Autobiography of a Recovering Skinhead (10 page)

“Jesus, she’s fucking sitting right there,” I said, but I didn’t try to move her hand.

Lauren half-opened her eyes and looked at me. I smiled at her. She smiled back, then dozed off again. Amy never took her
hand off my cock. If I hadn’t been completely drunk, I would have come right there in the car.

When we poured ourselves out of the car in the club parking lot, Lauren took my hand. Amy shot me a look that made me a little worried about Lauren’s safety. I squeezed Lauren’s hand. She squeezed mine back. We got in line to pay the cover charge. It was chaotic until the last few feet, where it dropped to single file so the bouncers could stamp people’s hands. Being the polite and respectful boyfriend Amy had taught me to be, I motioned for Lauren to go in front of me, ladies first and all. When I dropped Lauren’s hand so she could pass through the gate, I felt Amy press up against my back. Her breath was a blowtorch on the nape of my neck.

The second Lauren stepped inside the club, Amy yanked me out of line. We barely made it into the alley behind the club. There was none of the sweetness there had been with Lauren that afternoon. For a few seconds, Lauren and I had almost made love. Amy and I just fucked. It was the best fifteen minutes of the first fourteen years of my life.

When I finally made it inside the club, Lauren nailed me. “What did you do with her?”

“You know you’re my only girl.” Then I hugged her, which was stupid because I reeked of Amy. Lauren and I never made love a second time.

Amy and I fucked almost every day for the next two months. Then Amy broke off our nasty affair without warning, which left me with nothing to do during the day. None of the suburban skinheads came into the city during the week. Jimmy and Louie both still went to school. And with the birth of their second child just weeks away, George and Rachel were too busy to hang out. Whether I was lonely or just bored out of my skull, some days I’d cruise over to my dad’s neighborhood to see if anybody was lolling around in Finnegan’s Park. Usually, since I was in the neighbor – hood already, I’d show up at Nanny and Pop’s just about the time Nanny was putting dinner on the table. By then my grandparents
knew I’d become a skinhead, and they knew what that meant. Nanny and Pop in no way approved of what I was doing with my life, but they weren’t willing to cut me out of theirs. They’d tried that tack once before with my dad, and it had been a disaster. Nearly twenty years later, the ghost of who my dad could have been still haunted my grandparents. No matter how bad I got, no matter how much trouble I got into, every time I showed up at their back door, they welcomed me into their lives. And every time I stopped by they tried to convince me to step away from the white supremacy movement.

“If you hate everybody you’ll end up hating yourself,” Pop warned me. His barreled chest heaved when he said, “This thing is taking control of you. You aren’t yourself anymore.”

“I’m afraid you’re going to get hurt,” Nanny said. “You’re too good of a boy to let your life be ruined by this. Please don’t do this to yourself. Please don’t do this to us. We love you.”

I respected my grandparents too much to call them “ZOG dupes.” I knew they were worried about me. I just didn’t care. Nothing mattered to me as much as being a skinhead, and I wasn’t going to let anybody take that away from me, not even Nanny and Pop. I’d been stopping in for dinner and a lecture a few nights a week for several weeks when Nanny finally got suspicious about why I was there so often. When she dropped the question I had been hoping to avoid, she dropped it like a bomb, right on target and without warning.

“When did your mom kick you out?”

“A few months ago.”

“ Why didn’t your father tell us you were back?”

“He doesn’t know.”

“He doesn’t know you moved in with him?” Nanny knew her own kid; she knew it was possible my dad was on a bender and too messed up to notice something like me moving back into his house.

“He doesn’t know I got kicked out,” I said. “I’m not living with him.”

Nanny looked like she was going to throw a pot across the kitchen. “Are you telling me your mother put you on the street and your father doesn’t even know?”

“I’m not on the streets. I’ve been staying with friends.”

Nanny shook her head.

There was no sense in lying at that point, so I spilled the whole story, which didn’t seem to surprise Nanny; she’d lived through almost the same story with my dad two decades earlier.

“Do you want to live with us?” Nanny asked. “We love you. You’re always welcome here.”

“I love you, too,” I said. “But I’m okay. I’m doing fine.”

 

I HAD MY thumb up by the side of the road for a ride home from Louie’s one evening when a middle-aged guy pulled over to pick me up. It was always middle-aged guys who stopped. Women don’t pick up hitchhikers. Young dudes are too cool to stop and really old dudes are too scared. This guy looked like every other guy who’d ever given me a ride – still young enough to feel safe with a stranger in his car, but old enough to feel sorry for a scrawny kid standing on the side of a highway. Like the rest of them, he seemed nice enough, a regular Joe, salt-of-the-earth and all that. We were speeding east on Highway 3, shooting the shit about sports, when he reached across me, opened the glove box, pulled out a revolver, and shoved the barrel into my temple. He held the steering wheel with his knee and used his free hand to unzip his pants.

“Suck me,” he said.

“No fucking way.”

“Your choice, kid.” He pulled back the hammer.

He kept that fucking gun cocked, jammed into my skull, the whole goddamn time. When it was over, he dumped me on the side of the road. I memorized his license plate as he sped away.

A few hours later, I stumbled into my dad’s bar more desperate for him than I’d ever been. He offered me a beer. I asked for
whiskey. I must’ve downed a half dozen shots before I could bring myself to confess that I’d sucked another man’s cock just because he’d held a gun to my head. I needed my dad to tell me I wasn’t a pathetic little pussy. I needed him to have one of his boys track down that plate. I needed him to show that motherfucking asshole what the 68th and Buist boys did to perverts who rape kids.

“Bad shit happens,” my dad said.

That’s all he said. I was fourteen years old, slamming back Jack Daniels to try to wash the taste of some asshole’s cum out of my mouth, and the only thing my father could think to say was, “Bad shit happens.”

Later that night, I jumped a random queen in Center City. I bragged to the other skinheads about how I’d brutalized him, but I never breathed a word to them about what the man in the car had done to me. The skinheads closest to me could tell something was up, though – my drinking got even heavier, my moods even darker. I paced South Street like a wounded lion; Philly felt like a cage.

Matt Hanson misread my mood when he came into the city that Friday night after his school let out for the summer.

“We should go on vacation,” he said.

“Dude, where am I supposed to fucking go? Beverly Hills? Youse know I ain’t got no money.”

“We don’t need money. You up for a little trip to the shore?”

“Jersey?”

Matt grinned. “There’s always somebody down there from South Street. We can get by.”

 

OTHER THAN CASINOS, Atlantic City’s got nothing on Wildwood. The Wildwood boardwalk is classic East Coast, Jersey’s very own Coney Island, only it’s not an island. It’s block after block after block of wide wooden decking crammed so tight with souvenir shops, carnival rides, and junk food joints that in some stretches it’s easy to miss seeing the Atlantic Ocean. Still, you can’t escape
the ocean in Wildwood. Every gust of wind whips off the waves, crosses the beach, then side-checks the boardwalk. Along the way, the salt air mixes with the sand, the fast-food fumes and the sweaty, suntan-lotion stench of tourists so that it’s thick and sticky by the time you suck it in. One good breeze in Wildwood and I knew I was on vacation.

No other Nazi skinheads lived at the Shore full-time that summer. In fact, it had been a few years since any Nazi skins had really laid claim, which is how the SHARPs had managed to get a foothold. With no Nazis around to counter them, the SHARPs had done to the boardwalk in Wildwood what they’d once done to South Street in Philly: they’d terrorized every alternative white kid in town. Matt and me decided it was time to take back the beach. We had about the best support troops imaginable for this mission. The Axis Skinheads out of central Jersey were the most brutal Nazi crew on the East Coast back then. I was brutal enough myself by this point, but I was fucking terrified of the Axis Skins.

Early in the summer, a couple of them came down to visit. They hadn’t been there more than a few hours when they grabbed this homeless guy and dragged him under the boardwalk. It was like a scene out of a movie. It happened so fast, and they didn’t say a word, not to him or to each other. They shot each other this look and leapt into action like they were following a script. I’d seen a lot in my fifteen years, but I hadn’t ever seen anything like that. A few minutes after the Axis guys disappeared with the homeless dude, they reappeared on the boardwalk. One of them had a puckered face that made him look like an old man who forgot his dentures. That Axis skin wasn’t missing any teeth, though. He flashed Matt and me a smile that would’ve made a dentist proud. Then he claimed he and his crewmate had stabbed the homeless dude. I don’t know if they did or if they were screwing with us, but either way, it left an impression.

The only reason the Axis Skins had ever let the SHARPs so much as touch the Wildwood boardwalk was because it was
inconvenient for them to police it. They had their own boardwalks to patrol in other parts of Jersey, and they patrolled them like the Nazi stormtroopers they were. But some weekends, when they were sure everything was under control on their home turf, they’d ride in to Wildwood and clean house. Word of those raids traveled fast and far.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Nazi skinheads and SHARPs were waging serious turf warfare all up and down the Eastern Seaboard. Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, and New Jersey were home to enormous crews on both sides of the race issue. The Eastern Nazi Alliance owned Jersey from Camden to Newark. After the collapse of The Uprise, our South Street crew started unifying all the Nazis in Southeastern Pennsylvania. The Axis Skins ruled central Jersey like a gulag. And Nazi crews in Baltimore, DC, and Virginia Beach were pushing the new era of white supremacy closer toward the Old South.

Of course, damn near every town that had even one Nazi also had a SHARP, and the tension between those two lone wolves is how the rival crews were born. Kind of like how it happened with Jimmy and me at Furness. Jimmy wasn’t a Nazi at all when he slammed that cafeteria tray into those black kids’ heads; he was just my cousin and loyal friend. So when he saw me outnumbered and in danger, he jumped in on my side. That made him a Nazi to everybody in that cafeteria, and, when I look back on it, that made him a Nazi to me and to him, too. SHARPs had the same thing happen the first time they got into a fight with Nazis. If they had buddies loyal enough to jump in and help them, those buddies became SHARPs the second that fight was over. Once you bleed for a cause, you may as well sign up.

By summer of 1990, guys were bleeding on both sides, from New York to Richmond. The more Nazi crews that sprung up on the East Coast, the more SHARP crews sprung up, or tightened up, to counter them. In a lot of parts of the country, SHARPs weren’t very organized. Then again, neither were Nazis. Most
American Sharpie crews were loose knit groups of guys who were proud of their working-class roots, into Ska, and wished like hell they’d been born in England. In some places, the SHARPs were only a “crew” because they liked the word; it was British.

But in some areas, the SHARPs were more organized. The tightest Sharpie crews I ran into hailed from Delaware, Manhattan, Baltimore, and DC. There were SHARPs in pockets around Jersey and SHARPs on South Street in Philly, and a few dudes in those crews were hardcore fighters. But it was the Delaware, Manhattan, Baltimore, and DC SHARPs we really had to watch out for. They would’ve denied they were a “gang,” but they fought like gangsters.

With the Axis Skins’ blessing and our own boys from Pennsylvania on call if we needed them, Matt and I laid claim to the Wildwood boardwalk for the white supremacy movement and became its round-the-clock security guards. We were only there a couple weeks when the inevitable happened: some kid on vacation from Baltimore went home and talked about his trip, and the Baltimore SHARPs caught wind there were Nazis in Wildwood.

Fifteen of them showed up on a Friday night. Fifteen of them versus Matt and me, who combined couldn’t top 300 pounds, and two Richie Rich suburban Nazis who happened to be on the Shore with their parents. The four of us were sprawled on the benches of the Douglas Fudge Pavilion when the Baltimore Sharpies materialized out of the never-ending parade of tourists. Fifteen versus four, assuming the two dudes from the suburbs knew how to fight, which we didn’t know because we’d just met them.

“This is our boardwalk,” I said, without bothering to stand up.

The leader of the SHARPs moved nearer the entrance to the pavilion, but he didn’t step inside. He jutted his chin out, trying to look tough, knowing he had us outnumbered. But numbers alone don’t always add up; there was no way that dude
was going to risk stepping too close until he knew for sure who we were.

“Are you Axis?” he asked. That still cracks me up. Fifteen SHARPs from Baltimore, probably the toughest SHARPs in the nation, against four of us. But those Sharpies wanted to know before they even thought about starting anything if we were Axis. That’s how notoriously ruthless the Axis crew was.

We used some girl’s long-distance phone card to call the Axis Skins. If they’d sent even two of their best guys that probably would’ve been enough for us to handle those SHARPs. But they didn’t send two. Axis turned out in force, nearly half their crew, about two dozen of the meanest Nazi skinheads in America. The next night, the Baltimore SHARPs were not given the option of backing down; Axis didn’t give options.