My father never touched me.\u00a0 Those who say he did are trying to make my allegiance to Charlie Manson seem like the illness of a victim.\u00a0 I was no more a victim than are all human prisoners of money and the work that poisons our air and water.\u00a0 My father, with his cruel words and workaholic commitment to engineering, compelled me to accept he was ill, our family doomed, and society in a free fall to hell.\u00a0 Confronting that at age fifteen, I tried to soothe and expand my mind with alcohol and pot and LSD but my father could not understand and cared only about my plummeting grades, which he said reflected badly on him.\u00a0 So for him, perhaps, or more likely to escape, it\u2019s still unclear to me, I graduated from high school in 1966 and suffered a couple of months college before demanding freedom forever.<\/p>\n
<\/strong>One special 1967 day on Venice Beach, not far from the Redondo Beach of my old life, I met Manson and suddenly it no longer mattered I was hungry, hungover, and depressed.\u00a0 I was with the greatest genius on earth.\u00a0 But never did he ask me or anyone else to call him God.\u00a0 He was a humble little man and a giant who showed me how to connect with animals and birds and trees and took me into his arms and bed and his life.\u00a0 He loved me as he loved all the many women in our family.\u00a0 We had a real father who understood us and didn\u2019t preach like old fathers but showed us by example, like the way he danced, or by scaring the shit out of us one second then rushing back to show us he cared.\u00a0 We were all poised and happy and safe together.\u00a0 And we were committed to saving the earth.<\/p>\n The earth was Charlie\u2019s first woman and many people wanted to follow him and that terrified the judge and jury who framed Charlie for the seven deaths of pregnant actress Sharon Tate and her friends and another couple.\u00a0 Charlie wasn\u2019t there.\u00a0 Several of my family members were responsible and ready to die to save the land and air and water.\u00a0 But Charlie should not have been convicted.\u00a0 He committed no crime.<\/p>\n After the judicial lynching, I was in charge of the family, and on me weighed the responsibility to protect our environment.\u00a0 In Sacramento, on September fifth, 1975 I tried to wake everyone up by pointing a pistol at President Gerald Ford. \u00a0I had not wanted to kill him or he would\u2019ve been dead.\u00a0 There was no bullet in the chamber of the pistol, just four bullets in the magazine. \u00a0I\u2019d intentionally ejected the magic bullet in my downtown residence before putting on a long red velvet dress and heading to the state Capitol.<\/p>\n I didn\u2019t mind being in prison.\u00a0 Living without Charlie was prison anyway.\u00a0 I was considered a pleasant and cooperative prisoner.\u00a0 I had good reason to attack another prisoner with a claw hammer in 1979.\u00a0 And in 1987, after hearing Charlie was ill, I had to escape and go help him.\u00a0 Two days later they got me.\u00a0 Fine.\u00a0 They could keep me.\u00a0 I hadn\u2019t applied for parole when first eligible in 1985 and didn\u2019t apply for decades.\u00a0 I think I only applied because they were going to kick me out and make me look like a loony, and I could not allow that since all members of our family are bright and articulate and unapologetic champions of clean air and water and trees that live thousands of years.<\/p>\n <\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" My father never touched me.\u00a0 Those who say he did are trying to make my allegiance to Charlie Manson seem like the illness of a victim.\u00a0 I was no more a victim than are all human prisoners of money and the work that poisons our air and water.\u00a0 My father, with his cruel words and…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[290,291,289,293,292,10],"tags":[],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"yoast_head":"\n