VACAVILLE, Nov. 10 — Eleven years after the shocking Tate-LaBianca killings, an aging but spirited Charles Manson — imprisoned for masterminding the mass murders — dreams of climbing trees, smoking marijuana and wandering the desert “where no one can touch me.”

The California Medical Facility’s most notorious inmate — turned down for the third straight time in his flamboyant plea for parole — holds little hope of ever realizing his wish.

The former leader of the bloody sex and drug cult known as the Manson “family” — who turns 46 Tuesday — said he was too old to follow the directives of the parole board that he train for a trade as part of his rehabilitation.

“I’ll stay here forever, instead,” he said after a panel of the Board of Prison Terms rejected his automatic appeal for a release date.

“I’m too old. I can’t do too much. I like to sit around, smoke grass, read the Bible now and then.”

In an interview, the mercurial Manson, his eyes gleaming, his fingers twisting his scraggly graying beard, said his only hope was that those who are to decide whether he is ready to return to society “will finally get a flicker of light in their minds and understand what I’m saying.”

“I don’t think this group did,” he said quietly of the panel, which unimpressed with his two-hour rambling discourse on political corruption and death, found there would be “unreasonable danger to society” if he were freed.

Suddenly grabbing this reporter’s arm and pressing his mouth close to her ear, he whispered, “Do you know of a way out of here? If you get me out, we can go to the desert, and I’ll show you things that’ll blow your mind.”

Then, abruptly letting go and beginning a lively jig, waving his arms wildly above his head and spinning on his toes, he shouted, “Out there I can move … just like this.”

An illegitimate son of a 16-year-old prostitute, Manson said he has “done a lot of thinking and learned how not to lie” during the 30 or so years he has spent in correctional facilities, ever since he ran away from a foster home at age 8.

“The difference between you and me,” he said, growing calm again, “is that you live out there, and I live in here, and I never grew up. I’m just a kid. That’s the reason I get along with children and animals. With human beings, I just don’t fit in.”

Winking, he added, “But I can get along with anybody if I have to.”

Winking, he added, “But I can get along with anybody if I have to.”

Charged with 25 violations of prison rules, including three attacks on guards, Manson has undergone a change in recent months.

For the first time since being sentenced to death in 1971, he has emerged from his life as a shunned loner in solitary confinement to work as a janitor in the prison’s Protestant chapel.

Looking closely at Manson, one can make out the swastika he carved in his forehead during his sensational trial. He was spared the gas chamber and his sentence was reduced to life in 1972, when the California Supreme Court overturned capital punishment.

“I take responsibility for my actions,” Manson said, his voice rising, his hands clenching into fists. “If I did those things, I’d have to pay.”

What he misses most about “those brief moments of my life that I spent outside” are “my friends, climbing trees and roaming the desert and my music.”

The 5-foot-2 Manson learned how to play the guitar from Alvin Karpis of the Ma Barker gang years ago at McNeil Island, Wash., penitentiary.

“I really miss my music, but I can’t really play here ’cause people complain about the noise. We don’t have big, private suites here, you know.”

By LIDIA WASOWICZ