Autobiography of a Recovering Skinhead (30 page)

At one of those house parties, I locked eyes with an Italian girl so gorgeous the sight of her felt like a kick in the nads. Maria Salerno was from the part of Northeast Philadelphia where rich Italians raise their children in restored Victorian homes. I’d never seen a girl like that at a South Philly party before. Her designer jeans showcased her petite curves, but they didn’t cling like the jeans South Philly girls painted on. I didn’t think Maria Salerno would go for my standard pick-up line, “So, youse wanna hook up with me tonight or what?” She wasn’t a pick-up line kind of girl. She was a wine-me-dine-me-buy-me-a-diamond-ring kind of girl. If she hadn’t been so smoking hot, I would’ve run for my life. Instead, I spent a weekend worming her phone number out of her and close to a week convincing her to go on a date. I spiffed myself up like I was headed to the prom and took her to a fancy Italian restaurant in Center City.

Maria and I weren’t just from different parts of Philadelphia; we were from different fucking planets. Maria Salerno fell in
love with a Frank Meeink that didn’t exist except in her imagination. It drove me fucking crazy. Maria’s brown eyes looked right through my Nazi tattoos, right over my criminal record, and right past the lines of cocaine on my bathroom counter. She wanted to see our relationship for more than it was. To me, it was an extended booty call. To Maria, it was an engagement. No matter how many times I tried to give her the brush off, she just kept coming back. And every time she came back, she brought more of her stuff along. After two months, I felt like she was living with me. I was plotting how to tell her we were through when she dropped a bomb: “ We’re going to have a baby.”

Under the circumstances, I didn’t break up with her. But I didn’t ask her to marry me, either, and that seemed to piss her off, just not enough to leave. We were still together in a cold-war kind of truce a month or so later when Barry Morrison called to ask me if I’d be willing to talk to some people on behalf of the ADL.

“I don’t know. I ain’t ever given, like, a speech. I just talked to youse guys that one day.”

“And that’s all you need to do this time: just talk. Share your story so others can learn from it. Will you do it?”

I thought about it for a few minutes and figured, how bad can it be? So I committed with, “Okay,” then after the fact asked, “So who am I talking to?”

“My daughter’s seventh-grade class.”

Shit.

 

BARRY DROVE ME to the suburban school himself. The whole ride, I kept coaching myself, “They’re just little kids. Don’t cuss. Don’t cuss. Don’t cuss.” We walked into the classroom. The teacher had all the kids arranged in a circle. One little chair at the front was empty and waiting for me. “Oh, fuck!” I thought, as I wedged myself into the seat, “ What in holy hell have I gotten myself into?” Then I reminded myself one more time, “Just don’t cuss.”

It was my only goal for my first public speech. Just don’t
fucking cuss. Cussing, as it turned out, wasn’t the challenge; crying was. I broke down sobbing minutes after I started, before I even got to the part where I joined up with the skinheads. I spilled my guts to those little kids for nearly an hour, and I bawled like a baby the whole damn time. They just stared at me. No one said a word; no one so much as coughed or squirmed around in their chairs. Not the kids. Not the teacher. Not even Barry Morrison.

I was a basket case the whole ride back to Philly. Barry kept trying to console me, saying I’d done a good job and the teacher knew it was going to be rough and the kids and their parents had all been warned beforehand, but nothing he said mattered to me. I’d blown it, and I knew I’d blown it, big-time blown it. It wasn’t just that I didn’t think I’d made my point or even made any sense. I was worried I’d actually scarred those kids for life. Two dozen twelve year-olds spent an hour locked up in a classroom watching my nut job Nazi ass have a complete mental breakdown. Getting my point across was the least of my worries; I was worried about getting bills in the mail for their therapy sessions.

I stayed high for days trying to forget that God-awful experience. Not even Second and Porter had a drug that could block it out. So when Barry called me about a week later and asked me to stop by his office, I figured he wanted to tell me in person that I would never, ever again be speaking on behalf of the ADL, ever, under any circumstances, about any subject, ever.

“A package came here for you.” Barry handed me a large manila envelope addressed, “Frank Meeink, c/o ADL.” I stared at it.

“It’s from the school where you spoke last week.”

I kept staring. The first round of therapy bills? Grievances from the school board and the PTA? Hate mail from twelve yearolds?

“Open it,” Barry said.

The first letter sounded like the kind of letter a teacher would make a kid write to a guest speaker who’d had a breakdown
in front of a bunch of seventh-graders. “Mr. Meeink, Thank you for talking to our class. You were brave to share your story.” The second letter was about the same: “Mr. Meeink, Thank you for visiting us and talking about what happened to you.” A few letters in, a few of the students wrote, “I’m going to try to be nicer to people from now on” and “I promise I won’t ever hate anybody.” I remember thinking it was nice of the teacher to have some of the kids pretend they got my point. Then I hit this letter that changed everything: “Mr. Meeink, I bet you had a long, boring ride back to Philly.” That’s all it said. That’s exactly the kind of letter I would’ve chicken-scratched in seventh grade. That was the real deal. And if that was real, so were the others. Some of those kids had actually heard me through all the crying. My words had made a difference.

When I looked up from the stack of notes, I was crying again. Barry was beaming like a proud papa.

“I told you your story could help people,” he said. “A lot of people want to hear you speak, Frank. I just need you to tell me if you want to keep going.”

I did. Within just a couple of months, Barry and other members of the ADL team were driving me to speaking engagements all around Southeastern Pennsylvania. It was like therapy for me, only instead of lying on a couch, I stood up on a stage.

MARIA WAS STILL IN HER FIRST TRIMESTER AND STILL convinced we were getting married when my roommate skipped town with my half of the rent in her pocket. She’d always dealt with the landlord; I didn’t even know his name. And he didn’t know my name, because it wasn’t on the lease. When he didn’t get a rent check from our unit, he busted through the door. Maria witnessed the landlord telling me I’d better be gone that night. She had overlooked my five-year Nazi “phase,” my prison record, my drinking and my drugging. But an eviction notice? Now that little white trash mess caught her attention. Maria fled straight back to her family’s home in Northeast Philly.

I crashed at my dad’s place. Maria called me there almost every night, but I never called her. We rarely saw each other. She was scared to come to my dad’s neighborhood, and I was scared of her dad’s neighborhood, too. I was scared her dad would meet me with a shotgun and a priest if I showed my face within ten blocks of his pregnant daughter. After a while, she stopped calling so often. Then she stopped calling.

One afternoon a few weeks after Maria’s last call, I spotted a girl in a “Sick of It All” T-shirt. Her hair was a frenzy of brown curls, bouncing like shadows across her face as she counted out worms into Styrofoam cups at the counter of a bait-and-tackle shop not far from my dad’s. Even elbow deep in bait, she was amazingly beautiful and too cool to give me the time of day or even a glance. If she had, she would’ve busted me ogling her.

I couldn’t shake the thought of the hot girl counting worms. I found out her name was Nina and that she was sixteen. I was twenty-one. Five years didn’t seem like much. Unlike Maria, Nina wasn’t blind to me or trying to change me or trying to marry me. She was a bad girl who liked bad boys. She was into me exactly as I was. And she was basically the same as me, just five years younger, without the Nazi “phase” or the prison record. When she wasn’t counting worms, she was full-on South Street hardcore. Nina’d made her debut on South Street at the tender age of fourteen. She fell in with some former skinheads, guys I had recruited who’d drifted back into the straight punk scene while I was away. Nina and I had been seeing each other about a week when she finally confessed that her South Street buddies used to tell her stories about their wild days as skinheads, back when Frankie Meeink was still with Strike Force.

“I recognized you,” she said, tracing her fingertips around the swastika on my neck. “I knew who you were the second I saw you.”

Nina knew me from the start like she’d known me forever. The only thing she didn’t know at first was that a girl named Maria up in North Philly was counting down to her due date. When I told Nina about Maria, she didn’t care so long as we could be together. When I got the nerve to call Maria and tell her about Nina, it didn’t go quite as well. Maria said if I kept seeing Nina, I’d never see my kid. I was still reeling from that ultimatum when I got horrible news. Matt Hanson, the only skinhead I still loved, was dead. Matt always fell hard when he fell in love, and every breakup left him a little more broken than the last. But Matt’s last breakup was more than he could take. He called his ex-girlfriend, told her she’d ruined his life, then pulled the trigger so she would hear him die. My heart broke for my lost friend, for his poor, sweet mom, Nazi Viv, even for the girl on the other end of that God-forsaken phone call. Nina got me through. She didn’t try to make me talk or cheer me up or any other useless shit;
she just wrapped me in her arms and held on tight so I wouldn’t get lost alone inside the pain.

Matt’s death destroyed me – I crossed an invisible line in the months after he committed suicide. I don’t know which beer or line of cocaine or hit of acid pushed me over; I only know everything but my boozing and drugging started falling to shit. I tried to keep enough cash from blowing up my nose so Nina and me could get our own place, but all I could manage was renting a couch in another couple’s tiny apartment. I lost Riley’s Antiques because I spent the booth rent on drugs. When I showed up an entire week late for work at Kyle’s store, he finally fired me for real. Riding the trolley home, I rehearsed how to tell Nina I’d lost my job so I didn’t come out sounding like the failure I was. But I never got the chance to give my speech. When I walked through the door, I found her crying on the couch we called home. A shredded pregnancy test box lay at her feet. Nina looked so small, so young, so afraid. I put my arms around her and promised her over and over, “It’ll be okay. Whatever you want to do, I’m with you. It’ll be okay.”

 

NINA WAS STILL considering her options when Maria called to tell me I had a son.

“What’s his name?” I asked, dreading the answer.

“Jake.”

It was the one name I had begged her not to pick, but she picked it anyhow. I had a bad history with that name; both the closet SHARP I’d kidnapped and my co-defendant in that case had been named Jake.

“And he’ll have my last name,” Maria said.

“Can I at least see him?”

She hesitated a long time before saying, “I guess. But don’t you dare bring her.”

I went alone. I welcomed my beautiful baby boy into the world with a whispered, “I love you,” then I walked away.

I ran back to Nina, vowing to myself I’d stick by her no
matter what she decided to do about the baby. Even a year earlier, I would’ve pushed her to keep it because of my Catholic upbringing. But a lot had changed for me in a year’s time. The world that had always been strictly black-or -white seemed so gray to me. I’d been wrong about so many things I would’ ve sworn on a Bible were absolute facts. But nothing seemed absolute to me anymore, not even what Nina should do about the baby. I wasn’t exactly the poster boy for involved fatherhood. No matter how many times I promised Nina I wasn’t going to leave her, she knew the truth: I’d already walked away from two girls and two babies. No matter what I said, Nina knew that if she kept the baby, she might very well end up raising it alone, and she’d been alone too much already in her life. When I met her, she was living with her grandmother because her folks had kicked her out. After she met me, Nina barely checked in at her grandma’s. Grandma wasn’t happy about that. She was downright pissed when she learned her sixteen year-old granddaughter was pregnant.

I understood why. It wasn’t just that Nina was so young. It was that she was so smart. She was a wild child, but the second she opened her mouth, you knew she was going to ace the fuck out of college someday. Her grandmother was afraid Nina would give up on her dreams if she had the baby. She was afraid Nina would drop out and end up counting worms for the rest of her life. So when Nina announced her decision to keep the baby, I promised I’d find a way to support us, so long as she promised to stay in school.

No pregnant teenager has ever looked hotter in a Catholic schoolgirl uniform than Nina. She kept her end of the bargain, and I kept mine. I went to Kyle and begged for my old job. When I explained the situation with Nina, Kyle not only hired me back, he hired Nina, too. While I carried furniture, she put her amazing brain to work on Kyle’s computer system. Kyle even advanced us enough cash so we could upgrade from our rental couch to a studio apartment in University City.

Nina ate healthy food, went to bed early, and swore off booze and drugs while she was pregnant. Like a lot of pregnant women, she developed an aversion to certain things because they made her sick. Nina developed an aversion to Louie Lacinzi. By the end of her second trimester, she flat out hated the dude. Any time he stopped by the apartment to take me out for the night, Nina flew off the handle. She got right in his face, so close she’d ram him with her belly, and chewed him a new asshole. Louie was real patient about it. He’d take a deep breath, like he was the one going to Lamaze classes, and ask me, “Youse ready yet?” By then, I always was.