Manny, a youth who has been abused and betrayed, ends his life by overdosing in a squalid back alley. This reading is excerpted from his mother, Lucinda’s, journal. She did everything in her power to sheild him from the undermining, demeaning influences of their world. In this reading she recollects her own earliest memory of a man she would learn to fear, then hate, and utterly distrust—her father.