“Whether I was approaching it or seeking escape from it, jail always defined in some way the measure of my life.”

Jimmy Baca’s earliest memory is of a visit to his father in jail. By the time he is a teen, he is being housed in a detention center himself—not for any crime, but because none of his family will provide a home for him. At twenty-one, Baca is sentenced to five years in prison, and soon prison begins to feel like home. He has spent so much of his life confined, from his time in the orphanage to his time in a maximum-security prison, that jail is the setting for most of the milestones in his young life.

“I remember him being two men. When sober, he looked boyish in pressed trousers, dress jacket, and white shirt, his appearance giving no trace of alcoholism. When he was drunk, he became vulgar and abrasive, reducing himself to a pitiful phantom of the man he was when sober.”

In this passage, Jimmy Baca describes his father, who changes completely when he drinks. Damacio Baca works with politicians and is adept at hiding his darker nature when he is with them. When he drinks, however, he becomes abusive to his family. The two sides of the man mirror Baca’s conflicting feelings about his father. Baca loves his father and longs for a relationship with him, but he fears his father when his father descends into drunkenness and violence.