Uncaged

by Frank Shamrock

  I knew from the streets what this moment was, and I could feel twenty sets of eyes sizing me up and down and waiting to see what I was made of. So I said, “Oh, here you go” and threw the chili right in his face. Then I jumped up and started beating him on the head with the metal tray. That was a good start, but then it got ugly. He hit me hard in the stomach, and I hit him back in the face with the tray, and then it was on. He grabbed me and threw me across the room. Then he got on top of me and pounded me on the head and back. I started uppercutting him in the balls. The guard got on us and we all fell over. He was still banging me on the head, but I still had hold of his balls. We were both screaming. By the time the guards separated us, we were messed up. It was a successful fight because that guy never bothered me again, and everyone else was very nice to me, too. In fact, after that, the old-timers would bring their bowls right to my seat and spark up some conversation.

  At CYA, I was always prepared to fight, always on guard. I knew I was going to get jumped, and I was going to get hurt, and I was maybe going to have to hurt someone else. I didn’t want to do that. I had been roughed up a little. I could take a fair amount of punishment. But I didn’t like hurting other people. So I signed the papers and filed the writ, and the transfer came through. I was taken out of CYA and sent to an induction center at Tracy, California.

  This was another step up. Or down. CYA had been weird. This was really, really scary. It was a real prison, a big prison. It was eight stories tall. It was all cells. The cells were filled with men—serious adult criminal men. Everyone was wearing prison orange and moving slowly. The mood was very tense, and very sad.

  I remember the first night. I was on one of the lower tiers with easy access, cell block number two or number three, because I was a new guy. I was a fish. That meant they kept me on a rotating suicide watch, in case I killed myself or something. I was alone. Up on the seventh floor there was a gay black guy, and when it got dark he started singing. He had the most amazing voice. He sang “Under the Boardwalk.” It was unbelievably beautiful. It made guys cry. You could hear him singing. You could hear guys crying. You could hear guys getting beat up. You could hear other stuff that you weren’t sure what it was. It didn’t sound good.

  I remember lying there thinking, “What’s a guy with a voice like that doing here? And what am I doing here?”

  The whole life was new to me. For example, there was the kite. I never knew about this stuff. A kite is a way of sending things from one cell to another. One guy would tie something to a piece of string—a cigarette, a message, a tattoo needle—and send it to the next guy. He’d send it to the next guy. It might start on the eighth floor and wind up on the third floor, just passing along from one cell to the next, on this little piece of string. Some nights there would be kites going all over the place. Everyone sends the kite along. Even if one guy’s a white guy and other guy is a black guy and they hate each other, they have to move it along. Everyone’s got to move the kite along.

  There was also a “telephone” system. There was a way you could take your pillow and stick it in the top of the toilet and suction the water out of the pee trap. It turned the toilet into a telephone. You could lean into the toilet and talk to the cell above you or below you—depending on whether they took the water out of their toilet, too. You could have a whole conversation that way, or pass along a complicated message.

  Because Tracy was an induction center, everyone was in his own cell. There was no work. You just sat around waiting for your one hour on the yard, or to go to the chow hall, or for someone to bring you a bag lunch. There was no visitation, either. Maybe that’s why there was so much kiting and telephoning. It was the only way for anyone to communicate, and we all had too much time on our hands.

  It was a big facility, and the yard was huge. Everyone was in orange, and everyone was broken into groups. This was my first introduction into the racial self-segregation of prison life. In the youth system, I was aware of people being from different places. I was aware that I looked Mexican. It was no big deal. At Tracy, it was much more serious. There were three groups—white, black, and Latino. In that facility, the whites had most of the control. They were the most trusted, and they had the most access. But the blacks had all the power. Everyone was most afraid of them. If you weren’t black, you couldn’t walk through the black guys’ area. But if you weren’t Latino, you couldn’t walk through the Latino area, either. And if you were North Mexican, you couldn’t walk through the South Mexican area. When I first arrived, some old-timer took me aside and laid it out for me. He asked me what I was and who I ran with on the streets. I wasn’t sure what I was. He told me I was “other”—not black, not white, not Latino, but other.

  “Other” was for the leftovers. “Other” was for Indians, and Pacific Islanders, and Asians. This was the smallest group, maybe 10 percent of the population or less. That’s where you’d find the Japanese guy and the Hawaiian guy and the Samoan guy. And me. Mostly they don’t bother anyone because they don’t have any power, and no one bothers them because they’re no threat. But they’re also the most exposed because they have small numbers and no protection.

  It was tense, like all jails are tense. Everyone is scared. Everyone is angry. You have all these violent men, and everything has been taken away from them. They have nothing left. They have no power, and they’re scared. So they grab what they can and are ready to die for it. This is my piece of the yard, and you can’t be on it, holmes.

  I was at Tracy for only forty-five days. It felt like a long time. No one bothered me. No one assaulted me. I was pretty good at figuring out how to survive and be OK. I got some tips. I figured out who went where and what part of the yard to stay away from. I did the time and waited.

  At the end of my induction time I was sent to Corcoran. I was in real prison. I mean, real prison: Charles Manson was on the yard next to mine. I could do my time, and maybe make something out of it. In real prison, you could get a job. I got a job bending sheet metal. I got an apprenticeship, and I made eleven cents an hour. After a while I transferred out of that and got a job in the kitchen, where I made a little more money. I treated it seriously, like a real job. I had decided to be a provider for my family. I was making as much money as I could and making the best of a bad situation.

  I had realized by then that I was not going to be able to manipulate myself out of prison. I wasn’t going to be able to talk my way out of doing the time. No one wanted to hear my story. I saw I was going to have to do my time and work the system the hard way. So I decided to play by the rules. I found out you could get an education in prison. I decided to start going to college. I had graduated from that continuation high school up the hill when I was seventeen. Now I had lots of time on my hands. I knew I was smart. I knew I could study and learn. So I learned sheet metal on the job, and I took psychology classes and history classes. I took business classes. I took all kinds of other classes. I figured that one day I was going to get out of jail and I was going to need a trade. I didn’t know how to do anything, and I didn’t know what I wanted to do anyway, so I studied everything they had.

  I also learned about being Native American. My grandfather had told me I was part Native American on my father’s side. But I didn’t have any sense of the history or the culture until I took a class in Native American history. I learned about the tribes and the ceremonies. I had a connection to something. I got to be part of something other than “other.”

  The time went slowly. It was hard for me. I was lonely. My wife hadn’t visited me since I left Susanville. She had stopped writing me, too. I found out from a friend I’d known at Shamrock Boys Ranch that she had gotten pregnant. I wrote to her and said I didn’t care about the other guy, and I didn’t care about the baby. I said I’d take care of her anyway, when I got out. I asked her to please write to me.

  She sent me pictures of our son, little Frankie, and included some scribbles from him. But she couldn’t visit me. It was too far. I tried to ge
t myself moved to Susanville prison, which was only seven miles from where she was living with the two children. But there was a problem: there was an arrest warrant out for me. It turned out it was for back child support! I hadn’t even known about that, but now it prevented me from moving to be close to my family.

  For a couple years I stayed out of trouble and followed the rules, so I accrued points for good behavior. My classification dropped from IV to II. I got transferred to Avenal and then to Jamestown. Life should have been easier there. But it was still prison. I got into a fight with a guy in the bathroom. He thought I’d taken something of his, though I hadn’t. He came up on me at the urinal and threw a punch. I slipped the punch and then I decked him with a right uppercut to the eye that laid him out unconscious and crushed my knuckle. It was over, just like that.

  I wasn’t especially good at fighting, but I was starting to get strong. I had started lifting weights when I lived with Bob at the Shamrock Boys Ranch. I continued in work camp and then prison. I got good enough at it that I started training other guys. They wanted to know how to get big, so I spent some time training them in conditioning their bodies with weights. I could talk to them about the mechanics of their bodies, and why their form was correct or incorrect. It helped that I read anything and everything on the subject and had plenty of time to read.

  Up until this point, I had been good at staying out of trouble. But it didn’t last. I got into a bad fight.

  Jamestown was a minimum-security facility. It wasn’t as tense as Corcoran or Tracy, but it was still very segregated. I was still with “other.” The races didn’t mix, and one group didn’t mess with another. But there was only one TV. So every night was designated. Each race got a night of TV in rotation with the other races.

  It was our night, “other” night. I was alone in the TV room watching some show. Then a group of black guys came in. In Living Color was scheduled to be on. The show hadn’t been on the air that long. It was the only sketch comedy show on TV that was made by blacks for blacks, and it was really popular in prison. So these guys just came in and changed the channel.

  I said, “Hey, it’s our night.”

  They said, “Nah. We’re watching this.”

  There were eight of them. I knew they’d kill me if I fucked with them, so I just left to make a plan. I took a bunch of sharpened pencils and stuck them in my sock, where I would have easy access to them. Then I went and found a mop handle, which makes a pretty good club. You can also do some pretty serious jabbing and stabbing with it. I went back into the TV room and just started swinging. I pulled a pencil out of my sock and stuck it into somebody. I landed a couple of blows with the mop handle. But there were still eight of them, and no one jumped in on my side. They got on me pretty quickly, wrestled me down, and took away my weapons. I hurt a couple of guys, but they hurt me back. The guards came and broke it all up.

  I got two months in solitary. I probably could have shortened that, or missed it altogether, if I’d told them what had happened. But you can’t do that in prison. You can’t tell on anybody, ever. So when the guards asked me what happened, I said, “I slipped and fell.” When they asked me about the eight black guys, I said, “They slipped and fell on top of me.”

  The guards were concerned that it was the beginning of some kind of gang war. But I refused to tell them anything, so I got two months in solitary with no release date set. I didn’t have to do more than a month, though, because someone from the dorm, maybe someone from “other,” came forward and told the guards what had really happened. That was good, because I got sent back to the yard. But it was also bad, because it looked like I must have told them what happened. Because the guards figured it was a gang thing, they put me back on the yard and sent all eight of the black guys to different prisons to separate them.

  That was bad. I was in deep shit, and I knew it. A snitch is the lowest thing you can be. It doesn’t matter what color you are or who you roll with. If you’re a snitch in prison, you’re going to get killed.

  I was back working in the kitchen when they came up on me. I was sitting with my book, back to the wall, alone at a table. Fifty guys came into the kitchen. They were black guys and Mexican guys and white guys, all together, and they were pissed. One of them said, “We are going to kill you, you rat.” I put my book down and said, “I’ve never ratted anybody out. I didn’t tell anybody anything. But if you’re here to kill me, we better get going.” I put the book down and stood up.

  For some reason, they changed their mind. They turned around and left. Nobody bothered me after that.

  Time passed. I took my classes. I taught weight training. My body developed. It was something people noticed. Guys asked me about it—”How can I look like that?” I started thinking maybe I could do something with my body when I got out of prison. I didn’t know what, exactly.

  I had always had it in my head that I was going to be some kind of entertainer or showman. But I didn’t have any actual entertainment skills. I wasn’t a singer or an actor or a comedian or anything. But I wanted to entertain. So I thought I’d use my body. I thought I’d be some kind of a male dancer, an exotic dancer or something. Or, if that didn’t work out, some kind of fighter. But I didn’t have any real information about that. I didn’t know any fighters. I hadn’t trained for fighting although I had a childhood fantasy that I was a world-champion boxer. I know some people have said that boxing and martial arts exist so that belligerent, angry guys have someplace to go. I wasn’t one of those guys. I wasn’t looking for a fight or a fight scene. I never equated fighting with anything other than animosity and problems. But I had this body and I was really strong. By the time I got out of prison, I was huge. I was pumped up to about 210 pounds and I looked awesome. It seemed like I could do something with that.

  I had managed to stay out of any more trouble at Jamestown and was eventually invited to be a trainer for the fire crews, convicts who went outside the walls to fight fires. It was a dream job that I was never able to qualify for because of the child support order issued against me. When my time was short, I got sent to Folsom, and I was paroled out of there on April 5, 1994. Of the six years that I had been sentenced to, I had been locked up for three and a half years. The state of California paroled me out into the care of Bob Shamrock.

  Bob had come and visited me in prison. Other than my wife, he was the only one. I hadn’t had any contact at all with my family, not for years, except for the one visit in jail when my mom came to see me. (Joe was with her. He stayed in the car.) It was as if we were all just done with each other. Joe was able to semi-retire once the rest of the kids left home, selling the house and touring the US in a motor home. They sent postcards from their travels and escapades. Utah, Nevada, Louisiana: beautiful places that I was sure I would never see.

  But Bob came. He encouraged me to stay out of trouble, to take college courses, to take care of my body. When my time was getting short, he told me he had a plan for me. He wanted me to join Ken Shamrock at a gym he ran in Lodi, California. It was called the Lion’s Den.

  Ken was his adopted son. He had been at Shamrock Boys Ranch for three or four years and had gone on to a career in professional wrestling. I hadn’t known him at Bob’s place. He was older than me, and he’d left just before I got there. He had already had a checkered career. When he left the boys’ home, he went off to Shasta College in Redding, California, but that didn’t work out somehow. He started making money by squatting in bars. He used to sit at the bar and say, “I’ll fight any man here for a hundred dollars.” He was a real tough guy. I would be scared to death to do that! But Bob told me he’d come home every night with $500 or $600.

  Later on, he got work as a bouncer. One night he pulled a guy into the street and started fighting with him. The guy had a friend, and the friend got a crowbar. Ken hit the first guy so hard that it broke his jaw and drove part of a bone into his brain. The guy was a very talented college linebacker who was in line for a career in the NFL. That punc
h ruined him and destroyed his career. He sued Ken and won some judgments against him. Bob told me it cost Ken a huge amount of money; it took him years to pay it off. Bob would always tell me, “Never hit anybody in the street!”

  I think it was after that fight that Bob took Ken to a wrestling training camp in Sacramento. He pushed him into that as a career. Ken trained under the wrestling brothers Buzz and Brett Sawyer and made his wrestling debut under the name Wayne Shamrock in 1990—around the time I was in the middle of my prison sentence.

  I didn’t know too much about Ken or what he had been doing. But I was flattered that Bob wanted to make a place for me. So one day after I got out of Folsom Prison I headed for Lodi. I was twenty-one years old, and I had nowhere else to go.

  5

  THE LION’S DEN

  Ken Shamrock was a lost boy like me. He had no place to go and no one to claim him. He had no mother and no father. Like me, he’d had a really difficult childhood, maybe worse. His mother was an uneducated vagrant. She had three sons by at least two men. She was a drug addict who’d leave her boys alone to go out and do her thing. Ken ran away from home when he was really young. He was on the streets when he was ten years old. He used to fight for food. He had come into Bob Shamrock’s care when he was about fifteen, and he stayed until he was eighteen. When he became an adult, Bob adopted him as his own legal son, and Ken took Bob’s name.

  By the time I was released from Folsom, Bob was on his own, too. Bob told me his wife had been a young woman who had never been with another man besides Bob. He was on the road a lot, interviewing kids, bringing kids back to the ranch. She was at home alone in a house with all these boys. Bob said she hooked up with one of the young men and they ran away together. I heard Bob was willing to take her back, but she moved to Hawaii and never returned. That was it for Bob and marriage. He never had another lover or girlfriend. He took all his love and put it into his relationships with Ken and me.