‘Helter Skelter’: See First Trailer for Epix’s Manson Family Docuseries

Six-part series, premiering June 14th, promises "most definitive recounting of the Manson Family story ever put on screen"

More than 50 years after the Manson Family murders, Epix will take a deep dive into Charles Manson's infamous cult with Helter Skelter: An American Myth.

The six-part docuseries premieres June 14th, and ahead of Helter Skelter's arrival, Rolling Stone presents the series' first trailer, which mixes archival footage, Manson's own testimonials, never-before-accessed interviews with the Family and chilling recreations.

"I was definitely under Charlie's spell," one Family member admits in voiceover, while another adds, "He was a puppet master pulling everyone's strings."

"The legend of the Manson Family permeates our culture, our media and our collective fears," Epix said of the series in a statement. "Why, after 50 years, does this ragtag group of hippies and their two-night murder spree still fascinate and perplex us?  The six-episode EPIX original series Helter Skelter: An American Myth is the most definitive recounting of the Manson Family story ever put on screen, and will challenge everything viewers think they know about this bizarre chapter in American history."

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Charles Manson's Musical Legacy: A Murderer's Words in 9 Tracks

From Beach Boys to GN'R, how Manson made his way onto other musician's music

By Elisabeth Garber-Paul (Rolling Stone)

Axl Rose, the Beach Boys and Marilyn Manson all reinterpreted Charles Manson's music in their own ways. Central Press/Getty, Dave Benett/Getty, Rolls Press/Popperfoto/Getty, Catherine McGann/Getty

Charles Manson wanted to be bigger than the Beatles. Today his name may be almost as well-known, but his original goal was to achieve that end via a recording contract – not multiple life sentences.

When Manson arrived in Los Angeles in the fall of 1967, he was a career criminal who'd learned guitar in prison and was trying to parlay a vague prison contact into a legitimate deal. Over the next year-and-a-half, he met some people who might have made it happen – Beach Boy Brian Wilson, producer (and Doris Day offspring) Terry Melcher – but between his creepy demeanor and clear lack of talent, Manson wasn't able to get anything off the ground. After his disillusionment with the music scene – and perhaps because of it – Manson, a small-time hippie guru, ordered his followers to murder Sharon Tate, Jay Seabring and four other people on the nights of August 9th and 10th in 1969. They were arrested that fall, and Charles Manson has been a national bogeyman ever since.

Following the murders, there has naturally been an unending stream of Manson-related pop culture, from tell-all books to made-for-TV movies to strange bits on 1990s sketch shows. But what about his non-murderous dream – his music? His voice and words have appeared on more than a few tracks over the years, offering him a place in musical history, courtesy of some morbid artists who found inspiration in his creative output. Here are nine times Charles Manson showed up in other people's music.

Beach Boys, "Never Learn Not To Love" (1968)

The only entry on this list that was recorded before the murders. Since Charles Manson and Dennis Wilson met in early 1968, the drummer had introduced Manson to his friends and even set up a session to record a demo – which would be released in 1970 as Lie: The Love and Terror Cult – but no one was willing to give Manson a deal. Dennis did, however, manage to get one of his songs onto his band's 1969 album 20/20, which was a small coup for Manson. Though the song's lyrics about getting a girl to submit went largely untouched, they changed the original title, "Cease to Exist." Worse, Manson didn't even get a writing credit on the LP. Needless to say, he was not pleased.

The Lemonheads, "Your Home Is Where You're Happy" (1988)

For this track off 1988's Creator, college radio rockers the Lemonheads did a pretty faithful cover of the Manson demo of the same name, keeping the lyrics intact and performing it on acoustic guitar. Manson was listed as a writer on the song and thus was entitled to royalties, though according to Jeff Gunn's 2013 biography Manson, all the profits went to murder victim Voytek Frykowski's son Bartek.

Crispin Glover, "I'll Never Say Never to Always" (1989)

It's perhaps not surprising that child-actor-turned-Hollywood-eccentric Crispin Glover decided to cover the notorious Angelino – the surprise was that he put out an album in the first place. After coming up on sitcoms like Happy Days, Glover had found mainstream success as Marty's dad George McFly in Back to the Future. But by 1989, he was bored with the industry and took a hiatus from acting to make his debut album The Big Problem Does Not Equal the Solution, The Solution Equals Let It Be, which included this Manson-penned track. For his version, Glover layered falsetto, crying babies and distant whistles to make the track even more menacing than the original – yet somehow not even the creepiest song on the album.

Skinny Puppy, "Worlock" (1989)

For this track off its album Rabies, the influential industrial act Skinny Puppy added a clip of Charles Manson singing the Beatles' "Helter Skelter" – the song Manson claimed was a call for him to start an apocalyptic race war – over the Fab Four's guitar intro to their White Album track. Though Cabaret Voltaire had sampled him a few years earlier, this seems to be the first time Manson's voice was fully been incorporated into a song – but it wouldn't be the last.

Nine Inch Nails "Gave Up" video (1992)

Not technically an appearance of Charles Manson, but weird enough to make the cut. In 1992, after the success of 1989's Pretty Hate Machine, NIN founder Trent Reznor moved into Sharon Tate's former home on Cielo Drive in Los Angeles to record his follow-up EP, Broken. For the beginning of the single's video, Reznor decided to splice in shots of the home’s manicured exterior over menacing synth – and like the opening moments of a horror movie, they are used to a surprisingly chilling effect. But Reznor would eventually feel guilty about using the Manson imagery. He recalled to Rolling Stone in 1997 that, after a chance encounter, Sharon Tate's sister asked him point-blank if he was living there to exploit Sharon's death. "I realized for the first time, 'What if it was my sister?'" he said. "I thought, 'Fuck Charlie Manson.' I don't want to be looked at as a guy who supports serial-killer bullshit."

Guns N' Roses, "Look at Your Game, Girl" (1993)

Marilyn Manson would later take credit for Axl Rose's interest in Charles Manson, which led to this macabre addition to the Spaghetti Incident? and by far the most well-known song on this list. Another straightforward cover from Charlie Manson's 1970 album Lie, it's a rather unimpressive track on first listen – a half-assed attempt at seducing a woman via Axl's nasal croon over a vaguely caribbean beat – until you realize that the guy who wrote it led a female-heavy cult.

Marilyn Manson, "My Monkey" (1994)

As if it weren't enough to name himself in an homage to Charlie, Marilyn Manson also repurposed a verse from Charles Manson's "I'm a Mechanical Man" for this track off his 1994 debut Portrait of an American Family, creating an ominous chant about a monkey sent to his death in the country, layering in samples of Charles's real voice for effect. The shock rocker had long wanted to cover the song – he'd discovered it in high school, later saying it was "the beginning of my identification with Manson." When he first met Trent Reznor – who was living on Cielo Drive – Marilyn told his new friend how much he'd like to cut the track at Sharon Tate's old home. While that didn't happen, he was there late one night mixing another American Family track including samples of Charlie's voice. He eventually gave up for the night, and the next morning the samples were gone from the tapes. "There was no real logical or technical explanation for it," he later said in an interview, albeit one punctuated by him doing lines of cocaine. "It was a truly supernatural moment that freaked me out."

Brian Jonestown Massacre, "Arkansas Revisited" (1999)

Though it doesn't exactly feature Manson's words, "Arkansas Revisited" makes the list because of it's a genuinely thoughtful reinterpretation of the song. What began with Manson as "Arkansas" was transformed into something beautiful – and that expresses desires that sound an awful lot like Charlie. As on the original track, the San Francisco psych-folk band with the cult-y name kept the instruments largely acoustic and maintained the original bluesy beat. But instead of Manson's somewhat incoherent rant about squatters in the south and men with droopy beards, singer Anton Newcomb tells the story of a person returning home to Arkansas to kill his parents because of the emotional damage they caused during his childhood.

Anthony DiMaria's Response to Rolling Stone story on Manson

Below is a letter that Jay Sebring's nephew, Anthony DiMaria, sent in response to Rolling Stone story on Manson. It is republished with permission from Restless Souls.

mansondirect.com

On June 15, 1970 Rolling Stone featured Charles Manson on it's magazine cover. Sadly, the narrative following the massacres on the nights of August 8th and 10th, 1969 holds firm approaching four and a half decades- Manson and his clan are sensationalized, glamorized as anti establishment pop celebrity icons, while their eleven victims remain trivialized and vilified to fit the sexy packaged formula of good old true crime mass murder. The Tate - LaBianca killings have become a massive source of interest and profit for countless news/tabloid organizations, books, TV/film companies, TIME, LIFE and prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi.

It is painful and disturbing to see that the Rolling Stone piece by Erik Hedegaard (December 5, 2013) is yet another example of how horribly the victims are disregarded, even slandered ( "Sharon Tate wasn't a movie star. Even now, nobody's ever really heard of her, even though she was supposedly killed by Charlie Manson, the most famous guy in the world. And that's the only reason anybody knows who she is. And still nobody knows who the fuck she is") while Mr. Hedegaard presents Charles Manson in a reverent, mystical light, "I will never know or understand why when Manson rested his hand on my arm it felt so good, not passively good, but actively... it's a presence."

Apparently, Mr. Manson has the same impact on Mr. Hedegaard as he had on Vincent Bugliosi's wrist watch when it stopped suddenly upon Manson's telepathic powers as depicted in Bugliosi's 1974 television version of "Helter Skelter".

It is curious that Mr. Hedegaard would omit from Manson's interview what the interviewee said he would do to a random baby ("he says something truly awful about what you could do to that baby, worse than you could imagine"), yet the author printed Manson's abhorrent slander of one of his victim's ( Sharon Tate's) character, " She compromised her body for everything she did. And if she was such a beautiful thing, what was she doing in the bed of another man [Jay Sebring] when that thing jumped off? What kind of shit is that?"

So the narrative continues and everyone wins. Charles Manson is back in the spotlight as mystical boogeyman, fascinated consumers satiate their appetites- while an author and his employers line their pockets with cash.

But for eleven people who lie in their graves, the blood letting continues... this time at the hands of Erik Hedegaard and Rolling Stone magazine. 

The Cover of the Rollin' Stone...

We take all kinds of pills that give us all kind of thrills

but the thrill we'll never know Is the thrill that'll getcha

when you get your picture on the cover of the Rollin Stone...

In 1970, David Dalton (co-founder of Rolling Stone Magazine), and co-writer David Felton won the prestigious Columbia School Of Journalism Award for their Rolling Stone interview with Charles Manson.

When asked was it like to interview Charles Manson in 1970 for your Rolling Stone piece with David Felton, he replied:

David had worked for real newspapers, I had only written for rock magazines--pretty much only for Rolling Stone, actually. I was, as I said, a rock evangelist, and, like most of my hippie peers (including Jann--who originally wanted to put "Manson Is Innocent" on the cover), I thought Manson was innocent and had been railroaded by the L.A.P.D. It was a scary awakening for me to find out that not every long-haired, dope-smoking freak was a peace-and-love hippie. My whole harrowing adventure is told in "If Christ Came Back as a Con Man: Or How I Started out Thinking Charlie Manson Was Innocent and almost Ended Up Dead" in Gadfly--which should be archived at Gadfly. Org, I would think.

Follow the link to the Gadfly article, it's a good read.

THE MOST DANGEROUS MAN IN THE WORLD

An Audience with Charles Manson, a.k.a. Jesus Christ Moving slowly across the municipal geometry of civic buildings and police officers, a man comes toward us looking directly into the sun, his arms stretched out in supplication, like the Sierra Indian. From a hundred feet away his eyes are flashing, all two-dimensional boundaries gone. A strange place to be tripping, outside the new, all concrete, Los Angeles County Jail.

"You're from ROLLING STONE," he says.

"How did you know?"

No answer. He leads us to the steps of the jail's main entrance, pivots and again locks his gaze into the sun. "Spirals," he whispers. "Spirals coming away...circles curling out of the sun." His fingers weave patterns in the air. A little sun dance.

"A hole in the fourth dimension," we suggest.

His easy reply: "A hole in all dimensions."

This is Clem, an early member of the family called Manson. Inside is another, Squeaky, a friendly girl with short, red hair and freckles. Her eyes, too, are luminous, not tripping, but permanently innocent. Children from the Village of the Damned.

We went to the attorney-room window to fill out forms. Two guards watched from a glass booth above. A surprise: we were not searched. "Step inside the gate," says a disembodied voice. "Keep clear of the gate."

After nearly an hour he comes in. The guards greet him, casual, friendly.

"Hi, Charlie, how are you today?"

"Hi, man, I'm doin' fine," he says, smiling.

He's wearing prison clothes, blue denim jacket and pants. His hair is very long and bushy, he pushes it out of his face nervously. He looks different, older and stranger than in the press photos. His beard has been shaved off recently, and it is growing back black and stubbly. He has a long face with a stubborn jaw, wizened and weathered like the crazy country faces you see in old TVA photographs. A cajun Christ. He moves, springing, light as a coyote.

"Can't shake hands," he explains, jumping back. "Against the rules."

He unfolds casually in the chair. He strokes his chin, like a wizard trapped under a stone for a thousand years.

ARE YOU HAPPY WITH YOUR RECORD?

All the good music was stolen. What's there is a couple of years old. I've written hundreds of songs since then. I've been writing a lot while I was in jail.

I never really dug recording, you know, all those things pointing at you. You get into the studio, and it's hard to sing into microphones. [He clutches his pencil rigidly, like a mike.] Giant phallic symbols pointing at you. All my latent tendencies... [He starts laughing and making sucking sounds. He is actually blowing the pencil!] My relationship to music is completely subliminal, it just flows through me.

"EGO IS A TOO MUCH THING" IS A STRANGE TRACK. WHAT DO YOU MEAN BY EGO?

Ego is the man, the male image. [His face tenses, his eyes dart and threaten. He clenches his fist, bangs it on the table. He gets completely behind it, acting it out, the veins standing out in his neck.] Ego is the phallic symbol, the helmet, the gun. The man behind the gun, the mind behind the man behind the gun. My philosophy is that ego is the thinking mind. The mind you scheme with, make war with. They shoved all the love in the back, hid it away. Ego is like, "I'm going to war with my ego stick." [He waves an imaginary rifle around, then sticks it in his crotch.]

IN "EGO" THERE'S THIS LINE, "YOUR HEART IS A-PUMPIN', YOUR PARANOIA'S A-JUMPIN'."

Yeah, well, paranoia is just a kind of awareness, and awareness is just a form of love. Paranoia is the other side of love. Once you give in to paranoia, it ceases to exist. That's why I say, submission is a gift, just give in to it, don't resist. It's like saying, "Tie me on the cross!" Here, want me to hold the nail? Everything is beautiful if you want to experience it totally.

HOW DOES PARANOIA BECOME AWARENESS?

It's paranoia...and it's paranoia...and it's paranoia...UNH! [He mimics terror, total paranoia, scrunching up his body into a ball of vibrating fear that suddenly snaps and slumps back in ectasy.] It's like when I went into the courtroom. Everybody in the courtroom wanted to kill me. I saw the hatred in their eyes, and I knew they wanted to kill me, and I asked the sheriffs, "Is somebody goint to shoot me?" That's why I feel like I'm already dead. I know it's coming. It's the cops who put that feeling into their heads. They don't come in with that.

They whisper, so I can hear it, "Sharon Tate's father is in court." And then they go over and shake him down to see if he has a gun, and they're just putting that idea into his head. He has a nice face. I saw him the first day in court. He doesn't want to kill me. They're putting that into his head. You know, they say things like, "We wouldn't want you to shoot the defendant." And every day I see him in court, his face gets a little harder, and one day he's gonna do it.

And they put the whole thing in his head, feeding him all those negative vibrations. And if you keep doing that, it's got to happen. I know it's coming. They all got their things pointed at me, and they want to use them badly. But actually they can't use them, and that's what makes them so mad. They can't make love with them, they're all suffering from sex paranoia.

They've been following me for three years, trying to find something, and wherever they go there's like thirty women. And that really makes them mad. They can't understand what all these women are doing with one guy.

They're looking for something dirty in everything, and if you're looking for something, you'll find it. You have to put up some kind of face for them, and that's the only face they understand. The answer is to accept the cross. I've accepted it. I can go up on the cross in my imagination. Oh, ooooooh, aaaah! [The orgasmic crucifixion! He gives a long sigh of relief.]

Have you ever seen the coyote in the desert? [His head prowls back and forth.] Watching, tuned in, completely aware. Christ on the cross, the coyote in the desert - it's the same thing, man. The coyote is beautiful. You learn from the coyote just like you can learn from a child. A baby is born into this world in a state of fear. Total paranoia and awareness. He sees the world with eyes not used yet. As he grows up, his parents lay all this stuff on him. They tell him, when they should be letting him tell them. Let the children lead you.

The death trip is something they pick up from their parents, mama and papa. They don't have to die. You can live forever. It's all been put in your head. They program him by withholding love. They make him into a mechanical toy. [He sings from his album, jerking his arms like a spastic Tin Man.] "I am a mechanical boy/I am my mother's toy."

Everything happened perfectly for me in my life. I picked the right mother, and my father, I picked him too. He was a gas, he cut out early in the game. He didn't want me to get hung up. [Charlie laughs privately at his private joke.]

CAN YOU TELL US WHAT YOU MEAN BY SUBMISSION? IF WE ARE ALL ONE, HOW CAN YOU JUSTIFY BEING A LEADER?

There is only One. I'm the One. Me is first. I don't care about you. I'm not thinking about what other people think, I just do what my soul tells me. People said I was a leader. Here's the kind of leader I was. I made sure the animals were fed. Any sores on the horses? I'd heal them. Anything need fixing? I'd fix it. When it was cold, I was always the last one to get a blanket.

Pretty soon I'd be sitting on the porch, and I'd think, "I'll go and do this or that." And one of the girls would say, "No, let me." You've go to give up, lie down and die for other people, then they'll do anything for you. When you are willing to become a servant for other people, they want to make you a master. In the end, the girls would be just dying to do something for me. I'd ask one of them to make a shirt for me, and she'd be thrilled because she could do something for me. They'll work twenty-four hours a day if you give them something to do.

I can get along with girls, they give up easier. I can make love to them. Man has this ego thing. [Charlie stiffens up, holding on to his prick.] I can't make love to that. Girls break down easier. When you get beyond the ego thing, all you're left with is you; you make love with yourself. With a girl, you can make love with her until she's exhausted. You can make love with her until she gives up her mind, then you can make love with love. [Charlie starts to run his hands up and down his body, caressing himself like a stripper, his fingers tingling like a faith healer in a trance. They dance all over his body.] You climax with every move you make, you climax with every step you take. The breath of love you breathe is all you need to believe. [Charlie pulls a thousand postures from the air. He squirms, stiffens, anguishes with ecstasy.] Oooooh, aaaaaaaah, uhhhhn! Your beard, it feels sooooo good, mmmmmmm! [His fingers, with half-inchlong nails, fondle his own face, his stubbly chin, impersonating the hands of an unseen lover, making love with himself.] Your beard feels sooo good, mmmmmmm, yes it does. It all comes from the father into the woman. [Suddenly he assumes his teaching position.] See, it's because I am a bastard that I can accept the truth. Hell, I am my father! The Father... the Son... [He withdraws in mock terror from some imaginary host of accusers, pushing the thought away with extended hands.] No, no, NO... it's not me... you've got it all wrong. I'm not-you couldn't think that! I don't know what you're talking about. Listen, I'll get a job. [He continues fighting his phantom, Jacob wrestling with his angel, then giggles.] See, the cop-out is Christianity. If you believe in Christianity, you don't have to believe in Christ. Get a job and you won't have to think about it at all.

Being in jail protected me in a way from society. I was inside, so I couldn't take part, play the games that society expects you to play. I've been in jail twenty-two years. The most I was out was maybe six months. I just wasn't contaminated, I kept my innocence. I got so I actually loved solitary. That was supposed to be punishment. I loved it. There is nothing to do in prison anyway, so all they can get you to do is "Get up! Sit down!" So solitary was great. I began to hear music inside my head. I had concerts inside my cell. When the time came for my release, I didn't want to go. Yeah, man, solitary was beautiful.

WHAT DO YOU FEEL ABOUT JUDGE KEENE TAKING AWAY YOUR PRO PER PRIVILEGE?

The judge is just the flip side of the preacher. He took away my pro per privilege because they don't want me to speak. They want to shut me up, because they know if I get up on the stand, I am going to blow the whole thing wide open. They don't want to hear it. Between you and me, if that judge asks for my life, I'm going to give it to him right there in the courtroom. But first of all he is going to have to deal with my music, the music in my fingers and my body. [Charlie demonstrates. His nails tap out an incredible riff on the table, the chair, the glass of the booth, like the scurrying footsteps of some strung-out rodent.]

He is going to have to deal with that power. I'm probably one of the most dangerous men in the world if I want to be. But I never wanted to be anything but me. If the judge says death, I am death. I've always been dead. Death is life.

Anything you see in me is in you. If you want to see a vicious killer, that's who you'll see, do you understand that? If you see me as your brother, that's what I'll be. It all depends on how much love you have. I am you, and when you can admit that, you will be free. I am just a mirror.

Did you see what they did to that guy in the Chicago Seven trial? Hoffman saw in those guys what he wanted to see. That's why he found them guilty. The white man is fading, everybody knows that. The black man will take over, they can't stop it. And they won't be able to stop me either unless they gag me.

WHY DO YOU THINK BLACK PEOPLE WILL GAIN POWER?

They were the first people to have power. The pharaohs were black. The Egyptians took one man and raised him up above the rest. They put him on the throne and they fed all these lines of energy into him. [He folds his arms across his chest like Tutankhamen, holding his pencil between two fingers like a pharaoh's rod.] That means power. This represents the penis, the power. They built the pyramids with this energy. Love built the pyramids. Power without love is aggression. There has been no true love since the pharaohs. Except for J.C. He knew what love meant.

Tempt me not. Do you remember the story about Jesus on the hill? You know, the devil takes Him to the edge of this cliff, [Charlie leans over the table as if precariously on the edge of the Void] and he says to Him, "If you're God, prove it by jumping off the edge." And Jesus says, "There ain't nothing to prove, man." When you doubt, your mind is in two parts. It's divided against itself. See, Christ is saying, "Past, get behind me." The Devil is in the past. The Devil is the past. What he is saying is, "Don't think. He who thinks is lost, because if you have to think about something, to doubt it, you're lost already."

My philosophy is: Don't think. I don't believe in the mind that you think with and scheme with. I don't believe in words. IF YOU DON'T BELIEVE IN WORDS, WHY DO YOU USE SO MANY OF THEM? Words are symbols. All I'm doing is jumbling the symbols in your brain. Everything is symbolic. Symbols are just connections in your brain. Even your body is a symbol.

CAN YOU EXPLAIN THE MEANING OF REVELATIONS, CHAPTER 9?

What do you think it means? It's the battle of Armageddon. It's the end of the world. It was the Beatles "Revolution 9" that turned me on to it. It predicts the overthrow of the Establishment. The pit will be opened, and that's when it will all come down. A third of all mankind will die. The only people who escape will be those who have the seal of God on their foreheads. You know the part, "They will seek death, but they will not find it."

CAN YOU EXPLAIN THE PROPHECIES YOU FOUND IN THE BEATLES' DOUBLE ALBUM?

[Charlie starts drawing some lines on the back of a sheet of white paper, three vertical lines and one horizontal line. In the bottom area he writes the word SUB.] Okay. Give me the names of four songs on the album. [We chose "Piggies," "Helter Skelter" and "Blackbird," and he adds "Rocky Raccoon." Charlie writes down the titles at the top of each vertical section. Under "Helter Skelter" he draws a zigzag line, under "Blackbird" two strokes, somehow indicating bird sounds. Very strange.] This bottom part is the subconscious. At the end of each song, there is a little tag piece on it, a couple of notes. Or like in "Piggies," there's "oink, oink, oink." Just these couple of sounds. And all these sounds are repeated in "Revolution 9." Like in "Revolution 9" all these pieces are fitted together and they predict the violent overthrow of the white man. Like you'll hear "oink, oink," and then right after that, machine-gun fire. [He sprays the room with imaginary slugs.] AK-AK-AK-AK-AK-AK!

DO YOU REALLY THINK THE BEATLES INTENDED TO MEAN THAT?

I think it's a subconscious thing. I don't know whether they did or not. But it's there. It's an association in the subconscious. This music is bringing on the revolution, the unorganized overthrow of the Establishment. The Beatles know in the sense that the subconscious knows.

WHAT DOES "ROCKY RACCOON" MEAN, THEN?

Coon. You know that's a word they use for black people. You know the line, "Gideon checked out/And he left it no doubt/To help with good Rocky's revival." Rocky's revival - re-vival. It means coming back to life. The black man is going to come back into power again. "Gideon checks out" means that it's all written out there in the New Testament, in the Book of Revelations.

DO YOU THINK YOU WILL EVER GET OUT OF JAIL?

I don't care. I'm as at home here as anywhere. Anywhere is anywhere you want it to be. It's all the same to me. I'm not afraid of death, so what can they do to me? I don't care what they do. The only thing I care about is my love.

Death is psychosomatic. The gas chamber? [Charlie laughs.] My God, are you kidding? It's all verses, all climaxes, all music. Death is permanent solitary confinement, and there is nothing I would like more than that.

* * * * * * * *

A bell rings. A deputy comes over to tell us the time is up. The jail is closing for the night. Charlie gives us a song he's composed in jail, "Man Cross Woman," written neatly on lined yellow paper ripped from a legal tablet.

Charlie just stands at the entrance to the attorney room, smiling. Outside, in the distance, Clem and Squeaky wave and smile back ecstatically at their captured kind, their fingers pressed against the glass. The deputies watch Charlie, puzzled, as he flops his head from one side to the other like a clown. They cannot see Clem and Squeaky behind them, imitating his every movement, communicating in a silent animal language.