That Time My Best Friend And I Were Killed By Charles Manson

Some people are just beautiful. There’s no debate about it, it’s just a fact. And the rest of us have to drag our disfigured carcasses through life without complaining too much because, hey, them’s the breaks.

Jackie was beautiful. She had flawless skin with a hint of natural blush and jet black hair. She was like a living, breathing Snow White. Next to her, I was one of the acne-ridden and deeply unpopular dwarves.

I lived on a 76-acre farm in the middle of nowhere, an only child with middle-aged parents who were too busy working at the automotive plant (my dad) and taking care of the farm (my mom AND my dad) to pay a whole lot of attention to what me and my little friends were up to.

This was before helicopter parenting and the internet, or video games, or cell phones, or any of the techno-clutter that keeps kids busy today. The mall was almost an hour away and constituted the kind of major outing you planned for weeks in advance. You strategized a trip to the mall much as you would an attempt on Annapurna.

The mall’s central fountain was base camp. Spencer’s Gifts was a dark, incense-laden cave that you could only explore if you ditched your parents. Sears was a featureless plain of nothingness you had to slog through in order to get back to the car. You didn’t even glance at the clothes at Sears.

Jackie and I had nothing to do but spin 45’s in my bedroom and talk into a tape recorder. Then we’d play the tape back and laugh hysterically at our own jokes.

Like I said, this was before YouTube.

This was also before Lyme disease or murder hornets or skin cancer became a thing. I don’t remember us taking any particular precautions before we waded out into the burning hot fields in shorts and T-shirts at high noon to explore the abandoned gravel pit that took up a large chunk of our property (try not to think about the safety implications of that), or wander around in the corn and soybean fields looking for…what?

Well, trouble, of course.

One day, wandering aimlessly on a hill in a distant pasture looking for blackberries, or interesting rocks, or giant holes left by random natural gas explosions (again, just don’t think about it), we saw a pickup truck parked in the neighbor’s field below us.

And in that truck was a man.

Now, we were 12 or 13 at the time, but *ahem* well-developed for our age. And the growth of our boobs was clearly outpacing the growth of our brains. We decided to wave the guy over to us.

He was probably a phone guy, or a cable guy, or a farmhand. Maybe he leased the field from our neighbor and was just looking it over before planting. Who knows? All we cared about was that he was a living, breathing man.

From our vantage point he looked to be on the young side, with long hair and a thin build. You know — drifterish. The kind of guy that picks you up by the side of the road and leaves your body at several different rest stops along the highway.

Which, when you’re 12 or 13, is hot. There’s a reason why Charlie Manson attracted all those young girls.

But however old the guy was, he was definitely an adult. Looking back on it, I don’t know which was worse: that we thought it was a great idea to talk to a strange man in a desolate field, or that he actually started walking towards us.

Needless to say, we immediately freaked out, which is of course the default setting for teenage girls.

To be fair to the guy, we waved a lot. We were persistent and single-minded in our pursuit of whatever the hell it was we thought we were doing. But that was the problem. What exactly did we think we were going to do with this strange man once we caught him? Our understanding of sex at that age was vague and apocryphal. Were we going to have a nice little chat? Exchange telephone numbers? Go steady?

Or be raped and left for dead?

With sudden clarity, we realized we had made a huge mistake. If the strange guy was a fish, we would have thrown him back. But it was too late for that.

So we hid.

And like, we didn’t hide well. It was a field, for God’s sake. I think we ducked down behind some blackberry brambles.

The guy finally waded up to where he’d last seen us, looked around for a minute, and then headed back the way he’d come. He most likely saw us huddled together in the weeds like scared rabbits, and realizing that we were just kids, decided we weren’t worth 20 to life.

When he left, we ran all the way back to my house, pumped up on adrenaline and hormones.

Jackie’s gone now, disappeared from the world suddenly and without explanation by the treacheries of the human body.

But in my memory we’re still singing into hairbrushes, convinced for some strange reason that Laura Branigan’s Gloria is about E.T., and waving like idiots at a strange man from the top of a hill in the golden light of our childhood.