Autobiography of a Recovering Skinhead (18 page)

I moved in with a guy named Jake who wasn’t interested in the white supremacy movement so much as the music that came with it. If Jake had been in Philly, he probably would’ve been a straight-up punk on South Street. But seeing as he was stuck in Springfield, the local skinhead crew was the closest he could get to a hardcore scene. Once I got settled in Jake’s apartment, I got down to business. If I was going to stay in Springfield, the Springfield skinheads were going to have to get a little more organized. The guy from Aryan Nations was thrilled by this, of course. He sent off to the Aryan Nations compound in Idaho for more flyers. He was ready to tape their recruiting posters on every telephone pole in central Illinois.

I had a slightly different plan, though. I asked one of the skinheads if his high school had lockers. He looked at me like I was an escaped mental patient. I reminded myself I wasn’t in
South Philly and rephrased my question, “The lockers, do they have slats, air vents?” He said they did. A few days later, he slipped about a hundred of my homemade recruiting flyers through those slats. He just went down a hallway, sliding them into every locker he could without knowing whose locker was whose. In the parking lot after school that afternoon, black and white players alike from the varsity basketball team threatened to kick the shit out of him.

The next afternoon, when the basketball players walked outside, they found a half-dozen skinheads leaning up against their cars. Not surprisingly, they didn’t give us any shit. When we came to the parking lot again the next day, I noticed that all the alternative kids were huddled up under a tree. It was a fine hangout spot as hangout spots go, but it wasn’t big enough for all of them. They were crammed next to each other like sardines, so I asked what was up.

“The tree breaks the fall when they throw shit at us.”

Right about then, I heard something whistle through the air, catch in the branches, then bounce downward: plunk, plunk, plunk, one branch at a time. The kid was right: the tree broke the fall, sort of. Even slowed by the branches, the D battery was still a dangerous missile when it smacked a girl in the shoulder. She shrugged it off like it didn’t really hurt, but I could tell it did. I picked up the battery and walked over to the crowd of jocks leaned up against the most expensive cars in the whole parking lot, laughing like a pack of idiots.

“Who the fuck threw this?” I asked.

The laughing stopped.

“I said who the fuck threw this? Youse ain’t got big enough balls to even answer a question? There’s twenty of you and one of me.”

Silence.

“There’s six of us,” one of the skinheads said behind me.

“There’ll be more tomorrow,” I said. “And if I ever see so
much as bird shit drop out of that tree again, I’m going to fucking rape one of youse. You hear what I’m saying?”

Silence.

That was October. By November, there were more than a dozen skinheads in Springfield. I didn’t need to bother recruiting racists. All I did was befriend kids who were pissed off about being picked on day in and day out. I trusted them to pay me back with loyalty. I trusted that I could turn their humiliation into hate. All I had to do was redirect their rage until it came thundering back out as racism.

I know it’s scary to think it’s really that easy to turn a nerd into a Nazi, but it is. Even easier was getting that kid’s friends to follow him into the movement. I always devoted the most time to recruiting guys who owned their own cars. In the Midwest, guys with cars literally drive their buddies’ social lives. Guys without wheels either follow along or sit home alone. Once I started, all I had to do was sit back and wait for my first-round draft choic – es to drive up with my next wave of followers.

White Oaks Mall became our South Street, and the parking lot outside of the Sears became our Skinhead Alley. After I beat down two SHARP s in the mall parking lot, I got “SHARP KILLER” printed inside my bottom lip. I think watching me get that tattoo inside my mouth scared the rural skinheads even more than what they’d just seen me do to the SHARPs. I’d been on a tattoo binge ever since I’d climbed off the bus in Indy because they were so much cheaper to get in the Midwest than out East. I’d already had the letters S-K-I-N put on the knuckles of my right hand, and H-E-A-D on my left, so that people could read who I was when my fists came flying their way. Soon after, I got “4-Skins,” the name of one of my favorite bands, on one forearm, and a South African Swastika on the other.

By the time I got “SHARP KILLER” hidden inside my lip, I was plenty easy to spot, and I wasn’t in Philly anymore. I was in Springfield, Illinois, a city of only about 100,000 people; the cops didn’t have much of anything better to do than to close in
on me. And before long, they knew all about me thanks, in equal part, to the local media and my ego. After about a dozen kids shaved their heads, the newspaper decided to do a story about the Nazi threat. They even asked if they could interview me. The paranoia about getting busted that had led me to jump out the window of Crazy Cate’s disappeared in the glow of the media spotlight. Being the cocky young idiot I was, I not only agreed to the interview, I gave the reporter my real name. When the article came out, it talked not just about me and the sudden increase in local skinheads, but also about the national white supremacy movement. It didn’t actually say I’d been planted by the movement to start trouble in Springfield, but it kind of sounded that way if that’s what you wanted to think. And that’s what the panicked people of Springfield seemed to want to think once the story hit the newsstands.

Ironically, it was right after the story came out that the national movement contacted me; it was
because
of the story that they even found out I was in Springfield ready to stir things up. A leader of one of the big adult Aryan nationalist groups sent me a letter at the PO box I’d set up to receive mailings from groups like his and to list on the bottoms of the flyers we were distributing. He said he was proud of the work I was doing and wanted to help me out however he could. He also advised me that a lot of skinhead crews on the West Coast were putting the media to work for them in recruiting. He told me just what to do to attract more journalists to publicize our crew. He also told me how I could go about getting my own show on cable access television. Within a week, I stopped by Sangamon State University’s Telecommunications Department and filled out the paperwork to request production assistance and airtime. The program director damn near passed out when I told her I wanted to call my show
The Reich
. But there was nothing she could do to stop me. Thanks to my pen pal mentor, when she tried to stonewall me, I had my legal arguments ready.

The first episode of
The Reich
wasn’t much more than a bad
imitation of
The Tonight Show
, Nazi-style. First, I did a little monologue about the evils of ZOG. Then a bunch of skinheads lipsynched to some white power songs and proved beyond a shadow of a doubt the truth of one racial stereotype: white men cannot dance. We concluded with a spoof on the Klan that would have gotten us into deep shit had John Cook been in the vicinity: the Klan probably came out looking worse than any minority we mentioned.

Of course, the central Illinois viewing public didn’t see it that way. People went ballistic. They swamped the television studio with phone calls demanding that our show be banned; the program director had to explain over and over that she could not “ban” a public access show so long as it met the guidelines, which ours did. The local Jewish league launched a counteroffensive and scheduled airtime for a show of their own. Then a radical black Muslim launched a counter -counteroffensive and invited me onto his public-access radio show so we could go after the Jews together. Meanwhile, all the mainstream media flipped into a feeding frenzy; Nazi TV was the scoop du jour.

The more the community publicized the evils of hatred, the more kids wanted to sign on as skinheads. Even some of the jocks I’d threatened to rape for throwing that battery started showing up to drink with us outside White Oaks Mall. By December, there were at least twenty freshcuts wandering the streets of Springfield, and dozens of other kids, both alternative kids and popular kids, acted like we were rock stars and they were our groupies.

But the bigger our group got, the more the core crumbled, the more I crumbled. Bullshit bickering I would’ ve ignored back in Philly felt like an earthquake in Illinois. Jessica and the Springfield skinheads were all I had. Even with them, I felt so damn alone. I couldn’t and wouldn’t let myself trust anybody, and, God knows, by then nobody should’ve trusted me. Somewhere between Terre Haute and Springfield, any shred of conscience I
still had left withered up and died, and everybody around me paid the price.

I loved Jessica more than I’d ever loved anyone, but every time I got tanked when she wasn’t around, I screwed whoever was. When the cops hauled me in for questioning about a home invasion me and the boys pulled, I gave them names: Rudolph Hess and Adolf Hitler did it. Worst of all probably, when I look back on it, I used my connections with the Aryan Nations dude to import a shipment of illegal guns into a city so small fistfights still made the newspaper.

I was so broke then I probably should have sold some of those guns for cash. But I hadn’t wanted them for the money. I’d wanted them for the same reason I’d always carried a knife in Philly. Just because. Just in case. Just like my dad taught me. Some of those guns were stashed in the apartment I shared with Jake and another skinhead. On Christmas Eve night, 1992, Jake came home all excited about some electronics he’d bought off a kid we both knew, a kid I hated. I’d heard the kid had been talking shit about me behind my back. He didn’t dress the part, but something in my gut told me he was a closet SHARP. If there was one thing I hated worse than a SHARP, it was a SHARP too fucking chickenshit to show his true blue colors in public.

Jake wasn’t far enough into the movement’s ideology to share my Sharpie paranoia. So I gave him a different reason to hate the kid. I convinced Jake the kid had sold him stolen goods. Just in case that wasn’t motivation enough, I snuck our rent money out of its hiding place then told Jake the kid had stolen it. That did it. Jake and I asked the kid to come over, said we were having a little party. When he arrived, I said I needed to speak with him in private. I led him back to my bedroom and fed him a line about how Jake and I were pissed off at the other skinhead sitting out in our living room. That’s all me and that kid discussed behind closed doors. But when I led the kid back to the living room, I gave Jake the signal, the one I told him I’d give if the kid confessed to being our thief. The kid must’ve thought Jake was
insane when Jake started screaming at him about being a thief and a traitor and owing us big time. The kid was hunkered down on the floor, leaning away from Jake’s torrent, the first time I kicked him in the face.

We kept him in our apartment for what felt like all night, and what must have felt like eternity to the kid. But it was only a couple of hours. Still, it was long enough. We caught the highlights on tape, thanks to the third skinhead and a handheld camcorder. While the videotape rolled, Jake and I took turns beating the kid. One of us would offer commentary while the other one pummeled him and kicked him. Then we’d swap.

“We should kill this fucker,” I said to Jake, loud enough that the kid heard every word. “Tie him up with some duct tape, haul his sorry ass out in the woods, and just take him the hell out.”

I left Jake to do the beating while I went into my room. I returned with a shotgun. I put the barrel of the gun dead center of the kid’s forehead and said, “We could kill you and no one would care.” When he flinched, I added, “This gun is loaded. Youse wanna see?”

We didn’t kill him; we just tortured him. At one point, our cameraman complained he wasn’t getting enough blood in the shots, so Jake cracked the butt of the shotgun across the kid’s back, and I kicked him in the face so many times I couldn’t believe he still had teeth. The gore thrilled our cameraman, but not me: the kid was bleeding all over the place, so much I was afraid he was going to stain our wall-to-wall carpet and get us in deep shit with the landlord. I picked the kid up off the floor by his shoulders and propped him against the wall.

“If you bleed on this rug, I will kill you. You understand me?”

He moaned and nodded “yes” as best he could. He cupped his hands underneath his chin, desperately trying to catch his own blood while I twirled the gun and weighed, aloud, the relative advantages of taking him into the woods to kill him or just blasting his knee off right where he sat.

“You can’t shoot him here,” the cameraman said. “I’m gonna get hit with the spray if you unload that thing inside.”

So I didn’t shoot the shotgun. Instead, I nudged the kid to make sure he was still conscious, and I picked up the telephone. He heard the whole message I left on a national movement hotline calling out for anybody willing to do a hit on the kid and also his girlfriend. Then the kid listened to me asking a buddy of mine if I could borrow his 9mm for an hour or two.

In the end, we decided to let him go, it being Christmas and all. As the kid struggled to limp out of our apartment, Jake warned him he had forty-eight hours to pay us back or he would be dead for real. I warned him not to call the cops if he planned to keep breathing. He didn’t get ten feet down the sidewalk before I had a second thought and called him back inside.

“Youse gotta scrub that blood off, dude.” I shoved him toward the bathroom. “I wouldn’t want anybody thinking you been in an accident or something.”

There was one death threat already waiting on his answering machine by the time the kid staggered home. More Christmas “greetings” came in throughout the night. Santa never made it down that kid’s chimney, but me and a few of my elves stopped by late Christmas morning while he was out, probably at the hospital. We erased the messages from his answering machine and ransacked his apartment. While my little helpers broke everything they could get their hands on, I pulled my knife and slashed his waterbed.