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

elegant, but my fear was up. ‘How did you know?’ I started to say, and he smiled really bright, and I had the strangest feeling that he knew my thoughts. ‘Up in the Haight, I’m called the gardener,’ he said. ‘I tend to all the flower children.… It’s all right,’ he told me, and I could feel in his voice that it was. He had the most delicate, quick motion, like magic, as if he glided along by air, and a smile that went from warm daddy to twinkly devil. I couldn’t tell what he was. I was enchanted and afraid all at once, and I put my head down and wished he would go away, and when I looked up, really he was gone! And I turned my head, wanting to talk to him now with urgency. And as soon as I turned back around, there he was again, sitting on the wall, grinning at me. I had only conceived of such things in fairy tales. ‘So your father kicked you out,’ he said with certainty, and once again my mind went with the wind, and I laughed and relaxed.… We talked and I felt very good with him and freer, much freer. ‘The way out of a room is not through the door,’ he said, laughing. ‘Just don’t want out and you’re free.’ Then he unfolded a tale of the 20 years he’d spent behind bars, of the struggle and the giving up and the loving of himself.
    “We came back to the fact that I didn’t have any place to go. He told me that he was on his way to the woods up north and that I could come with him if I wished. I declined, having obligations to fulfill, having three weeks of my first college semester left. Then I looked at him, wanting to get up, crunching up my face in thought. ‘Well,’ he said, moving down the walk. ‘I can’t make up your mind for you.’ He smiled a soft feeling and was on his way. I grabbed my books, running to catch up with him. I didn’t know why. I didn’t care—and I’ve never left.”
    Charlie got hot in a Nevada cardroom and won enough money to trade his beloved van for a black school bus, giving Squeaky and the traveling gang more space—and more room to grow. He returned to the preacher’s house and rewarded the man who made it all happen by seducing his fourteen-year-old virgin daughter, Ruth Ann Morehouse. If that wasn’t bad enough, a few weeks later, he carried Ruth Ann away on the fun bus. (Manson would later admit that Ruth Ann was the only person he ever snatched from a parent. All the others had left home, or run away, on their own.) When the raging reverend came after him in Los Angeles, Charlie slipped the guy some LSD and reversed the tables, preaching good parenting to the confused, and considerably mellowed, father. Ruth Ann stayed.
    Diane Lake, another fourteen-year-old, escaped her parents’ hog farm and joined the harem shortly thereafter, giving Ruth Ann a playmate. Bobby Beausoleil, a handsome Hollywood hustler, hopped aboard and brought four others, Catherine “Gypsy” Share, Leslie Van Houten, Gary Hinman, and Kitty Lutesinger.
    The bus kept rolling, attracting kids like a magnet. Nancy Pitman, Paul Watkins, Sandra Good, Steve Grogan, Charles “Tex” Watson, Linda Kasabian, and Stephanie Schram followed. Manson made love to nearly all of the women and some of the men, alternating on a daily basis.
    With a bus overflowing with mostly young, nubile, and sexually liberated girls, Charlie was welcomed at every party, home, and gathering from San Diego to Oregon. Even the Hollywood movie and music set was intrigued. For a while, Manson and his love bus were well known among the thrill-seeking movers and shakers who ruled a select number of motion picture and music studios. Dennis Wilson, the drummer of the Beach Boys, hung with the Family for nearly a year, enjoying the girls so much that he opened his sprawling mansion to the whole gang. Wilson collaborated with Charlie on some Beach Boys songs, and even allowed his new best buddy to record some of his own tunes in his brother Brian Wilson’s private home studio. (The skittish Brian Wilson,