By then the other skinheads had closed rank around us. I didn’t recognize some of them at first. Guys who’d been scrawny freshcuts when I’d fled town were now fully sleeved in movement
tattoos and looked like they’d put on thirty or forty pounds of muscle and beer gut. More than half the guys I didn’t recognize at all; they’d joined up while I was behind bars. I finally knew how Scott Windham must’ve felt the night he cornered four of us little newbies in a Center City alley. He felt like a fucking king. That’s how I felt when a kid whipped out a camera and asked if he could get his picture taken with me. All night, dudes I barely knew, even dudes I’d never met before, kept huddling around me, telling me stories about my own freaking past. It was like they were trying to prove they’d done their homework. It was weird. It was also a total ego trip.
“When’s Louie getting here?” I asked Jimmy.
He quickly herded me away from the others and said, “I don’t know how to tell you this, but, um, he’s, um…”
My heart stopped beating. Jimmy saw the color drain out of my face and hurried to correct his mistake.
“He’s ain’t dead or nothing. He’s just, well, he ain’t one of us.”
Like me, Louie’d gotten mixed up with drugs, but he hadn’t had the excuse of trying to lose reality while in prison. To the more moderate skinheads, Louie Lacinzi had become nothing more than a white trash wigger, just another South Philly druggie. The radicals of the group viewed him as a full on race traitor. Jimmy advised me not to mention his name to anyone else.
“Did anybody jump him out?” I asked, hoping they hadn’t.
“He wasn’t worth it.” From Jimmy’s perspective, that was the end of the story: he spat on the ground.
For about two seconds, I was in shock; then I was outraged. This wasn’t some disposable freshcut Jimmy was talking about; it was Louie. “Jesus, Jimmy! Did you at least try to talk him out of it?”
“He made his choice. He ain’t come back around since.”
“You’re telling me youse ain’t even heard from Louie in a year?” I imagined Louie ending up like my cousin Nick, Jimmy’s cousin Nick, and tasted puke in the back of my throat.
“Louie was our boy! It was Louie and me and you before there even was Strike Force!”
“There was just you and me before there was Louie,” Jimmy replied. “And now it’s just you and me again.”
Jimmy dug up a lifetime of shared history with that one comment.
“I’m sorry, man. I ain’t questioning that you tried.”
“We’re cool,” Jimmy said. “You just gotta understand. A whole lot of shit went down while you were gone. Now it’s over. Louie’s history. Just don’t go picking at the scabs, okay?”
Jimmy turned to head back to the party.
“ Wait.” I said. “I won’t bring it up over there, but I gotta know if you heard anything at all? I mean, is he okay?”
“Depends on how you look at it,” Jimmy said. “I sure as shit wouldn’t want to be him, but I wouldn’t mind having his car.”
My confusion must have registered on my face. Jimmy burst out laughing.
“He ain’t nodding off on skid row. He ditched us for the money, man. Louie’s a fucking kingpin.”
As the night wore on, I learned that Louie wasn’t the only Philly skinhead who’d disappeared during my absence. Rumor had it Stug was totally strung out on heroin, but no one knew for sure because nobody’d heard from him in more than a year, either. Dan Bellen was gone, too. One day a skinhead called his house looking for him, and his mom said he’d up and joined the Air Force.
Things didn’t feel the same without those guys around. Still, I felt less lonely at that skinhead party in the woods than I’d felt since leaving Philly in the first place. I don’t think I’d realized how profoundly lonely I’d been until I finally stopped feeling it. I’d met some good people in the Midwest, but none except for Riley was my family. I had lots of family in Philly. Every skinhead at that party was my family.
A few days later, I visited my dad at his bar and learned I had killed a man. Or maybe two men. It depended on which aging
68th and Buist boy I talked to and how much they’d already had to drink. Not one of my dad’s buddies, or my dad for that matter, knew what I’d really done to get sent to prison. And none seemed to care. They just kept sliding me drinks on their tabs and patting me on the back and saying shit like, “Our little Frankie’s all grown up.” As I had my whole life, I followed my dad and his boys out into The Boneyard; this time they offered me a hit off their joint. It was another moment of truth: was I a skinhead or just another South Philly druggie? I passed.
I spent a long time in the bathroom the next morning. When I was done, I called Jimmy.
“Yo guess what? I shaved it.”
“Fucking A! Now you’re really back.”
“Like youse said the other night. Strike Force ain’t yours or mine. It’s ours.”
I dove back into the Nazi scene with the idea that I’d be like the elder statesmen who’d brought me along when I first joined up with the movement. I’d be like The Uprise veterans in the Wise’s parking lot or maybe even John Cook. I’d pass along my hard-earned wisdom. I’d help raise up the next generation of Hitler’s youth. I’d rally the troops for battle. But I wouldn’t be battling anymore. Battles are for the young. I wasn’t young anymore. I had just turned nineteen.
ONE NIGHT, WALKING home from Skinhead Alley, I approached the intersection of Second and Porter and wondered if I’d actually wandered into a Sharswood School reunion. There must’ve been close to thirty guys on that corner, and I’d shared a hallway with at least half of them at some point during grade school. A lot of time had passed, but I recognized everybody immediately. No amount of hair could ever disguise Tommy “Earbow” Petanzi. And there’s never been a pair of jeans made that could camouflage Mikey “Muffin Ass” McCarthy. Of course, I didn’t need to see the face of the skinny, dark-haired dude sniffing
lines of coke off the trunk of a parked car to know his identity: that little maneuver had John “Vicey” Sullivan written all over it.
They asked me what I wanted before they asked me where the hell I’d been for the past five or so years.
“I’ll take a beer if you’ve got it.”
“You sure that’s all you want?” Hands flashed open to reveal a smorgasbord of drugs. Rainbows of pills. Tabs of LSD. Big bags of weed. Small bags of cocaine.
“Just a beer.”
“Whatever youse want, Frankie.” Someone put a forty in my hand.
“You were in prison for what, a year?” Earbow said.
“About.”
“You were gone a hell of a lot longer than just a year. Where the hell were you?”
“No shit,” Muffin Ass said. “We ain’t seen youse since, geez…” He turned to the other guys. It takes a while for thirty guys who’re stoned off their asses to kick their memories into gear.
Finally, someone said, “Sheldon Jones! Remember? Frankie kicked his fucking ass!” That was the fight that got me bounced out of Sharswood for good.
“I can’t believe we ain’t really talked to you since then.” Earbow said. “ What the hell happened to you?”
I hit the highlights of the trip I’d been on since the day I beat up Sheldon Jones. It was a hell of a trip, even by South Philly standards. The guys could hardly believe even the sanitized version I gave them.
“So your mom just fucking kicked youse out after that?”
“Yeah.”
“Youse really got totally into that Nazi shit?”
“Yeah.”
“Youse ended up in fucking Illinois? On fucking TV? In fucking prison?”
“Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.”
Vicey threw a boney arm over my shoulder and leaned in close to my ear. “You do anything to pass the time in prison?” he asked.
“I did what I had to do.”
“Then why the hell ain’t you doing it now?” He flashed me another view of his personal pharmacy.
“Same rules don’t apply on the inside. Out here, it ain’t who I am.”
“If you change your mind,” Vicey said, “youse know where to find me.”
The next night, I laced up my Docs and headed toward South Street to meet up with the other skinheads. But before I got very far from home, I switched directions.
“You sticking with beer or you want something else?” Vicey asked me as soon as I rounded the corner.
“Sticking with beer.”
After that, I spent most nights hanging with the Second and Porter boys, sticking with beer while they did and sold pretty much everything but heroin. I didn’t bail on Strike Force, though. I still showed my face in Skinhead Alley a couple times a week, and I hit all the big Nazi parties. I got a tattoo of a crucified skinhead. I even wrote lyrics for a song called “Die Liberal Scum,” and cut some vocals with a white power band.
I’d been back in Philly for several months when Jimmy told me he needed me to show for a big pow-wow. Some skinheads from New York City were coming down to talk about forming an alliance with Strike Force. That kind of meeting required both co-commanders of Strike Force be present. The plan was for the leaders on both sides to get there early and get the business out of the way before the rest of the Philly skinheads showed up to party. So around seven o’clock, I gave my head a fresh shaving, suited up in full-dress skinhead gear, and caught a cross-town trolley.
Another passenger on the trolley reminded me of Little G. My mind wandered back to Shawnee. I wondered how Little G
and Jello were doing. I hadn’t thought about them much since I’d stepped through the door leading back to the real world. The more I thought about them on that trolley ride, the more I realized all my good memories from prison were about the friends I’d made: Jello and Little G, the guys we played against in basketball, the other guys on our football team. Not one of those friends had been white. It was a strange thought to have crossing my mind on my way to a major skinhead bash.
The party that was supposed to start after the big meeting was already in full-swing by the time I arrived. I checked the clock. I wasn’t late; the freshcuts were early. And they were acting like complete fucking idiots, trying to impress the visitors from New York. My arrival only made things worse, because now they were trying to impress me with how impressive they were being in front of our guests.
Those baby Nazis felt like they had cast-iron balls every time they spat out “nigger ” or “spic.” They felt like geniuses when they spouted off about how the ZOG-Jew landlords were handing North Philly over to the Puerto Ricans. They felt like gods when they bragged about what they’d done, as a pack, to a lone Puerto Rican kid in a dark alley the night before. I know for a fact that’s how they felt, because it’s exactly how I’d once felt.
But I didn’t feel that way that night. That night, for the first time since I’d joined the white supremacy movement five years earlier, I listened to someone tell a racist joke, and I thought, “That ain’t funny.” For the first time in five years, I heard people flinging around theories about “mud” and I thought, “That ain’t true.”
I’ve been thinking about that night for more than a decade now, trying to figure out exactly what happened to me. If I could bottle it, we’d have world peace, and I’d be the richest man in history. But it wasn’t that simple. There was no magic potion, just a freak set of circumstances that put me in the right mood, at the right place, at the right time to finally see the lies behind the “truth” I’d believed with all my heart since I was fourteen years
old. Sitting in the middle of that party, surrounded by dozens of drunk skinheads spewing the same old stereotypes, I wanted to scream, “That’s such fucking bullshit!” But I didn’t have the balls. Instead, I got real quiet, so quiet one of the older skinheads came over and asked me if I was okay.
“I miss Riley,” I said, which was true, but not the whole truth.
I found an empty spot on the end of a couch and started in on a twelve pack, hoping maybe it’d be enough to drown out the “nigger” jokes the freshcuts were screaming at the top of their lungs. It wasn’t. It didn’t drown out the “spic” jokes, either. Or the “chink” jokes. Or the one about the “fucking heeb rabbi.”
And it sure as hell didn’t drown out the New Yorker on the other end of my couch who started bragging about how he was
pure
Irish, a
real
Aryan, not some “fucking wop.”
“Most Italians ain’t really white,” he said to an adoring audience of freshcuts.
“What the fuck are you talking about?”
It was the first time I’d spoken in nearly an hour. That alone caught everybody’s attention. But so did the tone of my voice. The older Philly guys knew this was definitely a bad situation about to get worse unless that New York dude backed down immediately. But the dude didn’t get it; he didn’t know me. He met my eyes and got to his feet. I stood too. He had at least three inches on me. “I mean Italians ain’t real whites like us Irish. What’s your deal? Your name’s Meeink, ain’t it?”
“My name’s Meeink,” I said. “Thing is, it’s also Bertone.” You could’ve heard a pin drop in the middle of that party.
The dude glanced around to make sure the other New Yorkers were still in the room. They were, but he backpedaled anyhow: “You’re half Irish, so you’re white.”
The big-mouthed New Yorker seemed to think our debate was over; he mumbled something about needing another beer. He was just about to walk away when I said, “My kid’s seventy-five percent Italian. You gonna to tell me she ain’t white?”
There’s the kind of silence where you can hear a pin drop,
then there’s the kind where you can hear a heartbeat. That New Yorker’s heart was trying to pound its way out of his chest. The dude only had two options: save face or save ass.
He puffed up his chest and got out, “Then your kid ain’t wh – ” before my fist shut his mouth. The sucker punch stunned him, but it didn’t stop him. He lunged toward me like a linebacker. I dropped him with an uppercut. He fell slowly, so slowly I would’ve had plenty of time to land two, maybe even three, shots to the back of his head. But there was no way I was going to waste my knuckles on that piece of shit. I waited for him to land. Then I let my boots do my talking.