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

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. Ifinished 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 money 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