Autobiography of a Recovering Skinhead (20 page)

“It’s him,” someone said.

Whispers followed as I made my way toward my new cell.

“He’s the Nazi with the TV show.”

The voices sounded more curious than threatening. One actually sounded a little concerned: “He’s just a kid.”

The first few days, everyone talked about me, but no one talked to me. Even though I was free to come and go, I mostly stayed in my single-man cell, studying my Bible, looking for answers to questions I couldn’t put into words. I felt like God was trying to tell me something, but what? Sometimes a shadow would darken the page I was reading. I’d look up to see a giant of an inmate standing in front of my doorway, blocking the bright overhead light from the hallway, silently watching me. Whenever I met his gaze, he’d saunter away. Eventually, I ventured back out into the common room. I poured myself a Dixie cup of Kool-Aid, the Dom Perignon of lockup. I found an empty spot as far away as possible from the crowd around the television and leaned my back against the wall so no one could take me by surprise. I tried to ignore a group of black and Latino inmates playing Spades at a nearby table, but after a few minutes of me just standing there, one asked, “Know how to play, Aryan Boy? Want dealt in?”

“Okay.” There’s nothing quite like boredom to shatter a dude’s political convictions.

I got damn good at Spades thanks to the Sangamon County Jail. And I got the scoop on the Illinois prison system. If I got lucky, I’d get sent to Big Muddy, which was air-conditioned. If I got fucked, I’d get sent to Menard, which was hotter than hell and home to Satan himself: John Wayne Gacy, the notorious serial killer.

The card players were divided on whether or not I should’ve taken the fifteen-year offer. The guys who’d already done hard time thought I was insane to turn it down, especially after I told them about the videotape. But the younger guys, the ones who
still had hope, agreed with me. Except when the table talk turned to gory predictions of what my life was going to be like in a hellhole like Menard State Penitentiary, playing Spades with those guys helped distract me from the mess I was in. When I was alone in my cell, my mind wandered to places darker than Menard. Alone in my cell, I kept drifting back to Tree Street. After all the years and all the hell, my mom was still too busy fucking the warden to check on the prisoner. She didn’t write. She didn’t call. She sure as hell didn’t climb on a bus to come visit me. “She chose dick over you,” I reminded myself. And she was still choosing. I assumed my dad was still choosing drugs over me. I didn’t know for sure because I hadn’t seen him for about a year. All I knew was that my mom had told Nanny and Pop how to reach me and they would’ve told him. Nanny and Pop wrote me faithfully. My dad never wrote me a single word.

 

I WAS HUNCHED over my Bible, praying that I’d get out of prison before my baby was an adult, when the shadow once again descended on my cell.

“Yo, skinhead!” His voice was as deep and dark as the Mississippi River. The Spades players had told me all about him. His name was Abel. He stood nearly 6’6” tall. He’d been a drug kingpin in East St. Louis before he’d been born again behind bars. The feds didn’t care about his conversion; they’d transferred him from his prison home up to Springfield to try him on new charges that would add even more years to his sentence.

“I see you reading the Bible in here by yourself all the time.” Abel paused, like I was supposed to answer him, even though it hadn’t been a question. I waited.

“You know, skinhead, we have Bible study in my cell every night at eight. You ought to come down.”

Facing fatherhood and fifteen years in prison had re-opened my heart to God, but it hadn’t opened my mind. I would play Spades with minorities, I would take prison survival tips from
minorities, but I wasn’t going to study the sacred word of the God of Identity with “mud.”

“I hope you join us,” Abel said, then he walked away. The light returned to my cell.

Later that day, I wound up next to Abel during a body count. Once the guards cleared us, he leaned down to me and said, “See you tonight.”

“No way in hell,” I thought. I guess Abel knew something I didn’t. I don’t know what changed my mind, but a few minutes after eight I found myself at Abel’s door. He and five other black inmates were standing in a circle, holding hands, reciting the Lord’s Prayer. The two men closest to the door silently opened the circle to me. They took my hands gently in theirs. I finished the Lord’s Prayer with them.

“ What’s your name, skinhead?” Abel asked.

“Frankie.”

“Lord, thank you for bringing Frankie to us on this night,” he prayed.

I attended Abel’s Bible study almost every night after that. Abel would lead us in prayer, asking God to bless our meeting and guide us toward understanding and love. He’d offer specific prayers on behalf of fellow inmates facing jury selections or verdicts the next morning. After the prayers, we’d discuss a passage from the Bible and how to apply it in our lives. To close the meeting, the brothers would sing gospel songs. I’d croak along as best I could, thankful that Abel’s booming voice drowned me out.

Before I started going to Abel’s Bible study, only the Spades players treated me like a human, and even they never called me by my name. But everybody in the jail seemed to relax around “Aryan Boy” once they saw me going to Abel’s cell each night. That’s not why I went. I went because the hour I spent there every night was the only hour of every day when I didn’t feel like I was dying.

Everybody was basically cool with me by the time a voice
came over the intercom and announced, “Frank Meeink, please report to the guard station. You have a phone call.” I’d been in general population close to a month, and not one other inmate had ever been paged to take a phone call. I felt like the king of lockup. Everybody in the common room gave me the same weird look. “Jealous,” I thought. The other inmates watched me bound toward the guards’ station like I was expecting a bouquet of roses to be waiting. The guard at the desk didn’t make eye contact. He just said a call had come in for me a few minutes earlier, and I needed to return it right away. He escorted me to a telephone and handed me a note with a number scrawled on it. My mom’s number! My mom was finally checking up on me. Then my mom picked up the phone, and I finally understood: the weird look I got from all the other inmates hadn’t been jealousy; it had been pity.

She was sobbing so hard she couldn’t even say, “Hello.”

“ What’s wrong?”

“Nick’s dead!”

“Not Uncle Nick!” I cried in disbelief.

“No!” she said. “Not Uncle Nick!
Nick!
Nick is dead!”

She rambled on about how some junkie named TJ had shot my cousin Nick so full of China White that he’d never had a chance, about how there was no way Nick would’ve overdosed on purpose or even by accident, about how she didn’t know how she was going to survive this, about how she couldn’t fucking believe I was rotting in jail in bum-fuck-nowhere when my family needed me back in Philly, about how she was going to call the Red Cross to see if they could spring me for the funeral like they did with soldiers. But I couldn’t follow her. Nothing she’d said after “Not Uncle Nick!” really registered with me. Nothing in the whole fucking world made sense.

I clung to the receiver even after my mom hung up. Tears streamed down my cheeks. My shoulders shook. I sank to the floor. I have no idea how long I stayed like that before my Spades partner, an older Latino, threw his arms around me and dragged
me to my feet. He buried my head in his chest and held it there so that no one could see my face. Then he started walking me toward my cell.

“Don’t cry,” he said in a gruff whisper. “Don’t let anybody see you cry.” He kept moving me toward my cell, shielding me from the view of the other inmates, knowing my moment of weakness could make me a target. He didn’t even know what I’d just heard on that phone call, only that it was tragic. Jailhouse veterans know that all incoming calls to jail are bad news. Only I hadn’t known.

“You can’t lose it in here. You gotta put it out of your mind.”

That’s what Nick would’ve said if he’d been there. But, of course, he wasn’t. He never would be again.

I didn’t get to go to the funeral. I had no clue if my mom had actually tried to get the Red Cross to fly me home, because she didn’t call me back. It didn’t matter. I wouldn’t have gone even if I could have. I wouldn’t have done that to Aunt Catherine and Uncle Nick. They didn’t need to see their nephew in shackles next to their son’s grave.

If I hadn’t known Jessica was pregnant, I would’ve been praying for the death sentence. Only the thought of her and our baby made me want to keep breathing.

After close to three months in jail, my day in court finally was in sight. In preparation, my lawyer had me speak to a psychiatrist. The doctor asked me if I’d ever experienced any trauma. I said, “Not really, just life, you know?” So we talked about my life: South Philly, my mom, my dad, John, skinheads, being on my own, being suicidal, being on the run, going to prison, becoming a father. Every couple of sentences, he’d interrupt me with, “You didn’t find that traumatic?”

Finally, the doc asked, “What
would
you consider traumatic?”

I thought about it for a few minutes, then I asked him, “Does being raped count?”

My case never made it to trial. Right before we were scheduled to begin jury selection, my public defender had
another meeting with the prosecutor. That PD had one hell of a shit-eating grin on his face when he asked me, “Would you be willing to take three-to-five?”

NOT MANY WHITE SUPREMACISTS ACTUALLY LAND IN prison. Groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center figured out years ago that the best way to break up a hate group is to break their bank, so the real powerbrokers are more likely to get sued into oblivion than incarcerated. Of course, some of the big dogs get chased by the FBI or the ATF. If they don’t go down shooting like Bob Matthews or Randy Weaver, those guys disappear forever inside the federal system. Regular old rank-and-file white supremacists rarely do time, because they rarely get arrested – most adults in the movement are all talk. And since a lot of skinheads are under eighteen, the worst they usually get is a stint in juvie. Unless of course they pull a shotgun while they’re beating the dude they’ve kidnapped, then forget to take the freaking videotape out of the camcorder.

Less than a week after the ink dried on my plea agreement, I rode a Department of Corrections bus to the intake facility at the Graham Correctional Institution. I was photographed, finger – printed, body-searched, and renamed: B25509. Then I changed into my prison-issue blues and followed a guard to my temporary home in the intake-observation cell block.

My cellmate was a Gaylord. The name ain’t what it seems: the Gaylords are one of the meanest gangs in the Midwest. They formed in Chicago in the 1950s. The gang’s real name is Great American Youth Love Our Race Destroy Spics, which is a shitload to tag on the side of a train car. So they go by the acronym Gaylords,
which sounded cooler back in the ’50s, but still sounds like trouble to anybody in the know.

I couldn’t have asked for a better first cellie. I’d grown up around East Coast corner boys and skinhead crews, not Midwestern gangs and sure as shit not prison gangs. I needed to learn my way around fast, before I made a mistake that might cost me my life. My cellie had grown up in Chicago. He was only in his twenties, but he’d done stints before, as had most of the other Gaylords waiting for him in general population. He looked how my cousin Nick would’ve looked if he’d been pure Irish. His street smarts reminded me of Nick, too, so I trusted him, as much as I was willing to trust anybody under the circumstances. Our first night together, he gave me a crash course on how things work behind bars.

Gangs control the prisons; any dude who tells you otherwise has never been on the inside or he’s a warden. The truth is the system caters to the gangs, uses the gangs, because the gangs are the only thing standing between the guards and the bowels of hell. The gangs bring order to the chaos; they make the violence predictable.

My cellie gave me the rundown on all the big gangs within the Illinois prison system and where they all fit within the superpower alliances called People and Folk. To understand People and Folk, just think Cold War, 1960s-style, but with JFK and Castro wearing doo-rags. By the time I got sent up, the People versus Folk line divided most prisons right down the middle, and it was the only thing that consistently cut through the race lines that divided the gangs. The People included the white Gaylords, the black Vice Lords, and the Latin Kings, among dozens of others. Black Disciples, Latin Folk, and white Simon City Royals were among the Folk. So were the Crips. But the Bloods were People, which explains why it’s a miracle Los Angeles didn’t burn to the ground back in the 1980s.

Each side of the alliance lived by the same basic code: the integrity of the alliance itself trumped any frictions between
particular gangs inside it. So Vice Lords and Gaylords may have battled it out sometimes, but if the Black Disciples started any shit in the meantime, the battle stopped until the war was over. Beyond just defense, there were certain courtesies extended between gangs within an alliance. Like, if a Gaylord were to shank a Vice Lord for no good reason, since they were both People, the head Vice Lord would tell the top dog Gaylord, “If you wanna keep the peace, you better take care of your boy.” The next few days, there’d be one less Gaylord in the yard. Now, had that been a Black Disciple who’d stabbed a Vice Lord, the Vice Lords would’ve taken that dude out themselves, no questions asked, no warnings issued, black unity be damned.

People and Folk weren’t just about war and peace; they were also about the bottom line. The prison black market in Illinois was enormous in the early 1990s. Food, cigarettes, homebrewed hooch, and narcotics were the top commodities, and the gangs traded them like Wall Street brokers. The most powerful gangs had connections on the outside and guards in their pockets. For the right price, they could get you anything short of freedom. I actually saw one dude take delivery on a bag of McDonald’s. But I never saw People gangs doing business with Folk.