Free Uncaged by Frank Shamrock, Charles Fleming Page A

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 get 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