Now you must change it. If the world dies, we all die, because we’re all one. I’ve been sent to save you and your planet and to tell you what must be done. If you want to be in my truth and in your own truth, you must do something to stop the pollution. I’m already in trouble. They’re watching me, waiting for me to make a mistake so they can drag me back to prison. But I’ll show you the way and what you must do. I’ll teach you so that you can survive, so that you can kill if you have to when the time comes.”
    The time for killing would be years later. In 1967, Manson was mostly about sex, freedom, and more sex. On that end, it was a kindhearted preacher who started Manson on his way. The reverend picked up the scruffy hitchhiker, brought him home to dinner, and when he learned of Manson’s interest in music, generously gave him an old piano. Manson traded the piano for a Volkswagen van and hit the road, collecting young women like a snowball rolling down a hill. Squeaky was next, scooped off a street in Venice. Patricia Krenwinkel was rescued from a drug house in Manhattan Beach. Bruce Davis was the first male, swallowed up in the Pacific Northwest. The infamous Susan Atkins breezed in from the Haight in a haze of marijuana smoke.
    Squeaky detailed her historic first encounter with Charlie in one of her numerous fanciful writings, offering a penetrating insight into both Charlie’s style and the immediate effect he had on his potential recruits.
    “Suddenly, an elfish, dirty-looking creature in a little cap hopped over the low wall grinning, saying, ‘What’s the problem?’ He was either old, or very young, I couldn’t tell. He had a two-day beard and reminded me of a fancy bum, rather