Uncaged by Frank Shamrock, Charles Fleming Read Free Book Online Page A

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 justturned 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