Read The White Album for Free Online

waiting out the time until she could testify about the murders of Sharon Tate Polanski, Abigail Folger, Jay Sebring, Voytek Frykowski, Steven Parent, and Rosemary and Leno LaBianca, and, with her lawyer, Gary Fleischman, I spent a number of evenings talking to her there . Of these evenings I remember mainly my dread at entering the prison, at leaving for even an hour the infinite possibilities I suddenly perceived in the summer twilight . I remember driving downtown on the Hollywood Freeway in Gary Fleischman’s Cadillac convertible with the top down . I remember watching a rabbit graze on the grass by the gate as Gary Fleischman signed the prison register . Each of the half-dozen doors that locked behind us as we entered Sybil Brand was a little death, and I would emerge after the interview like Persephone from the underworld, euphoric, elated . Once home I would have two drinks and make myself a hamburger and eat it ravenously .
    “Dig it,” Gary Fleischman was always saying . One night when we were driving back to Hollywood from Sybil Brand in the Cadillac convertible with the top down he demanded that I tell him the population of India . I said that I did not k now the population of India . “Take a guess,” he prompted . I made a guess, absurdly low, and he was disgusted . He had asked the same question of his niece (“a college girl”), of Linda, and now of me, and none of us had known . It seemed to confirm some idea he had of women, their essential ineducability, their similarity under the skin . Gary Fleischman was someone of a type I met only rarely, a comic realist in a porkpie hat, a business traveler on the far frontiers of the period, a man who knew his way around the courthouse and Sybil Brand and remained cheerful, even jaunty, in the face of the awesome and impenetrable mystery at the center of what he called “the case . ” In fact we never talked about “the case,” and referred to its central events only as “Cielo Drive” and “LaBianca . ” We talked instead about Linda’s childhood pastimes and disappointments, her high-school romances and her concern for her children . This particular juxtaposition of the spoken and the unspeakable was eerie and unsettling, and made my notebook a litany of little ironies so obvious as to be of interest only to dedicated absurdists . An example: Linda dreamed of opening a combination restaurant-boutique and pet shop .
     
    12
    Certain organic disorders of the central nervous system are characterized by periodic remissions, the apparent complete recovery of the afflicted nerves . What happens appears to be this: as the lining of a nerve becomes inflamed and hardens into scar tissue, thereby blocking the passage of neural impulses, the nervous system gradually changes its circuitry, finds other, unaffected nerves to carry the same messages . During the years when I found it necessary to revise the circuitry of my mind I discovered that I was no longer interested in whether the woman on the ledge outside the window on the sixteenth floor jumped or did not jump, or in why . I was interested only in the picture of her in my mind: her hair incandescent in the floodlights, her bare toes curled inward on the stone ledge .
    In this light all narrative was sentimental . In this light all connections were equally meaningful, and equally senseless . Try these: on the morning of John Kennedy’s death in 1963 I was buying, at Ransohoff ’s in San Francisco, a short silk dress in which to be married . A few years later this dr ess of mine was ruined when, at a dinner party in Bel-Air, Roman Polanski accidentally spilled a glass of red wine on it . Sharon Tate was also a guest at this party, although she and Roman Polanski were not yet married . On July 27,1970,1 went to the Magnin-Hi Shop on the third floor of I . Magnin in Beverly Hills and picked out, at Linda Kasabian’s request, the dress in which she began her testimony about the murders at Sharon Tate