In the early 60s, my friend, Danny Trejo, was locked up in LA County. I can’t remember the details of why, and in truth, he might not either. He was in a large block segregated along racial lines. While Danny was in with the Mexicans, a good number being friends from his neighborhood, finding himself lost between the racial groups was a short, wiry, dirty, white guy from out of state. He was vulnerable.
“To survive that environment,” Danny said, “if you didn’t have a gang backing you, you had to have some kind of trick, provide a service, do something to get by.”
Knowing they offered protection for a price, the white guy approached Danny and his friends, He offered to do stuff like clean their cells and shine their shoes. One day, Danny overheard the guy telling Danny’s friend he could get him high on weed. He said he had hypnotic powers.
The guy talked to Danny’s friend for a bit, then took off. Danny asked his friend if it worked. “Yeah,” he said, “it worked.”
Danny found the white dude and asked if he could do the same for heroin. He said, “Yes, but you got to trust me.”
The guy told Danny and two of his friends to relax, picture their favorite place, listen to his voice, and most importantly, follow what he said.
For the next fifteen minutes the man took them on what would today be called a “guided meditation.” In great detail he described the dope, the spoon, the needle. By the end, Danny said he and his friends were passed out, slumped over, tongue-hanging-out-of-their-mouths high as f***ing kites.
“That was the dude’s trick,” he said. “He survived inside by getting people high just talking to them. If he wasn’t a career criminal he might have been one of those dudes who went to high schools and state fairs and brings people up on stage to get them to do stupid shit like pretend they’re a cat and stuff.”
“You were really high?”
“High as I ever got.”
“Wow,” I said, “that’s wild.”
“What’s wild is that dude was Charles Manson. That’s how he got people to follow him on the outside and do evil stuff.”
