HOW TO MEET
CHARLES MANSON
[and not have to go to rehab afterwards]
Copyright (c) 1998 by Michael Finley
For more on Manson and other California
happenings,
check out GOOD SOAP
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 (as we
never entered any type of alcohol drug rehab for
it). 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.