Uncaged

by Frank Shamrock

  If the beef was more serious, Bob would say, “OK, get the gloves and go to the living room.” He’d move the couches and sofas out of the way, and you’d have a little boxing match. Then he would make you hug each other and take responsibility for your part in the beef.

  If you’d done something more serious, told a lie or stolen something from another boy, there were punishments. First you’d get excluded from things—you wouldn’t be allowed to play in the football game, or you wouldn’t be invited for the tubing trip on the river. Next, you’d get something taken away—your radio or, if you were older, your car keys. Maybe you wouldn’t be allowed to go visit your girlfriend. Next, you’d get the road crew.

  If you couldn’t straighten up, you were out. Bob had all the patience in the world for a kid who tried to be good, but not as much for a kid who wouldn’t try. Some of these kids were tough city kids who’d been pretty bad. They didn’t last very long.

  It all felt very safe to me. After an hour, I just knew: Bob wasn’t going to lie. He wasn’t going to take advantage of anyone. If he said it was like this, it was like this, every time. He was patient, but he was firm. And he was loving, which I’d never experienced before. I had had no idea what had been going on with me, why I was so unhappy, why I acted out so much. But I was starved for affection. I’d had no one to be affectionate toward. My mother doesn’t hug. She’s a quick-pat-on-the-back sort of person. Joe’s idea of affection was a smack on the head. But now I was around a guy who showed me it was OK to love people and to show them you loved them. He would give you a hug, and let you hug him back. If you were lonesome or sad, and you started crying, he’d hold you and let you cry.

  This was a brand-new thing for me. Even when we were being punished, we knew we were loved. Bob would say, “You’re a good kid, you’ve got a good heart, and I love you. I’m sorry you’re being punished.” You absolutely understood that he didn’t stop loving you just because you’d screwed up.

  The first time I got punished, he said, “I love you, and it’s very important for me that you know this. What you’ve done is serious, and this is your punishment. But I’m doing it because I love you and I want you to act like a good kid.” I’d never felt anything like it. It was the first time I had ever heard anyone say, “I love you” and mean it. With Joe, when you were in trouble, he’d sit you down and say, “Who loves you?” and you’d have to answer him, “You do, Joe.” “And who does all this stuff for you?” “You do, Joe.” Then he’d beat the shit out of you. With Bob, you could feel the love. If you screwed up, you knew you had disappointed him, but you also knew he wouldn’t stop loving you, no matter what. I wanted to make him proud of me.

  For a while, it seemed like everything was working. I really enjoyed being there. I couldn’t imagine ever leaving. But it was difficult for me to stay good. I hadn’t changed all that much. I was still drinking and smoking pot, acting like an idiot, staying out late. It was minor stuff, but it was against the rules, and I kept getting into trouble. I was often on the road crew. I was one of those kids cleaning the park.

  I was mischievous. I don’t know if it was because it gave me a sense of control or power, or just because I was restless and needed something to do. But I had to try really hard to stay out of trouble. I would find myself wanting to do something but think that would be wrong or I shouldn’t steal that. Normal people don’t have to think like that.

  I know now that, because I was young, my brain was not fully developed. I know that young boys can’t fully understand consequences. And I know that I never thought about the consequences, which I couldn’t imagine would be that bad anyway, at least until I turned eighteen. The worst thing that would happen was I’d get sent back to juvenile hall and see all my friends.

  So I was good for a while, until I got integrated with the boys. I found the troublemakers. I was good for five or six months. I made a couple of new friends. One of them was Ryan, who came in around the same time as I did. He was a skinny little Puerto Rican guy, brown like me. We had that in common. He became my friend and stayed my best friend for years and years.

  Unlike me, he was not a bad boy. He wasn’t serious about criminality. He was just a good kid who got into trouble. He grew up with a wealthy adoptive family. For most of his childhood he didn’t know they weren’t his biological family. He found out when he was fifteen, and he went a little nuts. But he wasn’t a bad kid. He just had a big mouth. People beat him up, and he got into trouble, and he wound up with me at the Shamrock place.

  After a while, after I got settled in, I started drinking and screwing around, staying out, testing the limits. Some of that was probably not a big deal. Bob understood boys. He understood that if you were taking care of business and doing your stuff—keeping up with your schoolwork, doing your job, coming home on time—then having a beer with your friend was OK. His philosophy was “If you can handle all your responsibilities then you can handle one beer.”

  It was easy to do. There were a lot of older boys at Shamrock. There was a lot of drug use there because Bob was pretty naive when it came to addiction and the harder stuff. He knew about pot and drinking, but the rest was a big secret. And I found the bad kids in the community, the way the bad kids always find each other. It wasn’t hard to get the stuff; it was hard to stay away from it.

  As much security as there was around us, and as much love, screwing around had become my life. I’d get up on time and get on the van for school, and I’d be there on time to get on the van to go back home. In between, I went to a rural high school run by people who weren’t used to dealing with little criminals. It was easy to get away with stuff. There were hoodlums like me all over the place. The big hangout was the high school. If you wanted someone to hang out with, or drink with, you’d sit on the high school lawn. Eventually, someone would drive by. There was always someone who would buy a bottle for you. Or you could get a ride outside of town, where there was a family who ran a small liquor store. They’d sell liquor to anybody with money. I could get booze from town, or pot from school. Near our school was the continuation school where they sent all the problem kids. It was just a short walk, and that’s where the pot was. And in town you could get a twelve-pack of Hamm’s beer for a few bucks.

  I usually had a little money. I was always volunteering to wash Bob’s Cadillacs. He paid five bucks per car. I was very meticulous about it, and I’d wash two cars a week. With ten bucks, I was cool for beer and pot for the weekend. My problem was that I had no control when drinking or using drugs. I would get wasted. I would be the drunk-in-public guy, the guy who gets everyone in trouble because he’s too trashed.

  This led to some terrible things. There was a counselor at the ranch who was sort of the house dad for our group. He seemed to act really nice to me, and really helpful. He got booze for me. But then he also molested me. After he got me drunk, he would suck me off.

  I was only thirteen. I hadn’t really had sex with a girl yet. I had all kinds of ideas in my head about sex being wrong and dirty. I was twisted up about it because of what I had been told and what I had heard, mostly from the Jehovah’s Witnesses. I knew that what he was doing to me was wrong, but I didn’t know what to do about it. I could have told somebody. But who would I tell? He was a trusted employee of the Shamrock ranch who had been there for years and I was some punk kid who was always in trouble.

  Over time I got a reputation for being a bad kid. I got thrown off the football team after going through “hell week” because I was fooling around with a girl. Later, I lost my chance to be on the wrestling team because a bunch of the guys on the team had gotten drunk and the coach thought I had gotten them the booze. I actually had nothing to do with it, but I was sort of the go-to guy when something bad had gone down. I just happened to be innocent that time. My life might have been really different had that moment turned out a different way.

  There was a world-class wrestling camp at Lassen College, near Susanville. It was a fantastic place, and I loved be
ing there. But the second day of camp the coach started screaming at me and told me to leave. Bob came to pick me up. He asked me what happened, and I told him I didn’t know. When we got home Bob called the coach. He told Bob, “Frank took the boys out last night and got them drunk and ruined our practice.” Bob said, “That’s impossible. Frank was here with me the whole time.”

  The coach apologized and invited me back, but the damage was done. I was finished with wrestling. Why would I participate in anything run by a guy like that?

  But I had always been into sports. As a kid I could play soccer for hours without ever getting tired. I never got cramps or got winded. I never wanted to stop. I would play every position on the field— at the same time—and I’d never stop moving. I had no idea I was a gifted athlete or had anything special in that area until I got to Bob’s. He pointed out to me that I was fourteen years old and completely shredded. I didn’t realize it, but I had been like that since I was twelve. I just had this extremely developed body, before I ever started doing anything to work on it. Later on, when I started training and lifting weights, my body got really extreme. But at that time it was just how I was naturally. I could have done anything with it, but I was too busy getting into trouble.

  I finally did have sex with a girl from the high school. We were both drunk. It was at some house party. I don’t remember much about it except that it wasn’t special. But then I met someone who was special.

  Her name was Connie, but she was called Christy. She was really pretty, maybe the prettiest girl in town. She went to my high school, and that’s where we met: I ducked into the girls’ bathroom to smoke a cigarette, and she asked me for a drag. The next thing I knew, we were together. We started fooling around, and almost right away she got pregnant.

  Right after that, I got into some real trouble. I was out drinking, getting into my usual wasted state—not quite blacking out, but almost. That happened to me a lot. I had no on/off switch for my consumption. Alcohol and drugs just melted my brain. Almost every time I drank, I blacked out. I’d start drinking, and then I’d just wake up somewhere, hours later, with no idea what I’d been doing.

  This particular night I was at a party at somebody’s house. I started feeling sick, so I went outside to get some air. Then I decided I’d walk home. It was a long way, and it was really cold. So when I came upon a car parked outside a house, with the keys in the ignition and the motor running, I decided to steal it.

  That’s not quite right. I didn’t “decide,” exactly. I just saw the car and I knew I was going to take it.

  I wasn’t in any condition to begin a crime spree, and I think someone must have seen me getting into the car and driving off. The cops caught me right away. I hadn’t driven a mile before they came up, lights and sirens on. I drove hard for a while, then turned into a Safeway parking lot. I ditched the car and made a run for it. That didn’t work. They were on top of me. Then I was in handcuffs in the back of the car and it was over.

  I wasn’t quite sixteen years old. Technically, this was my second stolen car, since I helped liberate the van from the group home and got arrested in Sacramento. It was also my sixth or seventh actual arrest. I’d been caught throwing rocks at the train. I’d been caught pulling a knife on my sister. I was busted a couple of times for shoplifting and petty theft. I already had a record. So this was more serious than just a kid acting out because he was drunk and stupid.

  Bob Shamrock did what he could. He wrote letters. He tried to get me back to his place. Some of my teachers wrote letters, too. And for months, it looked like I was going to be reassigned to the Ranch, but someone determined that the security level at the ranch was too lax, and I was getting into too much trouble going to school and hanging out. Bob was very respected, but in this case that didn’t matter. I got sentenced to 120 days in juvenile hall.

  I was held there for a while, and then I was sent to a group home in South Lake Tahoe. This was up one level in security from Shamrock Boys Ranch. But it wasn’t horrible. It wasn’t like prison. It was a good home. The guy who ran the place was a hippie dude, and he was very kind.

  I was doing my time there and keeping things clean when I found out my son had been born. After some complications, Christy gave birth to a healthy baby boy. He was a huge baby, causing her to go into labor early and prompting doctors to fly them both to Reno, Nevada, for an emergency delivery. We named him Frankie Blake. A little while later, Christy brought him up to visit me. I had just turned seventeen. She was about the same age. We decided to get married and try to make a life together when I got out of the group home. I told her I would stay out of trouble and finish my time and come back to live with her in Susanville.

  Now I had a goal. I was going to get out and be a husband and father and work to support my family. But I got in trouble again. The group home was a couple of miles from Stateline, Nevada. A group of guys and I rode our bikes over there to the Harrah’s Casino. They had an arcade in the basement, and that’s where all the local kids hung out. My friends and I were drinking and goofing around. There were lots of kids hanging out who we didn’t know. One of them was a Latina girl who was being really loud. One of the guys in our group didn’t like it, so he said, “I wish that fat Mexican bitch would shut up!”

  For some reason she thought I had said it. So she came up to me and whacked me. I was surprised, so I instinctively hit her back. Unfortunately for me, she had friends. Twenty guys came running and jumped on top of me. My friends ran off. I ended up getting my ass kicked. The fight ended when the casino security people showed up. Luckily for me, it was too much trouble for them: I was in their casino, drunk, and I was a minor, from a group home across the state line. So they just let me go.

  I walked home, limping and bleeding and still kind of drunk. But unluckily for me, the police picked me up in that condition and charged me with being drunk in public. That violated the terms of my sentence to the group home. I got sent back to juvenile hall. While it was a lot more like real jail than the group home, I was closer to Christy. We started talking about having a real future together.

  Then I was sentenced for an undetermined time to the BAR O Boys Ranch in Gasquet, California, a high-security work camp isolated in the redwoods of far northern California, population 93. I finished the program in the fastest time of any inmate. I was really serious about being a man and a husband and a father.

  As soon as I got out, Christy and I got married. That made me an emancipated minor, so I was no longer a ward of the court, and within months I was free of probation. It also meant that if I got into trouble again, I would no longer be tried as a juvenile. I would be treated as an adult, and tried and sentenced that way. But that didn’t worry me. Things were different now. My relationship with Christy was for real. She was my wife, and I was a father. We lived in Susanville with our little son.

  Because we were first-time, teenage parents, the state helped with bills and food. We moved into a house at the end of a dead-end street, right next to one of those storage-unit rental places. I found a job pretty quickly, working for Payless Drugs. I got another, too, working for a plumbing company. I also mowed lawns in my spare time. I was a hardworking man.

  But I was still a thief. Right away, I started stealing. My job at Payless included working at the cash register. I learned how to do that pretty fast. Then I figured out that if someone came in and bought something expensive, I could charge them a lot less, and then they could sell the expensive thing and give me some of the money. So I had friends coming in right away, buying high-priced stuff and paying $10 for it.

  I was also stealing cash. The registers all required a four-digit code, and each cashier had his own personal code. I’d peek over my coworkers’ shoulders and memorize their codes. Then when it came time to clean up at the end of the shift, I’d volunteer to do the register areas. I’d open the registers with the codes and slip out a couple hundred dollars.

  I borrowed some money from a friend and used some of the stolen m
oney to buy myself a car. It was a canary yellow Chevy Nova. I bought it from an old lady who had it sitting in her backyard. I brought a can of WD-40 and a tire pump. I put air in the tires, sprayed the carburetor, and drove the car away. I think I stole another hundred dollars from Payless to pay back the loan. I was rolling!

  Not surprisingly, Christy’s family wasn’t really happy about our marriage. They didn’t like the idea of their daughter living with a career criminal who was only seventeen. My behavior didn’t help, either. We were both under a lot of stress. We were both still trying to finish high school. She took care of the baby while I worked my two jobs. We were both drinking and taking a lot of drugs. The crummy house we lived in got condemned, and we had to move into an even smaller place. It was like a shed, in the middle of town, maybe three hundred square feet. It wasn’t even like a real house. It was like a playhouse for children, which was funny, because we were children.

  As part of my second job, with the plumbing company, I was helping build a house at Eagle Lake. I had an old friend from Shamrock Boys Ranch helping me. One weekend I invited Christy and my friend’s wife to come hang out and go out on the boat as soon as we were finished with the job. We were all drinking beer and the job was taking forever, but soon as we got done we stripped down and hopped onto the boat to pick the girls up on the sandy shore. When the girls saw us pull up, drinks in hand, they wanted to leave— they thought that we had been drinking and cruising the boat all day while they were stuck with the kids on the beach. Christy was pissed at me. She yelled at me. I must have yelled back, because she suddenly hauled off and hit me. Without even thinking about it, I hit her back. She took little Frank and they raced away in my yellow Nova. I went back to the job site and hitched a ride into town.