“Everything is falling apart right now,” Anger said. “That’s what we know. This revolution or whatever they’re calling it, it’s really happening. Whether it’s only chaos, or if it leads to something better, we don’t know yet. That’s why I want to make the next film. I don’t think it has to be only chaos.”
Mick was looking down at the book, a forgotten quality about his unmoving lips. It was opened to a picture of his own face, framed in yellow with the omega-like glyph for Leo. Above his head was a tiny Marine helicopter inscribed with the same sign.
“I’ve been asking you for a favor,” Anger said. “I’ve been asking you for a long time now. It would take two days. Maybe less.”
“It’s been a busy time,” Mick said. “You know that. You know this whole story, Kenneth. There was Brian, then we were in the studio, now we’re leaving for the States. The tour. Rehearsals.”
Anger took the book out of his lap. He put it down on the table and turned away from it: the glossy cover, the careful lettering, the fussy four-color printing. On the cover were two Egyptian gods, Isis and Osiris, signaling with their two raised arms the coming of Horus, the child god. It all looked slightly ridiculous now.
“I thought you were going to do this for me,” he said.
“I want to do it. I just can’t do it now.” Mick sat up, not looking at Anger, twisting his neck a little from side to side. “We should go downstairs.”
“It’s just a film.”
“Right, and what we do is just music.” He leaned forward on his stool, his forearms resting on his knees. “You want my name, my image, I understand all that. It helps us both. The Lucifer bit — that’s what we’re into now. But I don’t know why you’d show me a film like that when we’re about to go out on tour.”
Anger reached down for his briefcase, looking at his hands as he picked it up and put it on the desk. He closed his eyes and tried to stop it, but the film was playing itself back in his mind now, sped up to an absurd jumble, a spasm or an assault. An invocation draws forces in. It can lead to an evocation, which spits the forces back out. He didn’t know what had happened with Bobby yet, nor did he know what was about to happen with the band on their tour, but it didn’t matter. It was already present on some level in the film. He opened the briefcase and put the spools inside. Then he closed it and flipped the locks shut.
GIRL TELLS OF TWO NIGHTS OF SLAUGHTER
Links Death Cult to Eight Slayings Tate Murder Finally Solved
DECEMBER 1, 1969.
Murder suspect Susan Atkins, 21, recounted today how she and a band of hippies broke into the Benedict Canyon residence of Sharon Tate on the night the screen actress and four friends were murdered. She said that on August 9, a man, two women, and herself entered the house dressed all in black to carry out the raid.
Miss Atkins has also admitted to being present the next night, August 10, when the same group broke into the Griffith Park home of Leno LaBianca, owner of a chain of grocery stores, and murdered him and his wife, Rosemary.
The lawyer of the pretty, dark-haired girl, Frederick Cobb, described the August 9 killings: “A man cut the phone lines with a pair of bolt cutters, then entered the house through a side window. He then let the others in through the front door. The victims were tied up, then beaten and stabbed.”
Cobb said that his client told him that Charles Manson, 34, ordered them out on another murderous raid the following night, August 10, at the LaBianca home. He insisted that his client “had nothing to do with the murders” and that she admitted only to being present at the scene. He described Miss Atkins as being “under Mr. Manson’s sway. [She and the others] revere him as a fatherlike figure. He has a hypnotic power over them.”
The houses of the victims were selected at random, Miss Atkins stated. Her story ends months of uncertainty in what had become some of the most publicized and frightening murder cases in recent history.
Miss Atkins appeared yesterday in Santa Monica Superior Court to face charges in yet another murder, the July 31 slaying of Gary Allen Hinman, a Topanga Canyon music teacher. Police now believe that the Hinman murder was the first in a series of at least eight homicides related to the Manson group. Also charged in that crime is Robert Beausoleil, 22, who will stand trial later this month. Beausoleil, a rock musician, has pleaded innocent. He has denied any connection to Manson and his followers.
Miss Atkins stated that the crimes were “an act of war. I was told to go and I went. We had a basic way of living. You didn’t think about what you were doing, you did it.”
Manson was arrested two weeks ago in a roundup of more than 30 hippies in Death Valley. He was taken yesterday to Municipal Court for a preliminary hearing on charges of receiving stolen property. The bearded cult leader stared blankly as witnesses gave testimony about six stolen motorcycles he is charged with receiving. He did not speak with Deputy Public Defender Ross Kuzak, who represented him.
ALTAMONT, 1969
THE CROWD COULD HEAR the band’s helicopter before they found it in the sky, the deep burble of its rotors. It got louder and louder, narrowing in focus, building to a whine. They looked up at it, the large black ship with a swinging arm above its body. It was impossible not to admire it for a moment, a Bell UH-1 Iroquois, a “Huey,” the same kind of helicopter being used in Vietnam.
It was December 6. The crowd had been gathered there for a day and a half already, staking out their spots, waiting for something they couldn’t quite envision. There were people with cameras and people flashing peace signs, people walking with backpacks on their shoulders, people handing out leaflets. They wore football jerseys, jean jackets, floppy leather cowboy hats, mirrored shades. Some of them wore nothing at all. In their nakedness, they looked like mendicants — earnest, emaciated, begrimed. They lay on sleeping bags, blankets, cardboard boxes, stood up with their hands on their hips to look out over the crowd to the distant stage. It was a free concert for half a million fans, the biggest concert on the band’s tour, the first time they’d been in San Francisco in three years. All that week the news had been about a series of brutal murders last summer in Los Angeles and the arrest five days ago of several suspects and their leader, Charles Manson, who had already become a new kind of star. Nobody knew what to think about the story, whether it was to be believed. Nobody could explain the strange glamour of it, why the killers were fascinating while their victims were hardly even real. It had already been a day and a half of wine and Quaaludes, seizures by the medicine tent, fistfights, barking dogs, but it was possible not to look at any of that if you didn’t want to look at it. Some of them broke out into fits of dancing and singing, buoyed by the bright, sunny day. There was a procession of people in flowers and beads who pushed a colorfully painted cart through the crowd, its spoked wheels as high as their shoulders. Inside the bed was a blue cow made of papier-mâché, like something from India. In spite of everything they knew about the band, in spite of everything the band embodied, the crowd was thinking about Woodstock, the glow of having been there. They all wanted this to be something like that, and they were already a little frantic, wanting a good spot, not wanting to miss out.
Someone with blood on his shirt was walked across the field by two people who led him by the elbows. A sixteen-year-old boy sat in the straw drinking wine, staring right at him, not seeing him, brushing something off his sleeve. The helicopter circled above it all, waiting for its chance to land. Then, as if in escort, a group of motorcycles arrived, coming in a long line between the hills, forty or fifty of them, some of the riders with girls on the seats behind them, some of them drinking from jugs of wine. As they got closer to the crowd, they shifted into low gear so that they were half walking, half riding. They were different from most of the fans, older, dressed in black clothes and boots. At either side of their line, people picked up their things and stood up, not even realizing in that moment how afraid they were. Some of them nodded their heads in solidarity; some of them smiled to their friends as if they were somehow a part of it. The motorcycles had saddlebags and mirrors and gas tanks painted black or blue. Behind them came a yellow school bus with a banner draped over its side that said HELLS ANGELS and bore the regalia of the different local chapters. More than a dozen people stood on its roof, drinking beer, shoving one another around, held in by a metal rail. One of them wore a black top hat. He was a tall, thin man with a beard, his clothes covered with dust, raising his arms like a scarecrow as he danced.