| The Steven Earl Parent Murder By David Lawrence |
| You don�t know me. You should. My name is Steven Earl Parent. When I was sixteen I was at Venice beach with my first date, Mandy. She was a curly blond headed, rumpled bikini-clad, sea-fresh-smelling beauty who had just graduated from high school with me. The beach was filled with topless girls and I tried to encourage Mandy to unhook her halter.
She argued, �No, I�m a virgin.� �Virgins go topless,� I said. �No they don�t.� �Why?� �They just don�t!� she said, petulantly. I sulked. We walked along in childish domestic miasma. After not speaking for ten minutes, she asked, �Do you want to see it that badly?� �Yes,� I lied. What I really wanted to see was her bush. But I felt this was the first step. �You�re going to be surprised,� she said. �I hope so,� I said. I expected to see round, illuminated orbs like the globe my dad had at home with the light in it that lit up countries around the world. She reached around and unsnapped her bra. She looked me in the eyes and let it drop. I stared into her eyes and then looked slowly down at her breast. I passed out. When I awakened she had picked up her bra and put it back on. One of her breasts was missing. There was a huge, crinkled scar there. I started to mumble something but couldn�t get the words out. �I had breast cancer when I was ten.� �I�m sorry,� I said, putting my arm around her. I should have never insisted on looking at her. This was all my fault. �You asked to look at it.� �It was nice,� I lied. I couldn�t tell her how horrified I was. I didn�t want to hurt her anymore. I felt happy that I still had my dick. We dated for the next year. I sucked on her absent nipple. I never realized that she had been one of the lucky ones. That she had traded in just one tit to live a full life. I would have done the same in a flash. If I had known what was to come. If I had tits. The day of my murder, August 16, 1969, I saw my mother at lunch. She was always worrying about me. I could understand that if we were in New York but we were in sunny, friendly California. Ma: Don�t be home too late tonight. Me: Don�t worry ma. Ma: I�ll worry if I want to. Me: Whatever you say ma. Ma: You shouldn�t work two jobs. It�s too much. Me: Who�s going to pay for my college. Ma: It�s not worth getting killed to get an education. Me: What are you talking about? Ma: I don�t know. She kissed me on the forehead and blessed me. Did she suspect I was going to get killed that night? Yes. But she suspected I was going to get killed every night. Her intuition was right on. It�s just that her timing was a little random. A recent high school graduate who was just feeling his way in and out of life in California, I was a good kid who worked two jobs, saving for college. I had no sense of the grandiose. I was not into the macabre. So I don�t know what miracle plucked me out of my humdrum suburban existence and plunked me down on the Manson murder map where I wiggled blood red resplendent in my Rambler like a moth pinned to parchment? How did I become a memorable marble in the fudgy game of historic mass murders? When the Manson killings hit the news all hell broke loose in the media. The fearsome boxes of bourgeois life were shaken up like frosted flakes. Sharon Tate was on the tip of everyone�s tongue. When a beautiful woman is killed it�s a sexual event. Everyone was getting off on her fame and wondering about her marriage to that genius midget, Roman Polanski. The other victims, Abigail Folger, Voytek Frykowski, and Jay Sebring weren�t as well known. Well, Jay was known a little. He was an international hair stylist. Big deal! Oh, of course, there was one other; the first victim, John Doe 85. Imagine. I had lived eighteen years as Steven Earl Parent, doing the things I had to do to be a good boy. And now at the moment of my death, of my apotheosis, commingled with celebrity status, I was reduced by the police to John Doe 85. At the time of my murder no one knew my real name. I was a dead non-entity. My memory was scratched out. I was broken chalk without a blackboard. The day of my death went such and such. I left my job at the plumbing supply company where I was a delivery boy to have lunch at home in El Monte with my mother where I argued with her about having two jobs. Then I went back to work and came home again, changed clothes and went to my second job as a stereo salesman. Later I went up to 10050 Cielo Drive with a clock radio hoping to sell it to the caretaker, William Garretson. I was a little disappointed that he didn't want it but I figured I'd find a buyer somewhere. My hobby was stereos and I got a kick out of transacting deals on electronic devices--radios, record players and TVs. When I got into my Rambler, not unhappy about not making my sale because it was kind of nice to just come up to a big estate on a beautiful night, I was broadsided by Charles Tex Watson. He slashed me with a knife and then shot me four times in the head with a Hi Standard .22 caliber Longhorn revolver. I was dead all right. The moron made sure of that. Then he wobbled inside and killed four other people. This was a day before the LaBianca murders. He didn't know any of us. There was no reason to kill me or anyone else. But I suppose I should thank him because his cruelty made me legendary. Well, not too legendary. All anybody really remembers from the Manson killings was Sharon Tate and Charles Manson. Events have a way of isolating what is historically important. High school students don't amount to much. We disappear into the vast legends of crime like escaped convicts into alligator swamps. One hundred and fifty celebrities attended Sharon Tate's funeral. Only about a dozen of my classmates showed up at mine. And those because I was part of the Tate murder story. By myself, I had almost no crowd appeal. That's all right. I was no star. But I did contribute to the magnificent falling comet of death. I was shot forth from the sky into the mud. I boiled in my own bloodshed. Give me some credit. I was the first dead. That made me the gatekeeper to the slaughter. William Garretson, the caretaker, and I chatted before I left his cottage to get murdered. And we didn't just talk about the clock radio. Garretson: I'd love to ball Tate. Me: She lives here, doesn�t she? Garretson: Renting. Me: With all her money? Garretson: She�s no big star. She�s like a starlet. Then I saw a light on Garretson�s head that said, �Pig.� Me: Look! I led him over to the mirror. He looked at himself. Garretson: What? Me: Don�t you see it? Garretson: What? I looked at his forehead. There was nothing there any longer. Me: Nothing. I didn�t want to tell him that I had seen �Pig� on his forehead. He might be insulted. I didn�t know until after I was dead and I read the newspapers that �Pig� was written in Sharon Tate�s blood on the door. I wonder how I was able to forecast this and not pick up my own death. I suppose my antennae were star struck. They were more interested in picking up vibes from what went on in the main house. Garretson: You want a beer? I drank it and made a phone call. Then I took my clock radio and went out to get killed by Tex. That�s another thing that troubled me. Why did I get killed by some no count drifter like Tex? Why not Charlie himself? He was the man, a haunted legend. I deserved his wrath. But Charlie wasn�t there. He had given the commands. That was it. He dropped the killers off then skedaddled. I don�t even know if he would have had the nerve to kill me. Maybe he wasn�t even to blame. And if he wasn�t the high priest of evil than why was I being killed under his sway? I looked into the pool of blood forming on my shirt and felt sorry for myself. I was killed by the loser subordinate of a chicken-shit missing leader. Tex was a poor withering surrogate for a boastful midget. Manson was a five foot two inches tall whirlwind of self-importance mutating life into failed slashings. He gave the impression of being a giant but he was three inches shorter than Polanski who was known for his diminutive status. He couldn�t� t beat up his own whore mother without a weapon or an army of gladiator retards. When on trial for our deaths in prison he carved a swastika into his forehead thinking that made him look tough. Big deal. It was a cowardly nothing. He barely scratched the surface. Teenage boys do that shit all the time and don't take credit like they're some sort of big rough and tumble killers. I once carved my girlfriend's name in my thigh with a razor blade. Manson had no balls. Another thing that bothered me was that Garretson said he didn't hear any of the gunshots or the shouts. All the murders, screams and death gurgles went on around him and he didn't hear a thing. I couldn't rest with this for a long time. I had to discuss this with him from the other side. One night I came back into his dreams and appeared as his father, accusing him of hearing the murders and hiding under his couch. He denied it. He said, "I never heard nothing." I don't know if he was telling the truth. Maybe he was denying what he had heard so that he wouldn't have to face what he had failed to do. Or maybe he just didn't hear so well and didn't know that we were getting murdered right down the way from him. It doesn't really matter. It wasn't his fault anyhow. It was Charlie's. The malicious munchkin loser who had nothing to offer but destruction. Getting slashed with the knife hurt. It sliced through me and stung. But the bullets were ice cubes pumped into me. They were numb, chilled thuds in my head. I was sipping a cool drink of my own death. I was spilling into the ultimate ocean. The sacrosanct escape from the dead thumb of life's derelict garden. On the other side I arrived at this reflection. I am a continuous, churning spotlight on my own defeat. I was dating Jean Lebure. Nothing serious but I had asked her brother John to come for a ride with me the night I was murdered. If he had, he'd be dead now too. Or maybe he would have helped me defend myself and we'd both still be alive. I wondered how he felt about not getting murdered with me and I sneaked into his ear to listen to his thoughts. John Lebure: Man, I'm one lucky son of a bitch. If I'd gone with that maniac Parent, I'd be dead dog doo now. Praise the Lord I didn't leave Dales Market with him. I can't blame him for being happy that he didn't join me. But he shouldn't have thought of me as a "maniac." Being killed by maniacs doesn't make you a maniac. I was just trying to sell a clock radio. I wanted a damned education. If I weren�t born to a poor family I wouldn't have had to work two jobs. I was killed because of poverty. It was a class thing. No, no, no! Sharon Tate got killed too and she had plenty of money. It wasn't a class thing. Death is not capitalistic. It does not favor Bill Gates. It treats everyone equally. At the trial, when the prosecutor, Vincent Bulgiosi, showed the picture of me slumped over dead in the Rambler Susan Atkins said "That is the last thing I saw in the car." Imagine that bitch referring to me as a thing. I was Steven Parent, a specific, magnificent and unique human being. Not a thing. This shouldn't surprise me though. Susan Atkins was the same woman who grabbed Sharon Tate by the neck and when she was begging for her life and saying, "All I want to do is have my baby," she said, "Woman, I have no mercy for you," and stabbed her sixteen times. She then tasted her blood. She said it didn't bother her to kill Sharon because "I loved her, and in order for me to kill her I was killing part of myself when I killed her." She had Charlie's confusion between love and death. His amorphous personality, which translated into his victims. Vincent Bugliosi said, "Steven Parent had a defensive stab wound that ran from the palm across the wrist of his left hand. It severed the tendons as well as the band of his wristwatch. Obviously, Parent had raised his left hand, the hand closest to the open window, in an effort to protect himself, the force of the blow being sufficient to hurl his watch into the back seat." I'd just like to say that I wasn't trying to defend myself. I was trying to hold the knife. To seduce its anger and coax it into lying down gentle with me. To find peace in self-surrender and have its cold steel glow with warm subtitles of forgiveness. I was not fighting, I was embracing. I was Gandhi. I was defusing the anger with passive resistance. I had thrown the hot metal of fury into the cold, wet black trunk of meager docile relatedness. There is a rumor that when Tex leaped up to me to shoot me I said, "Please don't hurt me, I won't say anything." I might have said that. I don't remember. But if I did, I regret it. I should have spit in Tex's face and gone down fighting. I know this contradicts my idea that I was making love to the knife. But consistency is an earthly affair. Since I died, I�m on the other side of small issues in a cloudbank of contradictions. Charlie Manson and his goons will never make it to heaven. But I suppose they did me a service. They made me a minor celebrity. Even in heaven the dead whisper about me, "There's the first guy killed at the Tate murders." That's not a bad moniker. I get to wear it for eternity. I suppose that's worth giving up sixty years of life. If I had not met up with Tex I'd probably be dead in another thirty years anyhow. But now I�m pumping the iron of heaven forever. I am an innocent rumor. A whisper trailing the shoelaces of forgotten feet. |