I MEET CHARLES MANSON

Copyright (c) 1998 by Michael Finley

I remember one day in 1969, in the spring. I and a bunch of college dropouts from the Midwest were living in a commune we had set up in the Vermont district of Los Angeles, a couple dozen or so blocks south of Hollywood. 

Our commune was a spin-off of something called the Universal Life Church, a mail-order ministry run out of Modesto, California, which ordained anyone who sent in a postcard, without questions. The church was really little more than a pretext to get together with friends and smoke pot. We weren't bad people, but we were foolish. 

One of our agenda items was ecclesiastical outreach, so every other weekend or so we made little trips to other Universal Life branches around southern California. One of our favorite places was a desert drop-in known only as Thompson's Chicken ranch, near Twenty Nine Palms in the Mojave Desert 100 miles away, which in turn was vaguely near to Palm Springs.

The first chance we got, we hitchhiked out there, to see if it made sense to align ourselves with the place. 

Thompson's Chicken Ranch was a true desert commune, consisting of a gutted main house, a machine shed, a couple of lean-to's and a water tower that had water when it rained, which it never did.

We went out there perhaps three times during our months on L.A. The first time was on church business, ostensibly; the other times were just for fun. 

Life on the ranch

The desert was an incredible place for Midwesterners on holiday. The crumbling ruined mountains, that looked older than Sinai, and twice as forbidding, sat right behind the ranch. Everywhere were Joshua trees and the braided branches of their dead. Yucca plants exploded at every arms-length. And under every rock, something living -- a gecko, a Gila monster, hornytoad, or a rattlesnake. It was Don Juan country, a fine, unforgiving place to surrender to the sun.

I have two main memories of Thompson's Chicken Ranch, one involving teenaged runaways, and one involving mass murderer Charles Manson. There is a third memory, involving an earthquake that destroyed all of California, and us with it, but that will have to wait for another time.

The core population of the ranch was a small handful of men in breechclouts, as lean as jerky and about half as verbal, who lounged in the shadows in the daytime, and ventured out only at night. It says something that in all our visits to the place -- where we were regarded about as seriously as the Partridge Family -- we never learned any of their names. Indeed, I can't recall even having a conversation with anyone. We communicated mainly with grunts and far-out's. People just arrived, found a corner to crash in, and did their thing. It was not just that they were nonverbal, but that they were incurious, as if the sun had baked all the inquisitiveness out of them. 

These guys were hard-core in their habits, and I would guess wealthy in their background. They had no visible means of support, they never lifted a finger for any other human being, yet they were up to their ears in high quality LSD, California red wine and ganja, and for their delectation a kind of underground railroad arrived every day with three or four or five high school girls in it.