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Actor Danny Trejo is looking back on his time spent in jail with notorious criminal and cult leader Charles Manson. The Machete star recounted his hypnotizing experience with Manson in his upcoming memoir, “Trejo,” when the two were both incarcerated in the Los Angeles County Jail in 1961, The Daily Mail reports.

Trejo, who first encountered Manson when he was just 17 years old, remembered Manson as “greasy” and “dirty,” noting that the man was so “scrawny” that he needed protection. “He was so poor, he didn’t have a belt, and instead used a piece of string to keep his pants up,” Trejo wrote. “I felt sorry for him. It was clear the only shower the man was ever going to have was the one he was going to get in jail.”

He added, “When we first met him, it was before all that stuff, okay? He was like a 5ft, slick little wimp. He wasn’t a bully. Wasn’t a thug. But he had the jargon of prison and jail.”

Not long after they first met, Manson offered to lead Trejo and some other inmates through a form of meditation that he promised could get them high without using any drugs. After sitting down with Trejo and the rest of the group, Manson told them all to close their eyes as the “guided meditation” began.

“For 15 minutes, in great detail, he walked us through the process of copping the dope, finding a place to fix, cooking the heroin in a spoon, drawing it into a needle, and sticking it in our veins,” Trejo recalled. The process was so effective that Trejo felt as if he was actually using.

“Even before I fake-fixed, I could taste it in my mouth. Any junkie knows what that is like,” he wrote. “By the time he described it hitting my bloodstream, I felt the warmth flowing through my body. If that white boy wasn’t a career criminal, he could have been a professional hypnotist.”

Manson was eventually released from prison just two years before the infamous 1969 Manson murders, when Manson and his “family” — Tex Watson, Susan Atkins, and Patricia Krenwinkel — brutally killed six people in Terry Melcher’s home, including pregnant actor Sharon Tate. After being imprisoned for the murders, Manson was denied parole 12 times and later died in prison in 2017, at age 83.