Manson Boy

by

Amanda Dougherty

If they hadn’t seemed interested in Charles Manson in the first place, I wouldn’t have started going on about the Tate-LaBianca murders. I wouldn’t have revealed just how many of the Manson girls’ names I knew, or how I’d heard one of them, Susan Atkins, the sick fuck, had once blown a baby. I certainly wouldn’t have told them I took a trip out West to see the site of old Spahn Ranch, where the Manson family set up shop for a while, or how I’d brought a little fistful of dirt home with me.

But they did seem interested in Manson in the first place. My new coworkers I mean, Terry and Rob. Terry brought it up — he recently read Helter Skelter, the bible of the Manson trial. Over the summer, he said, at the beach. They hadn’t exactly been talking to me, but for chrissakes, they were talking about it in the cube right next to mine. The way they stared at me once I chimed in? Sheesh, I might as well have been Manson himself. Terry shouldn’t have been so shocked. If he really read Helter Skelter, then I wasn’t telling him much he didn’t know. Except for the bit about Susan Atkins and the baby. And the bit about me and the dirt. I should have kept the dirt thing to myself, especially considering I can’t even explain what made me take it in the first place. I was just trying to make friends, which isn’t exactly my strongest suit.

I think I got so into all this Manson business because my Gran loved the Beatles. I spent an awful lot of time at my Gran’s growing up. My mom was a single parent, always working. Gran used to drag me to the grocery store just about every goddamn day. In the car, she played the Beatles. I swayed to the beat while she told me: When I was young, I’d have bet my life, yes I would, I was gonna marry Paul McCartney.

Gran always smelled like cigarettes and green tea perfume she bought for cheap at Rite Aid. She was the perfect opposite of my mother, who worked an office job and wore pantsuits and click-clacking heels. Who talked about wanting to impress the partners at her firm and only ever sat up as straight as a pin. My mom did everything she could to get out of her mother’s world, only to have to drive back to it pretty much every day to drop me off or pick me up. Single parenthood, it seems, had not been part of her escape plan.

But if Gran cared what Mom thought, she didn’t show it. She didn’t care what anybody thought. If a cashier didn’t accept Gran’s expired coupon, she’d say fuck ‘em, indignantly when we got back in the car. If someone beat her to the closest parking spot at WalMart, fuck ‘em, she’d shout, banging a wrinkly, be-ringed hand on the steering wheel. She took no orders from my mom — Don’t curse in front of my child, please, mother! — or anybody. She spent her free time at the casino, playing slots and smoking inside, downing old fashioneds like they were going out of style, hobbies my mom didn’t think much of. But no one gave better hugs. No one else’s horrible singing voice filled me with such joy. When the other kids at school laughed at me, called me freak, no one could pick me up quite like she could. Fuck ‘em, she’d say, taking a long pull of her Marlboro. I’ve never loved anyone more.

I don’t really remember when I first learned about Manson. But once I heard his whole thing was called “Helter Skelter,” because he thought he’d heard special messages in Beatles songs, well, I kind of got that. Don’t get me wrong — I don’t think the messages he heard, all the apocalypse, race riot nonsense, were good or anything. But I got how the Beatles could make a person feel things. So I took up Manson, the way some people take up knitting. Manson lore makes me nostalgic for the 60s, even though I wasn’t born yet. For the younger version of Gran, the one I never got to meet, who played the white album in her bedroom, blowing cigarette smoke out the window, trying to save up enough bus fare to get out to California herself. If she’d made it, would she have been one of them? If I’d met Manson, would it have been me instead of Tex or Clem?

But I didn’t tell Terry and Rob any of this. About Gran and how she’d wanted to marry Paul McCartney and all. Once I registered their expressions, their speechlessness, I realized I’d missed the mark on making friends and conversation — again. So, I put my headphones on, turned back to my computer screen. I tried to get back in the groove with my spreadsheets, to ignore the embarrassed voices in my head berating me for telling them about Susan Atkins and the baby and the dirt. I scrolled through the music on my phone, pulled up the white album. As ambient plane sounds gave way to the zip of guitar and steady tap of drums, I closed my eyes, and thought of Gran, of stale smoke and the fuggy heat of her car. I could almost hear her say it — Fuck ‘em.