When Blake learned he had ten days to reach Denver, he quickly planned a few visits along the way. His brother was studying Computational Neuroscience at the University of Pittsburgh. His grandmother lived in Illinois. His college friend was studying History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Indiana. Blake planned to visit each of them for a day or two, then to rush across the plains to Denver.
The Illiniwek, Kiikaapoa, Mamaceqtaw, Meskwaki, and Sauk nations all lived around the Great Lakes. They grew corn and squash. They practiced elaborate burial rituals. They traded with far-off places. Today, scholars call their language family Algonquin. In 1717, French Canadians built a fort to control the Wabash River and Indigenous trade routes. In 1763, the French lost a war against the British. They were forced to cede their claims to all lands between the Mississippi River and the Appalachian Mountains. Algonquin soldiers seized the fort and the British Empire, perhaps under duress, granted them all land west of the Appalachians. When the United States rose to power, it incorporated all the Algonquin lands and the entire Great Lakes area into the Territory Northwest of the River Ohio. Congress later divided this territory into states. Settlers stripped the Algonquin of their land using the usual methods: murder, theft, plague, fraud, propaganda, and war. Two brothers, Tecumseh and Tensquatawa, formed a coalition to resist these incursions and trespasses. After a cataclysmic defeat at the battle of Tippecanoe and the death of both brothers, the Algonquin nations could not muster the military force necessary to stop the colonial armies. Between 1800 and 1820, soldiers relocated most Native people to lands west of the Mississippi.
Blake drove across Pennsylvania in five hours. The highway wound through mountains, trees bright with dew, gray roils of cloud folded across the sky; scraps of fog shorn by crags drifted across the path of Blake’s blue comet. He felt like pulling off onto the shoulder, crawling out among the loose stones, and curling up like a wounded animal.
In Pittsburgh, Blake parked near his brother’s address. Pittsburgh was built around Fort Pitt, which British and French soldiers had used to control the confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers, which form the Ohio. Blake had graduated from the University of Pittsburgh a few years earlier, majoring in English Writing and Literature. Blake’s brother was renting a house with a few friends. While his brother was in class, Blake wandered around the campus, grimly admiring the brutal concrete offices and plazas, the labyrinths of terraces and tunnels, the shabby expanses of rowhomes and weed-shattered pavement. As a college student, he had wandered through scrapyards and concrete-slab badlands, the underbellies of bridges and embankment-stairways, narrow streets where asphalt crumbled into gravel. A man had been welding in his driveway, overalls open to the chest. A sign had been taped to the window of a house, reading, “Kill your TV.” An old man had walked out onto the porch and invited Blake and Mohammed to drink tea and play chess with him. But years later, as a graduate, Blake just walked around the student slums, limbs heavy and eyes unfocused. Everything was the way he remembered it, but he felt bitter, not curious.
His brother was a little paler than him, and blonder. That night they went to a bar and saw a sleek electro-funk ensemble. Neither of them danced much, but they enjoyed the music. Blake’s brother lived like an obsessive craftsman, surrounded by neuroscience and information theory. He said he rarely saw live music. Blake could grin and laugh occasionally, but he felt like he didn’t know how to have fun anymore. They got home late. In the morning, Blake got in his car and left the city.
His grandmother lived in South Bend, Indiana, an impeccably clean town with hundreds of identical streetlamps. She had a wide, flat house on a scenic lot, laid out like a Japanese garden, with grass paths curving through beds of English Ivy. She curled her hair and dyed it auburn. Blake walked her dog and trimmed her hedges. She cooked ham and scalloped potatoes. He drank beer and she drank whiskey. She watched FOX News on television while he browsed social media on his laptop. She didn’t talk about politics. He couldn’t bear it either.
Indianapolis was a single enormous motorway, a highway interchange made of highway interchanges with skyscrapers and warehouses in between. Bloomington, the home of the University of Indiana, was a quiet, tree-lined town, esoteric, erudite, and harmless. Blake’s friend, Andrew, called himself “a short version of a fairly attractive person.” He had sharp features and light-tan skin. They drank craft beers at a modern bar where the tables were made of polished beech. That night, they went to a party in a neighborhood of hills and pines, where the professors lived.
Andrew was a graduate student. He knew the value of collaboration. Like all his friends, he was brilliant and forthright, casually tossing off cynical wisdom. He espoused the Dismissive Theory of Discourse, which holds that some arguments are too stupid to bother considering. (This theory was recently categorized as “Marxist” on FOX News.) Andrew studied Human Ecology. He made horrifying comments just to challenge people’s sense of propriety. Every day, he became more dismissive of human civilization.
At this party, there was a fat, ruddy man with a scraggly beard who unironically argued that the one true religion had been practiced by certain Neoplatonic cults which had embraced Porphyry and rejected Iamblichus. He had reconstructed this religion from archeological and historical evidence, and he claimed to practice both veganism and animal sacrifice. Blake couldn’t stop arguing with him because he was desperate to understand how such an irrational idiot could successfully pursue a Master’s Degree, but eventually he hit a brick wall and recoiled in horror when he learned that this man founded his entire philosophy on “blind faith.” Now fairly drunk, they watched a movie about the relationship between Charles Manson and the Beach Boys.
The Beach Boys consisted of Brian, Dennis, and Carl Wilson, three brothers, as well as their cousin, Mike Love, and their friend, Al Jardine. Murray Wilson, the father of the three brothers, abused everyone around him, both physically and psychologically, just as his own father had done.
This book is hosted on another platform. Read the official version and support the author's work.
Brian Wilson dated a 15-year-old girl when he was 19. He later married her, refused to help raise their children, and cheated on her with a teenage telephone operator. He was the lead singer of the Beach Boys and he believed that, “The great Messiah comes in the form of drugs.”
Dennis Wilson was Brian’s brother. From a young age, he exhibited energetic, violent, and avoidant behavior. To exercise his urges, he started hunting at the age of nine. He raced bikes, horses, and cars. He fought, he chased girls, and he learned to play boogie-woogie. He was the only member of the Beach Boys who actually surfed.
When the Beach Boys became famous, Dennis spent all of his money. He rented a house in Hollywood, California. He began using LSD regularly and became terrified that his fame might fade. He performed rituals before playing music. In 1968, he gave a ride to two girls hitchhiking. They happened to be members of the Manson Family, a cult controlled by Charles Manson. One was named Patricia. The next day, he met the same girls at the same place. He invited them to stay at his house.
Patricia Krenwinkel was born in Los Angeles and bullied throughout her childhood. She decided to become a nun, enrolled in a Jesuit college, and dropped out within one year to become a clerk. She met Charles Manson on Manhattan Beach in Los Angeles, 1967. He was accompanied by two other women named Mary and Lynette. At the time, Manson was 33 and all three of the women were in their early 20s. Patricia had sex with Manson that night. The next day, she left her life behind to join him. They explored the American West. The girls danced naked in the woods while Manson played the flute. He convinced them to recruit other girls.
Mary Brunner was known for her wide, staring eyes, her enigmatic smile, her criminal genius, and her complete lack of empathy. Lynette suffered from depression and drug addiction. Her parents had kicked her out; she was homeless. Mary assisted Manson in recruiting Lynette, then the two women helped recruit Patricia. Manson eventually recruited about 30 women, most of them very young. He acted like a guru, preached peace and cooperation, but he ruled over them tyrannically and forced them to sell sex and commit violent crimes. He prophesied an apocalyptic race-war in which Black people would make him King of America.
Charles Manson’s father was a con-man who had pretended to be an army colonel. His mother was a teenage alcoholic. When she became pregnant, the “colonel” disappeared on “army business” and never returned. At the age of nine, Manson set his school on fire. He was transferred to a Catholic school for delinquent boys, where harsh punishments were prescribed for small infractions. Shortly after running away from this school, he was arrested for a string of armed robberies and sent to the National Training School for Boys in Washington, D.C., where he raped a boy at knifepoint and later attempted to escape by stealing a car. After being released, he made a living by pimping young girls and passing fake checks. By 1967, he had spent over half his life in prison. He had incredible social and emotional intelligence, but no remorse, no empathy, and a consistent pattern of abusive, manipulative, and controlling behavior. During the course of his life, he progressed from schizoaffective to schizophrenic.
Charles Manson got parole in Los Angeles. He immediately absconded to Berkeley, where he contacted the parole office. For some reason, they transferred his parole the Berkeley office and assigned him to Roger Smith. Smith was a federal parole officer and a doctoral researcher studying the effects of drugs upon counterculture movements. He worked at the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic, where he studied methamphetamine and LSD in particular. This program was funded by the National Institutes of Health. Manson began taking LSD, preaching free love, collecting retinues of girls, and bringing them to Roger Smith to participate in experiments.
Between 1953 and 1975, a CIA program called MK-ULTRA conducted experiments on Americans and people from other countries, often without their knowledge. The researchers were searching for substances that could paralyze people, render them vulnerable to suggestion or interrogation, weaken their motivation, or cause confused and irrational behavior. They found great success with LSD, but also employed barbiturates, amphetamines, opiates, alcohol, and hypnosis. To test their substances and techniques, they operated secret prison camps in Germany, Japan, and the Philippines. They set up brothels in San Francisco to test substances on gay men. In the course of their research, the CIA formed relationships with over 80 institutions. In 1973, most records of MK-ULTRA were destroyed when the program came to light.
Dennis Wilson came home from the recording studio and found Charles Manson standing on his lawn. Manson claimed they had met before, at a party, and said that Dennis had invited him to visit. Dennis’ home was filled with girls, 20 or 30 of them. Apparently, Patricia had invited her family. Over the next six months, Wilson gave over $100,000 in gifts to the Manson Family. He recorded a song written by Manson. The song had originally been titled, “Cease to Exist,” but the Beach Boys published it under the name, “Never Learn not to Love.” The Beach Boys’ version of the song bore little resemblance to Manson’s, though both were mediocre. When Manson learned that the Beach Boys had changed his lyrics, he became furious. Brian bought his writing credit in exchange for a large sum of cash and a motorcycle. Dennis became terrified of Manson. Eventually, he fled his own house and lived with a friend.
When Manson threatened Dennis’ family, Dennis threw him to the ground and beat him, then chased the Manson Family out of his house. In 1969, they murdered several famous people on Manson’s orders. Their motive was unclear, but they tried to blame it on the Black Panthers, so they may have been trying to start a race war. Patricia and Mary were present. Lynette later tried to recruit Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin, but failed. She also tried to assassinate President Gerald Ford. Charles Manson died in prison.
Dennis persisted in his addictions. By 1983, he was homeless. In 1984, after drinking all day, he dove into the ocean in an attempt to retrieve his ex-wife’s belongings, which she had thrown into the water three years earlier, at the time of their divorce. He died and was buried at sea. Brian Wilson was still touring in 2019. Charles Manson’s music was also covered by Marilyn Manson and Guns N’ Roses.
After watching the movie, Blake was shaken. When he was in college, he had taken LSD and listened to “Wouldn’t It Be Nice?” while playing Mario Kart: Double Dash. He walked back to Andrew’s house in the strange, cool, silent darkness of Bloomington. The whole town felt like a military base.
