Bomp. Bomp. Bomp. “Singing in the rain…”
“So this is what it feels like,” I thought, as Axis Skinheads punished me with their combat boots. Doc Martens looked like sledgehammers as they closed in on my thighs, my sides, my face. I curled into a ball and begged my back to endure the brunt of the blows. I tried to cover my head with my arms, but they kicked my only defense away. My arms fell helplessly, uselessly to my sides. Someone kicked me over onto my back.
“Just singing in the rain…”
I found Shawn against the far wall. I stared, as best I could through the blows and the blood, into my cousin’s eyes. Five years had passed since he’d recruited me. He watched silently, shoulder -to-shoulder with the Strike Force skinheads I had recruited, as the Axis brutalized me. One lifted me off the floor. Maybe he was the same one who knocked me back down.
Maybe it was someone else. They were no longer individuals, just a blur of boots and fists.
Two Axis skins grabbed my feet and dragged me down the hall. I couldn’t see the parade behind me, but I heard it. My eyes were trained on the stairwell dropping off only a few feet ahead of me. It moved in and out of focus, distorting and reforming before me like a reflection in a funhouse mirror. I felt Axis hands pawing at my torso, my legs. I smelled the stench of their sweat as they heaved me high above their heads. Then I felt their hands leave my body.
“ What a glorious feeling…”
I was floating. Just for a second, long enough to realize what would be next. Then I fell, rolled, careened out of control. My arms and legs caught on the railings, on the walls, on the steps, but I was moving too fast to stop the momentum the Axis unleashed when they threw me off the top step of that endless flight of stairs. I felt my body splatter, part by part, onto the concrete. My back slammed down first and my lungs emptied. There was no air left to carry my screams into the night as my legs, right, left, then my arms, right, left, struck the concrete. My head hit last. I was past the point of feeling, but I heard the impact. It was the “crack!” of the butt of a shotgun breaking across a back.
I have no idea how long I laid there. When I came to my senses, I saw dozens of skinheads looking down on me. Axis Skinheads. Eastern Nazi Alliance Skinheads. Lancaster County Skinheads. Strike Force Skinheads. Pure hatred shot from their eyes as they mocked me. Matt Hanson was the only guy who wasn’t laughing.
“You’re fucking dead to us, you fucking traitor!” someone screamed at me. Then they filed back into the apartment and slammed the door.
As I lay there, bloody and broken, it hit me. It’s over. It’s finally fucking over.
“I’m hap-, hap-, happy again.”
Free At Last
“NO MAN IS AN ISLAND,” MY GAYLORD CELLIE ONCE TOLD me. But I sure as shit felt like one, laying in a bloody heap on that sidewalk. The “family” I’d known since I was fourteen years old had just kicked me to the curb. Even my own cousins turned on me. The only skinhead who stayed friends with me was Matt Hanson. And he proved he was a true friend to me the night Axis jumped me out. He snuck out of Joe Morgan’s funeral party to help me. Under the circumstances, that took balls the size of Jupiter.
“You okay?”
I answered with a moan.
Matt scraped me off the sidewalk and drove me back to his place. He swore he hadn’t known he was walking me into a trap. I believed him. Matt was such a screwball, and he had such a big mouth. Hell, if I’d been setting somebody up, I wouldn’t have let Matt in on it. The only thing the other skinheads had said to Matt was, “Invite Frankie and bring beer.” That’s all it took. He loved me too much to realize everyone else hated me. I should’ve seen it coming. To this day, I can’t believe I walked into that party thinking it’d be okay because we’d all loved Joe. Even if guys like David Conover hadn’t known I’d stepped down the night Joe got killed, everybody knew the minute I walked up to Joe’s casket and kept my hands at my sides. I was the only “skinhead” at the funeral who didn’t salute Joe with a
Sieg Heil
. That’s when they realized they’d lost two comrades: one lying in a casket and one standing next to it refusing to salute. They took their grief and
rage out on me. I should have seen it coming, because for a couple hours a few nights earlier, I’d been ready to do the same fucking thing. Axis beat any fleeting thoughts I still had about returning to the skinhead fold out of me. I was a traitor. There was no turning back.
Once I recovered from the jump out, I headed straight for Second and Porter to numb my pain. I didn’t slip into addiction; I catapulted. I wanted to be fucked up all the time because it felt amazing, and because it was thumbing my nose at the skinheads. One night about thirty of us from Second and Porter went to the Trocadero Club on South Street. We hadn’t been there five minutes when Matt Hanson came flying in the door.
“They heard you was down here. You gotta get outta here.”
“Dude,
you
gotta get outta here,” I said. “It’s okay. I ain’t alone.”
“You ain’t alone,” Vicey Sullivan confirmed.
A few minutes later, about a dozen Strike Force skinheads marched into the Trocadero. I guess when they saw how many South Philly corner boys I had with me they had a nasty flashback to Jimmy’s wedding reception riot, because they walked back out the door.
“You worried about this?” Vicey asked.
“I don’t know, man. There’s a couple of dudes out there who…”
Vicey held up his hand to stop me. “Frankie, youse ain’t alone.”
IN THOSE DAYS, the biggest coke dealer in South Philly was a dude called Cork. Second and Porter was his home office. All night every night, cars pulled up to the curb, and Cork jumped in and rode off down the street. A minute or two later, we’d see him hop out at the next corner. Each time he strolled back to Second and Porter, the wads of cash in his pockets bulged out a little farther. One night Cork called me over to him.
“I’m totally backed up,” he said, waving toward the idling cars lined halfway down the block. He handed me a pack of cigarettes. It felt empty, but I knew it wasn’t; Cork concealed his
stash inside empty packs. He flipped open the lid to show me the small bags of cocaine tucked inside. “You can sell these one bag for $20 or three for $50. Your cut is five bucks a bag. Got it?”
Thus began my career in pharmaceutical sales. Second and Porter was like a drive-through for every drug you could want: Xanax, Valium, cocaine, Percocet, weed, acid. Anything and everything, except heroin. Nobody on Second and Porter dealt heroin, and everybody swore they’d never use it. Heroin was what addicts used. We weren’t addicts; we were just having a little fun and making a little money. At first, I only helped Cork, and only when he got really busy. Then Johnny Hawkins, the pot dealer, asked me to help him out, too. By day I was still moving furniture for Keith, which paid about three, maybe four hundred dollars a week. By night, moving drugs, I cleared about one hundred dollars an hour. Even a ninth-grade dropout can do that math.
Before long, I started my own business. Even though I was hated in Skinhead Alley, I still had a lot of connections on South Street. I used those to get a line set up with one of the older punks who wholesaled the best acid in the city. He charged me $90 for a 100-hit sheet; I sold hits for $5 each and cleared $410 per sheet. Some weekend nights, I sold as many as three sheets. If I hadn’t been taking acid while I was selling it, I could’ve retired by age twenty-five. As it was, I ate a lot of the profits and sometimes couldn’t remember the next morning where I’d stashed the rest.
If I got word there was a big rave going down in the city, I’d skip Second and Porter for the night, knowing I could double my business if I went to my clients instead of waiting for them to come to me. I raked it in for hours at one rave on South Street. I was on the verge of closing down shop when a large group of Italian guys, all dressed super-sharp, started filing through the door. “Cool, more business,” I thought. Then I damn near fainted. The third guy in their line looked like he’d just jumped down off the cover of
GQ
, but I recognized him anyhow.
“What’s up, dude?” I screamed across the room.
Louie Lacinzi’s thin lips curled into a smile. He pointed at me and declared to his entourage, “This dude’s closer to me than a brother.”
We threw our arms around each other. Louie’s boys kept their distance, but they never took their eyes off me while I talked to him. After a half an hour or so, one of Louie’s guys walked over and whispered something in his ear.
“Hey, man, I gotta go,” Louie said to me. “We gotta keep in touch, though.”
“Where are you living?” I asked.
“I’ve got a house out in Chester County. How about you?”
“Tree Street.”
“That fucking sucks.” Louie hugged me again. “I’ll be in touch.”
A few nights later, I heard a knock at the front door. A well-dressed young Italian guy was standing on the stoop. He didn’t say anything; he just pointed me toward the tricked out Mercury Cougar double-parked down the street.
“Is this really yours?” I asked through the car’s open window.
Louie grinned at me. “Business is good.”
We cruised around together for a couple hours, catching up and sharing a blunt, a cigar filled with weed instead of tobacco.
“I hear you’re working Second and Porter,” he said.
“Off and on.”
“There ain’t no future in that,” he replied. Louie would know. Turned out Jimmy didn’t have his facts straight about what all Louie’d been doing after he left the skinheads. He was a kingpin all right, just not the kind that works a corner, at least not for long. Louie was too big a dreamer to settle for small time hustling. The night he took me for a ride in his Cougar, he filled me in on his plan. The dude was talking about buying buildings and opening businesses. He knew every step he had to take, and he was sitting on enough cash to pull it off. He didn’t say where the money came from and I didn’t ask.
Nobody in my family had any plans to go legit. Every week ,
my cousin Jerry dropped off at least ten times the number of Percocets and Xanax my mom and John actually used, and they used a lot. My mom alone was taking at least ten Percs a day. She sold the leftovers for Jerry out of our living room, covering not only the cost of her and John’s habits, but also pretty much everything else the family needed to get by, which was good, since by then dealing was their only form of income besides state aid.
My mom gave me my first Percocet free of charge, family courtesy and all. When I came back for another the next night, she charged full price.
“Are you shitting me?” I asked.
“I ain’t the fucking Goodwill,” she said. “If you can’t pay, work it off.”
So I added xanies and percs as a sideline to my main gig dealing acid. The good thing about downers was I didn’t eat up so much of the profits. Xanax especially fucked with my drinking. A dude’s got to have his priorities.
Even though I was making a lot of money between my job with Keith and dealing, I kept living on Tree Street. It was close to Second and Porter, and I liked being around my little sisters. I set up a makeshift room in the dank basement. If somebody ’d told me when I was thirteen that I’d end up voluntarily living in that rowhouse with John, I’d have laughed in their face. But John had changed a lot over the years. Booze and drugs, it appeared, had finally taken all the fight out of him.
I’d been living back on Tree Street for close to six months when a relative stopped by for a visit.
“So, how have you been?” she asked.
“I’m doing great.”
“You’re nothing but a fucking cellar dweller,” John said from his nest on the couch.
It’d been so long since John had aimed one of his barbs at me, I actually thought maybe I’d misunderstood. “What did you say?” I asked.
“You’re over there bragging about how you’re doing so
fucking great. You’re living in a cellar. You’re a fucking cellar dweller. You couldn’t even afford your own box in an alley.”
“ What’s it been, ten years since you got off your lazy ass?”
“At least I ain’t a fucking jailbird,” he said.
“Here we go again,” I thought. He’s got an audience, so he’s going to dust off all his stupid freaking Sing- Sing jokes. My little half-sisters sat next to each other on the far end of the couch playing with their dolls; I guess John figured they were finally old enough for his big comedy routine.
He was actually calling me out. “I said, you ain’t nothing but a jailbird.”
I glanced at my little sisters. They weren’t looking at us, but they weren’t dancing their Barbies around anymore either. “Drop it, John.”
“You don’t fucking tell me what to do in my own goddamn house, jailbird.”
“Stop being a prick.”
But he wouldn’t. “I may be a prick, but I’m better than that fucking father of yours.”
It was more than I could take. Everything I’d ever wanted to scream at John came pouring out of my mouth: “Don’t you dare talk shit on my dad! You were a prick to me my whole fucking life. At least he didn’t fucking beat me! You beat the living fucking shit out of me!”
“Margaret!” John yelled out into the kitchen. “You better get your ass out here and shut your kid’s fucking mouth.”
My mom stormed into the room and chose dick over me yet again. “I don’t want to hear it anymore, Frankie! Stop lying! John barely touched you.”
“You know that’s a lie!” I replied.
“Shut the fuck up, jailbird,” John said, staggering to his feet.
“Fuck you!”
John raised his dukes like he had in his boxing days and rushed me like he had in my victim days. I laid him out with one punch. I’d never hit someone that hard before in my life. John
fell backwards over the same battered coffee table he’d knocked me over God knows how many times. He landed on top of my little sisters.
“You hurt my daddy!” Kirsten wailed, breaking my heart.