A few months ago I found a page on YouTube featuring tape recorded phone calls with Charles Manson himself from as recently as the previous afternoon advertising the chance to ask him a question. "What does the swastika on your forehead symbolize?" I typed in. Nazi use of the symbol is recent compared to its reverence by Buddhists, native Americans and other ancient cultures as a symbol of the elements in balance.
For years, Charles Manson has been an outspoken advocate of ATWA (his acronym for Air, Trees, Water, Animals). He's also been accused of harboring a Hitlerian streak. Which interpretation was he going for by cuttting it into his forehead? Both? Neither?
Manson answered my question a few days later in a handwritten note photographed and posted on YouTube. I recognized his nearly illegible scrawl from Nikolas Shreck's anthology of some of his writings, The Manson File. It was him all right. This page, the Backporch Tapes, offering near daily conversations about current events with the mad one, was also a chance at direct communication with its imprisoned namesake and topic, Charles Manson, a man accused in his time of being everything from a redneck hillbilly to one of the most powerful magicians around.
"This means gone in the dream" (or brain) (probably "dream") "of thy wars", Manson wrote, beside an arrow pointing at a swastika, then, "I got no reality" and "I'm a servant". Below the word "servant" was one more doodle which I think was just ornamental. Manson seemed to be saying the swastika on his forehead signified his place in history. Maybe I'll ask him something else. "Squeaky" Fromme, was released from prison lat month, where authorities sent her for waving a gun at Gerald Ford, after 34 years of incarceration. What does he think about that?
In one of the recorded phone calls I listened to, Charlie gave his opinion on the swine flu. "That's just a taste of what's coming, that's just the beginning," he warned. I decided to take his remark with a pound of salt, as everyone's lives may depend on it. I was grateful to have his advice on the matter just the same. I decided to send the page's owner an email requesting an interview.
Michael Channels got back to me right away. "I want to first say I am no advocate for ATWA, the Manson Family or any crime," he began. "I merely got interested in getting Manson's autograph, and after bugging him so long, he found a liking to me. Then he let me have access he wouldn't others, and sat and talked with me. The prison doesn't care about his message getting out as much as people think they do. They just don't want to be shown up or made to look bad, which I also understand. We all meet at a happy medium now on The Backporch Tapes."
Manson was preaching the doctrine of ATWA, a creed still outspokenly advocated by Sandra Good and the recently paroled Lynette Fromme ("Blue" and "Red" respectively in the color names given by Manson to his female followers), years before the notorious Tate-LaBianca slayings of August 8th and 9th, 1969 he's accused of having ordered, and decades before the inconvenient truth that we humans are fatally out of balance with nature, came to the fore of public discourse. Manson's ecological fervor is hard to reconcile with his popular image as an icon of madness and murder. Has he been misrepresented by the press? I want to believe him, but his apparent position that the Tate-LaBianca murders were committed by the kids to strike a blow for harmonious balance with nature is hard to swallow.
Michael Channels has collected autographs and Hollywood memorabilia of all types for over thirty years. He's had face to face encounters with some of the biggest names in showbiz since his childhood, visiting Gilda Radner's sickbed before her death from cancer in 1989 and meeting all the astronauts from the Moon landing. He launched the murder-themed website www.Hollywood187.com well before posting anything on YouTube, and has had contact with several of Hollywood's "mad killers" throughout his life. His fixation on the Tate-LaBianca case began, as it did with most people, after reading prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi's Helter Skelter, by far still the most popular account of the slayings and subsequent trial, and eventually led to a friendship with Charlie himself. "Manson has always given his blessings in anything anyone does, including some of the books put out. He has always been a sharing man, a kindhearted man, really, if you knew him as a person. I have never wanted to join a group or follow another, so Manson was just me being me: very curious. Over the years I've heard him say things others never have."
Many circumstances surrounding the Manson Family and the Tate-LaBianca slayings have never been fully exposed, including the alleged involvement of a secret ring of celebrities trading sex tapes starring themselves, and the fact that aspects of Family protocol, including the use of color-names for female members, were consciously modeled by Manson on the example of a Francis Herman Pencovic or "Krishna Venta", whose Fountain Of The World cult, centered around another four-letter combo: WKFL (which stood for Wisdom, Knowledge, Faith and Love) preceded the Family in the same Death Valley location by ten or fifteen years. Not to mention the part about how Charlie has spent most of his 74 years on earth to date in jails and prisons of various kinds. The Family's killing spree occurred during one of the two or three fleeting intervals of freedom in Charlie's life on earth as a son of prison.
"People need to read about Prison," Channels agrees. "His entire life was influenced by the men who came through prison. Old mob men, gangsters, and Vietnam vets. His experiences are all summed up by the stories he sits in prison listening to, of the lives of the men telling them. His life is all about prison and only prison. The thing he did was brought Prison out into the world with him. The kids and violence of the time took the Prison procedure and applied it to the outside world. They were all confused, is only my opinion."
On the Backporch Tapes YouTube page, there's a link to Hollywood 187. This doesn't conflict with his attempted promotion of Manson's lighter side, says Channels. "The 187 in police speak is murder and Manson would still go in there because the title basically means Hollywood Murder and that's what the Manson case is. I am NO ADVOCATE for anything or anyone. I have collected, and he has told me, lots of information that others may never have seen, and wouldn't if I didn't show them."
Charles Manson is very theatrical, at times performing elaborate dances, shaking his head and assuming Tai Chi-like postures to illuminate more abstract points in his ramble. He has a habit of renaming cohorts, from the color names given to female disciples at Spahn Ranch to "Ansom 13", the one he gave Family member T.J. "the Terrible" Wallerman's wife, Lori. In the phone call on Channels' page I'd heard, Manson addressed him as "Soul".
"Manson has called me many things, but I prefer Michael, and he said that was good, because he named all his kids that as well. 'Soul' is like hey, brother, or hey, friend . . . he says that to a lot of people. It's that sixties talk, like, 'you dig.' Ansom 13 was given that because she was a female version of the Manson And Some. 13 is the first cell Manson was in at San Quentin death row. She and his close, close friends back then feel they died in the cell with him, hence the 13."
So what does Charles Manson, accused of attempting to start a race war by framing the Black Panthers for murder 40 years ago, think about Barack Obama's election as the first black president? I had to ask. "The only reference he has made to me personally is he calls him ‘your slave'," Michael reports. "I don't know his thoughts on it, or why he says that. I will ask him one day. I'm making films people seem to like to watch, and that is humbling to me. Who knew? Never my intentions at all, life is funny that way."
Lori L. Mardesich Wallerman or "Ansom 13" died in October of the year 1998, and when Michael asked Charles Manson the cause of her death in a recent phone call posted at Backporch Tapes, his question went unanswered. Recent excerpts from Ansom's diary posted there assert that the Family's arrest in 1969 was some kind of frame-up by the prosecution's star witness, Linda Kasabian, adding one more wrinkle to the untold backstory. Another recent development at backporch tapes: Michael's begun posting pages from Manson's handwritten autobiography.
The last few days, the skies in Denver have been hazy. People have been smelling smoke and tasting it in their lungs from the latest rash of California wildfires. Charles Manson is incarcerated in the city of Corcoran, in Kings County, California, near the heart of the latest conflagration. Best wishes of safety for all Californians, including all the bugs and plants and wildlife. Weird times are here.
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