"Lights off!" the guard called.  It was routine.  I had been here for 14 years.  I knew the routine.

Needless to say I never became a doctor.  In fact, after that day I never even seen Father/Doctor again.  I knew he had tried to reach me because one day, excited about a pen pal letter I was supposed to receive, I ran to the mailbox to check before Uncle Frank could get there.  My hands did not pull out a letter from my pen pal but a letter from a man I hadn't seen in almost three years.  At first, I was angry because I had thought that this was the first time he was trying to reach me.  My nine year old brain had not understood there was no fight.  Uncle Frank wanted me and Father/Doctor could do nothing about it; Uncle Frank was relation, Father/Doctor was not.  Hastily, I had opened the letter and began reading.

Dear Frank,

I know that you have received my prior letters.  I just want to write the boy.  I won't take him away from you or even attempt to.  You know that I care about him and...

I was halted by a painful grip on my shoulder as his letter was torn out of my hands.  Uncle Frank was always a poser and played it off easily.  "Ahh, see that the man you were crazy about, the one you wanted to live with over me finally decided to write you after three years.  Didn't care too much, did he?  That's just trash, boy.  If that's all he cared then you don't need to be readin' it."  Uncle Frank just turned around and sluggishly walked back to the house.

How dare him.  He was the one who hadn't cared.  It was then that I had realized, as I was about to enter my teenage years, that I would never get rid of Uncle Frank.  I would never know anyone as a caregiver besides him and that made my stomach turn.

Looking back at it, I realize that my mind probably never matured much past the shot that had killed my father.  Sure, I had learned more things in school, taken in the ways of the world and based my decisions upon that, but probably in an immature manner. 

So I lived with Uncle Frank for another four years, pretty much most of my high school days.  I did well in school and had always intended to go on to college to be a doctor.  Even if Father/Doctor couldn't help me or see me and Mother had to watch from heaven I would show them.  But I knew in the back of my mind that one thing could and would stop me, Uncle Frank.

I couldn't bear the thought of allowing him to control my life to that extent and in my immature mind there was no question as to what had to be done.  As I look back I can't help but think about how after all of the planning I had done and all of the knowledge I possessed about how to make my life better, Uncle Frank still controlled me from the grave.  Here I sit in the west wing of Menard Maximum Security Prison only to reflect on the horrible childhood attached to my name and the non-existent adulthood as a result.

Uncle Frank's funeral was even worse than Mother's.  I sat in the front seat, joined only by two shady characters that Frank called friends.  I knew better.  They and Uncle Frank had been in a ring of drug dealers.  That was how Uncle Frank made a living, with the money that had been left to him via my Mother and Father of course.  Uncle Frank's death was being investigated after the autopy was performed for foul play.  Although it was a terrible situation and I despised that man, I smiled a little as I remembered the mortified look he left on his face when I walked in to find him dead on the floor, the last way I would ever see that worthless, old man.

"Good riddance, you bastard," I mumbled under my breath.