Autobiography of a Recovering Skinhead (39 page)

From 2004 to 2007, I worked with Frank to confirm key events in his past. We re-traced the first thirty years of his life by interviewing a variety of his family members, friends, and former associates and, whenever possible, by cross-checking those interviews against official documents and media accounts. Among those interviewed for
Autobiography of a Recovering Skinhead
were: Frank’s mother, father, stepfather, and half-sisters; his paternal grandparents, aunt, three of his four surviving uncles and two cousins; members of the corner-turf “gangs” known as 68th and Buist, 2nd and Porter, and 3rd and Jackson; a founding member of Strike Force and members of the Springfield crew; Frank’s ex-girlfriends and the mothers of his three oldest children; his wife, her parents and brother; teachers, coaches, and school support staff personnel who worked with Frank during his childhood; the program director and former production crew members for
the public-access television channel operated by Sangamon State University, now University of Illinois – Springfield; members of the Springfield, Illinois, police department, public defender’s office and state’s attorney’s office; the staff of Terre Haute’s Catherine Hamilton Center; Terre Haute police officers; representatives of the Philadelphia regional office of the Anti-Defamation League; a variety of Frank’s former and current neighbors, employers, coworkers, and associates in Philadelphia, Illinois, and Indiana; and several of Frank’s friends from addiction-recovery programs. In addition, I consulted ex-convicts, employees of the Illinois Department of Corrections, and a southern Illinois-based criminal defense attorney to confirm the plausibility of Frank’s account of gang activity, violence, and contraband issues within the prison system at the time of his incarceration.

Autobiography of a Recovering Skinhead
is, ultimately, Frank Meeink’s personal recollection of the life he has lived and his intimate reflection on the lessons he has learned along the way. Frank’s story is a raw and raucous telling of one young man’s journey through some of America’s most devastating social problems. Significantly, Frank Meeink himself is living proof that those problems can be overcome.

Al- Anon/Alateen
www.al-anon.alateen.org

 

Alcoholics Anonymous
www.aa.org

Anti-Defamation League
www.adl.org

 

Narcotics Anonymous
www.na.org

National Association of Students Against Violence Everywhere
www.nationalsave.org

 

Southern Poverty Law Center
www.splcenter.org

ADAM O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ (AOR), SENIOR EDITOR FOR Hawthorne Books, conducted this interview with Frank Meeink (FM) and Jody M. Roy, Ph.D. (JMR).

 

 

 

AOR
How did this project come about?

 

FM
Jody came to me first on another book project she was working on and asked if I’d be interested in being interviewed for a chapter for the book. I said sure – she was recommended by a good friend of ours, Quay Hanna. She drove down to my house from Wisconsin; it’s about a six hour drive, and first thing, we went out to dinner and talked and she reminded me again that I was just a chapter in the book and I assured her I knew that I was more than a chapter. She laughed and said, “ We’ll look into that later on.” That was our first real meeting.

 

JMR
Frank’s response was slightly more colorful than “ I’m more than a chapter” but that was the essence of it. For that particular project, the day after we had dinner together, we sat for about two and a half or three hours of interview, just sort of a basic run-through of everything, and I was convinced by the end that yes, Frank was more than a chapter, no doubt about that. But also, Frank seemed comfortable talking about the book project even at that point.

FM
What I really felt comfortable with was two things: one, that she knew the lingo. I’d tried to work on this project with other people before, but to have to describe and define every piece of the movement – like what SHARPs are, Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice – to have to define all that stuff bogged me down talking until I wasn’t enjoying it. But when I talked to Jody, she would sometimes know more of the history than I did.

And second, she knew other things, like that some people have businesses in civil rights and sometimes those groups will use fear to get more donations. When I talked to her about that, she knew what I was talking about already; she knew what I was getting at. So I felt comfortable enough that I could say whatever I wanted, because I wouldn’t say something like that around most people. Of course, most civil rights groups are very legitimate, great groups, but when I said that some weren’t, she knew exactly what I was talking about. And I remember thinking right then that I felt comfortable with her.

 

AOR
What was the process you used to get the story from spoken to written?

 

JMR
We had that first short interview for the other project and we decided we’d move forward, but I had to finish working on the other project, some work I was doing wearing my academic hat. We actually got started about a year and a half later, just because of things we both had on our plates at the time. Step one was to do a great deal of interviewing, but also to do some site visits. This was a gut instinct on my part – I believed Frank would remember things better if he could see them. You have to remember-for four and a half years, Frank was pretty itinerant, at times homeless. There aren’t the kinds of records most people would have from their teenage years. We can’t look in the high school yearbook. We can’t look at family pictures in photo albums. We can’t cross-reference things to a grade sheet. Trying to pin
things down and get the discussion going, it seemed it might be better if we left the home and office space and got in the car.

In October of 2005, I picked Frank up and we started toward the end of the story – we did Indiana and Illinois. It was our first trip ever together and it was quite a commitment. We were on the road for six days, twenty-four hours a day of work on the book interrupted only by sleep, naps really. I had Frank on tape basically the whole time, whether he was talking about things that had happened in Philly when he was a little kid or talking like, “ Wow, I’m standing in the parking lot of Crazy Cate’s for the first time in fifteen years” – we captured it all. Part of that was so that I could go back and piece the timelines together, but it was also of course to capture his voice, because I needed tons of exposure to that.

After that trip, we went back to our separate corners, and I went into research mode really trying to nail down the dates. The following May, we spent seven or eight days on the East Coast doing the same thing – interviewing people, visiting the scenes of various events. And that was important for me because I had to get a feel for what some of these places looked like. One example: having not grown up on the East Coast, my concept of an urban alley is based on Chicago or St. Louis or Indianapolis. I had no idea that what Frank considers an alley, I would consider an outdoor hallway; I needed to see the compression of South Philly and how close things are to even begin to evoke that sense of space within the book. That trip was very important for that purpose. It was also important to meet people and capture their voices for purposes of dialogue in the book.

Somewhere in between those two trips, we realized we were off by a year on the time layout for the book and for his life. It took months to figure that out. As Frank talks openly about in the book, he not only was itinerant, he also lied about his age as a teen – it’s not like we could ask somebody, “ Well, what was Frank doing when he was sixteen,” because when Frank was sixteen, people thought he was eighteen or nineteen. For several years,
the timelines are convoluted and without touch points. Ultimately, what became the touch points were the arrest dates and counting back from that to Crazy Cate’s and counting back back back and realizing we had an extra year in there. We were off base due to confusion about his age and lying about his age when he was a teenager, and also because he just doesn’t have the date markers most people rely on. Frank can’t assume it was summer when something happened because he wasn’t in school then; he dropped out at fourteen. Actually, his memories of what was going on in sports and what songs were playing heavy rotation on the radio became very important. Without Guns-N-Roses, we never would’ ve figured out parts of that timeline.

 

FM
And on the lying about my age – most of my life I was either running, head of, or hanging with older guys, which included older girls. So most of my life, I wanted the girls to think I was older, so I was fourteen telling everyone I’m sixteen because the girls we’re hanging with are sixteen.

 

JMR
Whenever we’d try to nail down when these things happened, I’d be talking to someone for the book and I’d ask, “ Do you know how old Frank was when this happened?” And the universal answer was sixteen. Frank was sixteen for about five years according to most people who knew him. Figuring out the timeline was the hardest part of the book. We rarely were able to pinpoint a particular week or something; unless somebody keeps a daily record from birth on, they’re not going to be able to do that. But to get it into some kind of causal order was a key issue to me, and that took a long time. So after we got that down and did the site visits and the interviews and everything else, then I started the original rough draft. After that it’s been I draft and proof, then Frank reads and gives me feedback, then draft, proof, read, feedback, again and again for about two years, until we decided to move with it.

FM
With the timeline, since I’ve been speaking about my life for the past ten or fifteen years, I remember when Jody and I first started this project, I thought, “ Well, I’ve been telling this story, but am I standing on a stage as the fisherman who’s been telling people the fish was two foot big when really it was just one foot?” What was good about our trips was that it seemed like the fish really was two foot, because to hear other people tell their versions of the story, they actually make me sound worse – in my version of the story, I threw a lucky punch one night. But in other people’s versions, I was an animal. That was one of the good things about interviewing other people and me being very open and telling them they could say anything they wanted about me. Sometimes when Jody would do interviews, I’d leave so they could be as honest as they wanted about me.

 

JMR
I had lots of good reasons to have complete faith in Frank when we started this project, but you just don’t know. Part of the reason that I wanted to do the Indiana and Illinois trip first and in that specific order is because I was going on an old theory that if there’s going to be a lie, something exaggerated, it’s going to be something big. I knew what it was going to be. For me, the most unbelievable thing in the entire story was the escape from Crazy Cate’s; there was just no doubt in my mind that if there was a lie, that would be it. So we got in the car together on a Saturday afternoon and it was about 9:00 am Monday that we showed up at the Catherine Hamilton Center in Terre Haute, Indiana. So we’re standing in the parking lot, and Frank said, “So, is this the first time youse ever been to a nuthouse with an escapee?” And I said, “ Why, as a matter a fact it is, Frank.” But we walk in and sure enough, coincidentally several staffers who were working that day remembered the incident very well. So I’m listening to these people who’d been admissions staff, orderlies,
et cetera
, when this wild and wacky event happened fifteen years earlier, and the story they’re telling me is dead-on with Frank’s memory.

AOR
Several notable memoirs have been in the news lately for having stretched facts and in a few cases, invented the whole thing. Some critics might say that a few scenes in
Autobiography of a Recovering Skinhea
d stretch credibility. What is your response to people who question the truth of the book?

 

FM
When we started writing this, it was maybe two months after James Frey got called out, so me and Jody had that conversation right away, she was like, “ People question memoirs now ” and I said I understand. I remember thinking that I was going to be so truthful that sometimes we’d go into a two-hour story that probably wasn’t even useful to the book, but was just something I’d talk about. The point I’m trying to get at is that if I have a big, pure glass of milk sitting in front of me and I’m dying of thirst, but you put one little drop of poison into that, I’m not going to drink the glass at all. I don’t want there to be one little drop of lie in this book; I want the milk to be okay.

 

JMR
The thing that’s so tough, though, from a writing perspective, is that to reduce thirty-one years to less than three hundred fifty pages is by definition an exercise in lying by omission. While that is a great frustration, I don’t think we missed the mark on anything major – we’ve checked and double-checked and triple-checked against his memory recalled on different occasions, against documentation, and against memories of unbiased witnesses when possible – but we skipped talking about that girlfriend and we didn’t talk about the time he wore the tan T-shirt. You have to do that or you devolve into levels of detail no reader could tolerate.

 

FM
Me being honest, sometimes when I read how Jody put something or maybe how it was edited, if it didn’t sound right, I was quick to say so, and it’s never been in my favor. I’ve never said, “ No, I was such a badass in that fight.” It’s always been the opposite, like, “ Maybe that guy wasn’t in a good fighting mood
and I got the best of him.” I always put the worst spin on myself. I’m very good at self-deprecation. I don’t take myself too seriously.