Autobiography of a Recovering Skinhead (9 page)

Then there were our sisters. Girls started wandering back into Skinhead Alley once word spread that we always had beer. There weren’t any actual skinchicks on South Street then, just a bunch of punk-rock chicks and skater girls. Even without the beer, we were like magnets for some of those girls. Guys who
couldn’t have bought a date off a prostitute before they shaved their heads found themselves juggling three or four girls at a time. Of course, they also got their asses beat down by some of those girls before they learned the cardinal rule of dating on South Street: never cheat on a punk girl who’s spent more time in mosh pits than you have.

I didn’t consider myself much of a ladies’ man when I was fourteen. Like any boy that age, I was self-conscious about my looks even though a few girls had told me I was cute. Mostly, I was self-conscious about my age, though. I was younger than just about everybody on South Street, but only Louie and Jimmy knew it. Everybody else assumed I was at least sixteen because I was one of the skinhead leaders. The girls who came into Skinhead Alley assumed I was older, too. At first, I didn’t correct people’s assumptions, then I started telling people I was actually two years older than I really was. Eventually, I realized I’d made a royal mess for myself by lying about my age. It was bad enough that I was a fourteen year-old virgin; now I’d turned myself into a sixteen year-old virgin. I lived in fear of one of the girls on South Street tasting my innocence while she was kissing me. I could just imagine her telling all the other girls, them telling all the guys, and me ending up the laughing stock of Philly: the big, bad Nazi dude who couldn’t get himself laid even once in sixteen years. What could I say? “Hey guys, leave me alone. It hasn’t been sixteen years; I’m only fourteen.” I would’ve choked myself on Kirsten’s pacifier before I would’ve admitted I was the baby of my own gang.

I don’t know if it was the skinhead-mystique thing I had going for me, or the Italian-stallion genes I got from my dad, or both, but something fooled the South Street girls into thinking I was a lot more experienced than I actually was. None of them ever acted like they suspected I was only fourteen, and none of them acted like they thought I was a virgin. Almost every weekend, I’d meet up with some punk girl or another in a dark corner of Skinhead Alley. She’d start kissing on me, and I’d start
kissing her back. Usually right about the time I’d start trying to get her clothes off, she’d realize we were leaning up against a nasty ass brick wall in a hell hole of an alley with a dozen or so sweaty skinheads drooling along at the show. Not exactly the kind of romance a girl reads about in
Seventeen
magazine.

There wasn’t any privacy within forty blocks of Skinhead Alley, so I spent a lot of nights pacing South Street, trying to give myself a mental cold shower. I’d imagine the most unsexy things I could think of, like Kirsten’s poopy diapers or John passed out drunk on the couch. Once I finally got myself back under control, I’d go back into Skinhead Alley in hopes of finding some other cute little punk girl who might not be so shy about having an audience.

I GOT KICKED OUT OF THE EIGHTH GRADE AT SHARSWOOD School after I beat the holy hell out of a black student named Sheldon Jones who’d been terrorizing some of the Irish kids I’d grown up with. The next day, bored, I stopped by Furness High School looking for Jimmy. The cop who guarded Furness’s front door knew I wasn’t a student there anymore and wouldn’t let me in. When I snarked off about that, he patted me down and found my knife. A couple hours later, two Philadelphia police officers escorted me home. Right in front of me, my mom asked the cops if there was something she could sign so they’d take me away somewhere. They said there wasn’t.

Those cops hadn’t wedged their cruiser more than a block down Tree Street before my mom and John kicked me out again. I didn’t bother calling my dad this time. I just threw some clothes in a duffel bag and started walking. Hanging around South Street, I’d gotten to know this older punk dude named George. He and his wife Rachel had an apartment that was the first floor of a rowhouse not far from Tree Street. I’d partied there a couple times. While George and Rachel’s place was party central, it was also a real home. They already had one kid and Rachel was pregnant. So there’d be all these punks crowded in, listening to music and drinking and playing with the kid. Except for her belly, Rachel looked like she hadn’t eaten in a year, but she’d make amazing food for everybody, and George would do dishes like a maniac, suds splashing up onto the skull
tattoos on his arms, trying to keep up with Rachel, who was basically an anorexic Julia Child with a mohawk. I showed up on George and Rachel’s stoop hoping only for some food and sympathy before taking up residence on South Street with other homeless kids. But George and Rachel weren’t having any of that. They insisted I stay.

Since I didn’t have to get up for school or anything else anymore, I partied seven nights a week. If I wasn’t officially an alcoholic before I moved in with George and Rachel, I became one there. There was almost always somebody hanging around the apartment to drink with. If there wasn’t, I drank alone. I’d get myself half in the bag every afternoon before heading down to South Street to get really wasted. One night at a club, I was standing with George when this black punk friend of his leaned over to me and whispered, “Check her out, man!” I followed his finger to where he was pointing on the other side of the room. This girl was completely focused on the band, bopping to the music, totally oblivious to everything. She looked cute as hell in her pleated plaid miniskirt and Doc Martens.

“Dude,” the black punk said to me with complete sincerity. “You two should get together and make Nazi love.”

So that’s how it came to pass that a black dude set me up on my first date with a neo-Nazi skinchick. Lauren was fifteen. She didn’t know I was only fourteen, and she didn’t know I was a virgin. She only knew I was a skinhead, and that was enough for her. Lauren was the first girl I met who was seriously into National Socialism. She was a skinchick because she was a Nazi, not just because she was hot for skinheads. That girl knew as much about the theory behind National Socialism as any skinhead in town. Whenever any of the guys got in her sweet pudgy face even a little bit about her being “just” a skinchick , she’d word-whip them something fierce. Lauren wielded quotations like Jimmy wielded cafeteria trays.

Another girl around the scene was Rachel’s best friend, Amy. She was eighteen, same as Rachel. She was a true anarchist punk,
opposed to anything that looked like conformity, and you can’t get much more conformist than Nazism. I had a hell of a crush on Amy long before I actually met her. She was one of the most beautiful women I’d ever seen, even when she was snarling her lips and hurling slams about skinheads. I drooled every time she prowled past the mouth of Skinhead Alley. But Amy had never so much as spoken to me on South Street. She had to speak to me at George and Rachel’s, though. My first morning there, when she stopped over for coffee, I was leaning against the cabinet where Rachel kept the cups.

“Move, Nazi fuck,” Amy said. At least she was talking to me.

After a few days, she stopped calling me “Nazi fuck.” By the end of the week, she and Rachel were including me in their girl talk out in the kitchen. Once Amy started talking to me like I was actually a human being, I fell at least a little bit in love with her. Relaxed in her best friend’s kitchen, her lips loosened into a soft smile I found even sexier than her South Street sneer. But I wasn’t a fool; I knew Amy was about a million miles out of my league. And besides, I had Lauren.

Amy devoted a lot of time to me while I lived with George and Rachel. We would spend hours talking about everything from music to why I was into the white supremacy movement. Amy really listened to what I had to say, even when she didn’t agree with me. Nobody else had done that since I’d become a skinhead. Nobody else had paid me the respect to explain why they didn’t agree with my racism; everybody else who disagreed just wrote me off as stupid or evil. Amy wasn’t like that. She treated me like her equal, even though I knew I wasn’t. Amy and I got close enough after a few weeks that I confided in her that Lauren and me were having problems. It wasn’t anything earth shattering, just teenaged couple crap. But it was bugging me one night, so I told Amy about it.

“How did you and your last girlfriend get along?” Amy asked.

“I haven’t really had a ‘girlfriend’ before Lauren.”

I could tell she was surprised. “That’s part of the problem.
You haven’t had any practice being somebody’s boyfriend. You’re not used to thinking about how somebody else is going to react because you’ve never had to think about your actions as half the actions of a whole. I’m not saying you’re selfish, at least not intentionally. Guys can be really selfish sometimes and not even realize.”

“Like by doing what?” I asked.

“Like when a guy’s really sweet to his girlfriend at a party or somewhere, and they go off and fuck, then they come back to the party and he ignores her the rest of the night. Most guys are too dickheaded to understand how that makes a girl feel like a whore.”

I must have blushed or something. All of a sudden, Amy looked at me like a scientist who’d just discovered a new species of mold.

“You know what I mean?” she asked, dipping her toe in the water.

“Sure,” I said, trying my damnedest to sound cool. Amy wasn’t buying it.

“Are you a virgin?”

If it had been anybody else in the world asking, I’d have lied. But I trusted Amy.

I looked away. Panic washed over me, and I turned back and pleaded, “You’re not going to tell anybody, are you?”

Amy gave me a big hug. Her bobbed hair tickled my shoulder when she said, “Of course not. It’s nothing to be embarrassed about anyhow, but I promise I won’t tell anybody.” Now, this absolutely gorgeous eighteen year-old was still hugging me at this point, and she whispered in my ear, “Maybe, if you play your cards right, I’ll take that virginity from you one day.” Amy gave me a really innocent little kiss on the cheek, and went back into the kitchen to see what Rachel was doing.

I must have paced up and down the alley behind that apartment for three freaking hours. Kirsten’s diapers after she eats peas. The hair growing out of Pop’s ears. Puke crusted on the side
of a toilet. The time Kirsten spit up on my shirt and it looked like cottage cheese. I didn’t think my erection would ever go soft.

After that, every time Amy came over to the apartment, she’d pull me aside and whisper in this creepy boogeyman voice, “ You better watch out, Frankie. I ’m going to get your virginity.” We’d crack up. It was our inside joke. And what a joke it was: the hottest punk chick in Philadelphia hooking up with the homeless skinhead virgin!

I took the advice Amy had given me about Lauren. I was sure I wasn’t doing anything to make Lauren feel like a prostitute, seeing as I wasn’t doing anything much other than kissing her, but I tried to think more about her feelings. It must have worked, because we stopped fighting.

Lauren came over to the apartment early one Saturday afternoon for a pre-party George was throwing. A couple carloads of South Street punks were heading to Allentown for a concert that night, and they ’d offered to let Lauren and me ride along. We’d been drinking for a couple of hours when Lauren said, “ I need to talk to you for a minute.”

I grabbed a fresh beer and followed Lauren to the basement, which was the only place you could get away from the party at George and Rachel’s.

“ What’s up?” I asked once we were alone.

She answered me with a kiss. We kissed for a long time, long enough that I started unbuttoning her shirt. I was prying open her bra when I felt her go for the top button of my Levi’s. We weren’t leaned up against some nasty-ass brick wall in Skinhead Alley with a crew of Nazis watching us; we were leaned up against the nasty-ass brick wall of a rowhouse basement, but we were alone. Lauren and I were sickeningly sweet the rest of that afternoon at the apartment. When it came time to leave, we slid into the backseat of George’s car. Amy climbed in the back with us. I got stuck with the hump; I was in the middle, with Lauren on one side and Amy on the other. Allentown is about an hour and a half drive from South Philly. George was blaring the
stereo the whole way. I couldn’t hear anything anybody in the front seat was saying. To make matters worse, for the first half-hour or so, Lauren and Amy were screaming across me in the backseat, trying to hear each other over the thump of the speakers in the window behind our heads. My head felt like it was going to explode before they finally gave up trying to talk. Lauren dozed off. Amy stared silently out the window.

We’d been driving for almost an hour when Amy leaned in close to my ear and asked, “ Did you fuck her?” Her voice was a strained whisper fighting the loud music. She didn’t want Lauren to hear. Amy wasn’t the type to embarrass a younger woman like that.

“I’ll tell you later.”

“I said, did you fuck her?” Amy’s lips contorted into the snarl I hadn’t seen in weeks. This time, Amy’s voice didn’t sound strained; it sounded pissed. This wasn’t the opinionated, theory-spouting anarchist who’d taken me under her wing. This wasn’t the mature older woman who’d gently counseled me on how to be a better boyfriend. This was a fucking hellcat who sounded jealous. I was confused, scared, and turned on.

“Later.” I pleaded with my eyes for Amy to back off in case Lauren might wake up and realize we were talking about what had happened in the basement. Amy glanced over at Lauren, and so did I. She was propped against the door, still dozing. She’d had a lot of beer that afternoon, and the crowded car was hot. She wasn’t really sleeping, though; her eyes opened a little when we hit a bump. Amy didn’t care. She started tracing her fingers down my chest.

“Did your little friend even have a fucking clue what she was doing?” Her hand dropped down onto my crotch.