Since I Lost My Baby - Chapter 1 (Excerpt)

Prisoner of Love

Los Angeles, 1971

The wide metal doors of the service elevator, creaking and worn from the strain of carrying so many lost souls, moved toward one another to close shut and take me to my assigned cellblock. I was twenty years old and had just finished being interrogated and booked at the Sybil Brand Institute for Women, a miserable facility on the eastern rim of downtown Los Angeles. It was my first time going to jail but not my maiden voyage of being locked up.

As the grimy panels of the elevator were about to meet, a voice from down the hall shouted, “Stop! Wait!” and the guard escorting me shoved a stubby palm between them, causing the doors to pop back open, allowing in three women and their jailor returning from the day’s proceedings in court. It was late, about seven o’clock, and before going to our cells, we were all herded to the dining hall to be fed.

The two guards were faceless female forms stuffed into khaki; leather and metal jangling about their waists like a belly dancer’s hip scarf. The three women prisoners joining us were the same age as I was and looked exactly like me: jail-issued denim dresses, dark blue varsity sweaters, and flip flops, although I noticed one was shod in clunky, orthopedic-type shoes. With our long dark hair and matching outfits, the four of us looked like repeating mirror images of one another.

The elevator doors finally closed, and a distinct tension began to fill the cabin. As it rose, the vibration escalated, making me scared the elevator was going to crash. I glanced toward the girls riding with me and saw an all-knowing smirk curling from the mouth of the one in the clunky shoes.

Her head was angled so that the guard wouldn’t notice, and her eyes turned barely but quite deliberately in my direction, as if to make the point that although we were all in handcuffs, she harnessed a power that was beyond theirs. Then I realized that the distress in the elevator was cosmic, not mechanical, and I noticed the pale scar of an “x” between her brows and on the foreheads of the other two.

And finally I recognized who I was in the elevator with.

• • •

Like me, and like so many of us in the 1960s, Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel, and Leslie Van Houten arrived at the end of their teenage years damaged, vulnerable, desperate for love, and searching for the Big Truth. Certainly there were other less obvious, perhaps even pathological things that set us apart. But from my perspective in 1971, there was only one distinction between us.

I’d never crossed paths with Charles Manson.

Mindful of the guards, I studied the three hippie girls as if I were looking at myself. They had just been convicted of the 1969 murders of pregnant actress Sharon Tate and four others in Benedict Canyon; and that of a Los Feliz couple, Leno and Rosemary LaBianca, and were now in the sentencing phase of their trial, facing the death penalty. Ever since their arrest, sensational stories about the so-called Manson family had filled the newspapers. But standing face-to-face with them in the jail elevator that night, it was as difficult to imagine these three girls my age stabbing their victims to death and writing on the walls with their blood as it was to imagine myself doing that.

And yet, though it was merely a cliché to me in 1971, there was little else I could think of that had kept me from becoming one of them.

“There but for the grace of God go I.”

Hitting The Wall

“Up against the wall!” we used to say out there in the quad of San Fernando Valley State College in Northridge, California, where I’d spent most of the four years prior to getting busted raising my voice and shaking my fist at the sky. “Up against the wall . . . !” followed by a colorful twelve-letter epithet beginning with the word “mother” that substituted for the name of any and all Establishment lackeys.

Swirling untethered in the Kennedy-Oswald-Ruby triangle, enraged by the war in Vietnam, and pumped on the boiling anger that had exploded in Watts and Newark and Detroit, we were the Alienation Generation: true believers in the idea that there was nothing left to believe in, and that a new order, by any means necessary, had to be forged. Back then it was a clear-cut Us against Them affair: the People vs. the Man. If you weren’t part of the solution, you were part of the problem. And as the curtain fell on the peace-love contingent of the 1960s, courtesy of Susan, Patricia, and Leslie, we ended the decade suspicious, cynical, and hating everything.

But here at Sybil Brand Jail, “the wall” became something else: something to become like; something flat and dull, without anxiety or feelings; something without fear or hope; something without life. We all had to go there. Eventually every prisoner was forced to transit the arc of arrest frenzy and jailhouse denial, and to don the glaze of nothingness just to get through each hour. To become blank, like the mush-colored walls that held us in. There wasn’t a doggone thing I could do about all the stuff that worried me like, What am I doing here? or Who’s going to water my Coleus?

After dinner, where there was no talking allowed, the Manson girls and I went our separate ways, and I landed in a cell with Liz, a chunky lesbian who seemed to have some pull around the cellblock. When she saw I came in there with nothing, Liz handed me a Hershey bar and showed me a stash of candy, tampons, and cigarettes, which she used for barter and also sold at a mark-up when there was no commissary. Liz was tough, but for no apparent reason, she was nicer to me than I expected anyone to be. Word got around that I had no money, and as other women made bail, several of them left behind for me the little denim drawstring bags they’d been issued to keep their coins and wadded-up dollar bills in.

“Here, girl, you take this,” said one sister, pushing her small bag through the bars. She had long fingernails, choppy jet black hair, and a huge cursive tattoo peeking out of the neckline of her dress.

“I got stuff on the outside.” She smiled. “You be okay now.”

I was surprised by the unexpected kindness. But Sybil’s wasn’t without class distinctions.

“What’s your rap?” we were always being asked. That answer was far more important than your name; it established your identity, rank, and status. Although I appeared to be a la-de-dah flower child, with my look-alike hippie jail-mates convicted of murder, prisoners were now cautious about judging one another on appearance only. While the charges against me weren’t capital murder, they were serious enough to raise plucked eyebrows and keep the bullies at bay.

For my part, it was felony dumbness that I wound up in jail. That day I’d been hanging out with a golden-haired hippie named John who suggested we stop by his pal Wally’s place for something to drink. We’d only been there for five minutes when undercover cops wearing Hawaiian shirts came to the door. Holding a lit joint in his hand, Wally, who was dealing pot and pills, opened up and let them in. After the cops tore up Wally’s bungalow, the three of us were handcuffed, shackled together, and taken to jail, where we were all charged with felony sales and possession.

I spent my first night at Sybil’s huddled in my bunk, staring at the wall, and commanding my soul to shut down every emotion. At five o’clock in the morning, the guards shuffled us bleary-eyed toward the dining hall, where we were lined up single file with prisoners from the other cellblocks. At nearly every meal, I found myself sitting across from at least one pasty-faced girl with stringy hair and an “x” carved in between her eyebrows. You might think that the Manson family was composed only of the infamous handful involved in the Tate-La Bianca murders. But every movement has its doers and its followers—minor league groupies and wannabes who hang out on the fringe and talk the talk but somehow miss the Big Moment.

The inmates at Sybil’s were of every age and background, including a shy, soft-spoken woman named Frankie who loved being in a place where she had her own bed, got fed three squares a day, and where people cared about what she did, even if they were guards. Frankie made no secret about the fact that as soon as they let her out, she would do something else so she could come back to jail. And then there was the elderly black lady who had gotten her wig in a tizzle for the last time at her abusive old husband, finally taking matters, and a pistol, into her own hands.

Our individual cell doors, which faced the narrow caged hallway of our cellblock, were opened during the day, and we were allowed to walk the length of the hallway within our block. A few days into my stay, I noticed a Latina woman who, despite the ban on going back to bed, was curled up in a fetal position on her bunk, her waist-length black hair wiping grime on the floor. Her head came up slowly when she saw me, and the two of us stared at one another for a long time. She wasn’t that old, but she was a total wreck. Face mottled from acne, raccoon circles around her eyes, her scrawny brown body folded up like a lawn chair. She was a junkie, and she was going through withdrawal.

“You okay?” I asked.

She nodded her head and sat up.

“Why don’t you tell the guard you need to go to the infirmary?”

“Cause I’m just in here for kiting. I can’t get sent to a program. I got kids.”

And suddenly we knew.

Her name was Marguerite, and we’d been locked up together four years earlier at the Florence Crittenton Home for Unwed Mothers, where she had been exotic, beautiful, and friendly. The two of us used to go for walks together, cutting through the alley where the Scotch Broom grew.

“You kept your baby?”

“Of course,” she said, as if anything else was unthinkable.

I stepped back. No one—not the social worker, the Director, or my parents—had told me that keeping my baby was an option.

A pained smile crossed Marguerite’s face. She reached out toward me from her bed.

“And now I got two more,” she said proudly.

I didn’t want to hear it. I fumbled in the pocket of my dress, handing over the Hershey bar Liz had given me; maybe it would help her get through the pain. Without saying goodbye, I turned and went back to my cell to stare at the wall.

Let Me Go The Right Way

Just my luck, I got arrested on the Thursday night before the four-day President Abraham Lincoln holiday weekend, so the clock wouldn’t start ticking on my arraignment, which someone told me was required within seventy-two court hours, until Tuesday. Monday was the day Liz had waited for, banked on; the day when, after a long weekend in which the commissary was closed, everyone was out of everything, and she could mark up her prices accordingly.

I did my best to count the court hours, but I didn’t know if they took off an hour for lunch breaks or what, and the days dragged on until I’d been there without going before a judge for seven days. Finally a guard came and told me, “The District Attorney has reviewed your case and determined there is not enough evidence to press charges.”

Like duh, I could have told him that.

I pushed the little drawstring bag I’d carried since the night I arrived, a few coins still left, into Marguerite’s hands as the guard escorted me past her cell and out of the block. They let me use the phone to call my father, who’d picked up my impounded Dodge Lancer the day I was arrested, and a few hours later he arrived at the jail. I would rather have taken the bus to my apartment in Hollywood, but my dad wanted to give me the heads-up that he’d told my mom I’d spent the weekend in San Diego. I was ashamed at having gotten into such awful trouble and agreed with him that not telling my mother the truth was for the best.

Having come so close to losing my freedom, I was desperately grateful to get home to my apartment on La Mirada Avenue, where my Coleus had died. That night I vowed to become a reformed citizen with appropriate fear of authority, and never to do anything wrong again.

• • •

Excerpted from Since I Lost My Baby: A Memoir of Temptations, Trouble & Truth (OG Press) Copyright 2020 Selimah Nemoy • All Rights Reserved

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