Autobiography of a Recovering Skinhead (16 page)

I not only had my head shaved, but also my eyebrows shaved off. I looked like Pink in the movie
The Wall
. I did that sometimes because it looked so totally hardcore, at least when I was wearing a flight jacket. Wearing a hospital gown, locked up in a mental ward, it made me look like a complete lunatic. Even the shrink did a double-take when he first came in to interview me. He asked why I’d taken the pills.

“I just really didn’t want to be there,” I said. “Not for Christmas. I wanted to go home for Christmas. I just want to go home.”

“Where is home?”

“My mom’s,” I said automatically. I heard the words roll off my tongue, and added, “I guess.”

I’m sure he already knew the answer from the visitor records, but the doctor asked, “Has your mom come to see you?”

He might as well have stabbed me. My dad’s words echoed through my memory: “She chose dick over you.”

“She’ll come,” I said.

“What about your father? Has he come to visit you yet?”

“I called him earlier. He said he’s coming tonight.”

“What did your mom say when you called her?”

I didn’t answer. The doctor didn’t push the knife in any deeper.

When my dad showed up a few hours later, the doctor asked to speak with him in private. They walked down the hall together. Any number of things may have happened in that meeting. Knowing what the doctor knew by then about my mom, he may have decided to bend the rules about legal guardian
signatures. Or maybe my mom had signed me away for good a few days earlier and nobody’d had the heart to tell me, seeing as I was already suicidal. But it’s also possible my dad leaned in close and whispered a little medical advice of his own, something like, “Youse wanna stay healthy, Doc, you’re gonna let me have my kid.” Whatever happened down the hall, when my dad came back to my room, he helped me get dressed, and then he took me home with him. It was December 23rd.

I guess I was still suicidal on Christmas Eve because after my dad left for the bar, I headed across town to see my mom. She barely even spoke to me. John took one look at me, burst out laughing, then made me stand in front of the Christmas tree so he could take a picture of “hairless Santa.” Then he shocked me and pissed off my mom by inviting me to spend the night.

I awoke on the couch Christmas morning to squeals and giggles. Kirsten and Hayley were up early and looting under the tree. I made them wait until my mom and John could get down the stairs. I watched my baby sisters open their gifts. I watched John and my mom open their gifts.

“I got this special for you,” John said. He handed me a beer.

I WAS SPORTING A NEW TATTOO, “STRIKE FORCE,” ON THE back of my neck in time for my cousin Jimmy’s wedding. He’d fallen hard for a girl from the old neighborhood, and they’d spent months planning their big day. Two huge Catholic families and every friend the bride and groom had made since birth crowded into a South Philly Mummer hall for the reception. There were more shaved heads than flowers at that shindig.

One of the bride’s uncles was a notorious doped-out drunk, and he was beyond sloshed by the time they wheeled out the cake. He stuck his hand in the icing and smeared it on my cousin Shawn’s head. The bride’s guests thought it was funny, but dozens of skinheads took offense. Tension rolled across the room like tear gas. Then both sides just fucking exploded.

The older guests and little kids ran for cover. I dove into the middle of the brawl with everything I had. Someone grabbed me from behind so forcefully he nearly jerked me off my feet. He wrestled my arms behind my back. I didn’t need to see his face: I recognized the handprint of the bruises already forming around my wrists and the stench of his beer-soaked breath.

“What’s it going to be?” John asked. “Your family or these fucking skinheads?”

My mom appeared before me, wagging her finger in my face. Over her shoulder, I saw the bride’s uncle take a swing a Louie.

“Get the fuck out of my way!” I twisted free from John’s grip and pushed past my mom. I ran to Louie.

OUT OF RESPECT for Jimmy, Shawn, and me, no skinhead would have ever knowingly hit one of our family members. But once the brawl spilled out into the middle of Second Street, the skinheads couldn’t tell who was who, only who wasn’t one of them. One jumped my cousin Nick from behind.

“No!” I screamed, but I was too far away to stop it.

Jimmy’s wedding reception riot had spread almost a block down Second Street before the cops crashed the party. Louie and I yelled for the other skinheads to follow us. We herded as many guys as we could back to Jimmy’s apartment. We were trying to decide how we could get the skinheads out of South Philly without anybody getting killed when Jimmy showed up in his shredded tuxedo. He was crying.

Jimmy spent his wedding night with me. The South Philly side streets seemed darker than usual while he and I crept around our old neighborhood, finding the other guys’ cars, driving them back to the apartment, and then guarding the out-of-town skinheads while they loaded up. On one of my runs, I swung by Third and Jackson to make sure Nick was okay. Jerry saw me before Nick did.

“Get your fucking pussy ass out of the car! I’m going to rip your fucking head off, you fucking retard!”

Nick still ruled Third and Jackson. He waived his hand at Jerry to signal, “Enough!” Jerry slunk away.

Then Nick walked over to me and said, “Your boys are fucked up.”

I started in about how the bride’s uncle had started it all, but Nick cut me off.

“Shut up! What’s wrong with youse is what I want to know? Jumping guys three or four to one like some little punk? That’s just not right. And fucking with family? Fucking with
us
?” Nick glanced over his shoulder at the other Third and Jackson boys. They were all keeping their distance, but they wanted to kill me.

“You didn’t see what started it,” I said. “We were just sticking up for Shawn.”

Nick looked away from me, away from the corner, into the shadows of the side street. He stayed silent for a long time, before he turned back to me and asked, “Why?”

“What do you mean, why? Because it’s Shawn.”

“Because he’s our family or because he’s one of your fucking Nazis?”

There was no way in hell I was going to answer that question. The truth would have killed Nick. The truth might have gotten me killed. Nick stared me down, waited me out, but I refused to answer. He walked away from me in disgust and stepped back inside the tightly-knit circle of Third and Jackson boys. I thought he was done with me, but then he came back over to the car, leaned through the open window, and hissed in my ear, “You used your only pass tonight, Frankie. Do you understand what I’m saying to you?”

I understood.

“Now you get your ass back to wherever your pussy friends are hiding and you tell them we’ll be waiting for them.”

As I drove back to Jimmy’s apartment, I wrestled with what I should do. Third and Jackson had called out the skinheads. My cousin had just warned me I’d already broken the code, the code you only get to break once with guys like Nick. I had to deliver the skinheads to Third and Jackson to prove my loyalty to the cousin who’d all but raised me. But the guys still tucked away in Jimmy’s apartment weren’t Axis or Nazi Alliance. Most of them were just young kids from the suburbs; they wouldn’t have stood a chance against the Third and Jackson boys. Hell, if it weren’t for Nick, I wouldn’t have stood a chance against the Third and Jackson boys that night. Only Jimmy was safe. Not even our asshole cousin Jerry would’ve busted Jimmy’s chops after the shitty day that poor kid had just had. So, with Jimmy by my side for added protection, one carload at a time, I escorted all the other skinheads out of South Philly.

I CRASHED OUT in the suburbs for a month or so, and eventually wormed my way into floorspace at a skinhead flophouse in Allentown. I have no clue whose name was on the lease or who paid the rent, only that my arrival pushed the roommate count to fourteen. I don’t think one dude crashing there had a job. Since we were all broke, nobody got all prissy about stealing being “beneath” Nazis. We stole shit all the time. Food. Beer. Weapons.

Of course, being skinheads, theft wasn’t our crime of choice. Every dude living in that house was violent. One night, two of my roommates came home bragging they’d just killed a homeless guy. Not to be outdone, the next night, three other guys walked in the door covered in blood and announced that they’d stabbed a cabbie for the hell of it.

I didn’t kill anybody while I lived in Allentown, but I changed up my look around that time. I went on a tattoo binge. The best ink man in the movement was a skinhead named David Conover who worked out of a shop in Reading. Conover wasn’t just a tattoo artist for the movement, though; he was a John Cook type, a high-ranked older skinhead with deep ties to adult white supremacy groups. John Cook had turned me into a Klansman, but it was David Conover who turned me into a walking Nazi art exhibit.

He started by inking “Made In Philly” across the front of my head, right above the hairline, if I’d had any hair. Then he drew a portrait of Joseph Goebbels on my chest. Of course, I got
the
Nazi symbol, too. But I didn’t get just a regular swastika. David Conover laid a five-inch circle swastika into the left side of my neck. David was one of the few skinheads on the East Coast who could authorize giving somebody that particular patch. It was the original White Combat symbol, and it required a certain amount of rank inside the movement to wear.

I’d earned my rank by then. And I feared that rank had earned me a certain amount of notoriety with the authorities, especially in Philly. After I got my cool new tats, I became even more paranoid about getting busted, just not paranoid enough
to change my ways. After every terror squad mission, I practically gave myself an ulcer worrying my victim would report, “One of the guys had a bigass swastika on his neck,” or “He’s got ‘Made In Philly’ on top of his head.”

But being the genius I was, I didn’t think twice about the cops nabbing me if they saw my picture in the newspaper. A writer for one of the Philly papers came out to Reading to interview John Cook and David Conover for a story about the growing number of teenaged skinheads in Pennsylvania. The paper ran the article with a picture of John and David posing next to two of their favorite teenaged skinheads: Louie and me. The article inspired one of the morning television talk shows in Philly to do a segment on skinheads. John Cook did most of the talking, but Louie and me made for real good visual aids, with my tattoos and Louie missing one of his front teeth from a fight.

I was convinced I had more warrants out on me than I could count. But warrants or not, I was determined to celebrate my seventeenth birthday on South Street. I was riding shotgun in the Muffster’s Dart, not ten minutes away from Skinhead Alley, when Muff got nabbed for DUI. For once, I was actually sober and totally innocent. But seeing those cherries spinning in the rear-view mirror was more pressure than I could take. If I’d given the cops my real name, and if they’d run it, I would’ve been screwed. I had to get out of Philly.

I hitched a ride to Jersey that night. The first and only skinhead I saw on the Wildwood Boardwalk was Joe Morgan. He said I looked nervous. Of course I looked nervous; I was nervous.

“Let’s take a ride,” Joe said.

“That’s it,” I thought. “I’m dead. Joe knows about Adrienne and me, and he’s going to whack me now while no witnesses are around.” So what did I do? I said, “Okay Joe” like he’d invited me out for an ice cream cone. I climbed into the car with him, proving I must have still been at least a little suicidal.

To this day, all I know is that Joe Morgan was a good shit, at least to me, when I was desperate. After I told him about how
much the Philly cops probably had on me, he spent the rest of that night on the phone making arrangements to get me off the East Coast. The next morning, Joe drove me to the Greyhound terminal in Philadelphia. All I had were the clothes on my back and a wad of cash in my pocket.

“They’ll meet you in Indy,” Joe said. “Just do what they tell you, and don’t do anything stupid.”

FROM THE SECOND I STEPPED OFF THE BUS, INDIANAPOLIS made me queasy. The sky was too far away. In the bright blue glare of mid-afternoon, the sparkling high-rise buildings reflected each other like funhouse mirrors. I took a deep breath hoping to steady myself, but that only made it worse.

Five members of the Nazi Alliance met me at the bus station as promised. Joe Morgan had called them not more than twenty-four hours earlier and said he needed them to take me in. Joe outranked them, so they obeyed, but they weren’t exactly happy about hosting a seventeen-year -old. The Indy Nazi Alliance guys were all in their mid to late twenties. They weren’t just skinheads anymore; they were hardcore Aryan nationalists. I wasn’t the first rogue race warrior they’d protected inside their safehouse, but I think I was the youngest. They seemed to hold that against me.

When I arrived, they were fine tuning their plan to rob banks to fund the race war in Yugoslavia. That impressed the shit out of me. I’d met some skinhead legends on the East Coast, but I’d never actually come face-to-face with Bob Matthews’ descendents. Back in the early 1980s, Matthews and his followers in The Order had pulled off a string of bank robberies for the movement; they’d scored more than a million bucks and even murdered a famous Jewish talk radio host before the feds caught up with them. Bob Matthews went down shooting. The rest of The Order was locked up in a federal supermax penitentiary by the time I
became a skinhead. If guys like Joe Morgan, John Cook, and Scott Windham were legends among skinheads, Bob Matthews was a god.

The members of the Indianapolis Nazi Alliance spent damn near every waking minute working out the details of their plan to follow in Matthews’ footsteps. They had books about guns scattered across the stained shag carpet in the living room and piled high on the kitchen table. They had guns all over, too. Of course, I could barely see the guns because their townhouse was always dark. The Indy Nazi Alliance guys were so paranoid they were pushing towards schizophrenia by the time I met them. And me showing up made it worse. They’d boarded up their windows from the inside in case of a raid and hung thick drapes over the boards in case of spies. I thought it might be nice to see what was in my cereal bowl, so I opened one of the drapes about an inch to let a beam of sunshine in between the cracks in the armor, and you’d have thought I’d outed myself as undercover FBI.