Grief Is General All Over America

Plus, Hollywood Maniacs Part II & Do What You Want in Paperback

Well, shit. Here we are again. More COVID. More death. More earthquakes and hurricanes and wild fires. Even the fucking Taliban is back. That’s something of a misnomer because they never left. They just bided their time and did what they do. Like a virus. 

I don’t have anything to say about Afghanistan. I’m not an expert on foreign policy. My status as veteran confers no special knowledge of world affairs. I will say this. When I was in the Navy and the USS Stark was hit by Iraqi jet fighters, our ship was on our way to the Persian Gulf. I’ve told this story many times, and I don’t have the stomach for it today, but 37 sailors died onboard the Stark and my ship never made that trip. 

Saddam Hussein apologized for the incident (I won’t say accident) and Ronald Reagan accepted that apology and the whole sad affair was swept under the rug. Why? Because Iraq was Iran’s enemy and the enemy of my enemy is my friend, at least as far as the Gipper was concerned.

The USS Stark should have sunk but didn’t because of the heroic preparedness of the crew, especially the damage control team. But the commanding officer’s career essentially ended that day—unfairly in my opinion. 

Not long afterward an American warship shot down an Iranian passenger plane killing everyone on board—all civilians, including many women and children. The United States’ response? Too fucking bad. And the man who mistook a passenger plane for a jet fighter went on to become a highly decorated officer. 

The players are different but the situation is analogous to the quagmire that started on 9/11. A superpower exacts revenge against an unprovoked attack by attacking without provocation an entirely different nation. Chaos ensues, arms dealers get rich, and innocents suffer.  

I wasn’t part of a fighting force. I was just a squid who worked in a paint locker. But my experience woke me up to the fact that the military minds of this nation don’t see men and women, they see numbers. And it really don’t matter if you are government property, as I was, or a civilian. We are all expendable. The human calculus is never going to work out in our favor. All we have is luck. Good, bad, dumb, or none at all.

This mess didn’t start with Bush trying to win daddy’s war and it sure as hell didn’t start with the Stark getting hit with a pair of Exocet missiles. Nor did it start in 1942 when Norman Schwarzkopf’s dad was disking around in Iran. 

It’s a sad saga all the way around and the only one who gets to feel good about it is that simpleton George W. Bush.  

It seems like every day a friend or acquaintance tests positive for COVID, is hospitalized, loses a loved one, or dies. It’s brutal out there. 

I was going through some files the other day and found the ticket I received in Mexico the February before last and my first instinct was to take a photo of the ticket and send it to Shanna. But Shanna isn’t with us anymore. She took her own life, but I have a hard time believing that option would have been on the table if she hadn’t been suffering from long COVID. I don’t know. No one knows. 

One of my rules for being a person on the internet is if someone announces the death of a loved one the least one can do is type in the words, I’m sorry for your loss. Even if I don’t know the person. Especially if I don’t know the person. If the algorithm that governs so much of our *cough* entertainment puts us together on one of the worst days of a stranger’s life, typing in those five words is the least I can do. I’ve been typing them a lot lately. Grief is general all over America.

Hollywood Maniacs Part II (Content Warning)

If you missed Part I, which concerns Tarantino’s terrible novelization of his excellent film, here’s a link. Please be advised that if you’ve had your fill of evil human beings today you may not want to read about Charles Manson and his family of murderous psychopaths as told by Ed Sanders in his strange yet riveting book, The Family. 

The book was originally published in 1979 and subsequent editions have been released with new material. (The edition I have is a mass market paperback from 1989.) Jeff Suwak at Weird Book Artifact sums up the book’s highly unusual publication history.

Sanders is an interesting writer. As a member of the experimental rock band, the Fugs, Sanders was part of the counterculture that he wrote about. He was a poet, a performer, and an activist, and an important link between the Beats and the hippies. Sanders doesn’t denigrate the Family for being long-haired hippies. Rather, he’s able to demonstrate how they operated on the margins of that society. 

Although Sanders initially set out to prove that Manson and his family was being set up, Sanders had a good relationship with many of the detectives working the case and was able to infiltrate the family at Spahn Ranch. In other words, Sanders had access and he used it to great effect. 

Still, The Family is a very strange book. It has a curious style that’s more odd than dated. Sanders has an unusual habit of deploying different names for people throughout the book, particularly Manson whom he refers to by a host of nicknames like the Devil or the Soul. This is compounded by the fact that Manson renamed each of his disciples, so we meet someone under their birthname, come to know them under a new name, and are returned to their given name when the law gets a hold of them. Sanders uses these names interchangeably throughout the book, making it hard to get a handle on the situation when Manson’s family swells to something like thirty or forty members. This was part of Manson’s criminal plan, but I’ll get to that in a bit. 

Sanders is a poet and a musician so he’s a fan of repetition. He peppers the freaky parts of Manson’s exploits with the phrase “Ooo-ee-oo.” I would love to hear Sanders read one of these passages, but it just looks strange on the page, especially after the fifth or sixth time he does it. Sanders also uses an odd sentence construction that feels very much of its time: subject, followed by the past tense of the verb to be. full stop, i.e. “Manson was.” This quasi-mystical language is interesting because it puts the reader inside the head of those who looked up to Manson, but again it looks odd on the page. Manson was what? Whether you like that sort of thing or not, you’re not going to find a paragraph like this in Vincent Bugliosi’s Helter Skelter:

“There were thousands of things to do. There were grief-whelmed relatives and friends. There was fear as never before. Thousands of rumors poured out of mouths. Acquaintances of the victims, some with enemies also, seemed to ask themselves, “Am I next?” What maniac was slouching through the smog with a grudge?”

Helter Skelter is the book I read when I was high school and it’s a very different book. Helter Skelter generally treats Manson as an abhorrent stain, a blight on society, an affront to everything good and decent. Manson is, without question, all of those things. As a kid, I ate up Helter Skelter. Now I’m much more suspicious of any attack that others its opponent because that’s a tactic those in power use to maintain the status quo. The countercultural movement was a threat, so the establishment did everything in its power to paint Manson as its point man. 

Sanders’s approach is much more nuanced.  He’s more interested in showing the reader how Manson got to be Manson, and how he was able to hold such power over people who, for the most part, were suburban kids at odds with their parents. In another generation those kids would be punks. Or two generations later, heaven forfend, juggalos. Ironically, Sanders’s attempt to get at Manson the human being makes him even more of a monster. 

Here are few things that stood out to me. Again, CW.

Manson wasn’t born evil. Spurned by his mother, Manson committed to a life of crime at an early age and ended up in reform school where he was gang raped. That set the tone for a squalid existence at the margins of society. This worked out for Manson because this is where he found his victims. He was a thief, a pimp, and serial abuser all his life. He was routinely in and out prison and these experiences taught him that life is transactional: take what you want before it’s taken from you. When he was twenty-five he was sent to jail and emerged seven years later at the height of flower power. Naturally, he went to San Francisco and picked up his first follower.

Manson wasn’t subtle. There’s a really gross section in the novelization of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood where Cliff Booth meets a pimp in France who lays down a rap on how to go about the business of being a pimp. It’s a classic example of Tarantino getting inside the head of a horrible person so he can say horrible things, but I wonder if QT got some of the pimp’s spiel from The Family or from somewhere else. Manson’s method of recruiting young girls, and many were underage, was to strip them naked, give them plenty of LSD, and engage in father-daughter role play. Manson wasn’t a cult leader. He was a pimp with a death wish.

Manson had a seemingly uncanny knack for sniffing out vulnerabilities. All of his victims had a terrible secret or fatal flaw that made solving their murders extraordinarily challenging. Charles Hinman had a secret mescaline operation so when his mutilated corpse was discovered in his apartment the police assumed his death was drug-related. Leno LaBianca had a secret gambling problem and routinely placed large bets with a bookie who lived down the street. Wojciech Frykowski, a friend of Roman Polanksi’s who was staying at the house while Roman was in London, was involved in an MDMA ring. Jay Sebring, who was also murdered at the house, was a notorious drug user. (As soon as his friends heard he’d been killed they went to his apartment to remove all the evidence.) Sanders speculates that Sebring may have sought retribution for a drug burn at the very house in which he was murdered. Each of these red herrings led detectives away from Manson. In fact, it was months before the Hinman, Tate, and LaBianca murder scenes were connected despite the fact that they were all savage murders whose perpetrators left behind messages written in blood. 

Manson targeted places, not people. Manson’s connection to the Tate residence is part of the back story to Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Manson first came to the house where Sharon Tate was living because that’s where music producer Terry Melcher used to live. Manson had been introduced to Melcher by Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys and wanted to play his music for him. There’s a whole subplot in the novelization involving Melcher and Pussycat, the underage family member who tries to seduce Cliff Booth. In Tarantino’s telling, Pussycat is clearly based on Ouish aka Ruth Ann Moorehouse, the fifteen-year-old girl that Manson seduced away from her father after Mr. Moorehouse picked him up while hitchhiking and brought the monster into his home. In the Manson universe, bad craziness follows bad craziness.  

What I find even more chilling than Manson stumbling upon the home that Tate and Polanski had only lived in a few months (and didn’t plan on staying) is Manson’s connection to the LaBianca residence. Manson stayed in touch with the friends he made in prison. One of them lived on Waverly drive—right next door to the home of Leno and Rosemary LaBianca—and Manson visited his friend there on several occasions. All Manson knew about the neighbors next door was that it was a house where wealthy people lived. 

Which brings us back to Cliff Booth. The reason I started this project was to find out if Tarantino based Cliff Booth on Shorty Shea, the stuntman who worked at Spahn Ranch and was tortured and murdered by Manson and multiple members of his posse. Many people have characterized One Upon a Time in Hollywood as an homage of sorts to Sharon Tate. Could it also be a tribute to another, but lesser-known victim?

Maybe. 

There’s not a lot about Shorty Shea in The Family. Certainly not as much as you’ll find in a quick Internet search. Part of the reason for that is Shea’s body wasn’t found until eight years after he was murdered. (Manson, among others, was convicted of the crime.) Shea and Cliff were both military veterans and Shea tried to prevent Manson from taking advantage of his friend George Spahn, just as Booth does in the movie. But the similarities end there. Manson believed Shea had ratted him out to the police, which resulted in a raid on the ranch concerning stolen automobiles and dune buggies. Where Cliff Booth is a superhero of sorts (at least in the novelization), Shea was a working stiff who tried to do the right thing. 

Perhaps the most disconcerting thing about The Family is the creeping suspicious one gets that Manson and his followers probably murdered a lot more people than we know about. Manson’s behavior from the time he got out jail in 1967 until he was finally apprehended in Death Valley can only be categorized as a crime spree. He engaged in nonstop auto theft, credit card fraud, rape, child endangerment, murder, and so on. Sanders mentions a half-dozen or more instances when people were savagely murdered with knives or other sharp-edged weapons, including the brother of one of Manson’s followers in London. (!)

Manson’s strategy was to implicate his followers in a number of different crimes to prevent them from snitching on one another. Because not all of Manson’s followers were arrested, those on the outside famously made a spectacle of themselves. Because Manson had no fixed address and was constantly on the move with some (but never all) of his followers, it made keeping track of their movements difficult and a logistical nightmare for police, prosecutors, jurors, and reporters. It’s like the Donald Trump approach to crime: grab as much as you can and make the authorities prove that you did it. 

What did I learn from all this? 

I’m not sure. I’m still pretty confused about which family member committed which crime. One thing is for certain: I’m never reading another Quentin Tarantino novelization. 

PssSST! (Dreamland Edition)

Last week I dreamt that I was part of Greg Ginn’s road crew. He was younger than he is now but very much in the post-hardcore guitar-techno phase of his career. I was helping to organize a series of shows that were supposed to take place all on the same day. Somewhere between the first and second show, we got lost, and because somehow it was my job to take Ginn to the show, it was my fault. I kept apologizing to Greg, but he was very cool about it. He was all smiles, very mellow. “Don’t worry about it, man!” 

This did not put me at ease, because in this dream I was also the author of the unauthorized biography of SST Records, and the whole time I kept thinking, “Does he know? He has to know. He doesn’t know.”

I woke up exhausted. 

The other day I woke up to a message from a fan, thanking me for my work on Do What You Want. He said some very nice things, described his own connection to the band and it’s music, and thanked me again. This message was a little different because the author had an idea for my next project, a very good idea in fact. That’s a little unusual, but I get a message like this about once a week. This outpouring of support from readers has never happened to me before and I don’t expect it will ever happen again. 

Was the Greg Ginn dream my subconscious preparing me for the criticism my unauthorized biography of SST is going to provoke? 

Perhaps, but today I want to acknowledge my gratitude for Bad Religion fans around the world. Do What You Want has been the highlight of my career and I will always cherish the way the band’s fans have treated me. 

Yesterday the paperback edition of Do What You Want was released. That means you can get your copy wherever books are sold. The release of the paperback signals that I am on the back nine of the book’s “life.” In a perfect world there would be signings and readings to look forward to, but we do not live in a perfect world. 

I don’t have my copies yet, but when I do I’ll raffle some off to readers of Message from the Underworld. Hell, I might just give them all away.