Autobiography of a Recovering Skinhead (2 page)

But the moment Frank Meeink is on the verge of some kind of secular enlightenment, he gets so caught up in drinking and drugging that it almost doesn’t even matter. He has such a tenuous – if any-relationship to contraception that he gets three different women pregnant before his twenty-first birthday. What becomes clear is that this isn’t really a story about Nazi ideology – it’s about a life that is swinging way out of control. And that’s the reason
Autobiography of a Recovering Skinhead
is not just a crazy story – it’s also a good book and a great read. Because we all have our moments when the world just doesn’t make much sense – for Frank Meeink that feeling was so palpable that he actually created a life that made no sense. But he turned it into a narrative that truly does. Over time and over pages, the pieces pull together, and the fractures and fragments turn into a person I would actually like to know.

Meet Frank Meeink – he knows the truth.

ON THE MORNING OF APRIL 19, 1995, I SQUEEZED PAST THE meat counter of a corner deli, grabbed a pre-wrapped hoagie, and made my way to the cash register. The clerk was glued to a small television set behind the counter.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“Somebody blew up a building.”

“No shit? Where?”

“Oklahoma City.”

Within minutes of the blast, the world was huddled around television sets. Even me and my fellow drug dealers abandoned our corner at Second and Porter to follow the story. We piled into the front bedroom of a ratty South Philly rowhouse.

“What kind of an asshole does that?” somebody asked.

Little conversations erupted around the room.

“Youse think it’s terrorists?”

“Like in Israel?”

“No fucking way. That shit don’t happen here.”

“It happened in New York.”

“This ain’t the same thing. It’s fucking Oklahoma.”

“I still say it’s terrorists.”

“I think it’s some fucking nut job.”

“I bet I know who did it,” I said.

The room fell silent.

The Second and Porter boys had taken me in a few months earlier when not a lot of people wanted anything to do with me.
I hadn’t seen most of them since grade school, but they accepted me back anyhow. I was one of them. Like every other dude on that corner, I was a South Philly Catholic cocktail. I was a little darker than the pure Irish guys, a little taller than the full Italians, and a lot skinnier than everybody except the kooksters who’d given up food for cocaine. But to the Second and Porter boys, I was still Frankie Meeink from the old neighborhood. They overlooked everything else. Or maybe they never really believed the stories until the day of the Oklahoma City Bombing, when they heard me say, “I bet I know who did it.”

For the first time that day, everyone turned away from the television. Every dude in that room stared at me as if he was really seeing me for the first time since I’d reappeared in their lives. I felt their eyes lock on the five-inch swastika tattooed on my neck. I glanced nervously at my hands. The tattoos on my knuckles accused me: “S-K-I-N-H-E-A-D.”

Finally, someone cautiously asked, “Who?”

“I ain’t saying I can name the name, but youse just watch: it’s going to end up being somebody tied to the movement.”

I knew. Deep in my gut, from the second the story broke, I knew. I recognized the plot. It’s from
The Turner Diaries
, the “novel” by Andrew MacDonald. The thing is, Andrew MacDonald isn’t the author’s real name; his real name is William Pierce. And, in 1995, William Pierce was still head of the National Alliance, and his book was still at the top of the white supremacy movement’s “must read” list. When the cops finally apprehended Timothy McVeigh, they found copies of pages from
The Turner Diaries
in his car. My copy was tucked away in the back of a closet. I’d read it cover-to-cover during my skinhead years, and while I read it, I wanted to blow something up. And I knew how, thanks to that book and others like it. I’d just never had the right opportunity.

The other Second and Porter boys wandered back to the corner later that night, but I stayed in front of the television.

I didn’t leave the house for days. I barely even got high. I just sat
there, flipping channels, catching all the angles on the story, unable to look away. One image seared itself into my mind: a firefighter carrying a bleeding baby girl out of the rubble. Every time I saw that picture, I thought of my little girl, the little girl I hadn’t seen in more than a year, and I wept.

As the body count mounted, I felt so fucking evil. For the first time ever, my victims haunted me. The kid in Springfield desperately trying to catch his own blood so I wouldn’t make good on my threat to shoot him if he stained my carpet. The unarmed gay men I beat with an Orangina bottle. The college student I held down so another skinhead could pry a hammer from his head. Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols killed 168 people. How many of my victims had wished for death while I brutalized them?

Once, when I had glanced down at the bloody face of a college student, I had been seized by a horrible realization: “He could be my Uncle Dave,” my childhood hero, the guy I could’ve been, should’ve been, if everything in my whole fucking life had been different. But I’d shaken that thought off the second it flashed across my mind, and I kicked that poor college kid more, harder. I laughed at his suffering. I attacked others that same night, and so many others in the years that followed. And for years, for five fucking years, I believed I was fighting a holy war. I was raining down God’s justice on an evil world. Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols believed that, too. That belief killed 168 people in Oklahoma City. Nineteen of them were innocent little kids, like my baby girl. I couldn’t shake that. I couldn’t bear that.

I knew if I didn’t talk to someone I was going to lose my mind. But I had no one to talk to. No one in my life outside the white supremacy movement understood what the movement was about. No one in my life outside the movement had a clue how far in I’d been. My parents, grandparents, my buddies on Second and Porter, none of them knew the truth about me: for five years, I would have blown up a building.

It took almost a week to figure out who I could talk to
without needing to translate every term, who probably knew enough about me to believe me.

 

THE LOBBY WAS impressive, but the offices were plain. A framed photo of an Eagles fullback stood proudly on a table. I’d expected wanted posters.

“How can I help you?” asked the clean-cut kid at the front desk. He looked like he’d probably played football in high school. I watched his eyes survey my tattoos like he’d been taught at Quantico.

“I need to talk to somebody.”

“What’s this in reference to?”

“Oklahoma City.”

Within about a minute, I was sitting on a metal chair in a windowless room. Unlike the kid working the front desk, the agent across from me in the interrogation room was no rookie. His dark, wavy hair framed the wrinkles cutting into his forehead. From the looks of the bags under his eyes, he hadn’t slept since the truck exploded.

“Do you know Timothy McVeigh?” he asked.

“No.”

He came at the same question from different angles until he was satisfied I really did not know McVeigh.

“I’m not here to rat nobody out,” I said.

“Then why are you here?”

“I didn’t know where else to go.”

“For what?”

“I didn’t know Timothy McVeigh.” I paused for a really long time trying to find the right words. Then I said, “For a really long time, I wanted to be Timothy McVeigh.”

I confessed to that agent like he was a priest.

I WAS CONCEIVED ON MY NANNY BERTONE’S KITCHEN floor a few hours after the Philadelphia cops killed one of my dad’s best friends. My dad was nineteen. My mom was seventeen. I was the accident that drove them to the altar.

The oldest son of a big, loving Italian family from Southwest Philly, my dad, Frankie Bertone, had been a star basketball player, a promising boxer, and a chess champion until his younger brother, Steven, was electrocuted on the train tracks. They were playing together when it happened. Fourteen year-old Frankie blamed himself. He withdrew into his grief and guilt, then tried to drown them in a bottle. When that didn’t work, he tried to poison them with drugs. Drunk, high, or more often both, Frankie took to the streets. Before long, the young boxer had earned a reputation as one of the meanest streetfighters ever to battle for the 68th and Buist boys.

My grandparents had already lost one son; they weren’t willing to stand by while they lost another. For two years, Nanny and Pop tried to persuade my dad to change, but he refused. The night he came crashing through the back door on the run from the cops, Pop kicked him out. He was sixteen.

My dad says the cops picked him up thirty-five times before he turned eighteen and shipped out with the Navy. The Navy could have been his fresh start, a chance to reclaim who he might have become had everything been different. But he slammed that last window of opportunity shut one weekend when he came
home on leave. A few hours after he learned the devastating news of his friend’s death, Frankie quietly let himself in his parents’ back door; he wasn’t alone. In a drunken fit of rage and desire, he knocked up a seventeen year-old Irish girl who popped Quaaludes like Chiclets.

Margaret Meeink had been raised to keep up appearances. When my mom was a kid, her parents refused to patronize the boozy Mummer halls that are the community family rooms of South Philly. Instead, they secluded themselves in a tidy rowhouse and drank their beers in private. My mom spent most of her childhood on her knees scrubbing floors, doing her part to maintain the family illusion. Over the years, the cleaning regiment scoured most of the love out of her. From everything I’ve heard, my mom played along with the family lie for a long time, embraced it. She drank heavily throughout high school and used her parents’ example to hide her drinking even from them. She hid the Quaaludes the same way she had been taught to hide her emotions, behind a bleached exterior. The night she met Frankie Bertone, petite, fair-skinned Margaret Meeink didn’t look like the budding addict she actually was.

Although few realized it, my mom was past the point of rebellion when she met my dad; by then she was shopping for retribution. With his shaggy hair and shady eyes, Frankie Bertone was just what Margaret needed. Margaret’s parents hated “dirty Italians.” At nineteen, Frankie had become their worst stereotype: a drunk, drugging, promiscuous, violent “dago.” Of course, my mom had become most of that by then, too. Drunk and stoned at a Phillies game during the heyday of their courtship, she attacked my dad so violently security kicked her out of the stadium. Yet she still thought she was the one slumming, and she rubbed it in my dad’s face and in her parents’ faces.

 

I WAS BORN Francis Steven Bertone on May 7, 1975. I don’t think my teenage parents were thrilled about my arrival, but the Philadelphia Flyers sure were. A couple weeks after I was born,
they celebrated by winning their second world championship. I like to think I had something to do with that, like I was their good luck charm. Or maybe it was fate that Philly’s notorious “Broad Street Bullies” brought home the Stanley Cup the same month my parents brought home the baby who would become one of Philly’s worst bullies.

Frankie and Margaret gave marriage and me the best shot they could. Parenthood tamed their desire for each other, but not their cravings for booze and drugs. They loved me between binges, did their best to remember to get a sitter before they got too far gone.

We lived in a second-floor apartment over a market in the heart of Southwest Philly. The entire Bertone clan was at the ready to look out for me. My twelve year-old uncle babysat me on Saturdays until the afternoon my parents promised to return within two hours, only to disappear until the wee hours of Sunday morning. After that, Nanny Bertone kept me at her house most weekends.

Neither my presence nor my absence ever really affected my parents’ social life. If they could find a sitter, they went out; if not, they stayed in. Their friends still talk about the wild parties they threw in the apartment over the market.

I survived my parents’ brief marriage with a lot of help from the Bertones and the neighbors. And my parents survived each other, although both were bitter and bruised by the time my mom walked out. She was nineteen and I was two when we moved in with her parents deep in South Philly’s Irish quarter. At first, my dad tried to visit me, but my Grandfather Meeink always slammed the door in the face of the “dirty Italian” who had soiled his “pure” Irish daughter.

Not too long after my mom and I moved in with her parents, she got a good job as a runner for a stock brokerage and started saving up money so we could get our own place. She pooled resources with her best friend, another single Irish
mother with a half-Italian son. Together, they managed to rent a tiny rowhouse on Tree Street.

Tree Street is narrow, even by South Philly standards. To be polite to their neighbors, native South Philly drivers park halfway up on the slivers of sidewalks and halfway out in the street, otherwise nobody can get through on streets like Tree. On wider streets, people still park half up over the curb, so there’s room for other people to double-park next to them. If there’s not enough street left after that, drivers edge two wheels onto the opposite sidewalk, being careful not to rip their front bumpers off on a stoop. Pedestrians are on their own. In South Philly, even if you’re standing on your front doorstep, you either get out of the way or you get clipped.

Nearly two years after she’d taken me back to her old neighborhood, my mom finally agreed to let my dad have visitation. The condition on my occasional overnight visits was that I had to stay at Nanny and Pop Bertone’s home, not at the apartment my dad shared with his best friend and fellow 68th and Buist bruiser, Crazy Cha- Cha Chacinzi. My grandparents welcomed both me and my dad, but usually only I stayed the whole night. I think I was more than my dad could handle for very long, especially by himself.