Autobiography of a Recovering Skinhead (41 page)

I don’t talk to my mom’s family very much – aunts and uncles and cousins included. And it’s funny, I became a skinhead on that side of the family. And a lot of them aren’t racists, great people, but I’ve just lost that connection, maybe talk to them on Facebook every once in a while.

Ironically, my cousin on my dad’s side who I was very close with, beautiful Italian girl, married a northeast Philadelphia Jewish guy, and he’s probably my greatest contact now in the family, we keep in touch more than anyone else in the family. It’s funny I guess, when people look at it and think, “Oh, you’re a former skinhead and you’re closest now to your cousin-in-law who’s Jewish” but it’s just because we’re similar people and great friends. It just happened that way.

They’re all really happy with the book. I know they wish they could’ve did better for me in life, but it wasn’t all up to them. They tried to step in many times, but I was too far gone. I was too far into having an alliance with somebody else and I turned my back on them and they didn’t turn their backs on me and I think they feel bad, but I try to reassure them they’re some of the main reasons I got out, because I wanted to be invited to the family parties, I didn’t want to be the guy who, when they’re thinking of having a family get-together, they say, “ Do we really want to invite Frank? Do we want to hear all that Nazi bullshit again that he always brings to the party?” I didn’t want to be that guy. And to know that now when something’s going on, even though I live four states away, they still call me now to let me know something’s going on if there’s any way I can make it back home.

 

JMR
And part of it, too, with Frank’s dad’s side of the family – there were so many years where he not only disappeared
from the pictures but they had no idea what was going on with him and no real way to get a hold of him to find out. And like Frank said earlier, he would usually prefer to leave the room while I’d interview people and he’d say, “ Tell Jody everything and if you have questions, you can ask her or if you want to later, you can ask me.”

I remember meeting with the Bertone aunts and uncles and cousins in Philly and the question they asked me that blew my mind was they wanted to know why Frank had gone to prison. This was in 2006, thirteen years after the fact, but they didn’t want to ask him because they didn’t want to embarrass him. They’d heard stories, the 68th and Buist rumor mill, but they weren’t sure what was true and what wasn’t, because the lines of communication were so severed by that point between the two sides of the family, basically since Frank was two. It was fascinating to me that it had gone that long and they really didn’t have a clue about Frank – for example, nobody knew how bad it was between Frank and his stepfather for a long, long time.

 

AOR
You were incarcerated in an adult prison as a seventeen-year old kid. How did doing that time shape who you are?

 

FM
I learned to become a man in there. In the movement, I was surrounded by boys; even the older guys were scared little boys. And when I went to prison, I met people who were real men. Real men in the fact that they handled themselves like men. I didn’t even know how to shave. A dude had to teach me how to shave in there. I only had a little goatee then, but I’d never shaven in my life; my father never gave me that lesson, my stepfather never gave me that lesson, and I’ll never forget that prison is where I learned to shave; it’s where I learned to talk a little deeper and mean a little bit more about what I say. I don’t want to put forward that guys in prison are great representatives of men because, even when I give talks I’ll say that they’re not the real
tough guys – the real tough guys are the men who pay their bills and take their kids fishing every weekend, those are the real tough guys.

I definitely became a man in there, and I learned that up until that point, I feared men because of my stepfather – I had a fear of men. And once I got in prison and learned that I can handle myself and do it with a streetwise dignity, that fear went away. Until then, I was always afraid of adult men. If you were a friend of mine and you had a dad, I didn’t want to be around the room with him – for one, I was probably trying to recruit you into the movement, so I didn’t want your dad to be involved in our talk, but I also had this fear that all fathers and father figures were mean. But in prison, I learned that I am a man and not all men are like that.

 

JMR
One of the things I’ve noticed in Frank, and this is coming from that fear as a child that lingers, is that as a kid on Tree Street, the only time Frank could eat comfortably was very late at night after John was asleep or passed out. And I’ve noticed now, having spent a lot of time with Frank, that he still consumes nearly half of his calories in any twenty-four hour period standing at the kitchen cupboard in the middle of the night, or eating pickles out of the fridge or if we’re on the road, raiding hotel vending machines, because it’s safe.

 

FM
I still do that every night, I wake up and I have to go downstairs and eat, because my body tells me, “ Yo, this is the time that you normally eat” and I do – I feel comfortable eating what I want, and my wife even says she knows there’s some issues there, like sometimes subconsciously I still might even hide what I ate, because when I was a kid, I wasn’t allowed to go downstairs and eat, so if I ate something that came in a wrapper, I had to bury the wrapper at the bottom of the trash. I still do that, and I don’t know if that’s a fear of men or habit.

JMR
The fear of men issue was overcome from everything I’ve seen. But some patterns that started because of that fear are still there, and that’s a behavior pattern I don’t think he’ll ever shake – it’s not like he’s eating at 2:00 a.m. because he’s scared of who’s actually in the room, it’s that his whole experience from ages ten through thirteen was so intense that it programmed certain behaviors that will always be there. It’s as if your stomach is only comfortable eating at that time.

 

FM
It’s even hard for me today to discipline my kids forcefully and not think, “Am I treating them like my stepfather treated me?” I know I’m not; I know I treat my children a million times better than I was treated, but when it comes time to discipline them – and I don’t hit my kids or anything – I make sure to not cut too deep with my words. And sometimes I think maybe I need to do that; that they need to see I’m really disappointed in something they did but I can’t go there because my biggest fear is that they’re going to go to their bedrooms and feel what I felt. And it’s hard to go up to that line, but I have to do it daily with them.

 

AOR
So you’ve moved toward softness with your children because of the way you were treated?

 

FM
I would say so, but of course my kids and their friends think

I’m strict, but I’m just a guy who says all the old things my grandparents used to say. Like my kids’ll say, “All my friends are going to go to the mall,” and I’ll say, “ No you’re not” and they’ll say, “but Johnny’s dad said he could go” and I’ll say, “ Well I’m not Johnny’s dad.” I say all them old things. But I’m also like this super fun dad, so their friends like to be around because I do take the kids fishing, I play sports with them in the backyard all the time. I think I’m a good dad, and I think my kids think I’m a good dad – a little strict maybe, but I would never discipline them the way I was. If my kids do something stupid, I would never call them
idiots, I couldn’t say that to them. Maybe I did learn something from my stepfather – do the exact opposite of whatever he did.

 

AOR
Sports, especially hockey, play a huge role in both your upbringing and the transformation you undergo in this book. What can sports do for someone’s life? Why are they so powerful?

 

FM
Sports in general, especially real team sports like basketball, football, and hockey, make you learn to rely on other people and if you don’t – if you try to be a puck hog or a ball hog – a real coach is going to make you play the whole team in practice so you see how good you really are compared to how good you think you are. It makes you gel more as a team, and once you start thinking together on the ice and in the locker room, you start to accept each other for what you are. Just like when I was in prison, obviously we didn’t have hockey – no skates with blades or big sticks to play with in there – but when we played football, once the guys saw I’d do anything for the team to win, they didn’t care I was a skinhead, they didn’t care what my political beliefs were, they just knew that when I came out there to play, I cared about what happened to the team. Once the other inmates thought I was a good enough player and a good enough teammate, they started to stand up for me.

Sports are universal. I just did this conference in Washington, DC, the PODER Reconciliation Forum, and I met a guy who does the same exact thing I do with hockey, but with soccer – and he does it with the south Sudanese and the north Sudanese. He does the same thing and has the same results. Once you get kids out of an environment where they’re expected to hate their neighbors and you teach them to just have fun, that’s all they’re going to want to do. Because for a kid, it’s a relief to just have fun and not have to live up to the expectations of adults that you hate someone you don’t even know.

AOR
You founded an organization called Harmony Through Hockey based on these principles. What has working with the organization taught you?

 

FM
I founded Harmony Through Hockey in 1997, and thankfully, the Philadelphia Flyers saw my vision and jumped right on board, told me that however they could make it work they would. When they got on board with it, it just took off. In the City of Philadelphia, to have a sports team back you in a big sports city like that made my program really well received by everybody, from upper class to lower class. And once the kids started to come, they didn’t just play sports – we had racial counselors come in while they were in the locker rooms getting dressed and they brought up issues that had the kids talking openly. Sometimes the talks went good and sometimes they didn’t, but at least they were talking. It was always a racial mix, we tried to do about half and half between black and white and then we started trying to make it like a quarter Asian, quarter Latino, quarter white, quarter black and let in both boys and girls. Once you put all that hockey equipment on a little kid – and by our insurance, we had to put so much equipment on them that normal players don’t have to wear, like neck guards, all kinds of stuff – you don’t even see their skin color. All you see is a little-sized hockey player who’s learning to skate. Race goes right out the window – the only color you care about is the jersey on the kid’s back.

One of the good things about Harmony Through Hockey, is every year, we always get one kid who’s kind of a bully and a loudmouth, kind of picks on other people, always says something about another kid’s sneakers, that kind of thing. But once we get all the hockey equipment on – and they all wear the same stuff, so no one’s better or different – every single one of them is going to fall, because they’ve never ice skated before. It breaks that barrier down, that nobody there is better or worse than anybody else in the program, and they all have to learn to work together. One of my strong rules is that you cannot laugh at each other –
if someone falls, you are not allowed to laugh. And the first week, sometimes the kids laugh, because it is kind of funny when a kid falls and screams or throws his gloves or something. I make sure to hold back my laugh, but the kids will start to laugh at first, but other kids in the program will step up and say, “ Hey, don’t forget about the rules, don’t laugh at him.” And that’s what I want.

 

AOR
In the book, you say that it isn’t one big moment that changed your views on race. Looking back on it, what do you think really did change those views?

 

FM
What I remember really made me think was meeting the two furniture guys I worked for. They were both Jewish, both recovering from drugs and alcohol, both had antique companies, and both knew my history- and at the time I was still basically a skinhead – and they took me into their companies because they saw something in me. Those two people cemented home what I’d already been learning – because I’d already at that point started to accept that blacks, Latinos, whites, Asians, were all equal, I could admit that – but something still held me back from accepting Jewish people, because it’d been drilled home for so long that Jews were secretly evil, there were all these conspiracy theories.

Something else that really started to get me, and I don’t think we talk about this much in the book, is that every animal on this earth, has children – elephants carry babies for a certain amount of time, twenty-three months, kittens are born in two months, humans carry babies for nine months. And no matter the race or any other differences, we learn to walk at the same time, at about one year, we start to learn how to talk at the same time – that drove home that we’re all human, we all care about the growth of our children. The DNA of all human beings is so similar that during the O. J. trial, maybe God was pointing out to everyone else that O.J. was guilty, but for me, hearing all about DNA, God was pointing
out how equal every one of us are as human beings, and how dare me judge the people who’d stepped into my life.

Even in prison, guys stepped into my life who helped keep me sane. Little G, if we would have continued our friendship when we got released, I know we would have been best friends because we were almost exactly the same type of human being; we were built exactly the same, we were both the same thing on the football field. Off the football field, we both cared about girlfriends we had on the outside, breaking both of our hearts. We both swore they were cheating on us. You don’t get more human than a man whose heart’s breaking and able to share with another man whose heart’s breaking, that’s all human. And we both regretted how we treated our girlfriends – all that stuff, to me that was God stepping in, slapping me on the head telling me, “ Who are you to judge anyone, Frank?”