Charles Manson Now Read Free

here, take this gun.” And I’m handing you the gun, could you reach out and take this gun in your hand? Would you feel safer that way?
ME: Absolutely.
MANSON: In other words, can you face your fear in what I’m saying. Okay, so you got the same options. If I don’t do what you say you can shoot me, right?
ME: Okay.
MANSON: I’ve been in that all my life. There’s two guns up here on the tower that tell me what to do. And when they tell me what to do, I do what they say to do, because if I don’t do what they say to do they will shoot me. Does that communicate?

I

THE WONDER YEARS

    I was an odd kid. Unlike most boys my age, I wasn’t interested in sports. My heroes were Houdini, Robert Ripley, and The Elephant Man. I had a tremendous interest in things like sideshows and magic, and, while the other boys in town tossed footballs and climbed fences, I collected bugs. More important, I tried to save them. After a heavy rain, I’d run outside to rescue worms from the gutter, gently scoop them up and return them to the grass with a prayer that they’d tunnel themselves back to their homes in the dirt below. I adorned my childhood bedroom with prized natural artifacts unearthed through countless explorations of the outside world; deer antlers, feathers, even wasp nests decorated my space. I loved to catch, study, and spend time with the tiny, complex life forms I could gather up in the palms of my hands, things like minnows, frogs, and snails. But I was ultimately most fascinated by the enormous, the fantastic, or the extinct: terrifying things that aren’t supposed to exist. I could contemplate dinosaurs and sea monsters for hours on end.
    I grew up in Saskatchewan, in the middle of the Canadian prairies. As a kid I developed a love for seashells and a fascination with the ocean, even though the closest ocean was fifteen hundred miles away. When I learned that marble is actually comprised of millions of compressed shells, I fantasized about visiting the Parthenon in Greece and the Coliseum in Rome, not because they are two of the largest, most impressive structures ever made by humans, but because they are comprised from some of the smallest gems in nature. I haven’t outgrown mychildhood affection for simple treasures like seashells, and small clusters of my collection are displayed in almost every room of my home. Once, I toured Graceland, where I was delighted to discover Elvis had decorated so much of his castle in vases filled with seashells. The man could have owned anything in the world, yet he showed off his shells as though they were some of his most valuable possessions. Propped up against one of the vases in the display was a small, stuffed teddy bear.
    I love a great underdog story and I began to tell my own when I was just three or four years old. Babysitters would later relate that they’d been “freaked out” by the tales I’d spin as a toddler. Most stemmed from an epic creation story I’d constructed about my own family, a carefully detailed account of its origins as an underground tribe, which was hated by rival tribes, and hunted if any member dared venture above ground for food.
    I spent summers visiting my grandmother in the small town of Bateman, Saskatchewan. She was most supportive of my storytelling and loved to share some of the narrative she’d collected from her own experiences. I was fascinated by a story she told of her emigration from Holland to North America, a trip during which a passenger caught a strange fish. The creature was the ugliest thing anyone on board had ever seen: it possessed the torso of a monkey and the tail of a fish. Listening to this story as a child, I could have sworn the animal in question was a mermaid. On board, the fish writhed and hissed at everyone in sight. The passengers tried to keep the fish alive, but it died, and they had no choice but to throw it back into the ocean. I couldn’t believe that they hadn’t released it sooner. I always thought