Autobiography of a Recovering Skinhead (21 page)

The peace treaties and trade agreements inside the two alliances made prison a lot safer and more predictable than I’d imagined it would be. If you abided by the warden’s rules, you stayed out of the hole. If you abided by the alliances’ rules, you stayed out of the grave. That’s good shit to learn before the guards waltz your ass out into general population. So my first night in intake, I took full advantage of my cellie’s knowledge.

“So is everybody People or Folk?”

“No. The super-hardcore Muslims, the Malcolm X types, they pretty much steer clear of all the gang shit.” His eyes dropped to the swastika tattoo on my neck. “So do your boys.”

The Aryan Brotherhood is the most notorious gang in the American prisons. By gang standards, they’re unbelievably small. They’re also unbelievably violent. The Aryan Brotherhood
formed in the California prison system back in the 1960s. It spread across the country almost as fast as its reputation. It was the gang no other gang wanted to fuck with. It’s still that gang. The Aryan Brotherhood answers to no one; everybody answers to them. All white inmates defer to the Brotherhood. No matter how badass they think their little gang may be, no white prison gang still in existence has ever refused a request from the Brotherhood. That’s why the Brotherhood can run a prison even if they only have one or two guys there. But it’s not just other white inmates who bow down to them. Most minority gangs get real quiet when the Brotherhood passes by. So do most guards.

The Brotherhood is so powerful it transcends the People and Folk alliances. But at least in Illinois in the early 1990s, the Brotherhood leaned toward the People. They did a lot of business with the Latin Kings, and they were tight with the Vice Lords. That shocked the shit out of me at first, seeing as the Aryan Brotherhood believes in white supremacy and the Vice Lords are all black. Then I learned that most Vice Lords are Muslims, meaning most of them hate Jews. The enemy of my enemy is my friend.

Other than some of the big white gangs like the Gaylords and the Northsiders, the two groups closest to the Brotherhood in most prisons aren’t actually gangs, just groups. The first is the great white horde of outlaw bikers doing time for dealing meth and battering dudes who ride Kawasakis. The second group runs under the tag Aryan Nation. In prison, any guy who belonged to the white supremacy movement before hitting intake is considered part of Aryan Nation, even though most weren’t actually in the real group by that name before getting busted. Some were Klansmen. Some were part of the National Alliance. Some had ties to White Aryan Resistance. A few actually had been members of the real Aryan Nations in their former life. But, at Graham, only one was a South Philly skinhead.

I was thrilled to learn from my cellie that there would be at least a few other Aryan Nationalists waiting for me once I got
out of intake. They’d be my family, my home base. I was counting on those guys to keep me from losing my edge, my faith, my mind. Those were the guys I could talk with about Identity and ZOG and destiny. They were my brothers. The Aryan Brotherhood, on the other hand, was totally out of my league. The Brotherhood doesn’t recruit short-timers or babies, and by their standards, I was both. But I was a skinhead, and a kind of famous one at that because of the controversy about
The Reich
. So I had a hunch the Aryan Brotherhood would step in if any minority inmate got a bug up his ass to try to kill me, and I was hoping to God all the minority inmates were thinking the same thing.

My second night in intake, I was shooting the shit with my Gaylord friend when a monster of a guard appeared at our cell door. If it hadn’t been for the uniform, I couldn’t have picked him out of a lineup. He reeked biker badass every bit as much as the badass bikers on my side of the bars.

“This is from a friend.” He handed me a shoebox.

As soon as the guard walked away, my cellie asked, “Who knows to send you a kite?”

“A what?”

“A kite. It’s not real mail,” he said. “You only get real mail at call. That’s from inside. Prison UPS.”

I carefully unfolded the small paper football attached to the top of my kite. “Welcome, Frank,” the note began. It then provided a list of inmates’ names and their cell assignments and instructed me to tell the guards to take me to any one of those cells whenever I was ready to talk. The note was signed “Scooter.”

When I read the name aloud my cellie said, “Dude, Scooter runs the bikers.” Then he leaned in close and whispered, “Word is he speaks for the Brotherhood.”

If there were any actual members of the Brotherhood at Graham they were either on their way out of the system or on their way back in. Except for its maximum-security intake and prerelease units, Graham was a medium-security joint. It wasn’t the kind of place where the Aryan Brotherhood floated around
for long in general population. According to my cellie, that’s exactly why the Brotherhood struck deals with guys like Scooter. He spoke where they couldn’t, on the very front end of the system. Gaylord legend had it that guys like Scooter were kind of like the Brotherhood’s welcome wagon. I didn’t know enough about the Brotherhood or the prison system to know if that was myth or fact. All I knew was somebody’d finally sent me a care package. The shoebox contained a little bottle of shampoo, some toothpaste, a toothbrush, a comb, deodorant, matches, a huge stack of candy bars, and two small, easy-to-conceal marijuana joints called pinners.

“I never got nothing like this on intake anywhere,” the Gaylord said. “ Who the hell are you?”

He’d been so busy answering all my questions he hadn’t paused to ask me who I was. He just assumed, since I was a kid, that I was, well, just a kid. So I told him about Strike Force and
The Reich
.

“I’m sharing a fucking cell with Adolf Hitler!”

“Dude, it’s really not that big of a …”

“Adolf fucking Hitler is my cellmate! My boys back home ain’t gonna fucking believe this.”

His eyes darted from me to the two pinners.

“So, Adolf, you gonna share?”

“Yeah, sure,” I said. “What do I do?”

He assumed I meant how do I smoke pot in prison without the guards busting me. Of course, I didn’t correct him; I just watched. I’d been around pot almost every day of the first fourteen years of my life, but I’d never paid any attention to how to light a joint, because I’d never wanted a joint. I’d only once ever even taken a hit off a joint, and I’d been really young, maybe fourth grade, and I only did that one hit so my older cousins wouldn’t call me a baby. I hated that hit. I hated pot for the same reason I hated Jethro Tull: it reeked of Tree Street.

For a convict, I was a goody-two-shoes when it came to drugs. All I’d ever done was that one toke off a joint and a few hits
of acid that had sent me on a guilt trip. As a skinhead, I didn’t approve of drugs. Hell, I didn’t even smoke cigarettes. I just drank. But Scooter hadn’t sent me a case of Budweiser; he’d sent me two pinners. My cellie had no clue I was basically opposed to drugs when he started working his magic on my kite. He unrolled about four feet of the toilet paper and smeared deodorant all over it. He shoved it into the shoebox and lit the toilet paper on fire.

“That’s prison incense,” he explained. Then he fired up one of the pinners and took slow, steady drags.

Minutes later, half-stoned from my cellie’s secondhand smoke, my whole anti-drug stance started to crumble. I was like one of those cartoon characters with a little devil whispering in one ear and a little angel chatting up the other.

The devil tempted me: “It’s okay, B25509. You’re stuck in fucking prison. It’ll dull the pain.”

“Don’t forget who you are! You’re only here because you’re an Aryan warrior. Good Aryans don’t do drugs,” the angel reminded me.

“But they’re from Scooter,” said the devil. “He’s got ties to the Brotherhood, and who the fuck are you to question the Aryan Brotherhood?”

I snatched the joint from my cellie and took such a long drag I nearly choked to death. I sputtered something about having a cold to try to save face, but it didn’t matter. So long as I shared, my cellie didn’t care that I was a weed virgin. Once I got myself back under control, he picked up the conversation we’d dropped when the guard delivered the kite.

“So like I was saying, man,” he drawled through the haze. “The gangs run the store. It’s all about who your friends are. What’s that saying, ‘no man is an island’? You can’t be an island, man. In here,” he rambled on, “you either sign on or bend over.”

That sobered my ass up quick. The great dirty-little-not-so-secret of the American prison system: rape.

“You don’t have friends to watch out for you,” my cellie said, “you’re fucked. All the gangs fuck with you. The psychos start
eyeing you up. Even the guards fuck with you more if you’re on your own.”

A couple days later, I thanked my Gaylord cellie for all the lessons, and he thanked me for sharing Scooter’s pot. We were sent to different cellblock houses in general population. My new cellmate was an older man whose accent I recognized on the first word.

“So what are youse in for, kid?” he asked.

“I beat a dude up and kinda kidnapped him. How ’bout youse?”

“I killed my brother.”

After dropping the ending on me like a bomb, he started at the beginning of his story. Every twist and turn of his life growing up in Philly revolved around his brother. They had been more than brothers; they’d been best friends. They did everything together, always. As adults, they moved to Illinois together, found work together, made friends together, and hung out together every night at the same bar. It would’ve been a blessing if they’d died together. But when the cops showed up at the scene of the accident, my cellie’s brother was already dead in the passenger seat, and my cellie was alive and uninjured behind the wheel. He blew nearly twice the legal limit on the breathalyzer while he watched the EMTs put his best friend into a bodybag.

When he finished his story, he asked me, “Youse drink much?”

I didn’t have the heart to answer him; I just shrugged my shoulders. He snatched a big book off his bunk and said, “Youse ever wanna read this, help yourself.”

I glanced at the cover.
The Big Book
. “What a fucking original title,” I thought. Then I noticed the words printed near the bottom: Alcoholics Anonymous.

That afternoon, I took my first trip out to the main yard. It looked like a South Philly playground, an ocean of cracked concrete surrounded by weeds passed off as grass. I hadn’t been outside more than a minute or two when a guy approached me.
I didn’t recognize him from my block. His long black hair was slicked into a ponytail. Two huge goons lurked behind him.

“You get what I sent you?” he asked.

“Scooter?”

“Take a walk with me.”

Scooter’s bodyguards lagged behind enough to give us privacy when we were far away from other inmates, but they closed rank whenever we neared members of minority gangs. No one made a move toward us, though. Not even other bikers.

“I’ve heard about you,” Scooter said, dragging hard on his smoke. He ran down a list of what all I’d done in the name of white supremacy since arriving in Illinois; he had more on me than the cops.

He waived his hand in the direction of a pack of young bikers. “Half those fuckers didn’t know they were white until the blood drained out of their faces in intake. You’re not one of them, not with that swastika on your neck.” He offered me his cigarette.

“I don’t smoke.”

“You didn’t smoke those two pinners I sent you?” He sounded pissed.

“I smoked those.” I did not need Scooter mad at me my first day in general population. “I don’t smoke cigarettes.”

Scooter nearly busted an artery laughing at me. “Kid, this ain’t a Marlboro.” He flashed his hand open to reveal the pinner. He showed me how to hold it so it wouldn’t be too obvious to the guards. I took a hit, then, being polite, turned to pass it to one of Scooter’s boys walking behind us.

“No!” the bodyguard sharply corrected me. That dude shot Scooter a look that said, “Sir, I apologize for this idiot offering to let me smoke your weed.”

That look taught me as much in one second as my Gaylord cellie had taught me in a week: no man is an island, but every island is ruled by only one man. I would’ve liked to have spent more time with Scooter simply to watch him work his Don-Corleone-on-a-chopper angle. He didn’t have a drop of Italian
blood in him, but that dude would have made a hell of a 68th and Buist boy. Unfortunately, my conversations with Scooter were short lived, because I was only passing through Graham.

Scooter must’ve seen the worry on my face. “No matter where you end up, they’ll be there. They ain’t gonna sign you on since you’re just a kid, but they ain’t gonna let anybody fuck with you, either.”

“So how do I find them?”

Scooter shook his head and choked back a laugh. He tapped his index finger on the swastika tattoo on my neck. “Trust me. They’ll find you.”

 

A FEW DAYS later, I was transferred to Big Muddy State Penitentiary, the prison the Spades players in Springfield had made such a big deal about because of it being air-conditioned. When the bus stopped and the doors opened, I understood why: southern Illinois is a lot farther south than it looks on a map. It was July and I swear I thought my brain was going to melt walking from the bus into the building.

From what I’ve heard, Big Muddy is where Illinois warehouses sex offenders these days, but in the early 1990s, it was a regular maximum-security prison. At Graham, it had seemed like half the dudes I met were either on their way into the system or on their way out. Big Muddy inmates were just there: most had already been locked up for years; some would be locked up for life. Guys who count down by decades instead of days don’t tend to worry about getting into more trouble.

In a twisted way, that made life pretty bearable inside Big Muddy. If the black market at Graham had impressed me, what I encountered at Big Muddy blew my fucking mind. Full-size joints replaced pinners. Instant soup took a backseat to hooch. If I’d wanted it, cocaine and heroin were there for the buying. So was porn. So were pretty-boy whores.