CATCH UP ON PREVIOUS CHAPTERS

Chapter 1
...Thirty years earlier, Ken had been diagnosed with Hepatitis C. Actually, back then they didn’t know it as Hepatitis C, just non-infectious Hepatitis. Doctors told him that it would sit in his liver for thirty years and then kill him. When Ken was twenty he didn’t think he would live for thirty years, so it didn’t bother him. While many of us in our twenties can’t ever imagine being 50, for Ken it was real. The life he was leading at the time meant that there was an 80% chance that he would never make it.

This is Ken’s story.


Chapter 2
Ken Windes
United States Penitentiary
Marion, Illinois

August 1968
It was a hot afternoon.  I was in the back seat of a late model Pontiac GTO, handcuffed to a body chain with leg irons around my ankles.  We were approaching Marion prison which looked like something out of a science fiction movie.  The first thing you see when approaching a prison is the water tower.  This one looked like a space ship poised for takeoff...


Chapter 3
I spent twelve years working my way into Marion State Prison. As a boy, I lived in a small town in the oil fields of central California, which was like being in the desert or the outback, many miles from anything.

When I was ten and a half years old, I was called from class to the principal's office.  My aunt and uncle were there and they told me my Dad had been in an accident and my mother was at the hospital.  I was going home with them... 


Chapter 4
“Windes, you’re a ‘high-risk’ parolee and you’ve been assigned to a Special Parole Unit,” Samuels the parole officer barked at me. The parole officer was short, about 5'4", and tried to make up for it by talking tough.




“What’s a Special Parole Unit?” I asked naively, as though I couldn’t guess.




“It means you’re under intensive supervision. You’re moving into the hotel next door. I want you in here at eight each morning until you find a job. If you’re even ten minutes late, you go back to the joint” he said still trying to sound like a Marine Corps sergeant, “and you show up for drug testing twice a week and go to a counselling program. Flunk the test, you’re on the next bus to San Quentin. You’ve violated parole nine times. Last time you stabbed someone in a fight. You use drugs. You’re a violent offender with a drug history. You don’t get any passes coming. You fuck up, we lock you up,” he said.


Chapter 5: "But Officer I'm innocent. I didn't know the drug money was counterfeit"
...When I got to the teller I handed over the deposit slip and the money.  The teller began counting the money and then picked it up, along with the deposit slip, excused herself and walked away.  I was standing there zoned on drugs, not realizing that something was wrong.  I was still standing there a few minutes later when two secret service agents show up beside me.  One of them said that some of the money I was depositing was counterfeit and they'd like to talk to me.