Autobiography of a Recovering Skinhead (32 page)

“You didn’t change,” he said at one point. “You can’t change.”

“You don’t know what’s in my heart,” I replied, but no one was listening.

“Hate was bred into you,” the professor said. “That comes from your parents.”

That made me mad. That made me want to smack the hell out of him. But I didn’t. I thought about my little hockey players and the pain I’d endured so they wouldn’t have to see a swastika on my neck. I sure as hell wasn’t going to let them see me taking a swing at somebody on television. So I took a really deep breath, unclenched my fists, and said, as calmly as I could, “You don’t even know my parents.”

White supremacists aren’t the only people who throw around stereotypes about people they don’t know. The host and the professor missed my point or ignored it. When the show ended, I looked at the producer who’d booked me and said, “You set me up.” He didn’t even have the decency to answer. Had I known what I was walking into, I probably would’ve brought backup just to make sure I got out of there okay-Louie Lacinzi or the Second and Porter boys. I did that sometimes for ADL speeches, especially the ones with a lot of advance publicity, in case somebody from the movement tried to shut me up permanently. But I hadn’t given the TV show a second thought because it was supposed to be about Harmony Through Hockey.

That professor knew the real plan, though, and he’d brought an enormous bodyguard along with him. The dude looked like The Notorious B.I.G. He waddled over to me after it was all over and said, “I feel you, dude.” Then he glanced across the studio at his boss, who was hobnobbing with the host and the producer, and said, “Don’t sweat what he said. That dude’s uptight.” We were standing there talking about Harmony Through Hockey when the producer’s assistant told me my car was waiting. Since the live show happened “After Midnight,” they’d promised me a ride home. The bodyguard left the professor chatting with his fan club and walked me out in case somebody was waiting to ambush me in the alley. He wished me good luck with the hockey program as I climbed into the waiting limousine.

I asked the driver to drop me off at my dad’s bar, where I
was greeted with a hero’s welcome. The limo alone impressed the aging 68th and Buist boys, but it wasn’t all about the car. They’d had the television above the bar tuned to “Philly After Midnight.” They’d watched the whole program. I’d spent the limo ride fuming about what the host and the professor had said and what I hadn’t said, could’ve said, would’ve said if I had one more chance. But the crowd at my dad’s bar wouldn’t have changed one word. They mobbed me with praise. “You really gave’em hell, Frankie! Personally, I’d have shot the fucker. How the hell did youse stay so cool?”

Then my dad shoved through the crowd. He threw his arm around my shoulder and said something I’d been waiting my whole life to hear: “I’m proud of you, son.” Years later, he told a friend of mine that watching me hold my own with that professor was the proudest moment of his life.

After the last game of the Harmony Through Hockey season, the Flyers hosted an awards ceremony for the kids. They set up a platform on center ice and handed out trophies. Mike Boni gave a nice speech on behalf of the ADL. I said a few words too, but I don’t think I made much sense. I was too distracted by the people in the front row. My mom and John actually came to the ceremony. And sitting right next to them was none other than Dave Schultz, one of the original Broad Street Bullies from the ’74-’75 Stanley Cup team.

The ADL hoped I could spread the word about Harmony Through Hockey to other cities, so they started booking me for speaking engagements all over the country. Any time I had to be gone very long, they paid me $200 a day. It more than covered the time I lost at Kyle’s store, just not the cost of my beer and drugs. My habits had gotten more expensive once I started speaking and coaching Harmony Through Hockey. Just getting fucked up is pretty cheap, all things considered. Getting fucked up and then taking other shit to mask being fucked up is what gets expensive.

My eyes lit up when the ADL offered me a thousand dollars to spend a week on the West Coast. While Barry was running
through the list of where all I’d be speaking, I was calculating how many weeks of drugs that grand would cover. The answer was three.

My trip to sunny California was grueling. The ADL had me speaking all over the place, giving lectures at universities, addressing a conference, meeting with various groups and officials, even headlining some fundraiser. I barely had time to enjoy the fancy hotel room they comped me. By the last night of my whirl-wind tour, I was wiped out. I passed on a local ADL rep’s offer to treat me to dinner. Instead, I wandered down to the hotel bar hoping to relax. I figured a couple beers would take the edge off so I could get a decent night’s sleep before my flight the next morning.

A few hours later, bed was the last thing on my mind. I was trashed and shopping for a party. The businessmen at the hotel bar weren’t the partying types, so I wandered outside. I heard music in the distance and followed my ears to a concert. On a outdoor stage stood George Clinton in all his funkadelic glory. I grooved out with strangers and gradually worked my way toward the front row. Somehow, I ended up talking to one of Clinton’s roadies. Next thing I knew, I was partying backstage and inviting all the roadies to come back to my sweet-ass comped hotel room.

I wasn’t back in Philly more than twenty-four hours when Barry Morrison called me in to his office.

“Did you have a good time on your trip?” he asked.

“It went all right.”

“Are you sure everything was okay?”

“Somebody say I fucked up?”

“The feedback on your speeches was very good,” Barry replied. “But I just got a copy of your hotel bill. There was more than five-hundred dollars worth of liquor missing from your minibar. Please tell me you didn’t drink that much.”

“Me? No.” I laughed. “I had some people over one night. It wasn’t just me. What do you think? I’m some kind of alcoholic?”

Barry stared silently at me for a minute, as if he wasn’t sure what to say next.

“So you did use the minibar?” he asked.

“Yeah, but youse don’t gotta worry about it. The ADL guy out there said my hotel was comped.”

Barry shook his head. “Comped doesn’t mean free. It means you don’t get the bill; your hosts do. And I can’t possibly ask the California office to cover $500 worth of alcohol as part of your traveling expenses. We’re going to have to take it out of your honorarium.”

It was my turn to stare silently for a while. Finally, Barry said, “I know you really need the money, Frank, but this is more than I can justify – ”

“It’s not that.”

“What is it?” Barry’s voice was so kind and so gentle. He really wanted the truth. Barry wasn’t afraid of the truth.

I was, though. My voice broke as I confessed, “It wasn’t all for the party. I think maybe I’ve got a problem.”

BARRY MORRISON IS THE FIRST PERSON I EVER TOLD I thought I had a problem with alcohol. I trusted Barry like family, more than family really. I trusted him like a lawyer. Even though he’s not one, Barry treats all conversations like they carry attorney-client privilege. So I trusted him enough to admit the truth, just not the whole truth: drinking was the least of my problems. My $500 minibar bill was nothing compared to what I dropped on dope every month. My cocaine habit alone cost me more than $200 a week. I smoked pot off and on every day. Most days, I also downed a few Percocets. Like always, I scored cocaine and weed from my buddies on Second and Porter, but I always bought percs from my mom. I stopped by Tree Street one night to stock up, and she recommended I try something new.

“What is it?” I asked, staring at the little pill she handed me.

“Oxycontin.”

I’d heard the buzz about “oxys” on Second and Porter, but I hadn’t actually seen one. Oxycontin is a synthetic opium, a super-strong pain killer doctors started prescribing in the late 1990s. Oxys were Quaaludes for the new millennium, so of course my mom was all over them. I understood why about an hour after I swallowed the sample she gave me. The oxy high was like nothing else. It wasn’t just that I felt no pain: I felt amazing. If it hadn’t been for Nina and Matt and the ADL and the Flyers and everything basically going well, I would’ve oxyed myself into oblivion that first night.

Oxys were a prescription pad away from heroin. They were pharmaceutical-grade junk, but junk nonetheless. And I wasn’t a junkie. Heroin was the one drug I promised myself I’d never try. Oxys are too close, too dangerous, I told myself the day after I took my first. A few days later, when I couldn’t focus on anything but the memory of that amazing high, I conned myself into believing the cliché about how close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades.

Not once during a meeting or before a speech did anybody ever think to ask me, “Hey, Frankie, are you high?” The people I worked with hadn’t grown up around addicts. They didn’t understand that after a certain point, addicts only seem “normal” when they’re stoned. I hit that point sometime in 1997, maybe even earlier. By then, if I skipped taking something for a day or two, people got worried. I became agitated, depressed, basically crazy. Sober, I acted like I was fucked up. Fucked up, I seemed okay. Only my mom and my other dealers knew I was an addict. Everybody else just thought I was an alcoholic. Even the druggies on Second and Porter gave me shit about my drinking. At a Halloween party, one of the guys showed up with a magic-marker swastika on his neck and beer cans shoved in all of his pockets. Everybody at the party cracked up as he weaved around the room slurring, “Trick or Treat, I’m Frankie Meeink.”

I laughed, too. I got the joke; I just missed the point: when your “problem” gets bad enough to be a Halloween costume on Second and Porter, there’s a pretty good chance you need help. But I wasn’t ready for help. I continued to resist Kyle’s campaign to get me to twelve-step meetings. And when Barry Morrison made the same recommendation, I ignored him, too. There was no way in hell I was going to walk into a room full of strangers and say, “Hi. My name is Frankie, and I’m an alcoholic,” because if I did, I might have to quit drinking.

I WAS IN pretty rough shape when Hollywood and everybody else came calling. It started when a reporter from the
Philadelphia News
did a feature on how I’d turned my life around. The guy was fair about what I’d done, and also what I hadn’t done, and he devoted a section of the article to Harmony Through Hockey. Working with a pro like that helped get me over the anti-media grudge I’d been nursing ever since “Philly After Midnight.” So when other reporters and producers started calling, saying “We read the article about you in the
News
, and we’d like to interview you for-” I agreed.

But not everybody who called was as fair as the
Philadelphia News
reporter had been. When I appeared on Black Entertainment Television, it was “Philly After Midnight” all over again, only this time it wasn’t just Philly watching me get ambushed. The BET segment aired nationwide; fortunately, it aired early on a Sunday morning, so most of America was still asleep. I was still hot about the BET experience when a young producer from
Hard Copy
started bugging me to do an interview. Even though I’d barely give her the time of day before hanging up, she wouldn’t give up. She called and called. She even tried to get the ADL to convince me to do it. But I wouldn’t budge. I had already vowed I was never going to let myself get set up on national television again.

If
Hard Cop
y had sent a camera crew to Philly, they would’ve caught one hell of a dramatic scene the night I came home and found Nina on the back porch with another guy. She swore they were just outside having a smoke because she never let anybody smoke near the baby. She swore they were just friends. But something in my gut screamed, “Friends don’t stand that close!” It took about a week of screaming and tears before Nina finally admitted she’d kissed that other guy. I suspected she’d done a lot more, and I wouldn’t drop it. Nothing she said or did could convince me she wasn’t sleeping with that other guy every time I walked out the door. “She’s choosing some other dick over you,” I warned myself. I warned Nina I better never see her
anywhere near her little “friend” again. But it didn’t matter if she saw him again; the damage had already been done. It only took one kiss to push me to the brink of insanity, and my jealousy drove Nina crazy.

Nina was seventeen and Matt still hadn’t turned one when she moved back into her grandmother’s house. I moved back in with my dad and Cha- Cha. At first, I tried to see Matt, but when I went to visit, Nina slammed the door in my face. My dad consoled me the only way he knew how, the same way he’d consoled himself when my mom took me away: he put me out of my misery. One afternoon I showed up at his bar and laid four-hundred dollars cash on the counter.

“You win the lottery?” he asked.

“I just cashed my paycheck. Give me one quick, then I gotta go buy some stuff for the baby and take it over to Nina.”

My dad filled a glass from the tap and asked, “Is she going to let you in?”

“If she don’t, I’ll just leave it on the stoop.”

I never made it to the stoop. I was still sitting on the same stool when my dad locked the door at closing time. It was just my dad and me and his coke dealer. I counted my money. I was doing pretty good, for me: I’d been sitting there for close to ten hours and all I’d had was maybe four or five pitchers of beer and a couple Oxycontin. I still had three hundred bucks left. I handed my dad a fiver, and he filled another pitcher. Then I slid a hundred-dollar bill toward the coke dealer, and he ran lines down the bar. When my dad kicked us out at four in the morning, I followed the dealer to an afterhours club. Within an hour, I’d snorted every dime I had left.

Needless to say, I couldn’t sleep when I got back to my dad’s house. I stretched out on the faded blue loveseat in the living room and tried to will my heart not to explode. I flipped on the television.