For about a month, we glared and dropped threats, nothing more. It was enough. South Street buzzed about how Louie and I had put the SHARPs in their place. Kids the SHARPs had always bullied started sticking real close to us. We sure as hell weren’t geniuses, but we were smart enough to recognize a brilliant idea. Maybe we didn’t have to find other skinheads to form our own crew-we could just create our own skinheads. The more the skaters and punks gravitated to us for protection, the more I flashed back to that mosh pit in Lancaster. I had been a “long-hair” on my way into the pit that night, a “long-hair” with my own skinhead bodyguard, but when I came out of that pit, I was a Nazi. Security breeds loyalty, and loyalty is everything. By the end of summer 1989, my loyalties were clear: Louie Lacinzi was my brother, and the white supremacy movement was my family.
MY MOM AND John must’ve been in shock after they heard I got promoted to ninth grade, because they invited me to move back home. Now, moving back in with my asshole of a stepfather was the second to last thing in the world I wanted to do. I knew I could survive John because I’d done it before. But I wasn’t so sure anymore about the Junior Black Mafia. In fact I was pretty sure I’d be dead the second they saw my shaved head. So the weekend before school started, I took my mom and John up on their offer since it meant I could go to Furness High School, deep in the heart of the Irish district. I noticed right away that things had changed on Tree Street while I’d been gone. I’d been living with my dad; I knew what a house looked like once drugs moved in. I didn’t know then exactly what John and my mom were taking, only that whatever it was glazed over their eyes and slurred their speech. Even the house had changed. The house had never been fancy, but my mom had always kept it clean. It was a disaster. It looked like my dad’s house, like a crack house. But it wasn’t a crack house; it was just a Percocet house then.
John no longer had the strength or desire to beat on me. He just gave me a speech about how I was going to have to live by the rules, especially since my mom was pregnant again and she couldn’t handle pregnancy, baby Kirsten, and me running wild all at once. Even while they lectured me, I could tell the rules weren’t going to matter anymore, so long as they kept using. But I remembered what it had been like in the past. I’d watched enough
Wild Kingdom
as a kid to know you still watch your back around a lion even after you shoot him with a tranquilizer. I made a good show of buckling down, good enough, at least, to convince two drunks on downers they could trust me.
At first, I confided the truth about them using to only a couple people. Louie was the only skinhead I really trusted with that information. Drugs were a big issue in the movement, one I couldn’t afford to be associated with so soon after joining even by association with my parents. Neo-Nazi skinheads hate drugs because they think drugs are a “nigger” thing. Part of the
ZOG conspiracy theory says that some whites, especially poor whites like my parents, get caught up in drugs because there’s this big plot to use drugs to weaken white resistance. That part of the theory gives white addicts a little bit of an out; they’re not just druggies, they’re actually victims of ZOG. But you only hear that part of the theory getting bounced around among skinheads when they’re having a really serious bull session. The other 99.9% of the time, they see a stoned white person, and they call them a “wigger.”
My cousin Jimmy was the only other guy I talked to about my mom and John. I trusted him with my secret. I trusted him with my life. And I trusted that if I played my cards right, I could get Jimmy to become a skinhead, too. Even though the skaters and the young punks on South Street were loving Louie and me for backing off the SHARPs, and even though my cousin Jimmy was a punk who loved to skate, I knew that tack wasn’t going to work on him. Jimmy didn’t fear SHARPs. Jimmy was a rare breed, a near perfect blend of seething rage and brass-knuckle balls. Louie and me needed guys like that if we were going to form a real skinhead crew. Of course, we also needed those guys to sign on to the whole movement philosophy, and that’s where we ran into trouble with Jimmy. When it came to hatred, Jimmy didn’t need any of our theories, and he didn’t want any of our lectures. He didn’t give a rat’s ass about race politics. Jimmy hated
everybody
, because at some point in his life, everybody-black, white, liberal, conservative, jocks, brains, everybody-had picked on him. I knew getting Jimmy to hate SHARPs and minorities would be a total no-brainer; getting him not to kill other Nazis was going to be the challenge. And, for a while, it looked like that might include Louie and me. Every time we tried to preach Identity to Jimmy, he got that Tasmanian devil look on his face. Then he’d spit. For Jimmy, spitting was more than just a habit; it was punctuation. When he hocked an exclamation point onto the sidewalk, I knew I should back away slowly without making sudden movements.
Jimmy and I reported to Furness High School together when school started back up. He cruised through the front doors in his Mohawk; I marched in wearing my Doc Martens. I’d been sulking through mandatory counseling sessions at school in between fights for about two months when Jimmy tipped me off that some black kids planned to jump me. He’d overheard a couple of them talking about what they were going to do to “that skinhead.” He didn’t know when it was going to go down, only that it was.
I saw them coming before they even moved toward me. They weren’t standing where they usually stood in the lunch line. They were watching me too closely. There were three of them. I’d survived worse odds and better fighters in my dad’s neighborhood. I glanced down at the polished stone floor, smiled at my shadowy reflection, and thought, “Bring it on.” They circled me, talking crap about my shaved head. The cafeteria fell silent. I just stood there, watching, keeping all three of them in sight at all times, waiting for someone to throw the first punch so I could claim self-defense, feeling my brass-knuckle knife inside the pocket of my flight jacket, knowing it would be more than enough if my fists weren’t.
Then from out of nowhere this hard plastic cafeteria tray came flying up against the side of one of the black guy’s heads. I was as surprised as he was. Jimmy was holding the tray like a club. He looked like a freaking rabid dog, crazier than I’d ever seen him look. If Jimmy had actually foamed at the mouth it wouldn’t have surprised one person in that lunchroom. He drew the tray all the way back, then smacked it across the face of one of the other kids.
“Get your motherfucking nigger asses away from Frankie!”
That was classic Jimmy: drop two guys to the ground with a tray before thinking to tell them to back off. The one black kid still standing inched away from us. The two still rubbing their heads didn’t look like they had any interest in getting up off the floor.
The guidance counselor called me into his office first thing the next morning. The principal was standing next to his desk when I arrived.
“I didn’t lay one finger on nobody.”
“That’s not why we called you in,” the principal said. “We pulled your records in hopes of getting some insight into the problems you seem to be having here at Furness. You did not complete all four quarters of the eighth grade.”
I wanted to say, “Dude, I didn’t even pass all four quarters of the seventh grade.” But I thought that might be shooting myself in the foot. So all I said was, “My mom got a letter saying I was in the ninth grade.”
“Well, you’re not,” the principal replied. “Some type of error was made and I’ve arranged for it to be resolved. Report to the front office of Sharswood School before first bell tomorrow.”
So much for ninth grade.
THAT EVENING AT home, I was playing in my room with Kirsten when Jimmy called.
“Yo, I shaved it,” he said.
Once Jimmy shaved his head, he started spending most of his nights and weekends down on South Street with Louie and me. We claimed a nasty back alley as our turf and hung out drinking beer that we either scammed from my mom and John or sweet-talked punk girls into buying for us. One weekend, Shawn and a couple of other guys from the Lancaster County crew drove in to party with us in “Skinhead Alley.” They must’ve told everybody they knew about the good time they had, because within a few months, there were at least a half-dozen Nazis, sometimes as many as fifteen or twenty, coming into the city from one suburb or another nearly every weekend. Between the parties in Skinhead Alley and the parties we got invited to in other towns, Louie, Jimmy, and I became regular social butterflies.
But for some reason, Jimmy wasn’t with us the night Louie and I first met John Cook, one of the most legendary skinheads
on the East Coast then. Cook was this huge dude in his mid-twenties, tattooed from head to toe in movement symbols. He was a big deal inside older skinhead circles; he was an enormous deal to a couple of kids like us. So Louie and I were totally flattered when Cook invited us to spend a weekend at his house outside Reading. And we nearly wet ourselves when he introduced us to the Invisible Empire of the Ku Klux Klan.
When we pulled into the driveway of the old farmhouse, I thought the place was abandoned, maybe condemned. We parked among at least a dozen other cars and trucks, some missing doors or engines, others new and polished to a high gloss. Cook led us behind the ramshackle house where a large, sided Army tent was already set up. Inside, neat rows of folding chairs faced off with a Confederate battle flag and men were beginning to take their seats. The elderly leader of the klavern told Louie and me we were welcome to join the Klan so long as we promised not to stir up any trouble and got our parents to sign off on our application forms. If you’re under eighteen, you can’t join the Invisible Empire without a parent’s or guardian’s signature. Klansman are surprisingly fussy about stuff like that for guys who made their name off lynchings.
Louie and I promised we’d ask our mothers for permission to join the Klan. Back in Skinhead Alley, Louie forged my mom’s name on my form, and I forged his mom’s name on his. We hitchhiked back to the country a week later and took our vows with Cook looking on like a proud godfather, but Louie and me were streetwise enough to take those country Klansmen with a big grain of salt. We knew when we signed up that they weren’t what we wanted to be. But they had stuff we wanted. That particular Invisible Empire klavern only had a handful of members, but they were on the mailing lists of every white supremacy group in the United States. That old house was a library and as members, we were free to borrow anything we wanted. That house was also an arsenal. And as members, we were free to shoot anything we wanted. The old dudes in the klavern had
grown up in the country; they’d been shooting deer and beer cans since they could walk. They taught us how to handle shotguns and even semiautomatics. My favorite was a Simonov SKS carbine. The Klansmen let us spend entire afternoons shooting at the pictures of Martin Luther King, Jr. they’d nailed to trees as targets. They never asked us to pay for our ammunition or even our food. For a couple of city boys, the place was like summer camp. But just as it had been with the Lancaster County skinheads, it wasn’t all about fun and games. Everybody in the Invisible Empire was seriously into Identity Theology. I knew the basics about it from the time I’d spent with the Lancaster County skinheads, but those Klansmen put Louie and me through seminary. Sitting through sermons was the price we had to pay to get to play with really big guns.
Louie and I went up to the Invisible Empire camp together at least every few months. If he wasn’t around or up for the trip, sometimes I’d go alone and meet up with skinheads from other parts of the state who’d started visiting the Klansmen. Usually I’d hitch a ride out in the morning then hitch another back late afternoon so I wouldn’t have to miss a night on South Street. Jimmy went with me a few times; Louie had signed for his mom, too. But none of the other South Street skinheads ever went out to Klan country. Most of the other skinheads who regularly hung on South Street then were from middle-class suburban families, and every goddamn one of them chickened out on the Klan when he found out he’d have to get a parent’s signature.
“My mom won’t sign this!” they’d say, offended we’d even think they would.
“So don’t show it to her, you moron. Sign it yourself.”
Then they’d really freak out. “My mom would kill me if I forged her signature!”
These guys spent Saturday nights bragging about how they couldn’t wait to beat the hell out of the SHARPs, and they were pissing themselves about getting grounded. It made Louie
and Jimmy and me wonder who would actually have our backs if all hell broke loose.
Everybody came to think of Louie and Jimmy and me as the leaders of the skinhead scene on South Street, partly because we were the only ones with big enough balls to forge our mommies’ signatures so we could join the Klan, but mostly because we were from South Philly. The suburban skinheads thought we were dangerous, and compared to them, I guess we were. But compared to the kinds of guys we’d grown up around, guys like my dad, for instance, we weren’t even on the same block as dangerous. We were just city kids, as dirty and mean in a fight as the streets we’d been raised on, and that alone secured our rank.
We had a hell of a good time being neo-Nazi skinheads in those early days. We battled the SHARPs enough to have fun with it, but not so much we had to fear for our lives. We talked about ZOG enough to remember why we hated everybody else, but not so much that it interfered with our partying. We let a lot of the punks hang with us then, and the skaters. So long as they weren’t friends with the SHARPs, we figured we might be able to turn them into Nazis. Most just wanted our beer, but we converted a few of the harder-core punks. A kid named Dan Bellen was one of the first punks to shave off his blond hair. He was from one of the townships on the outskirts of the city, but he fought like he’d been raised in South Philly. So did Matt Hanson and Brian “Stug” Stugen, two suburban skinheads who came to practically live on South Street. They were the only three guys we trusted to have our backs in battle. The other guys who partied in Skinhead Alley were our friends, our fellow Nazis, our followers, but only Dan, Matt, and Stug were our brothers-in-arms.