Uncaged (6 page)

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 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 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.

So now I was a drunk
and
a wife beater. When I got home, everyone was gone. Christy had packed her things and taken off. I called Christy's mom and drove over to Christy's parents' house. It was all
dark, but I pounded on the door until her dad came out. He said, “I don't know where she is.” I went home thinking she'd be there when I got back, or that she'd change her mind. She didn't. Her parents told me she wasn't coming back. I begged to see her, and after a few days they finally agreed to meet me in a park.

It didn't go too well. They all showed up—Christy's father, her mother, and at least two of the seven kids in the family. Her father told me I was a drug addict and a criminal and not fit to be married to his daughter. We started yelling at each other. He attacked me and tore my shirt. I fought back. Her mother jumped in. Everyone was screaming and beating on me. Finally they got into the car and drove away. That was it for my marriage. Not long after that, I got a court order telling me I had to start making child support payments. I wasn't even divorced!

That was the beginning of a real downward slide. With Christy gone, the brakes came off. I had no reason to be responsible. I had no reason not to be a
real
criminal. I started really drinking and really taking drugs, full time, with no regard for the consequences. What difference did it make?

While I was married, when I lived in the camps, and when I lived with Bob, there was usually a limit to how much I drank. I always had to be somewhere, or do something, that kept a kind of lid on my drinking. I might go out and get drunk, but that didn't happen every day. Now it was every day. There was no reason to remain sober or to control myself in any way. I was also smoking weed, and I started using huge amounts of crystal meth. In those days it was called “speed” or “crank,” and I was snorting or smoking at least $100 a day worth of it.

I needed a lot of money, so I committed a lot of crimes. After Christy moved out and took the baby, that's what I did with my time. Sometimes I had an accomplice, sometimes I worked alone. The jobs were always my idea, my plan. We went out every night and committed “jobs”; this was my new line of work.

For a few months I stole everything I could get my hands on that wasn't bolted down. The idea was to steal stuff and sell it. So we'd break into houses and vacation rental homes and steal stereos and cassette players. I thought electronics would be worth all kinds of money, but they weren't. I could hardly sell most of the stuff we stole. I wasn't a very good criminal. So I cranked it up. I started robbing businesses. I broke into an auto-body repair shop and stole some cameras. I broke into a pizza place and stole a VCR and a radio, plus some beer and some pizza sauce. I broke into a storage facility and stole some tools. I robbed a gas station, where I stole $200 from the owner's checkbook and a mini-cassette tape recorder. I snuck into the golf course across from Shamrock Boys Ranch and stole some money. I tried to break into the cash register in a restaurant, but all I got was a Makita drill. I broke into a florist shop and got away with some coffee mugs, some ceramic vases, some imported cheese samplers, and a roll of dimes.

Some of the crimes I must have committed while I was blacked out from drinking and smoking. I don't remember the incidents at all. And I wasn't wearing gloves, which meant I left fingerprints everywhere, which suggests I didn't really know what I was doing. Besides, I stole pizza sauce and imported cheese samplers; I
had
to be high. What kind of idiot steals cheese samplers?

The great Susanville crime spree went on for several months. I had met another girl named Christy, and we were hanging out. This was kind of funny, because her father was the local district attorney and I was a “master” criminal. Maybe that's why she liked me. I was the furthest thing she could imagine from her father.

My wife filed for a separation and got a temporary restraining order against me, so I couldn't see her or my son, and a child-support judgment. I was still working at Payless Drugs and scamming them, but they got camera footage of me lifting twenties from another employee's register. I was fired immediately and escorted to the front door with the promise they would turn the tapes over
to the police. I left quickly. Then I got another job, as a fry cook at Taco Bell. I didn't like working at Taco Bell. I resented the way they treated me, so I decided I should relieve them of their money. I had noticed that the drive-through window wasn't secured very well. I figured I could come back after the end of my shift, break the glass, and climb through. I would clean out the cash registers and sneak out. I'd come back to work the next day like nothing had ever happened.

Nothing could have been simpler. I went over there really late one night. I broke in through the drive-through window as planned. I noticed the manager's office door was open. I walked inside and saw that the safe, for some reason, hadn't been locked. I started shoving money into a bag. I felt like I had won the lottery! When the safe was empty, I went out to check the cash registers.

That's when I heard tires screeching. I heard people moving, too quickly. It was the middle of the night, so I knew something was up. I didn't want to trip the alarm, so I crawled back out the drive-through window and started to run.

There were cops everywhere already. I heard them yelling “Stop!” and “Freeze!” The Taco Bell was at the edge of the shopping center, at the edge of a wilderness area. I ran hard for the trees and up into the foothills, the cops running behind me. I knew I could outrun them.

But there was a cliff a little way into the woods, with a creek at the bottom of it. There was a thirty-foot drop to the creek, which was actually part of the Susan River. I jumped. But it was the middle of winter, and the creek was frozen. I hit the ice, broke through into the freezing water, and hit the bottom of the creek. The bag I was carrying broke and a bunch of the money slipped out. And because of the ice, I had trouble getting out of the creek. I had to swim to the other side and crawl out before I could start running again.

The cops got busy. They launched a manhunt and brought out the bloodhounds. But I was still running. I found some railroad
tracks and started heading down those. I ran for a long time. I was tired, and I was soaking wet with icy water from the river, and it was January in Susanville. I'd never been so cold in my whole life. Then after a while I started to warm up a little. I started feeling pretty comfortable, in fact. I was a little sleepy. I felt like I was going to be OK. So I lay down on the railroad tracks and started to take a little nap. But then I realized this didn't make sense. I couldn't be warm. I was freezing! It was the middle of the night in the middle of the winter and I was soaking wet. I realized it might be hypothermia. This wasn't good.

So I got up and ran some more. I made my way to a place where I thought I'd be safe. I knew a girl named Tracy. She was the girlfriend of a friend of mine. She was older than me, and she was beautiful, but all I wanted was a safe place to hide. Tracy took me in. She got me dried off and put me in bed.

I might never have gotten caught. I found out later that my body was so cold from the icy water that the dogs couldn't follow me. My body temperature was too low to give off a scent. According to the police report the cops called out an officer from the Lassen County Search and Rescue Team—Officer Daugherty and his dog Zeus. They wanted to catch me, but they were afraid I was going to die from exposure. (I did get hypothermia, and to this day I get cold whenever the weather changes, and I hate the winter.) They gave up after four hours and called off the dogs and the search.

But Tracy had a jealous boyfriend. He was one of my cronies, and we had committed some crimes together. He was pissed that I'd stayed all night at Tracy's house. He thought I had betrayed him, so he called the cops and told them where I was. The cops arrested me and searched my place and found all kinds of evidence.

I was sent to the Lassen County Jail, where I met with a public defender and got the chance to start thinking about what I was going to do next. The public defender seemed to think the evidence
against me was pretty substantial. He didn't think I had a chance of beating the charges. Neither did I. So it became a question of minimizing the damage. We decided to plea bargain and throw ourselves on the mercy of the court, and hope for the best.

It didn't seem that serious. I had a history of screwing up and getting caught. So I thought I knew what was coming next. I was going to get the old wrist-slap thing again. I guess I had kind of lost touch with my own activities. I didn't realize how much trouble I had caused, or how many crimes I had committed. I hadn't added it all up.