Autobiography of a Recovering Skinhead (13 page)

“Just looking for something to do,” I said as politely as I could.

“Like what?”

“Maybe a bum bash?”

The two guys behind him snickered. He almost grinned at me.

“They don’t have bums where they’re from,” he said. “They’re country boys. They came all the way up from Texas to welcome me home.”

“Are you from Philly?” I asked.

“Yeah, but I’ve been away for a few years.”

“Texas?”

“No, Rikers Island.” He let it sink in for a second, then he said, “I’m Scott Windham.”

I seriously just about shit my pants. Scott Windham was a fricking god among skinheads. Scott Windham was the co-founder of The Uprise. Scott Windham was the ringleader in the infamous train attack, the dude whose crime they’d been talking about on
Geraldo
when the chairs started flying. And at that moment, Scott Windham was actually shaking my hand.

“I thought you were in prison.”

“I was,” he said. “Now I’m not.”

Even though I’d switched over to one of Louie’s Oranginas right after we’d tucked ourselves into the alley, I’d downed more than a few forties already that night. I was half tanked. Meeting Scott Windham sobered me up faster than a full pot of coffee could have. I couldn’t believe I was actually talking to the guy. Usually, when a bunch of followers tell you about their long-lost leader, they exaggerate. But everything the guys in the Wise’s parking lot had told me about Scott Windham was true. If anything, they hadn’t done him justice. Scott Windham was the kind of guy no man wants to fuck with and every woman wants to fuck. There was something magnetic about him, something almost magical, that drew me in completely. I would have respected him just as much that night if I hadn’t had a clue about his legendary past. Hell, I might have respected him if he’d been a SHARP.

Scott Windham was the most hardcore white supremacist I’d met since I’d joined the movement. He didn’t just know the theories and talk the theories, he enacted the theories; I think he may have invented some of the theories back in the early days of The Uprise. Scott Windham was fresh out of Rikers Island. The red laces in his Doc Martens dripped blood. Scott Windham was the Aryan warrior the Lancaster County skinheads had promised me I could become. He was the Aryan warrior they would never be. He was the ideal, the hero, the fantasy, and he was shaking my hand and talking to me, telling me he was proud to know that guys like me had been keeping his dream alive while he’d
been gone. I was totally star-struck; I would have done anything he asked.

Scott was just making the rounds of introducing us to his friends, two Nazi Alliance members from Dallas, when we heard this big commotion: a rush of footsteps, then a shrill voice let out a shriek. We thought somebody was messing with a woman.

Two doors down from the mouth of the alley sat a small hole-in-the-wall bar. We’d walked past it earlier that night, but the neon beer signs hanging in the window got lost in the glare of the next door restaurant’s bright lights; when we walked by, the place just hadn’t registered with any of us as anything more than just another mom-and-pop shop. We hadn’t noticed it was a pop-and-pop shop. We figured that out once we realized the “woman” screaming was actually a man. He and two other guys, all white and all dressed up very fancy, were pitching one royal hissy fit out on that sidewalk. There was no way we were going to pass on front row seats at a gay love-triangle spat, so we sprinted down the street to check it out.

We were just a couple of yards away from them when we saw what really had them so bent out of shape. This old black man, who looked like he’d been living on the streets since before they were paved, was trying to panhandle the three gay guys. We could smell the dude from ten feet back; he reeked of booze and piss. He was everything Louie, Matt, Stug, and I had been hoping to find in Center City. I could just hear him slurring “bomp bomp bomp” in time to my boots cracking his ribs.

“C’mon, ladies, spare a quarter.”

“Get away from me you nasty thing,” one gay guy said.

Those three gay guys were talking to that black panhandler like they were a bunch of Southern debutantes and he was frickin’ Kunta Kinte trying to ask them to the prom. For some reason, that really pissed us Nazis off. None of us skinheads said it, but I think we were all thinking the same thing once we got a look at him. He wouldn’t have been much fun to bash, not compared to three gay guys. We were dogs looking to play: the
black bum was a busted stick lying on the ground; the three gay guys were tennis balls bouncing all the hell over the sidewalk, begging to be chased.

“You don’t have to take that shit off faggots,” Louie said to the old black man.

Scott Windham muscled his way in between the homeless guy and the three gay guys. “Leave him the hell alone.”

One of the gay guys started to say something like, “You can’t tell us what to…”but Scott decked him before he finished his sentence. The guy reeled backwards and slid down the exterior wall of the bar. Scott jumped on top of him. He didn’t get more than three or four punches in before both Nazi Alliance dudes piled on the same guy. The next thing I knew, Matt, Stug, and Louie all threw themselves on the second gay guy. There were two separate piles, each with three Nazis on top and one gay guy underneath; it looked like a scene out of an S & M porn movie.

I was just standing there holding my Orangina bottle, watching all hell break loose on the ground right in front of me, when the third guy started screaming, “Stop it, you bastards!” I looked up at him. He looked over at me. I looked down at the rock-hard, perfectly round Orangina bottle in my hand. I looked back up at him. He let out the kind of shriek I thought only six year-old girls could make, then hightailed it back into the bar. I took off after him.

When he threw open the door, everybody inside heard the screaming out on the sidewalk and turned to look. I caught a glimpse of a couple horror-stricken faces before the door slammed shut on its automatic hinges. When I jerked it open again about two seconds later, I saw a sea of panic. Everybody in the bar was crowding toward the door to get a better look outside. But because they were all pushing forward, the guy I was chasing couldn’t get more than about three feet inside. I took one step past the threshold and whacked my Orangina bottle down on top of his head. He fell straight to the floor, leaving the first guy who’d rushed over for a look wide open. He lunged at me but
got tangled up in the guy heaped on the floor. Just as he tripped and fell forward, I clocked him on the back of the head with the Orangina bottle.

There were two guys dazed, one on top of the other at my feet, and I looked at that crazy Orangina bottle and thought, “What the hell do they make these out of, iron?” I guess I must’ve actually held the thing up in the air a little ways to marvel at it because that’s when the next guy headed my way with his fists up caught sight of the bottle and stopped dead in his tracks.

“Oh, shit,” he said, but the words sounded funny, too slow for how fast his mouth was moving, kind of like an old 45 record set on the wrong speed. That dude and I were both staring at the Orangina bottle, him wondering if I was about to whack him with it and me wondering if it’d break if I tried throwing it up against a concrete wall, when somebody yelled, “The cops are on their way!”

I sprinted back outside. Windham and the Nazi Alliance guys were still wailing on the one guy. Louie and Matt were bent over on the sidewalk, catching their breath, while Stug was holding the other guy down on the ground. I jogged over to Stug, shoved him out of the way enough to open up an angle, and smacked the Orangina bottle over that guy’s head.

“This fucking bottle won’t break for nothing,” I said to Stug, holding it up so he, too, could admire it. “This is the third guy I’ve clocked with it, and it ain’t even cracked.”

The guy underneath us started struggling to get away, but he wasn’t going anywhere. Nobody could get out from under Stug without help from a crane.

It’s not very often that Nazi skinheads beat up gay guys like they’re defending the honor of a black homeless dude they don’t even know. I think Louie was kind of offended the wino wasn’t cheering us on. He said to him, “Get out of here or you’re next.”

“You get out of here,” the old black man replied.

Every single shaved head spun around at that moment. Even Scott Windham and the Nazi Alliance stopped pummeling
their victim long enough to see why the black wino was bossing Louie around.

“You guys got to get out of here,” the old man said. That’s when I heard the sirens.

I don’t know who said it, but one of the skinheads actually yelled, “Thanks, brother,” to that black dude when we took off running down the street. Three police cruisers slammed around the corner just as we hit the intersection. One ran right into Matt; he rolled up onto the hood, laughing like a lunatic. The rest of us were still trying to get away, but we were laughing, too, and stumbling all over the place. Meeting the legendary Scott Windham had sobered us up enough to beat the fuck out of some drunk gay guys, but we were all way too shit faced to get past a three-car police barricade.

Not more than fifteen minutes after Scott Windham introduced himself to me, he was handcuffed and sitting in the back of a police car. He and the two guys from the Nazi Alliance were all over eighteen and they all had records. For Scott, that fight wasn’t just a felony; it was also a parole violation. I couldn’t imagine how much time he was facing.

As the first squad car pulled away from the curb, Scott Windham smiled at Matt, Stug, Louie, and me through the back window. The cops had the four of us lined up in our matching flight jackets and combat boots. Shoulder to shoulder with my comrades, back up against the wall, awaiting my first trip to juvie in the glow of Scott Windham’s approving smile, I felt proud, truly proud, for the first time.

IF HE HADN’T BEEN A RACIST, MATT HANSON COULD HAVE scored a stand-up comedy gig opening for Eddie Murphy. His poor mom was his favorite straight man. Vivien Hanson was this super sweet, totally normal mom who was hoping she could pray her son out of his skinhead phase. Matt called her “Nazi Viv.”

“I’m home, Nazi Viv!” he’d say on his way through the door.

“Matthew, I told you not to stay out so late. You have school tomorrow. And stop calling me Nazi Viv!”

“You know you love it, woman. You know you’re down with Hitler. Come on, Nazi Viv. Say it for me. Say‘I’m down with Hitler.’”

Good old Nazi Viv. Saint Viv was more like it.

I’d been laughing my ass off at the Matt and Nazi Viv show for more than a year when the cops handed Louie, Stug, Matt, and me over to the jailhouse guards. Matt kept running his mouth nonstop about how he was going to sue the cops for running him over and their mamas for giving birth to them. After a couple hours, the guards at the jail didn’t think he was too funny anymore. By then even the rest of us skinheads were praying they’d gag him. Finally, they moved him to his own cell, hoping maybe he’d pass out if he didn’t have an audience.

It didn’t work. Matt amped up the volume. I struggled to hear my own thoughts. I couldn’t shake the memory of what Scott Windham had whispered to me a couple hours earlier. I’d been standing where I’d been told to stand on the juvie side of
the precinct’s booking room when the cops brought Scott through on his way to the main holding cells. The officer escorting him had stopped to drop off some forms at the desk, and in the few seconds that took, he parked Scott, still handcuffed, next to me. Scott didn’t look at me when he whispered, “Tell them I did it all. I’m done. No sense in you guys going down, too.” But I never would have rolled on Scott Windham.

“You fuckers don’t know who you’re messing with,” Matt was yelling at the guards. “I’m Charlie Manson, and I’ve got the swastika to prove it. It’s just not on my forehead anymore. I had it relocated to my dick. Come on, copper, suck my swastika! You know you want me.” We all started cracking up again. Matt Hanson had lost his mind. He was still rolling on his Manson impersonation when I finally dozed off.

The next morning, when the guards walked us into the juvie hearing room, I saw Louie’s mom sitting in the front row. Stug’s mom was two rows back. The bailiff lined us up in front of the bench. After giving us a lengthy speech about the evils of drinking and the consequences of violence, the judge said, “Mr. Lacinzi and Mr. Stugen, your mothers are present. I am releasing you into their custody until your case comes before the court. Mr. Hanson, your mother is on her way into the city as I speak. You will be detained downstairs until she arrives.

“That brings me to you, Mr. Meeink,” the judge said. I knew what he was going to say before he said it.

“Your mother was made aware of the scheduled time for your appearance before this court. At this time, she has not indicated when she will be able to sign for your release. You will remain in the custody of the juvenile detention system until such time as your mother appears on your behalf.”

I don’t know what was worse: knowing she wasn’t going to show or knowing the other guys knew it, too. The guards barely had time to transfer Matt back down to the cells before his mom came to take him home.

When he passed by my cell, I said, “Be nice to Nazi Viv.”

“I will, dude.” He sounded like he meant it. The guards hustled him on toward the exit, but he turned back and said, “Your mom’ll show up soon.”

I wasn’t so sure.

I had a lot of time to think that afternoon. My thoughts traveled back to the campus of a chi-chi private college out in the suburbs. I’d been thinking about it ever since the night we fled the scene, leaving that poor kid laying there bleeding from the head. Sitting in that holding cell, I knew for sure: the cops didn’t know it was us. It had been dark and there hadn’t been any other witnesses, but I finally knew without doubt that when our victims recovered, they hadn’t been able to give the cops any information that might identify us. If they had, the cops would have recognized us outside the gay bar. They didn’t know.