Saturday was a cold day, wind biting up and down the canyons. Sheila kind of weather. My friend Kate and I have discussed at length our preference for autumn as opposed to summer. While everybody else blisses out with the onset of warm sunny weather, she and I bliss out when the we bust out the sweaters.
Kate puts it this way, "There's no irony in the summer."
I arrived Saturday morning at my friend Allison's apartment in the West Village, to find her deeply engrossed in Helter Skelter, a book I have read multiple times, and with which I have a strange and sick fascination.
Allison and I were trying to pinpoint why exactly it is that we are so engrossed by such a grisly terrible story. We discussed it at length, lolling about in her cozy pillow-y bed, flipping through the book for reference.
I am fascinated by the Manson Family for the same reasons that I am fascinated by totalitarian, autocratic, fascist, communist regimes. What is it in human beings, some human beings, that makes them susceptible to such madmen? What is it like to be in someone's thrall like that? What is it in human psychology that can crack under such magnetic pressure?
I found Allison in a state of recent and fevered conversion to the Helter Skelter madness.
We signed on, and began to search the Internet for more information.
For example: where is Clem right now? Has Clem been paroled? (Yup. He's out.)
And Bobby Beausoleil...what has he been up to? His face always terrified me. There was something so obviously missing there.
We learned that Patricia Krenwinkle has recently received a puppy, through a special prison program which allows inmates to adopt animals. How sweet...to allow a ferocious murderess a little puppy.
Squeaky Fromme still corresponds with Charlie. FREAKS.
Allison and I got sucked into the strange world of Manson Web sites...going deeper and deeper and deeper. We veered a couple of times into the world of the Zodiac Killer and Jonestown.
Allison said, "If my job ever saw the search terms on my computer, they would think I had gone crazy. 'Dead bodies'...'Sharon Tate' ... 'serial killers'..."
The last time Allison and I hung out together in her apartment, we started looking things up in the dictionary. It began simply, but the game evolved. Eventually, it became a relatively complex guessing game: one of us would call out a name from history, say...Madame Curie, or Theodore Roosevelt ... and we would guess whether or not said person had a PICTURE beside their definition in the dictionary. This may sound like a dry and academic pursuit, but we ended up in complete hysterics and it occupied our time for 2 hours.
It's actually a fun game. Try it yourself on a rainy day.
Finally, we had to shake off the pall of the Mansons and Spahn Ranch and Shorty Shea's decapitation and Susan Atkins' crazy loony smile...and how haunted we are by the children fathered by Manson....WHERE ARE THEY??
We signed off reluctantly, and rejoined the life of the West Village. We went to Chumley's and had delicious Bloody Marys, and some lunch.
Then, we accidentally set a newspaper on fire. This is in a bar run by firemen; the bartenders are firemen, the clientele are firemen. Firemen were everywhere in sight. Meanwhile, Allison and I were battling to put out the flaming New York Post in front of us, and none of the firemen around us even looked up, or glanced over, or even batted an eye. I don't think they even noticed the inferno. We were on our own. And we did okay. We dumped a glass of water on the blaze, and then ordered 2 more Bloody Marys.
We returned home and watched Moulin Rouge. Actually, I should say we LIVED it. During the "Spectacular Spectacular" extravaganza at the end of the film, when everything gets very tense, Allison screamed at the top of her lungs, "THE GUN!! THE GUN!!"
After the film, still in a Moulin Rouge kind of mood, we looked through her book of Toulouse Lautrec prints. Marvelling at them. Beautiful. We talked about what it must it have been like...
Then we crawled out onto Allison's fire escape, trying to keep our candles lit through the wind. The sugary air from the Magnolia Bakery floated up to us.
And after that? We basically killed time until "Trading Spaces" came on at 8 p.m. We are jointly addicted to that show. Especially when the participants hate the newly designed rooms.
I confessed to enjoying Trading Spaces once, it got me through many afternoons of unemployment.
Posted by: Bill McCabe at December 22, 2003 3:42 PMmy favorite parts of the show are when you can basically see marriages fall apart.
i know that's a horrible thing to admit.
but ... the terrible new design is unveiled ... the poor husband doesn't know what to say or do, but he's in general more easy-going ... he'll say, "it's cool!!" while the wife bites her lip, stares around, furious, with tears trembling in her eyes.
and in those moments one can see that their marriage is an empty shell.
ah, it's better than a soap opera.
Posted by: red at December 22, 2003 3:44 PMand i would DEFinitely call "Trading Spaces" a guilty pleasure.
even for women. Allison and I kept busting each other up for watching it.
Posted by: red at December 22, 2003 3:45 PMI do love it when the rooms turn out terrible, sometimes, I think the designers enjoy ruining rooms.
Yeah, you can tell how far apart some spouses are, when the husband is trying to make the best of the situation while the wife is looking for an excuse to run to the bathroom and cry.
Posted by: Bill McCabe at December 22, 2003 3:49 PMMy sister and I drove by the Sharon Tate / Manson Family murder site and totally creeped ourselves out a couple years ago, imagining ourselves right there on the very same road, looking at the house. I haven't read Helter Skelter since I was a kid. Might be interesting to read it again as an adult. Let me add that to my never-ending list!
Posted by: Norahnick at December 22, 2003 5:39 PMnorahnick -
embarrassingly enough, I have read the book, in its entirety 3 times. i even know that the first sentence is something like this:
"it was so quiet that night that you could hear ice clinking in cocktail glasses across the canyon."
It's such an exhaustive forensic book and yet there's something still very mysterious and unexplainable about it all.
Posted by: red at December 22, 2003 5:41 PMSqueaky may still write letters to Charlie, but I guarantee you, they don't let him see them.
They changed the address of the Tate house shortly after the murders, and several years ago, razed the thing entirely because of all the gawkers passing by. There's nothing left of it anymore.
Sheila, for an interesting pre-murders look at the Manson family and the way they lived, you should check out Ed Sanders The Family. It's a good read. If you have trouble getting a hold of it, let me know, and I'll send you my copy.
Posted by: Emily at December 22, 2003 7:57 PMemily - i actually think i have flipped thru that book before at a Barnes and Noble. i will check it out.
Posted by: red at December 23, 2003 6:40 AM