https://crimereads.com/charles-mansons-body-or-how-i-ended-up-paying-for-the-notorious-cult-leaders-funeral/

CHARLES MANSON’S BODY, OR, HOW I ENDED UP PAYING FOR THE NOTORIOUS CULT LEADER'S FUNERAL

"Did a man like this deserve a funeral?"
APRIL 20, 2023 BY MAGGIE MILSTEIN

When I was 29 years old, I pushed Charles Manson’s corpse into an incinerator.

There’s something mean about cremation, to make a body completely useless. “Ashes to ashes” is just a metaphor for the quantum universe, not a recipe. We aren’t really made of stardust.

Manson once said, “Sanity is a small box; insanity is everything.” Maybe funneling his ashes into a little carton would somehow restore sanity to the world.

*

He died in November, the month of gratitude.

In 2017, Charles Milles Manson, or “Charlie,” expired in Bakersfield’s Mercy Hospital after eighty-three years on Earth. He had been transferred there from the California state prison in Corcoran, where he had been incarcerated since 1989. There are conflicting accounts of what exactly killed him, but it’s fair to say that an octogenarian Charles Manson was about as healthy as one might imagine. His death certificate names acute cardiac arrest, respiratory failure, and metastatic colon cancer as his pale horses, but he had lived with a litany of afflictions since he first shuffled into Corcoran. He lived in the Protective Housing Unit, or P.H.U., a ward for prisoners who, because of their colorful histories, couldn’t survive in the general prison population.

I spent the greater part of my twenties interviewing prisoners in an old visitation room outside the P.H.U. I started the project in graduate school. I wanted to explore the emotional lives of elderly prisoners, an overlooked demographic in the carceral system. A criminal is sentenced to life in prison—then what? What does it mean to grow old behind bars, and what keeps the soul alive? Some prisoners were easy to talk to. Charlie, who famously loved to mess with interviewers, was best understood through observation and anecdotes.

My favorite: A prisoner walked into the communal bathroom and found the elderly murderer perched on the commode, sucking on a pitiful joint that, in the delicate lifecycle of prison contraband, had slipped into the unit via officer or orifice. Asses to ashes, butts to butts. To the intruder, Charlie may have looked more like a 1950s housewife puffing on a filtered Viceroy than America’s most dangerous man sucking down a crotch roach. To Charlie, it was surely a moment of profound reflection.

I imagined him roosting, eyes closed, smoking his boot-scrape ganga while pretending to be surrounded by braless, smiling women with long, dirty hair. Maybe he was reliving one famous, perfect scene:

His girls waist-deep in a dumpster, their skin and hair shimmering, joyfully pulling out garlands of limp vegetables as if it were a victory garden.

In that moment he was young, even though his body was so stiff with arthritis that, instead of a king on his throne, he would have looked more like the Tin Man splayed on an oilcan, heartless. By some accounts, the little man was standing on the toilet rim. Regardless, he was in his element. He didn’t need to stunt, to act the fool. No throwing food, no yelling, no bitches of varying ilk. He could cogitate. Maybe, in the winter of his life, Charles Manson had turned to introspection and asked himself,

“Who in the world am I?”

“Get the fuck off the shitter, Charlie!” yelled the intruding prisoner, pointing to an air vent that was blowing skunk smoke out the bathroom window towards the yard where two notorious snitches happened to be chilling.

“You get the fuck out!” squawked Charlie, as he returned to the world.

It was incidents like these that made almost everyone in the P.H.U. hate Charlie. It wasn’t because he was Charles Manson. It was because he burned popcorn in the communal microwave and made everything smell like shit.. He always nabbed the last avocado from the visitation snack cart and left piles of candy wrappers on the table.

He was inconsiderate.

He was a “tool.”

Now the tool was just a thing, a whatchamacallit. A dead body. Someone else’s problem. But whose?

When Charlie’s condition began to deteriorate, both the prison and the hospital tried to keep the situation confidential, but when he was transferred from the prison infirmary in Corcoran to the general hospital in Bakersfield people began to talk. As international news outlets broke the story, the world waited to see if Charles Manson could really die. He seemed more spectral than mortal, and although I never bought into any supernatural concept of “evil” it was clear that Charlie had a superhuman and deeply serendipitous tendency to escape death. A horrific childhood in violent boys’ homes. An adolescence in and out of prison. A reign of terror and a death sentence that was later commuted to life-in-prison by Furman v. Georgia, a Supreme Court case that, in 1972, temporarily ended capital punishment in the United States and retroactively saved the lives of death row inmates. He spent his middle age and golden years in some of California’s toughest prisons, and although he spent the last stretch of his sentence in protective housing, Charlie was still beating the odds at every darkened corner. At the time of his death, he surpassed the average American man’s life expectancy by nearly five years.

One might assume that Charlie’s life choices weren’t conducive to creating real, lasting connections, and that finding someone reliable to claim his body would be his final inconvenience. His last smoking microwave. He had very few living relatives and even fewer who were willing to talk to him. He had people who called him a friend. They wrote to him and, sometimes, Charlie wrote back. If they were lucky, the friend would receive a trinket made from his body hair. I assumed that the state would cremate Charlie’s body or bury it quietly and departmentally in a pauper’s grave in Bakersfield, one without a view of the orchards or the mountains.

I imagined his ashes being flushed down a government toilet like a belly-up goldfish. It seemed like a befitting send-off until I realized that, if ghosts existed, Charles Manson would haunt those pipes forever. When it comes to the afterlife, most modern people are more willing to chance their souls than their plumbing.

I think that Charlie, like many of us, stayed alive out of pure spite. His last day, November 19, 2017, became the first stop of a long, absurd journey to the great beyond. On that day the proverbial worms burst through the woodwork. Self-identified “friends” of the deceased believed that they were the true keepers of Charlie’s corpse, and some even claimed that they were his blood kin. His biological grandson, a young family man from Florida named Jason, fought them in court for nearly four months to gain custodianship of his grandfather’s remains, hoping to dispose of Charlie quietly and respectfully.

Jason won his case, but during four long months of court deliberations, the corpse developed frostbite. Parts of it began to crack and stew. For whatever reason, be it freezer burns or the eager anticipation of a verdict, the thing was transferred to a refrigerator, which soon proved to be too warm. The body began to soften and putrefy. The coroner’s office put it back in the freezer, which, they hoped, would slow the death down. My mother, a Jewish convert from an old Southern Baptist family in Alabama, had always warned me about re-freezing something that’s already been warmed over. It was like leaving in the skeleton of a roasted chicken for more than a day (“You gotta take it out and pop the wishbone”). It was like trying to take back a piece of gossip.

By the day of the funeral, Charlie’s corpse was a soft cheese. Les Peters, the director of the Porterville Funeral and Cremation Center, would go on to say,

“I was anticipating that the remains would be in the freezer. That was not the case. The largest problem I had was that, just as if you were in a bathtub for an extended period of time and your fingers start to wrinkle up from the water. There were some fluids in the bottom of the bag that he was in, even though they had an absorbent cloth. That, for many months. That’s just what I was dealing with, to the point where it was just beyond repair.”

*

It was 2020, nearly three years since Charlie’s death. Thanksgiving was coming. I was working as a bookseller for an independent book and gift store that had survived the Spanish Flu, the Great Depression, WWI, and WWII. In the 1940’s, booksellers from the store smuggled reading materials to interned Japanese Americans and were shot at by tower guards. Sometimes that anecdote was the only thing keeping me at work, and I reminded myself of it whenever I wanted to walk away on my coffee break and never return to the long lines, slipping masks, and the ever-present film of sweat and sanitizers.

I’d look at an ornery customer, smiling with my eyes, and try to explain the disruption of the supply chain.

“The book you’re looking for isn’t available because books need paper. And ink. And glue, I guess. Can I help you find something else?”

I winced while fumigating a pile of James Patterson books that had been sighed-on. I walked up to strangers and asked them to pull their masks up over their nose, and some moved closer to me, growling with their eyes, as if to say, “I’m in a fancy L.A. bookstore. Don’t look at me as if I just crawled out of a storm drain in Bakersfield.”

I knew it was time to leave when the Halloween tchotchkes went on sale. Sugar skulls on deep discount. Bestsellers about serial killers were replaced with cookbooks about crockpots and warm tummies. Being surrounded by death felt a lot safer than seeing each room in the store swathed in the warm colors of late fall. Some patrons spoke freely about their upcoming Thanksgiving gatherings. About traveling. Hugging their loved ones. And they would do it all again for Christmas.

Thanks for posting this, Mongo, although I'd be lying if I claimed to have read every paragraph in full. In my view, one of the most annoying things about the smug internet generation and all their "cool" acronyms is that one TLDR, which I gather means "too long, didn't read", which of course means "I'm too much, like, of the raised-on-TV and, like, short-attention-span crowd, so reading is painful to me, and like, and I'd rather just watch, y'now, like MTV" (or some such similarly mindless sentiment). But this one really WAS too long, Mongo!

Or more precisely, Maggie Milstein isn't a skilled enough writer to understand how to hook her readers' interest. (Yeah, I realize I'm as longwinded as they come, but I ALSO always toil mightily during my editing process, ensuring one paragraph sensibly follows another, out of pure consideration for anyone taking the trouble to endure any of my verbose verbiage.)

Though I stayed with her disjointed musings--"essay" seems too sophisticated a term--a good while, I nonetheless never quite figured out where this ceremonial funeral Milstein conducted was, or who attended it other than herself. Sure, a second, careful reading would have answered those questions, but she just doesn't select her sentences scrupulously enough to impel me to want to read every word even the FIRST time, much less on some second, thorough (and thorougly time-consuming) read-through.

Milstein ought to learn how to coherently sequence paragraphs before she publishes anything this long, doncha think? (Bottom line, even for a fascinated-by-most-things-Manson fellow like myself, she ultimately failed me as a reader, I'm afraid.)

BRYAN STYBLE/Florida