background

Lillian was his mother and Carl his father. They were married in Iola, Kansas in 1937 then moved directly to California where Carl had a job logging in the mountains outside Portola. When Lillian got pregnant, Carl paid 200 bucks to have a shack built in a little logging camp call Spring Garden. Two things Lillian told him about that period. One, Carl drove them off the road before he was born, while he was still tucked up like a bean inside Lillian, on the way from Spring Garden to Portola to visit her sister. Probably drunk. Two, that when, after he had been born for sometime, and Carl and Lillian had left Portola for LA, he was in his crib and Carl started beating on Lillian, he stood up, grabbed an alarm clock off a layette nearby, and threw it at Carl. That's the sum total of what he knows about Carl and Lillian's marriage. Life before the foster home where he remembers being resented for his presence and eating beans.