American Girls by Alison Umminger
For my parents, with love and gratitude
These children that come at you with knives, they are your children.
—Charles Manson
Preflight
My first Manson girl was Leslie Van Houten, the homecoming princess with the movie-star smile. She was on death row at nineteen for putting a knife into the already-dead body of some poor, random woman for the lamest reason that anyone gives for doing anything: all the other kids were doing it. I found her by accident, reading an article in the waiting room of the lady-parts doctor my mom was going to when she was trying to get pregnant with my brother. I’d been to the same office the year before, when I got my period, because my mom wanted a professional to lecture me about not getting knocked up. I was probably so traumatized that I forgot you couldn’t use cell phones in the lobby—something about the radiation screwing with the pictures of the fetuses. This time, someone had left an old Rolling Stone next to the magazines about babies and pregnancy. Thank God. If the choices were between reading about psychopaths and “How I Fit Back into My Prepregnancy Jeans,” then it really wasn’t much of a choice.
The article was written by John Waters, a director who made a movie called Pink Flamingos. My sister’s then boyfriend had insisted we watch the film the Thanksgiving before, because he had seen it as a boy in Poland and had had some kind of revelation about his life. After that, he just knew that he wanted to go to America. Nasty, filthy America, where you could put a person on trial for being an * and supersize transsexuals ate dog shit off of lawns, at least in the movies. Happy Thanksgiving and pass the peas! After seeing Pink Flamingos, I wasn’t exactly shocked to learn that John Waters made friends with a Manson girl. He was out there. She was probably scared of him.
The whole morning had been stressful, because it was the day my mom was going to see if the baby inside of her had a heartbeat. The time before there hadn’t been, and months of torture followed. It’s not that I wasn’t sad for my mom, I was, but she took so long to start getting out of bed again that I practically had to move in with my best friend, Doon, just to get a bowl of cereal in the morning. I never knew someone could get so upset about something the size of a quarter.
The Rolling Stone article was about what a regular person Leslie Van Houten was, if you could get past that whole murder thing. I knew for a fact that Charles Manson was not a regular person. I had watched part of a biography about him once at Doon’s—he had pinwheels for eyes and a swastika carved in his forehead, which pretty much disqualified him from “regular.” He had masterminded the murder of Sharon Tate, a very pretty, very pregnant woman whose face I couldn’t remember, and that made me think of my mother and feel guilty for reading an article like that while she was having her big appointment. Manson did all of his crimes with a pack of women, girls who made it look like they’d found a way to clone crazy and dress it down with stringy hair, empty stares, lots of drugs, and lots of knives. Most people never thought about them as separate people at all. Definitely not as girls who went to homecoming once, or who got dragged to the lady-parts doctor by their moms.
Leslie Van Houten was a Manson girl, and she didn’t help kill the pregnant one. She did, however, put a knife into the corpse of mother-of-two Rosemary LaBianca—and not just once but at least a dozen times. Then she watched while her friends wrote on the walls in blood. She also read the Bible to Charles Manson while he bathed, which was just gross and weird on top of everything else. Three things stuck with me about the article. First, that John Waters, the writer, thought that forty years was long enough for a person to be in prison for doing something stupid as a teenager—even something really, really stupid, like World Series stupid. Second, that Van Houten was tripping so hard on LSD that she thought that after they’d murdered everyone she was going to become a fairy and fly away—she even asked her dad if she should cut holes in the back of her jacket to get ready for the fairy-tastic new world. In school, meth was the drug they were worried we’d start taking, and they liked to scare us with pictures of homeless-looking people, toothless and aged a decade overnight. LSD sounded like a whole other world of batshit.
The third thing I remembered was that John Waters said that Leslie Van Houten would have been happier if she’d wound up in Baltimore, hanging out with shit-eating transsexuals and making movies about killing people as opposed to actually killing people. She would have been a different person if she’d washed up in Baltimore, not California.
I made it most of the way through the article before my mom came out, hugging me and practically making out with her wife, because they were going to have a baby. It seemed like bad luck to keep reading about murders after news like that, so I left the magazine and forgot about Leslie Van Houten. I only remembered her two years later, when I was in the airport getting ready to board my flight to Los Angeles, looking over my shoulder to see if my mom had figured out that I’d left. The flight next to mine was headed to Baltimore—it was twice delayed and the passengers looked tired and sad, the exact wrong look for people to have before getting on an airplane. For some reason, when I was finally on my own flight, with the main door to the airplane safely sealing out the life I was leaving behind, I thought about John Waters and what he’d written about Van Houten, how she hadn’t just picked the wrong person but the wrong place. And I sent him a mental note, because it seemed like something he should have known, and because it was true: No one runs away to Baltimore.