I found a job framing pictures under the tutelage of "Donny", who started each morning with a big doobie. We worked for Ernie, a Jewish escapist from New York, who cut pictures out of artbooks. I made $40/week and Susan and I found a low rent apartment in New Westminster, on 6th and 6th, and got a kitten. A total dump, we wallpapered, bought a bed and began nesting. One day I got home to find the door blocked by everything in the apartment, after a physical assault involving a knife occurred, just outside the door. We moved a lot after that, on occasions planting small gardens but somehow always moving before the harvest.
I was totally alienated. Church and State, Education and Culture all denied freedom of expression in a culture of life as physical pain and suffering with a non-physical redemption on the basis of submission to earthly authority as our only hope in the face of eternal damnation in hell.
My parents, brilliant intellectuals and polymaths, who did not believe in birth control, could not speak of child abuse had fled as far as they could from the monster, dropping da big kids off in Canada, before returning to the un-united states, living in different cities until Charlie died in 1980.
