Uncaged (3 page)

While I was living in the garage, my next-door neighbor turned me on to pot. His dad kept a stash in their garage, in a little tool pouch on his bicycle. I started making nightly trips to his garage. We'd go in, steal his weed, and get high.

Pretty soon I was getting high all the time. I was either drinking or smoking or huffing every day. My grades and attendance fell apart. Within a few weeks, I got arrested for being drunk in public. It seemed like I was in trouble all the time. Usually it was because I had done something wrong and had gotten caught. Sometimes it was just because I was the go-to guy when something had happened. If something went missing, I got punished for stealing it,
even if I hadn't. If something got broken, I got blamed, even if I had nothing to do with it. I was always assumed to be the culprit, or the ringleader—which, admittedly, usually was the case. But it meant that I was in trouble, and being punished for something, all the time.

The right teacher or after-school sports or some extracurricular activity might have helped. But I couldn't stay involved with sports because I was always screwing up. I was on the Little League team, but I cut my knee and they said I couldn't play anymore. When that got better, I fell down and broke my collarbone and couldn't play anymore.

I was only ten or eleven, but I see now that my life was already very messed up. One day a neighbor kid and I were playing in the park, near a train trestle, but not the one I grew up next to. There was some water down below the trestle, and we'd go down there sometimes to catch snakes. This day a train was going by, maybe twenty or thirty feet above us. I wondered whether we could throw a rock hard enough to hit the train. So I started throwing rocks. The neighbor kid started throwing with me. We hit the train a few times. We felt good about that.

After the train passed, we went back to trying to catch the water snakes. But suddenly there were cops everywhere. They drove into the park and jumped out and grabbed us. They put me in handcuffs and threw me in the back of the police car. They told me I was under arrest on felony charges of throwing rocks at a train. I wasn't old enough to understand what a felony was, but I knew the situation was serious. But I was more scared of what Joe was going to do than what the police were going to do. I was really afraid he was going to hurt me.

There weren't any big consequences. The police called my mom and Joe, and they came to get me. I got punished some more. I had to keep sleeping in the shed.

Around the time that I broke my collarbone, I got thrown out of regular school. I was falling apart mentally from everything that was happening and still trying to play sports. One day I was running for a fly ball in left field when I tripped and rolled across my shoulder. I was really embarrassed about missing the ball and didn't tell anyone that my shoulder hurt until I got home. Mom and Joe were mad and we spent the night in the emergency room. I had to wear that collarbone brace thing you have to wear, the one that pulls your shoulders back like a straitjacket, and some older kids said that they were going to kick my ass. I was afraid that I would not be able to defend myself—but I had a knife, so I pulled it and told them to leave me alone. That didn't go over too well. Somebody must have told on me. The next day I got placed in a lockdown program where you had to check in every morning and check out every afternoon. It was just one big room where they put all the kids who cause trouble.

Because it was just me and a couple other kids on our own in this little room, I had nothing to do except my schoolwork. So I did my work; I did it fast and I did a lot of it. It was easy for me, and I got a whole school year's worth of work done in a couple of weeks.

I had already tested high enough to qualify for the GATE program. Now the administrators kicked me up a grade. They gave me some kind of test, and the next thing I knew I was in the ninth grade. I didn't do eighth grade at all. It wasn't the first time I had been tested. When I was seven or eight and just starting to get into all kinds of trouble, my mom started taking me to therapy. We were on welfare, so they must have been some sort of state or county doctors. I remember meeting many times, over a six- or eight-month period, with a really nice guy who taught me how to play chess. He had me take an IQ test, and he told me I was really smart. I liked the guy, and trusted him, and I liked playing chess. When I came home from one of those meetings, I sat down to play chess with Joe. I beat him. He got mad and never played chess with me again.

But even skipping a grade and the GATE program couldn't keep me out of trouble. I took alcohol to school and got some kids drunk, and I got caught. I stole something from a store, and I got caught. I might have been gifted and talented, but I had zero skills as a criminal. Every time I did something, I got caught. After a while my mom and Joe got sick of it. They had tried punishing me all the ways they knew. They beat me and made me sleep in the garage and made me move into the shed, and I was still acting like a jerk and getting into trouble. So my mom decided to send me to live with my dad.

I had not had any contact with him, ever. I didn't even know my mom knew where he was. But all of a sudden I was put on a bus and sent all the way down to Lancaster, near Los Angeles. Frank Alicio Juarez II lived in a dusty tract home on a street in the desert. He seemed nice, not scary like Joe. But he was gone a lot, working. He had a wife, maybe his third or fourth wife after my mom, and some other kids. The whole area was flat and sandy. You'd have dust and grit in your teeth when you ate. And it was hot and dry and the wind was always blowing. There were jackrabbits in the desert, which went on for a hundred miles in every direction, and the kids rode dirt bikes. They took me out and I crashed right away. I fell down and messed up my knee and got dirty. My dad's father—the original Frank Alicio Juarez—lived nearby, in an old house in the old section of Lancaster, with his wife. They were Jehovah's Witnesses, and they had been married fifty years.

I stayed for a few weeks over the summer and got to meet more of my dad's family. My great-grandmother stayed with us for a few days, and she spoke only Spanish. She was warm and friendly and I laughed and smiled at everything she said. I didn't get into a lot of trouble during my visit, and they seemed pleased to have me there. But it ended pretty quickly, and soon I was back in Anderson, living with Joe.

I guess I hadn't learned any kind of lessons on how to behave while I was in Lancaster because I kept screwing up. One day, I had stolen a bottle of Southern Comfort and gotten a bunch of kids drunk in the backyard. My little sister, Suzy, was going to tell on me. She was always telling on me. So I got mad and pulled a knife on her. On my own little sister! I must have been drunk. I tried to scare her; I said I'd stab her if she told. It didn't work. Suzy doesn't scare that easily. Robynn is sort of girly and sweet, but Suzy was tough. So she told on me anyway—about the Southern Comfort and the drunk kids
and
me pulling the knife.

My mom freaked out and called the police, so I ran away. I don't remember where I ran, but I didn't get far. I got picked up by the police and taken to some sort of crisis center. I knew I was in trouble. I was really scared and really confused. But I was also pretty tough. It wasn't like the end of the world or anything. It was just some more bad stuff I was going to have to deal with.

The crisis center was in Redding. It was full of boys and girls like me who'd gotten into trouble. They said things like “My dad's an alcoholic” or “My mom's a drug addict.” They came from messed-up places. I began to realize, maybe for the first time, that my life wasn't normal. I told someone about being locked in the closet, and he said that wasn't right. Parents weren't supposed to lock a kid in a closet.

I remember talking to counselors. They seemed nice. They didn't seem mad. They asked me a lot of questions, and from the questions—and the way they looked when I answered them—I understood that things were not OK in my house.

I stayed in the crisis center for three or four days. It wasn't bad. I was locked up, but I knew no one was going to hurt me. I was in trouble, but I didn't think anyone was going to beat me with a belt, like Joe did at home. I could have stayed there a while. It was better than living in the shed.

But I made friends with a girl. She didn't want to stay there, so I decided to help her. We found some way to sneak out of the crisis center. We ran until we were near my family's old apartment. I thought we could hide out in the park near the golf course. There were some homeless guys already living there, so we sort of moved in with them. There was a Safeway supermarket up the street where we would go to steal liquor and food. It went on like that for a few days. It must have been some time in the fall, because I remember I was cold. I hadn't taken enough clothes with me when I ran away from the crisis center. I only had what I had been wearing—maybe because that's all I had when the police took me in. I remember on the third or fourth day after we ran away we were trying to steal some pants and a jacket because I was cold. Later on we went back to the Safeway to steal some more food and we got caught.

This time they didn't take me back to the crisis center. They took me to juvenile hall. There was a hearing, and they sentenced me. That was more serious. Now I was in the system.

I spent some time being processed at juvenile hall. There were interviews and paperwork and lots of questions. The counselors and the psychiatrists couldn't figure out what to do with me any more than my mom and Joe or my biological dad could. But this was their job, and they seemed to take it seriously. They asked tons of questions. The most important one was: Do you want to go home?

I didn't want to go home. I told the counselors and psychiatrists the truth. They asked, “What are we going to do with you?” and I said, “I don't know. But I don't want to go home.” They got it. They said, “You're running away from home. You're running away from the crisis center. You're getting the other kids drunk. You're pulling a knife on your sister. You probably
can't
go home.”

They used the traditional two-person cell at juvenile hall. That's where I slept. At first it was me and an Indian kid. Then it was me and a black kid. Looking around, I saw all kinds of kids. Up to then, living in Anderson had meant being around nothing but rural Caucasian families. Now I was with a whole lot of different kids.

That's how I found out I was Mexican. Kids would ask me, “So what are you?” I didn't even understand the question. They'd say, “What are you, Mexican?” They asked me my name. I told them
it was Juarez. They said, “So you're Mexican.” For the first time I understood there were differences and classifications. I didn't know what my classification was, exactly, but I understood there was some sort of hierarchy.

Being at juvenile hall didn't feel like being in jail. We slept behind locked doors, and everything was hard and cold and made of steel, but it wasn't all that scary to me. I felt more free than I had at home.

At home, I had been scared all the time. I was always worried. I felt like I was going to get hurt, or that someone was going to kill me—usually Joe. My whole life seemed to revolve around trying to not get hurt, surviving, staying out of physical pain. My whole life felt like shit. Unless I was doing something physical, like playing in the park or doing sports, or getting drunk or getting high, I was just alone in my head and worried. I remember feeling like I needed to be taken care of. I needed my mom. And I couldn't have my mom, because Joe was there. I was always in trouble with him, and he was always mad at me, and he was always hitting me. I remember lying there at night thinking of ways to kill Joe, and thinking that there had to be some solution. There had to be something I could do. There had to be a way out.

Juvenile hall seemed like the way out. I was happy there. I was locked up, but I had plenty to eat, and I was free to read all I wanted. I went to classes and did schoolwork. We did arts and crafts, and we had sports, and no one was trying to hurt me.

So when the counselors said I should probably become a ward of the state, I said that was OK with me. I didn't really get what it meant. I didn't understand the long-term implications. Maybe they didn't explain it to me. But I knew that, whatever it was, it had to be better than my life at home. The state had been good to me. Why wouldn't I want to be a ward of the state?

In that moment, I learned a lesson: I made a decision. Up until then, I had been trapped in a place where I had no control and no
hope of change. I was just the kid in trouble, who couldn't stay out of trouble, who was going to get caught and punished. But at that moment I realized that I
did
have control, that I could create something new, be something new. I had broken the law, but I had taken control of my future. It gave me a weird sense of energy, like I could create whatever I wanted. Now I had the solution. I had a plan. If things got too tough, you grab the girl, grab some stuff, and run—and see what happens. If I didn't like my life, or my family, or my group, I could break the law in some drastic way and everything would change.

This became a pattern for me. This is how I lived my life for the next ten years.

I wasn't at juvenile hall for very long, but I grew to really love the custodians there. They were gentle and caring and more like a real family than any family I'd ever known. They were only there because they wanted to help kids in trouble. I
got
that. I didn't understand it, but I understood it was real. But they didn't want me to stay there. They wanted to get me placed with a family. They oversaw the paperwork that made me a ward of the court, and then they found me a home.

I was sent to live in a group home with a Christian Scientist family. They had a big white house in a small town in a rural area somewhere outside of Redding. The house was on two or three acres, and one of the acres was all lawn. I remember a black dog playing on the lawn. There were five or six kids in the group home, plus the mom and pop who were in charge of it. The kids were all boys of varying ages and backgrounds. The parents were loving and kind. The man was very strong in his faith. I was interested in what he believed and I loved to read, so he gave me some books. Before, all I had known was the Jehovah's Witnesses. Now I started consuming information about Christian Science. The man and I connected over that. I was studious and took it seriously, and we had long talks.