Love/Fate by Tracy Brown Page A

to the floor, and wrestled the weapon from his hands. They dragged him off to the box, and shut him in for the night.
    He was transferred the next day to a facility in Comstock, New York, where he spent the next eleven months of his sentence in solitary confinement. Ray had survived, though he was reduced to using a colostomy bag for a long time. And Born knew that this was another beef that would follow him for as long as Ray was still alive.
    While in solitary confinement, Born was subjected to twenty-three hours of lockdown in a cell the size of a small closet. They only allowed him one shower, one phone call, and one visit each week. He was allowed one hour of recreation in the yard each day, by himself, usually at five or six o’clock in the morning. And when the guards felt like being assholes, they would tell him that he had overslept and missed his hour in the yard. So Born learned not to look forward to it, so that they wouldn’t have the power to deny it to him. He would outthink them, he decided. Half the time it was too cold anyway, he’d tell himself. His hours in his cell were spent either reading or jerking off. He read no less than four books a week. When he could use the phone he called his mother most of the time, and Dorian’s brothers as well. He liked to check in on DJ. every now and then to see if he was doing okay. Dorian’sbrothers and the rest of the crew held Born down while he endured his sentence, sending him food packages, cigarettes, money, and clothes, and he was grateful to them for that.
    By the time they let him out of the box, Born emerged looking like Saddam Hussein, unshaven and grimy. He felt like an animal. His time in the box had been designed to break him, designed to dismantle his spirit. He wanted out of prison. He listened to his mother when she told him that he better start thinking about what direction his life was headed in. He saw the wisdom in her advice to turn over a new leaf.
    He enrolled in violence-management and parenting classes, and continued to read—now, about two books a week. The parenting classes showed him just how dysfunctional his own upbringing had been. He learned that children interpret and understand what’s going on in their environment long before parents usually think they do. He learned that children mimic their parents, and that was certainly true for him. He had patterned himself after Leo from the time he was small. They taught him about good parenting, and until then he hadn’t really realized how unorthodox it was to be the child of an addict. To witness drug abuse up close from such an early age. All his life he’d worked with the hand he had been dealt, and never took the time to really see it for what it was. He realized for the first time that so much of who he was, so much of how he lived his life, was attributable to his upbringing. It finally dawned on him just how dysfunctional his childhood had been. The odds had been stacked against him from the very beginning. The ease with which he had merged into the fast lane came from watching his father, and from seeing how Leo had handled power. He had studied and watched his father, and became his duplicate. He realized that, all the while he thought that he had the game figured out, and that he knew how to play it, the game was playing him. True, he hadn’t become a drug addict, as his father had. But he was in jail, and there was no victory in that. He thought about the fact that he could have wound up dead instead, and he was grateful that things had turned out the way that they had.
    Born began to pay close attention to his fellow inmates. He began tolisten when they griped about their lack of family, their lack of a sense of direction, and the fact that they had no plans for their future. But there was one man who was incarcerated with Born who would forever change his life.
    Earl “Ace” Frasier, an older cat, was incarcerated alongside Born. He