“What’s going on in Philly these days?” Bob Reynolds asked.
“Not much, I guess.”
“It’s okay,” Shawn said. “You can talk to these guys.”
“What do youse want me to talk about?” I asked. The only thing going on in Philly was bullshit with my parents. And if Shawn thought I was going to spill my guts about that to strangers, he was crazy.
“I want to hear about that school you go to,” Tim said. “Shawn says it’s almost all niggers. They ever jump you?”
I puffed up a little and said, “I hold my own.”
Tim and Bob smiled at me. Shawn said, “Tell them about the time you saw that nigger shoot one of us by your mom’s house.”
So I did.
“Tell them about all the coon crackheads by your school.”
Okay.
It went on like that for hours. Every time I told a story about life in Philly, Bob, Tim, and Shawn added their own commentary.
That conversation was the first time I thought about my life in Philly in terms of race. I’m not saying I’d been colorblind; that ain’t even possible in Philly. I’d noticed race. Especially after I moved in with my dad and I saw black guys beating the shit out of white guys almost every day. Especially on the days I was the one they were wailing on. But I had never really thought about it as a
race
thing. Growing up in the inner city, I understood it as a
gang
thing. To my mind, the black kids at Pepper were vicious because they were gangsters. But the more I talked to Bob, Tim, and Shawn that night, the more they got me thinking maybe I had it all backwards: maybe the kids at Pepper were vicious gangsters because they were black.
Looking back, I’d be lying if I said those guys planted a seed in me that night; the truth is they just added water and beer to a
seed already inside me waiting to grow. I had been raised to hate. I was a Catholic mulatto, a half-mick-half-dago who’d never felt more than half-accepted anywhere, especially not in my own home. I didn’t realize it, but by summer of 1989, I had fourteen years of rage bottled up. And I had three years of rage built up from John beating and humiliating me. I had three months of rage building inside me from having to run through a freaking gang gauntlet every day to get to Pepper Middle School. Worst of all, I had this God-awful guilt eating away at me for leaving that kid bleeding under the toilet the day I saved my own ass and ran out of Pepper for good.
By the time I met them in the early summer of 1989, Bob Reynolds and Tim Kleinschmidt were obsessed with the white supremacy movement, and they’d already recruited Shawn and a couple of other guys in the area. And they knew what to do and say to snag the interest of a fourteen-year-old half-Irish, half-Italian kid from Philly whose real dad was an addict, whose stepdad was an asshole, whose mom was indifferent, whose school was a war zone, and whose only real desire was never to feel like a fucking victim again: they gave a shit about me.
These three guys who looked too cool even to talk to a kid like me actually cared about me. Shawn and Tim were both very good-looking guys, real ladies’ men. Bob had muscles I didn’t even know the names of all cutting his clothes. They could have hooked up with the hottest chicks in Lancaster County any night of the week, but they chose to spend most of their time with me instead. The Lancaster County white supremacists talked to me like they cared about what I thought and what I could become. Then they told me I had a destiny. They told me I could become a warrior. They told me all I had to do was look in the mirror and see the truth: I was white and that was all that mattered.
After a couple of hours with those guys, I understood why Shawn had a Confederate flag hanging in his room. And I got the connection with the Nazis, even if I still didn’t know what “neo”
was all about. But one thing still had me confused: the whole skinhead thing.
“So if youse guys hate blacks so much, why do youse have all this skinhead shit?” I asked.
Bob exploded. “We
are
skinheads!
Real
skinheads! Neo-Nazi skinheads!” He jumped to his feet and thrust his right hand toward the ceiling. “
Sieg Heil
!” Shawn and Tim followed suit.
I probably would have been freaked out by that if I’d been sober. In fact, if I’d been sober, I probably would have realized the thing I was about to say may have been an invitation to getting my ass kicked. But I was drunk off my ass by then, drunker than I’d ever been before, so the words just spewed out: “I’m pretty sure the skinheads in Philly ain’t Nazis. Half the skinheads in Philly are black.”
The veins in Bob’s anaconda neck pulsed so hard I feared he was going to have a stroke. “Those nigger motherfuckers are not skinheads! They’re nothing but mud. They’re fucking SHARPs, and so are the fucking nigger-loving race-traitors who hang out with them.” He was right up in my face when he growled, “Don’t you
ever
let me hear you call them skinheads again!”
I felt like hell when I woke up the next afternoon. My head throbbed as I tried to piece together everything that had happened the night before. The drinking and the lecturing had gone on until dawn. I only remembered pieces of what Shawn and his friends had taught me, but I remembered enough to know better than to confuse a neo-Nazi skinhead with a Skinhead Against Racial Prejudice, a.k.a. SHARP, again. Of course, I didn’t realize then that I’d just survived my first night of indoctrination into the white supremacy movement. I just knew I liked hanging out with those guys and hoped they’d show up again.
They showed up almost every night. Usually, we’d hang out in Shawn’s room drinking and talking until three or four in the morning. Sometimes, we’d pile into Tim’s truck and meet up with some of their other friends for a party. The Lancaster County skinheads showed me good times the summer of 1989. But it wasn’t
all about fun. They spent hours explaining complicated theories to me. They were patient. Even when I got stuff turned around, not once that summer did anybody call me a “retard.”
Bob and Tim began by teaching me about something called Identity Theology. Having been raised Catholic, I was pretty suspicious of anything religious coming out of the mouth of any dude who wasn’t a priest, but I had to admit that a lot of what the skinheads said made sense, especially after they pointed out verses in the Bible that proved their points. Everything they said was basically the opposite of what I’d been taught at Our Lady of Mount Carmel, but it was all right there in the Bible when the skinheads showed me where to look. The twelve tribes of Israel were the ancestors of today’s Europeans, the “Aryans.” They were the only true children of God, the humans created in His image through the lineage of Adam. The other races were the bloodlines produced by Eve’s carnal sin with the serpent; they were the descendents of Cain, the literal son of Satan. The skinheads assured me the pure Aryan blood of the twelve tribes,
God’s
blood, coursed through the veins of every white person in the world, including mine. They told me it was a sin against God for whites to desecrate His sacred bloodline by race-mixing with the sons and daughters of Satan.
“ Why didn’t I learn this at mass?” I asked, holding the Bible in my hands.
“God chose for you to know now,” Tim replied. “The question you should be asking is, ‘What am I going to do now that I know?’”
Whenever the skinheads talked about Identity, I felt like I was being called to join God’s army. It was my duty as an Aryan, as a child of God, to fight against the forces of Satan. And those forces were enormous, according to my new friends. The skinheads told me that even though it looked like the black, Asian, and Hispanic “mud” were taking over the world, it was really the Jews who threatened Aryan survival.
“The Jews are Satan’s generals. The fucking Jews call the
shots for all the mud. They fucking control everything, the cops, the government, the media. It’s all ZOG; the Zionist Occupational Government. ZOGs everywhere. And most whites have totally fallen for it. Most whites are too fucking blind to realize they’re helping set up their own genocide.”
I grew up on the streets of South Philly; I was a hard sell even at fourteen. I asked those skinheads about a million questions, and they had an answer for every one. I tried to trip them up, to show them up, to prove them wrong, but I couldn’t. After a while, I just gave myself over to them, and the minute I did, everything started making sense, even the hell of the first fourteen years of my life. ZOG had all but destroyed the white working class in America, stealing our jobs through Affirmative Action and our rightful place in society through Civil Rights laws. In the name of “liberalism,” ZOG forced working-class whites to live amid “mud,” who brought gangs and drugs into what had been moral neighborhoods. ZOG had humiliated men like my father so much that they turned to dope to escape their pain, and men like my stepfather so much that they unleashed their rage on innocent children. Worst of all, the Jews who controlled Hollywood were brainwashing whites to think “race-mixing” was cool.
That summer was the first time I enjoyed learning about something other than sports. It wasn’t like in school where everything the teachers said sounded like gibberish. I don’t know what it was about those theories, but once I got the gist of them, white supremacy made perfect sense to me. It was like I’d been born already knowing about ZOG and Identity and all the skinheads did was remind me it had been inside me my whole life. Remember that movie,
Field of Dreams
: “If you build it, they will come”? Well, once you believe it, the evidence will come. By July, I believed it, and suddenly everywhere I looked I found proof of everything the skinheads were teaching me. The more proof I uncovered, the harder I believed. And the harder I believed, the more I wanted to follow the skinheads into battle.
The problem was there wasn’t really anybody to battle in the middle of bumfuck nowhere Pennsylvania. Hell, by virtue of being full Italian, Uncle Nick was the closest thing to a minority within ten miles of the farm. The Lancaster County skinheads spent a lot of time talking about jumping some black kid in the city of Lancaster, but they never did. That whole summer, they never laid so much as one finger on a minority. Instead, they laid into what they called “long-hairs,” better known to the rest of the world as skaters. I’m not sure the Lancaster County skinheads ever actually realized I was a skater, or maybe they did and they just overlooked it because I was Shawn’s cousin. They gave me a lot of crap about how long my hair was, but that was the extent of it. “Long-hairs” not related to Shawn suffered a far worse fate. The rural skinheads were absolutely convinced that all long-hairs were ZOG dupes. I swear, if Jesse Helms had skipped a couple of barber appointments, those farm boys would have thought he was a Jewish communist.
Midway through the summer, the skinheads took me along with them to a concert in the city of Lancaster. They knew some other skinhead crews from up around Allentown were coming in for the night, so they warned me to stick really close to them.
“They’ll think you’re a long-hair,” Shawn said, “So we’re going to have to keep an eye on you.”
I couldn’t wait to get to the club, expecting something like the Trocadero on South Street. I’d been trying to sneak into the Troc since I was ten. But the Lancaster “club” was nothing like the Trocadero. It was a small bar hosting a punk rock night open to underagers. The place was packed. A lot of long-hairs were there, but I noticed right off that they all were crowded against the back wall. As we made our way into the crowd, I saw why: the mosh pit at the base of the stage teemed with skinheads, all thrashing in time to the music and slamming themselves into each other. I’d glimpsed mosh pits in action before through propped exit doors at the Troc, but never anything like that. There must’ve
been thirty or forty skinheads in the pit that night. It was a blood orgy of the brotherhood.
“You’ll be safe up here,” Bob Reynolds said as he grabbed me under my armpits and hoisted me onto his shoulders. “Whatever you do, don’t fall off me, ’cause they’ll kill you with that damn hair of yours.”
“Are you sure this is a good idea?” I screamed over the roar.
“You see anybody in there bigger than me?” he asked.
He had a point. In that pit, being the biggest guy with a shaved head meant acceptance, even if you did have a long-hair riding on your shoulders.
I have no idea how many mosh pits I’ve been in, hundreds at least, but none ever compared to being up on Bob’s shoulders in that pit of skinheads. Every skinhead in the pit and every long-hair along the back wall was staring at me, wondering, “ Who
is
that kid? Who’s the long-hair with his own skinhead bodyguard?” I felt like a celebrity, totally safe up on my perch.
Maybe seeing me floating above the crowd is what inspired another long-hair to brave the pit. Maybe seeing me riding high on Bob’s shoulders is what kept the other skinheads from attacking that long-hair the second he stepped inside the circle. Bob saw him before I did. He nudged my leg to get my attention, then pointed across the floor. The other skinheads had moved away from the kid like he was a toxic spill, all looking to Bob for some kind of signal.
I nearly lost my balance when Bob took off across the floor. He rammed into the kid from behind, caught him by the hair, then spun him around to face us. Bob wrapped both his enormous paws around the long-hair’s neck and held him firmly in place. The kid looked like he was going to shit his pants.
“Kick him, Frankie,” Bob ordered.
It was my moment of truth: was I a long-hair or was I a skinhead? Everyone in the club was watching me. It felt like everyone in the whole fucking world was watching.
I drove my foot directly into the kid’s face. Blood sprayed
from his nose. Bob released the kid’s neck; the long-hair’s body slumped to the floor. Every skinhead in the mosh pit smiled at me. Then, without saying a word, they fell back into formation, swirling around the pit like bald, brawny dervishes.