Autobiography of a Recovering Skinhead (29 page)

My mom grabbed me around the neck and wrestled me toward the front door. “Get the fuck out!”

The last thing I saw before my mom slammed the door in my face was John sprawled half passed out across the couch, as he’d been most of my life. But this time, blood poured from the gash under his eye. I’ll go to my grave regretting that my little sisters saw it happen, but I’ll never once regret throwing that punch.

Although I never moved back into the rowhouse on Tree Street, after a few weeks, once we’d all cooled down, I popped in to visit my mom and the girls. My mom acted like nothing had happened; she probably convinced herself John got hurt playing hockey. My little sisters knew the truth, though, and it showed in how they reacted to me. When I tried to hug them, they pulled away scared. That damn near killed me. John’s reaction blew my mind. He came wandering in drunk about an hour after I got there and mumbled, “You got me good with that one, Frankie.” He said it like a compliment from one fighter to another, but I wasn’t ready to let my guard down.

“I ain’t that little kid you used to knock around.”

“I know you ain’t.” The scar still glowed bright red under his left eye.

“You ever pull that shit with me again,” I said, “Or with those two girls, so help me God, it’ll be worse next time.”

He laughed the same drunken laugh I remembered from my childhood. He leaned in so close I could taste his putrid breath.

“I guess I kinda had it coming.”

It was as close to an apology as I’d ever get from my stepfather.

I SPENT THE rest of that winter and the following spring living with Johnny Hawkins, the pot dealer, in a rowhouse about six down from my mom’s on Tree Street. Every night, when I’d stagger home around three or four in the morning, he’d ask , “What’d youse do tonight?”

I’d rattle off whatever insane combination of drugs I’d managed to survive. Some nights it was just a lot of weed. Sometimes, mostly on weekends, it was weed plus mushrooms or acid. But no matter what it was, if it was a weeknight and I wasn’t already half passed out, I’d wash down an extra perc with some beer so I’d have a chance of catching some sleep before the alarm clock rang. When it did, I’d snort a few lines of cocaine so I’d be awake enough to haul furniture.

One morning on my way to work, I walked into a deli to grab a hoagie. The clerk was glued to a small television set behind the counter.

“What’s going on?” I asked

“Somebody blew up a building.”

THE CREASES IN THE FBIAGENT’S FOREHEAD SEEMED to deepen over the hours it took me to make my first confession. When I finally finished telling my story, he set his pen down and flexed his hand several times to get the blood flowing back into his fingers. He flipped through page after page of the notes he’d taken, then carefully laid them inside a folder. “I want to check a few things out,” he said. He asked for my contact information and walked me out the door.

The whole experience was so weird. Not so much that I’d been talking to an agent, just that I’d talked about it at all. It was the first time I’d ever told my whole story to anybody. It was the first time I’d ever tried to make sense in my own mind out of the insane experience called my life. Thinking back on it, I probably should have been worried they were going to bust me for dealing. But none of that even entered my mind at the time. The only thing that mattered was finding somebody I could talk to. My past in the movement felt like poison inside me – I had to get it out of my system. I was grateful those agents had even let me in the door. I wasn’t sure they would. Of course, so soon after the Oklahoma City bombing, they were probably willing to talk to anybody they thought might have any insight. I think my tattoos had been my calling card that first day.

About a week later, the agent called and asked if I’d be willing to come back in. This time, he walked me past the sterile interrogation room and led me to his private office. He offered
me something to drink, sat me in a comfortable chair next to his desk, and tapped his finger on a file. I could see my name on the tab.

“Your story checked out,” he said. “You were in pretty deep. How’d you get out?”

I didn’t have much of an answer then. “I guess I just grew up.”

“Are you willing to work with us?”

“I told youse the first time-I ain’t gonna rat on nobody. I didn’t come in here to name names. I just want it to stop.”

He thought it over for a minute, then said, “I don’t think we’re who you need to talk to. Would you be willing to speak with the ADL?”

I burst out laughing. “There’s no way the ADL’s going to meet with me.”

According to the white supremacy movement, the Anti-Defamation League is right up there with the Israeli government at the top of the ZOG conspiracy. The ADL isn’t just an enemy; it’s
the
enemy. And it’s an aggressive enemy. For decades, the ADL has tracked the every movement of white supremacists. They monitor every publication, document every crime, and profile every leader.

For five years, I’d believed with all my heart that the ADL was a manifestation of the antichrist. So it took me a few days to get around to making the phone call.

“Hi, my name is Frank Meeink, and I need to speak…”

“ Did you say your name is Frank Meeink? Please hold.”

A minute or two later, the guy came back on the line.

“I’d like to come in…”

“No.”

I was thinking, “I told you so, Mr. FBI man.” But then the guy on the phone surprised me and said, “ We’d prefer to meet you off site. You understand.”

I cleaned up as best I could for my big meeting, but I still felt like a total dirtball walking into the fancy hotel lobby. I took a seat in a cushy chair. Center City loomed above me, but I couldn’t
enjoy the view through the glass ceiling of the atrium. I had to watch the door. Everyone who entered smelled like money and French cologne. I saw them dart their eyes in my direction, panic a little, then pretend they hadn’t seen me. I waited nearly ten minutes. I was on the verge of leaving when I was approached by a middle-aged guy wearing a nice suit. He was followed by a very large bodyguard.

“My name is Barry Morrison,” he said. “I’m with the ADL.”

“I’m Frank Meeink.”

“I know.” The hint of a smile crept across his stern face. “We profiled you a few years ago, before you left for the Midwest.”

Had I still been in the movement, that would’ve sent my ego into outer space. As it was, it freaked me out, in a Big Brother kind of way.

“You’re no longer part of Strike Force?” he asked.

“No.”

“Why is it you want to speak with us?”

“This whole Oklahoma City thing has me shaken up.”

“It has us all shaken up,” he said. Barry Morrison walked me to a deserted corner of the hotel lobby where we could talk without being overheard, then he quizzed me on every move I’d ever made as a skinhead. He put the freaking FBI to shame. But he wasn’t hunting for information; he was testing if I really was the Frank Meeink he’d profiled. When he was satisfied I was who I claimed to be, he started working a new angle, a battery of questions about how, when, and why I’d left the movement. By the time he finally finished, I was exhausted.

“I want to verify a few things before we go any further,” he said.” But I’ll be in touch soon.”

Barry Morrison called me less than a week after that first conversation and invited me to come to the ADL office for a meeting with his staff. From the outset, I told them the same thing I’d told the FBI: I wasn’t going to name names. But they weren’t after names. They wanted something far more difficult to produce: they wanted to know why. Why did I hate? Why was I so violent?
Why did I target particular victims? Why hadn’t I defected earlier? Why had I changed now? Why? Why? Why?

My answers weren’t eloquent, just honest. I answered the only way I knew how: I stepped back into who I’d been when I was a skinhead and gave voice to “why” as only a skinhead can. I explained to a room full of Jews why I’d believed for so many years that God wanted me to eradicate them. I confessed in detail far more graphic than the normal content of an ADL profile what I’d done. When it was over, the ADL staff looked shell-shocked; I felt like hell.

“Thank you, Frank,” Barry said.

“Thank you,” I said. The elevator door opened, but I lingered. “I didn’t think youse were going to talk to me.”

The same hint of a smile I’d seen at our first meeting peeked through Barry’s professional poker face. “You had good references,” he said. “A federal agent called a few days before you did. He assured us you were sincere.”

I left the ADL office feeling like I hadn’t done much good, even though Barry said I’d helped just by sharing my story. “Understanding is the first step toward prevention,” he explained. But I wasn’t so sure. While I’d been sitting in that executive conference room yapping about my past, some skinhead somewhere was preparing his next attack. What were my words doing to stop his actions? Hell, nothing anybody’d said had ever stopped me. So I wasn’t convinced by what Barry said to me: after all, even though he’d said I’d been helpful, he hadn’t said anything about me coming in again.

I returned to life as usual, moving furniture and drugs. Both my businesses were booming, so much so I no longer had time to commute to Keith’s store in Jersey. It was Keith’s fault he lost me. He gave me all the information and advice I needed to open my own booth in a consignment mall off South Street.

I specialized in reproduction antique doll chairs, and I made a killing every Saturday and Sunday when the tourists strolled through. The tiny chairs reminded me of the tiny girl in Illinois I
missed so desperately. I painted a wooden sign to hang over my booth: Riley’s Antiques.

I planned to save the money I made at Riley’s Antiques for my Riley, but by month’s end, I rarely had cash left over to send to Illinois. I convinced myself the high cost of life in the big city was the problem. The truth was I snorted my little girl’s support payments up my nose. I rarely let myself get close to that truth – it was easier to stay doped up enough that I believed my own lies.

One person saw through my sham, though. To help solve my commuting problem, Keith hooked me up with a buddy of his, Kyle Hirsch, a Filipino Jew who looked Puerto Rican and dealt used furniture out of a crammed storefront in an almost all-black section of West Philly. Kyle’s shop didn’t cater to the elite clientele Keith served in Jersey; he ran the kind of store where you could buy an eight-piece dining room set for two hundred bucks. Kyle’s employees looked shady, even by my standards. During my interview, Kyle explained that in addition to the furniture store, he also operated a halfway house for recovering addicts. Kyle was a recovering alcoholic and addict himself. Most of his employees lived in his halfway house. As Kyle was telling me all that, I got really mad at Keith. “He set me up,” I thought. “That fucker’s trying to sneak me into some rehab joint without me knowing it.”

“Would you like the job?” Kyle asked.

“What do I gotta do to get it?” I asked back, worried about that halfway house.

Kyle must’ve been reading my mind, because he laughed a little when he said, “I just need a good delivery man.” Then his eyes turned serious. “Why? Do you think you should be living in the house?”

Nobody can spot an addict like another addict. Kyle knew I was in serious trouble. But he also knew better than to push too hard too fast. My first few weeks working at his store, he never talked to me directly about recovery. But he and the other employees talked about it all the time. I tried to block them out,
but I couldn’t: the twelve steps echoed through the aisles all day long.

I worked hard for Kyle, when I showed up. Some days I clocked in late. Some days, my shift was half over by the time I dragged my ass out of bed. I always called in with some half-baked lie about being sick. Kyle’d been “sick” throughout his twenties; he wasn’t buying it. He’d fire me on principle, but he’d always hire me back a few days later, after I sat through one of his sermons about the glory of sobriety. I was usually too stoned during those talks to realize Kyle knew I was stoned.

The third or fourth time Kyle rehired me, he added a condition: I had to start hitting twelve-step meetings.

“I don’t care where you go or when you go, so long as you go,” he said.

“Fine.”

A few days later, Kyle asked me how meetings were going.

“When do you think I’ve got time to go to meetings?” I asked him. “Do you know how many deliveries I make for you? I ain’t got time to listen to a bunch of drunks.”

“I’ll keep you on the clock while you go,” Kyle said.

A few days after that, Kyle and I were riding together in the delivery truck when he again asked me how meetings were going.

“Fine.”

“Will you say the Serenity Prayer with me?” he asked.

“I ain’t ever heard of that, but I know the Lord’s Prayer. We can do that one if you want.”

Kyle kept his eyes on the road. “How’d you say your meetings are going?”

“Fine.”

“Every twelve-step meeting in the world begins with the Serenity Prayer.”

I was busted.

“Will you say it with me?” Kyle asked. “I’ll teach you.” We were stopped at a light. Kyle turned toward me and said, “Just follow me.”

Together we recited: “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” I guess I must’ve prayed part of it right, because God granted me the courage to change my address. After many months of crashing with Johnny Hawkins, the pot dealer, I moved into an apartment of my own. Well, half my own. My roommate was a punk girl I’d known for years. We split rent on a sweet place right on South Street. It was around the corner from Riley’s Antiques and an easy bus ride to both Kyle’s store and Second and Porter. It was also dead center of party central. Hell, it was party central for a lot of the South Street punks, especially the ones dabbling in acid. And that gave me the option of working from home. I still did most of my business on Second and Porter, simply because no other location could compete with the buyer traffic that intersection attracted at night. And since I was down there selling anyhow, I inevitably ended up partying with the boys until the wee hours of the morning.