I wouldn’t invite them over for dinner unless it was for soup.
One was a flaky kid I knew my sophomore year in high school. He would disappear off to Hollywood for weeks at a time and eventually dropped out of school.
Once he told us that up in Hollywood he was living with a ‘band’ called “The Family”. There was a rock band at the time called ‘The Family of Man’ but he said that wasn’t who he meant, they were simply called ‘The Family’.
That didn’t mean anything to me until two years later when we all found out about ‘The Family’. Vincent Bugliosi mentions a minor Manson hanger-on in ‘Helter Skelter’ who went by the name of ‘Mouse’ which was this kid’s nickname.
A few years later I worked at a pizza joint with a space cadet of a girl in her early 20s. She had a withdrawn personality and didn’t speak much- she was like a lot of drug burnouts that you’d see in that era. Some of the crew were talking about the murders and she just quietly mentioned that she had once lived with the Manson Family. It was bit of a conversation stopper. She didn’t elaborate on it but her younger sister told me that yes, it was true.
The common thread with both of them was that they came from chaotic homes and I guess the Manson Family gave them a feeling of belonging to something. They both lived in Orange County and it was common to go hang out in Hollywood. Hollywood was full of runaways and rootless kids, probably still is, and Manson would take them in.