later years, because of hard knocks and tough times, she may have sold her body some. I am not about to knock her. Knowing the things I know now, I wish my mother had been smart enough to start out as a prostitute. You can sit back and say, “A statement like that is about what is expected out of Manson’s mouth,” but to me a class whore is about as honest a person as there is on earth. She has a commodity that is hers alone. She asks a price for it. If the price is agreeable, the customer is happy, the girl has her rent and grocery money and the little teenager down the street hasn’t been raped by a stiff dick without a conscience. The teenager’s parents don’t have a molested child going through life trying to live down a traumatic experience. The police don’t have a case, and the taxpayers aren’t supporting some guy in prison for umpteen years. Yes, an honest prostitute does more than help herself. She is good for the community.
On November 12, 1934, while living in Cincinnati, Ohio, unwed and only sixteen, my mother gave birth to a bastard son. Hospital records list the child as “no name Maddox.” The child—me, Charles Milles Manson—was an outlaw from birth. The guy who planted the seed was a young drugstore cowboy who called himself Colonel Scott. He was a transient laborer working on a nearby dam project, and he didn’t stick around long enough to even watch the belly rise. Father, my ass! I saw the man once or twice, so I’m told, but don’t remember his face.
The name Manson came from William Manson, a fellow Mom lived with shortly after my birth. William was considerably older than Mom, and because of his persistence they eventually got married. I don’t know if it was his way of trying to lock Mom down or if it was a moral thing because there was a kid in the house. So through him I got the name Manson. But a father—no! The marriage wasn’t one of those long-term things and I don’t remember him. Whether the divorce was his fault or Mom’s, I never did know. Probably Mom’s, she was always a pretty promiscuous little broad.
When Mom ran away from a home that had completely dominated her, she exploded into a newfound freedom. She drank a lot, loved freely, answered to no one and gave life her best shot. When I was born she had not experienced enough of life—or that newfound freedom—to take on the responsibilities of being a mother. I won’t say I was an unwanted child, but it was long before “the pill” and, like many young mothers, she was not ready to make the sacrifices required to raise a child. With or without me, Mom still had some living to do. I would be left with a relative or a hired sitter, and if things got good for her, she wouldn’t return to pick me up. Often my grandparents or other family members would have to rescue the sitter until Mom showed up. Naturally I don’t remember a lot of these things, but you know how it is; even in a family if there is something disagreeable about someone it always gets told. One of Mom’s relatives delighted in telling the story of how my mother once sold me for a pitcher of beer. Mom was in a café one afternoon with me in her lap. The waitress, a would-be mother without a child of her own, jokingly told my Mom she’d buy me from her. Mom replied, “A pitcher of beer and he’s yours.” The waitress set up the beer, Mom stuck around long enough to finish it off and left the place without me. Several days later my uncle had to search the town for the waitress and take me home.
In saying these things about my mother, I may sound as though I am selling her short, and by society’s standards her measurements aren’t up to par. But hey, I liked my mom, loved her, and if I could have picked her, I would have. She was perfect! In doing nothing for me, she made me do things for myself.
When I was about six years old my mom had dropped me off by my grandparents for what was supposed to be just a day or two. Several days later, I remember my grandfather asking me to go for a walk with him. Once outside the house, he became softspoken and kinder than I had ever remembered. As we walked we played games and ran races, and he would let me outrun him. He put me up on his shoulders and carried me while I pretended I was a giant and taller than anyone alive. After a while we sat down to rest. He put his arms around me and, fighting back tears, told me, “Your mother won’t be coming home for a long time.” I don’t know if the lump came in my throat because my grandfather had begun to cry or if it was because I realized what he was telling me.
My mother and her brother Luther had attempted to rob a service station in Charleston, West Virginia. The story goes that they had used a coke bottle as a weapon to knock the attendant unconscious. They were caught and sentenced to five years in the Moundsville State Prison.
At Moundsville she lived in the women’s ward of the prison, but her work assignment was near Death Row. It was her job to clean an area that included the scaffold (West Virginia was a hanging state). Mom tells a story that one day as she worked, she saw the guards escorting a man to the scaffold. Normally, on a hanging day no one but the officials and the person to be executed are supposed to be in the area. By accident or oversight, they forgot to inform Mom a hanging was to take place that day. Afraid she would be in trouble for being there, she hid in a broom closet by the scaffold. When the trap sprung, the velocity and the guy’s weight caused the rope to sever his head, and as Mom peeked out the door for a firsthand view of the hanging, the head rolled right to her hiding place. She swears the eyes were still wide open and that death literally stared her right in the face.
Twenty-seven years later, when I was first placed on Death Row in San Quentin, I looked at the gas chamber. The room’s two viewing windows looked like two huge eyes of death. Instantly my mind flashed to my mother, and I had a vision of her looking into the eyes of death. During that moment, I understood more about my mom than at any other time in my life.
While Mom was doing time at Moundsville it kind of fell on my grandmother to take care of me, want to or not. So there I was in the same household that my mom had run away from six years earlier. Strict discipline, grace before each meal and long prayer sessions before going to bed at night. Don’t fight, don’t steal, and turn the other cheek. I believed and practiced all that my grandmother taught. So much so that I became the sissy of the neighborhood.
After a few weeks at Grandma’s, it was decided that I would live with Mom’s sister Joanne and her husband Bill, in McMechen, West Virginia. My uncle Bill had opinions about how young boys were supposed to act, and being a sissy and afraid of everyone in the neighborhood wasn’t his ideal of a male youth. I remember him telling me to stop crying at everything and start acting like a man or he was going to start dressing me and treating me like a little girl. I guess my behavior really didn’t improve that much. Right now I can’t remember what particular thing made him do it, but on my first day in school, Bill dressed me in girl’s clothing. I was embarrassed and ashamed. The other kids teased me so much I went into a rage and started fighting everyone. Turning the other cheek, as Grandma had always wanted me to do, was forgotten. I took my lumps and shed a little blood, but in that school I became the fightin’est little bastard they ever saw. It must have pleased Uncle Bill, because from then on I wore boy’s clothing.
Joanne and Bill were good people and tried to do right by me. In their home I lived what you might call a normal life, but it’s hard to describe where my head was emotionally with Mom in jail and me living with a couple I didn’t belong to. Hell, I don’t know what kind of thoughts were going through my head then. Their treatment of me was fine. I got my ass-kickings when I deserved them and my rewards when I did something right. I was trained in proper manners and taught to wash my face, comb my hair, brush my teeth and believe in and respect God—like any other kid. But if you don’t belong, things just aren’t the same.
I can still remember hearing grownups refer to me as “the little bastard” and the kids I played with telling me, “Your mother’s no good; she’s a jail bird. Ha ha ha.”
One year shortly after Christmas, I got even with some of those kids who were laughing at me. I had spent Christmas with my grandparents. My only present for the year was a hairbrush. A Superman hairbrush. As I opened the present, my grandmother said, “If you brush your hair with it, you will be able to fly like Superman.” Young fool that I was, I carried that brush around with me for days and was constantly brushing my hair. I’d jump off porches, anything with a little elevation, and really expected to soar in the air like Superman. I never did fly and to this day that was the only lie that my grandmother ever told me.
The kids in the neighborhood rubbed things in even more by showing me all