Autobiography of a Recovering Skinhead (11 page)

That brawl on the beach was the nastiest fight I’d been in to that point. It was a real, honest-to- God rumble. No guns or knives, just fists, combat boots, and anything within grabbing range. I got clocked in the head with a beer bottle; I returned fire with a chunk of loose railing one of the Axis monsters had ripped off the boardwalk stairs with his bare hands. When it was all over, every last one of those fifteen SHARPs was rolling around in agony on the sand.

The Axis crew spent the rest of the night celebrating with us in the pavilion. Everybody got totally shitfaced. As usual, I was one of the drunkest guys at the party. But I wasn’t so drunk that I forgot one of the Axis leaders had told me I was a hell of a fighter. I don’t think I could have been more proud if Bobby Clark, the Flyers’ legendary captain, had turned up at the South Philly ice rink to tell me I was a good wingman. I passed out that night feeling like I’d just won the Stanley Cup.

TOWARD THE END OF SUMMER, MATT AND I CAUGHT A RIDE out of Wildwood. He moved back home and I moved in with Dan Bellen, who lived in one of the townships on the outskirts of Philly. I’d crashed at Dan’s a few times since he made the switch from punk to skinhead. When I showed up in August carrying my duffel bag, his mom realized I didn’t have anywhere else to go. She offered to let me live with their family on the condition that I had to go to school, not just register. It seemed like a fair trade: a little bit of homework in exchange for sharing a roof with Dan, his mom, and his grandma.

A few days after I moved in, I got a job cleaning cages at a pet shop. It wasn’t glamorous, but it let me give Dan’s mom some money. She didn’t ask me to pay her, but it seemed like I ought to. Besides, I liked working at the pet shop. I gave half of my first paycheck to Dan’s mom and spent the rest on my own gerbil family.

I dug an old leather trunk out of a back corner of Dan’s pigsty of a room and turned it into a gerbil mansion. By the next morning, I understood why the pet shop kept gerbils in metal cages. We had gerbils running all the hell over the place. Dan’s grandma pitched a fit when one ran between her feet. I did everything I could to convince her it wasn’t a rat, but she wasn’t buying it. She screamed at Dan and his mom to get the rats and the rat-boy out of the house. Dan’s mom ordered us to round up the rodents before his grandma blew an artery.

I put about a week’s worth of food out in what was left of
the gerbil mansion, hoping to lure my little buddies back to me. The next morning, most of the food was gone, but the mansion was still empty. The next afternoon when I got home from work, I found little chalk outlines of gerbils on the kitchen floor.

“ You’re a riot, Dan,” I yelled out into the living room. I knew he was trying to be funny drawing those outlines, but it ticked me off anyhow. I liked those gerbils, and I was worried they were going to get hurt running loose in the house.

“I hate to be the one to break it to you,” Dan said, as he clomped into the kitchen. “But we brought in an exterminator.”

“Yo, Frankie!” Louie Lacinzi leaned his head through the doorway. “Youse should’ ve seen those things explode when Danny and me whacked ‘em with a tack hammer.”

The room started spinning. I felt like I was falling, like Alice in Wonderland, only I ended up on Tree Street. I saw this vision of my asshole stepfather beating my little gerbils to death with my E.T. lamp. I’d never had pets on Tree Street because I knew John would kill them. I shook my head, came back to reality. I wasn’t on Tree Street with John. I wasn’t a prisoner of war anymore. I was with my friends; I was free. And my friends had just murdered my gerbils.

“You fucking assholes didn’t have to kill them!”

“My grandma was losing her mind about it,” Dan said.

I knew she was. She’d been terrified. I don’t know if she was in the early stages of Alzheimer’s or if it was something else, but little things upset her, scared her. Gerbils loose in the house scared her. Nazi skinheads loose in the house scared her.

“It was the gerbils or you,” Dan said. “Somebody had to go.”

“You should have had me do it,” I said. They were my gerbils; if they had to die, I would’ve at least shown them some respect and not drawn outlines around them.

“There ain’t no way you could’ve killed ‘em,” Louie said.

He was right. It would’ve broken my heart to kill those gerbils. It broke my heart to know Dan and Louie had killed them, even though they did it for me. After Dan and Louie went back
into the living room, I lingered in the kitchen, pretending to fix myself a sandwich. I tried to keep my eyes focused on the bread, cheese, and pickles I’d set out on the table, but I kept sneaking glances down at the little outlines on the floor and slipping back in time. Early evening on Tree Street, and I was eleven years old, fighting back tears from the sting of John slapping my copy book against my face. Mid-afternoon on Tree Street, and I was twelve years old, reeling from the blow of John’s fist crashing into my skull. Late afternoon on Tree Street, and I was thirteen years old, curling myself into a ball on my bedroom floor, staring at the shards of my own fucking lamp, waiting for John to strike his final blow. I hated John. Even more, I hated the fucking pussy victim John had turned me into. I hated victims. I wiped my eyes on a dish towel. Goddamn gerbils probably hadn’t even tried to fight back.

 

ISTARTED CLASSES at a school so Spic-n- Span spotless it could’ve passed for a hospital. That township school was unlike any school I’d seen in Philly. It had shit I’d only seen on TV, like lockers that had locks on them. Even the stalls in the boys’ bathroom had doors and locks.

I don’t know how, but I ended up in the ninth grade again. I didn’t stand a chance of passing, but I gave school more effort than I had before, because that was my deal with Dan’s mom, and I didn’t want to break my promise. I went out for football, thinking that’d be a real stand-up thing to do, and earned a spot on the JV squad. I hardly ever ditched classes, at least at first. I did my best to learn, but I didn’t know how to learn. I didn’t know how to study and remember. I didn’t know how to move numbers around and show my work. I didn’t know how to write essays.

“I don’t know what youse want me to do,” I said to my English teacher.

“I want you to realize that “use” is a verb, not a pronoun,” she instructed.

Soon after, the principal called me into his office. I was
either suspended for a while for fighting with a couple SHARPs or expelled for good. It didn’t matter what he said. I was done with school. Dan’s mom didn’t throw me out; I didn’t make her. I knew the terms when I moved in, so I packed my bag that night, thanked her for everything she’d already done for me, and grabbed a bus back to the city.

It was late September, maybe early October, still warm enough outside that it didn’t bother me to curl up in Skinhead Alley for the night, especially after a cute runaway curled up next to me. Louie, Jimmy, and Matt heard the news by the next morning and came looking for me.

“We gotta get youse off the street,” Louie said.

“I’m all right.”

“No, you ain’t,” Jimmy said with a spit for emphasis. “You can stay with us.”

But I couldn’t. Jimmy’s mom was my mom’s sister. And I didn’t want to stick my aunt in the middle of our feud.

“I’m cool. Really.”

“Geez, Frankie, will youse drop the act already? You’re living in a fucking alley. Now will youse grab your shit, or are we gonna have to drag your ass outta here?”

I bounced back and forth between Louie’s mom’s basement and Matt’s mom’s couch. Although I never stayed at my mom’s house, I visited sometimes. Kirsten was almost three already, and my new half-sister, Hayley, was learning to walk. I loved my baby sisters, even though I hated their father. I loved my mother, too, even though I hated who she’d become. She’d become a full-blown addict by then, as had John. They washed their Percocets down with Busch pounders. My mom still dragged herself out of the house every morning to work some secretarial gig she’d scored in the neighborhood, but there was no way that one paycheck was covering everything, even with a little help from the government. They were dealing the same stuff they were using, hustling enough to keep themselves supplied and the girls fed.

If my mom was that bad off, I couldn’t even imagine the
shape my dad must be in. I hadn’t seen him in about six months when I decided to pay him a surprise visit. It was a shock to both of us. His hands shook violently as he struggled to take a drag off his smoke. I could barely make out his words. He mumbled for me to meet him at the bar later that night.

When I showed up, he was better; he was high. He’d gotten to the point where he seemed more normal fucked up than sober. But even totally whacked out, he wasn’t who he had been, even when I was a kid and he’d been high. Things didn’t register with him anymore. I didn’t register with him anymore. He talked to me like I was one of his boys from 68th and Buist, not like I was his fifteen year -old kid. It didn’t cross what was left of his mind to ask me, “Are you okay? Do you have a place to live? Are you hungry? Are you lonely?” No. No. Yes. Yes. I didn’t get the chance to tell him the truth; he was past the point of remembering a dad should ask his kid those things.

I wasn’t okay, but at fifteen, I was too cocky to admit it, maybe too stupid to know. I judged my welfare in comparison to others, and by comparison I came off great. I drank like a fish almost every day and, thanks to a punk chick, I’d tried acid, but I wasn’t an addict like the rest of the family. I didn’t have an address, but I had friends with couches, so I wasn’t homeless. I had not a clue in hell where my next meal was coming from, but I hadn’t starved to death. I’d been kicked out of three schools, but I wasn’t in jail. I was fifteen and making it on my own, with a little help from my Nazi brethren. I was okay. I believed that when I was fifteen.

I thought my biggest problem was transportation. I didn’t have a car, of course. Hell, most days I didn’t even have bus fare, so I started making out with this enormous skinchick nicknamed Muffy because she had a car and a crush on me. She drove me anywhere I wanted so long as I gave her some action. Usually by the time she rolled me into the backseat I was too wasted to care that she looked like a bulldog in a kilt.

One night I got so drunk I actually fucked her. The worst
part was she told people about it. I took unbelievable amounts of shit from the guys in Skinhead Alley once word spread that I had spread the Muff. But that didn’t stop me from crawling into her backseat at least a few nights a week so she’d keep hauling my ass around Philly. The Muff was a pimp, her Dodge Dart was her Cadillac, and I was her bitch.

Muffy had just dropped me off at Dan Bellen’s for a party one night when I heard one of the guys use the term “terror squad” for the first time. I loved how that sounded. That was what we’d been waiting for, what we wanted to be, what we could be. We only had to yank our heads out of our asses and do more than sit around drinking and shooting the shit. Of course, we had to sit around drinking and shooting the shit about the whole idea of the terror squad for a couple of weeks before we actually did anything. When we did, it got really bad, really fast.

Although we occasionally included a few other guys in our raids, the core of the terror squad was Dan, Matt, Stug, Jimmy, Louie, and me, in other words, the real streetfighters of the South Street crew. The purpose of the terror squad was just what the name suggested: to strike fear into the hearts of everyone we hated. We announced our presence by spray-painting a swastika and “
Sieg Heil
” on the side of a Polish-American club. Looking back on it, it was kind of a stupid target. Hitler took over Poland, but he didn’t hate the Poles. We weren’t thinking about that when we picked the Polish-American club – we targeted the building because it had a big open exterior wall just begging for some graffiti, it was dimly lit at night so we wouldn’t get caught tagging, but visible by day, so everybody would see our message. It had the desired effect: the very next morning, everybody was freaking out about having Nazis in their neighborhood. The outrage stoked our fire. By the second night, we were Nazi commandos. We were Aryan warriors. We were cruising the suburbs in Dan’s car, loaded again and still half-cocked, when we saw a poster advertising a reggae concert going on at that very moment at a nearby college.

We read that poster like a burning bush. The God of Identity had sent us a sign: he was pointing us toward the enemy. Filthy-rich white private school kids spending their daddies’ money to listen to a bunch of ganja-smoking Rasta niggers wailing about oppression! Fucking Jew bastards who ran the universities trying to mind-fuck another generation of Aryan youth! Fucking frat boys looking down their country-club noses at us like we had no right to even walk in front of their Ivory Towers! Fucking idiot fucking ZOG dupes paying to listen to nigger -motherfucking mud! Terror, you Jew rats! Terror, you nigger-lovers! Terror! Terror! Terror!

I felt like I was going to freaking explode. I knew every single Nazi walking with me was screaming the same thing in his mind. Terror! But the only sound in the whole quad was the echo of our combat boots marching in goose-step formation down a dark stretch of sidewalk. Terror! Right. Left. Terror! Right. Left. Terror!

We were ripped up drunk and armed old-school style. Louie had a bat. Matt had a hockey stick. Dan had his tack hammer. Stug had a pipe. I was wearing my weapon: my vintage Doc Martens, twenty holes and steel toes. Right. Left. Right. Left. Terror!

I felt the rage boiling inside me until I thought I was going to puke or scream or die. Right. Left. Right. Left. Terror!

We are footsoldiers in God’s army. Right. Left.

We are the enforcers of God’s law. Right. Left.

Our race is our fucking religion you fucking mud scum! Right. Left. Right. Left. Terror! Terror! Terror!