The Last Victim_ A True-Life Journey Into the Mind of the Serial Killer - Jason Moss [48]
“First I got no books,” Manson complained, “and its clear by your words that you were razed & taught how to bullshit your own thoughts & pay rent to live in your old life. Your a gamer & start out hiding behind your own words about what you think is all yourself.”
Of course, he had reason to be paranoid. I was being deceitful and dishonest with him. It was sensible of him to mistrust my motives.
In particular, it really seemed to bother him that I was a student, because that meant I aspired to be part of the establishment. He raged on and on, incoherently screaming at me in his letters that I wasn’t worthy of his trust. “I know a hole system of people like you,” he wrote, “who hide in books & schools & live on paper computing banks & past. I already got some books thanks—How long you been working in the mail room unless you make the rules in the mail room.”
In referring to me as working in the mail room, he was voicing his suspicion that I was working him “from the inside,” meaning within the prison itself. It might seem as if he’d caught on to me, but that wasn’t the case at all. He was merely testing me. If he truly believed what he said, then he wouldn’t have written back at all. Some weeks, he received over ten pounds of mail. Consequently, he was very selective in his replies.
I hoped that by being aggressive toward him, by letting him know that I wasn’t in awe of his notoriety, I’d prompt him to reevaluate me. And sure enough, when I began pushing him more instead of acting apologetic, he responded more authentically, even sending me poems that, while I couldn’t exactly understand them, did have a certain eerie power. Written on his personal stationery, with a watermark of his eyes staring at me in the background, the lines of gibberish ran down the page: “Be Bop, Boot & Shoe ding dong the bell has been rang.”
The combination of his words and those eyes looking at me disturbed me greatly. Even though it was impossible to impose any meaning on the gibberish, it still felt like something was coming across. In occasional moments of self-awareness, I realized I was becoming polluted by Manson’s evil, crazy thoughts.
Therapists have reported that when they allow themselves to get close to very disturbed people, they sometimes experience some of their despair, hopelessness, and destructive urges. This applied to me, because after I read some of Manson’s letters, even more so than after reading Gacy’s, I felt like I needed to take a shower to cleanse myself of the weirdness.
I wondered if Manson was consciously aware of all the things he did to manipulate and control others. So in one of my letters I decided to get the answer to this question indirectly by asking him how I should spread his word to others.
As usual, I didn’t understand his response. He seemed to be telling me that you can’t really teach anyone anything: “They TEACH you one world but when you go to LIVE what you forget you learn that people has been BULL shiting you—you cant find your self in any one else—you are your own experiences & they cant teach you your life.”
It was frustrating to deal with a person who communicated so strangely, even in response to direct questions. I tend to be hyperlogical, so Manson was an especially difficult challenge for me. I kept asking him about how I could survive in the world, how I should follow his teachings, how I could bring others under my/his control, and his responses were all over the map. He seemed to have the attention span of a gnat.
He kept sending me songs, poems, lectures, and scraps of his philosophy, even if I could understand very little of what he was driving at. Perhaps a trained forensic psychologist could venture some informed guesses about what Manson was referring to,