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Polanski’s house on Cielo Drive . “Size 9 Petite,” her instructions read . “Mini but not extremely mini . In velvet if possible . Emerald green or gold . Or: A Mexican peasant-style dress, smocked or embroidered . ” She needed a dress that morning because the district attorney,Vincent Bugliosi, had expressed doubts about the dress she had planned to wear, a long white homespun shift . “Long is for evening,” he had advised Linda . Long was for evening and white was for brides . At her own wedding in 1965 Linda Kasabian had worn a white brocade suit . Time passed, times changed . Everything was to teach us something . At 11:20 on that July morning in 1970 I delivered the dress in which she would testify to Gary Fleischman, who was waiting in front of his office on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills . He was wearing his porkpie hat and he was standing with Linda ’s second husband, Bob Kasabian, and their friend Charlie Melton, both of whom were wearing long white robes . Long was for Bob and Charlie, the dress in the I . Magnin box was for Linda . The three of them took the I . Magnin box and got into Gary Fleischman’s Cadillac convertible with the top down and drove off in the sunlight toward the freeway downtown, waving back at me . I believe this to be an authentically senseless chain of correspondences, but in the jingle-jangle morning of that summer it made as much sense as anything else did .
     
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    I recall a conversation I had in 1970 with the manager of a motel in which I was staying near Pendleton, Oregon . I had been doing a piece for Life about the storage of VX and GB nerve gas at an Army arsenal in Umatilla County, and now I was done, and trying to check out of the motel . During the course of checking out I was asked this question by the manager, who was a Mormon: If you can’t believe you’re going to heaven in your own body and on a first-name basis with all the members of your family, then what’s the point of dying? At that time I believed that my basic affective controls were no longer intact, but now I present this to you as a more cogent question than it might at first appear, a kind of koan of the period .
     
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    Once I had a rib broken, and during the few months that it was painful to turn in bed or raise my arms in a swimming pool I had, for the first time, a sharp apprehension of what it would be like to be old . Later I forgot . At some point during the years I am talking about here, after a series of periodic visual disturbances, three electroencephalograms, two complete sets of skull and neck X-rays, one five-hour glucose t olerance test, two electromyelo grams, a battery of chemical tests and consultations with two ophthalmologists, one internist and three neurologists, I was told that the disorder was not really in my eyes, but in my central nervous system . I might or might not experience symptoms of neural damage all my life . These symptoms, which might or might not appear, might or might not involve my eyes . They might or might not involve my arms or legs, they might or might not be disabling . Their effects might be lessened by cortisone injections, or they might not . It could not be predicted . The condition had a name, the kind of name usually associated with telethons, but the name meant nothing and the neurologist did not like to use it . The name was multiple sclerosis, but the name had no meaning . This was, the neurologist said, an exclusionary diagnosis, and meant nothing .
    I had, at this time, a sharp apprehension not of what it was like to be old but of what it was like to open the door to the stranger and find that the stranger did indeed have the knife . In a few lines of dialogue in a neurologist’s office in Beverly Hills, the improbable had become the probable, the norm: things which happened only to other people could in fact happen to me . I could be struck by lightning, could dare to eat a peach and be poisoned by the cyanide in the stone . The startling