Autobiography of a Recovering Skinhead (12 page)

Two white students leaving the concert, walking away from the rest of the crowd, walking away from anybody else who could be a witness, walked toward us. We could see them coming, their shapes backlit by the distant streetlights. They seemed startled to realize they were not alone in the darkness.

Stug’s dinner-plate face looked so innocent when he asked, “Got a dollar?”

“No, man, sorry.”

“Wrong answer.”

Terror!

Stug cracked his pipe over the guy’s head. Louie followed with his bat. The other student started screaming, running for help, running for his life. He didn’t get twenty feet before I landed a flying kick into his back. The force of my entire body channeled through my boots and sent him reeling. His face bounced off a fire hydrant; his body slammed to the sidewalk. He used the last bit of strength he had left to try to cover his head with his arms. I punished him with my combat boots. He rolled onto his back. His hands fell away from his head. His head was wide open when Dan brought the hammer down. Terror! Hammer. Kick. Hammer. Kick. Terror! The screams were inhuman, the sound of hell splitting open. Dan’s final blow was so savage the small, pointed end of the hammer got stuck. Blood gushed from the kid’s head.

“Give me back my hammer, you motherfucker!” Dan screamed. I pinned the kid’s neck to the ground with my boot to give Dan the leverage he needed. With one vicious jerk, Dan freed his weapon.

I still had my boot on the kid’s throat when I finally saw him, I mean really saw him. Underneath the blood and the gore, beneath the ZOG theory and the Identity theology, he was just a college kid. For all I knew, he may have been the best student on campus. He may have been the star athlete. He may have been the kind of all-around great guy kids looked up to.

He could have been my Uncle Dave.

I almost puked.

“Cops!” one of the skinheads screamed, shaking me back to reality. It was our turn to run for our lives. We were faster than our victims.

Looking back, I realize Dan’s final blow could not have been fatal, but when we fled the scene, we didn’t know. If it had been, the cops would have hunted us down. Even though it had been dark and there hadn’t been any witnesses, they would have
tracked down the monsters who brutalized that poor kid if he hadn’t survived. But I remember speeding away in the car, cracking open beers. We were all laughing ourselves sick at the memory of Dan yelling, “Give me back my hammer!” to the bloody mess on the sidewalk. We beat the crap out of at least three or four other people that night. I can’t say who, where, or why because by then I was so drunk they ran together, a blur of faces at the end of my steel-toed boots, a collage of victims who all made me want to vomit when they begged me for mercy, who made me hit them even harder because they showed me how pathetic and weak they really were.

That’s how sick I was then. I couldn’t see it, of course. Then, I thought the rest of the world was sick, sick from the parasitic infestations of ZOG, sick from the plague of race-mixing, sick from denying the truth of white supremacy. The whole world was sick, everybody but us Nazis, everybody but me.

I truly believed I had a permission slip from God to kick anybody’s ass if they disagreed with me, looked at me funny, didn’t look at me at all. I thought I was doing God’s will by raining down “justice” on those who violated his commandments. The thing is, I only enforced the “commandments” Identity preaches; I never thought twice about the other ten, the ten God handed down to Moses. I blew at least half of those on a daily basis.

THE TERROR SQUAD HAD BEEN RIDING PROUD FOR SEVERAL months already when Louie and I wound up completely shitfaced at a post-rally Klan party in West Chester. Our ride had ditched us, so we were looking to make some new friends. A few skinheads from Baltimore were the only other teenagers in the sea of middle-aged Klansmen. They seemed really cool by comparison, at least while we were tanked. We invited them to spend a few days with us in Philly just so they’d drive us home. In the sober light of the next afternoon, the Baltimore skinheads didn’t seem quite so cool. They were real stand-up guys; they were just boring. We took them down to South Street hoping maybe the action in Skinhead Alley would wake them up. It did. By their second night in Philly, they wouldn’t shut up about how they needed something like Skinhead Alley in Baltimore. Louie and me gave them some pointers on how they could liven up the Nazi nightlife over in Maryland, but they didn’t think they could pull it off on their own. They were right, so I decided to give them an on-site demonstration. It’s not like I had anywhere else in particular to be, seeing as I was homeless, jobless, and expelled from the ninth grade.

As it turned out, those guys weren’t shitting us when they said it was boring as all hell to be a Nazi skinhead in Baltimore. The month I spent in Maryland was the most mind-numbing month of the first fifteen years of my life. I talked to the Baltimore skinheads about how they could sign on more guys if they threw
some parties, real parties, with beer and girls. I talked about how they could form their own version of the terror squad. I talked about getting down and dirty, about living the skinhead life hardcore. A couple of local girls I barely knew and didn’t particularly like kept me fed and drunk. In return, I bounced back and forth between their two beds. I promised them I’d pay them back for real for my food and phone calls as soon as I could get some cash. One night, I tried to jack a car stereo. That plan didn’t work out too good. The guy who owned the car caught me – it’s a miracle the cops didn’t bust me.

The disaster with the car stereo made me hate Baltimore more than I already did. I wanted to go home. I felt oddly homesick, considering I’d been homeless for more than a year. One evening when my roommates went out, I called Nanny Bertone. It had been nearly a year since I’d last heard her voice. When she answered the phone, I got so choked up I could barely say, “It’s me, Frankie.”

“We’ ve been so worried. I was afraid you were dead. Where are you?”

I considered lying to her, but changed my mind.

“I’m in Baltimore. I’m getting sick of it, though. I’m not doing so good.”

“Come home. Now. You are moving in with us.”

It was an order, not an offer. My own room. A clean bed. Three hot, home-cooked meals a day. Access to all the sports equipment in Nanny and Pop’s front hall closet. I felt like I was being sentenced to prison at the Ritz Carlton. Nanny wired me bus fare, and I was settled into my grandparents’ house before dinner that next night.

Nanny and Pop did everything they could to make me feel at home, including laying down the law about how I was going to have to behave while I lived there. No throwing my clothes on the floor. No sleeping all day. No showing up late for dinner and expecting Nanny to cook for me. No cursing, drinking, or girls in
the house. No “
Sieg Heil
-ing ” in the house. I could live with all that because I didn’t plan to be in the house very much.

Nanny and Pop made me promise I would return to school in the fall, but they couldn’t do anything about the rest of the spring semester. I hadn’t dropped out; I had been expelled from at least two, maybe actually three schools in less than twelve months. I wasn’t welcome in any public school for at least another year, and I think my grandparents knew it would have been flushing money down the toilet to pay for parochial school. Besides, one look at my permanent record would have sent the local nuns screaming into the nearest bar.

I spent my days puttering around the house with Pop and eating myself sick in Nanny’s kitchen. In the evenings, I’d tell my grandparents I was going to go visit my dad or my cousins. They’d tell me to be careful and not to stay out past midnight. Then I’d meet up with Louie in Finnegan’s Park. Nanny and Pop proved to be a little more observant than I thought they were going to be. They busted me sneaking in after curfew several times. Every time I broke the rules, I got a lecture, but they never threatened to kick me out. They’d tried that with my dad. Nanny and Pop blamed themselves for what he’d become, even though not even my dad thought it was their fault. But the guilt had been building up inside them for nearly twenty years, and it influenced how they handled me. I was their second chance, their do-over, their mulligan. They weren’t sure what to do with me; they only knew kicking me out wasn’t an option, and I took horrible advantage of that.

 

ONE NIGHT, I hooked up with Louie, Matt, and Stug in Skinhead Alley. We headed toward Center City. We marched shoulder to shoulder in our matching flight jackets, our heads shaved, our Doc Martens laced in red. The closer we got to the downtown district, the farther away from us people moved. Center City yuppies weren’t used to sharing their streets with Nazis. Sidewalks cleared in front of us. We’d drained a twelve pack in Skinhead Alley
before we set out, tucked loose forties inside our flight jackets. We made only one stop along the way. Louie was a complete freak for Oranginas, those orange sodas that come in the little round bottles. He insisted on stopping at a market for Oranginas so he’d have chasers for his beer.

I felt like I was living
A Clockwork Orange
. I loved that movie; all the skinheads did. We watched it every chance we got. Our favorite part was the scene where the guys croon “Singing in the Rain.” I haven’t seen that movie in years, but I remember that scene: they made the guy they were beating on sing the “bomp bomp bomp” part of the song while they attacked him and raped his girlfriend. The first time I saw that scene, I thought it was fucking hilarious in a sick kind of way. Do people really do that kind of psycho shit? I wondered.

They do. And I felt it that night, deep in my bones. That night, the boys and me didn’t have to say anything or do anything to back people away from us; we gave off this vibe that sent those powerful Center City suits and their trophy wives scurrying out of our path. But we weren’t stalking them in Center City that night. We were hunting for the people most of those yuppies had probably never noticed living among them. All across America, the homeless haunt the wealthiest neighborhoods because rich people don’t rob the homeless; they just pretend not to see them. In places like Center City, the homeless are like gutters; people step over them instinctively without noticing they’re there, so nobody notices when one disappears.

Louie, Matt, Stug, and I were hunting the homeless that night. We were looking for some black wino or some Puerto Rican junkie nobody would miss. It was a terror squad night: we weren’t looking for a fight – we were looking for a victim. We stormed through Love Park, jumping up and down off the concrete walls and benches wailing “Singing in the Rain” at the top of our lungs. But we didn’t find what we wanted. We marched in formation around City Hall, yukking it up, goofing on everybody we passed. But still, we couldn’t sniff out our perfect prey. The longer we
searched, the quieter and more focused we got. By the time we settled into the front edge of an alley, we were like a pack of lions, bloodthirsty, ready to pounce on the first victim to stumble past our den. We’d been so focused on hunting we hadn’t realized we’d become the hunted.

“You SHARPs?”

This is not a good question for Nazis to hear echoing from the street when they’re standing in a dark alley that deadends into a brick wall. All four of us spun around to face the voice. All we could see was the shadowy outline of one really big guy standing about fifteen feet away from us out in the street, and the shadowy outlines of two even bigger guys standing right behind him.

In the darkness, I could see their combat boots and flight jackets, but I couldn’t see what color laces were in their Docs, and I couldn’t read the pins and patches on their jackets. Cornered inside that dead-end alley, I couldn’t tell if the three guys blocking our exit were Nazi skinheads like us or the three biggest SHARPs I’d ever seen.

“We ain’t no fucking Sharpies. Are you?” I replied, stepping into the street and into their range. I made out the swastika patch on the lead dude’s collar, but I didn’t recognize him.

He looked me up and down, checking the color of my laces and the patches on my jacket to make sure I wasn’t lying. I looked him up and down to size up what I’d gotten myself into. The guy must have been about twenty-five and must have weighed around 250 pounds, solid muscle. He locked his eyes on me.

“So if I don’t know you and you ain’t a SHARP, who are you?”

“I’m Frankie Meeink.” I waved behind me and added, “And this is Louie, Matt, and Stug.”

“Where you from, Frankie Meeink?” he asked without so much as glancing at my three friends.

“South Philly.”

I sheepishly took another step forward. That’s when he
closed in on me. He was just inches away from me, so close I could taste his breath, when he said, “This ain’t South Philly, kid.”

The tone of his voice made it sound like he was trying to decide if it was worth his trouble to kill me. I could tell from the look in the guy’s eyes that he wasn’t just smack-talking; this was one serious, badass Nazi, and he clearly thought we were invading his turf. If he’d been another teenager, I wouldn’t have put up with the attitude he was giving me. But I’d learned my lesson about respecting my elders from my run-in with The Uprise veterans in the Wise’s parking lot. Those guys had been a lot further into the movement than we’d given them credit for that first night, but this dude was a whole different ballgame. The guy staring me down on the edge of that alley was about ten times more hardcore than anybody we’d met in the Wise’s parking lot. This dude was a good three times more hardcore than the Axis Skins and, until that very moment, I’d thought those guys were the most ruthless dudes on the planet.

“So what are four boys from South Philly doing in Center City?” he asked.

I sure as hell wasn’t going to correct him and let him know two of the guys behind me grew up in the suburbs. He seemed like the kind of guy who might have a pretty serious problem with guys from the suburbs, or with guys who corrected him for that matter.