The second-shift guards came on duty late in the afternoon. I was relieved when one of them unlocked my cell and told me he was taking me to processing. I was also shocked; I’d figured my mom would make me spend at least another night in detention before she sprung me. When we got to the main desk, I scanned the waiting room.
“Where’s my mom?” I asked the guard. She had to be the one to sign for me because she was my only legal guardian. My dad had signed that power away in the same stack of papers where he’d given up my last name.
“She’s not here, son,” the guard said. “We’re moving you up to Sleighton Farms.”
Sleighton Farms was the guarded compound of dormitory-style housing where Philly stockpiled kids whose parents refused to sign for their release during the two-month wait for their hearing. I never figured out for sure who all was actually in Sleighton Farms and why. From the way some of the other guys talked, it sounded like they’d been convicted already, but maybe not. Maybe they’d already done time for something else and now were back waiting for a new hearing. All I know is that’s why I was there.
The other inmates had already been locked down in their single-man rooms for the night when I arrived. The intake guard watched me unlace all twenty holes of my knee-high combat boots. It takes a while to get out of those things, even if you hurry.
“Same routine every night,” the guard said. “Put‘em in there.” He pointed to a box big enough to hold a refrigerator. “You’ll get ‘em back in the morning.”
When I dropped my boots into the box, I noticed there wasn’t another pair of Doc Martens floating around anywhere in that sea of $100-a-pop basketball shoes. The next morning, I took my place at the end of the line of boys waiting to dig for their shoes. A black kid at the head of the line held my Docs up over his head.
“Who’s the fucking skinhead?”
I held my shaved head high as I marched barefooted to the front of the line of blacks and Puerto Ricans. If there was another white kid in my unit, he wasn’t waiting on the shoe line that morning. I held out my hand. The kid who’d called me out sneered at me, but he gave me my boots. It didn’t take a genius to notice that there were some serious racial tensions brewing at Sleighton Farms long before the Nazi arrived. Blacks sat on one side of the mess hall, Puerto Ricans on the other. Blacks congregated in one end of the rec room, Puerto Ricans in the other. It was like the Korean Peninsula with me and a handful of other white inmates sitting in the DMZ called the middle of the room. The only place the two sides ever met up was in the yard. Every afternoon an all-black team took on an all-Puerto Rican team in football. When I finally got yard privileges, I didn’t know this, so I stood in the middle of the unmarked lawn minding my own business. I noticed the Puerto Ricans were huddled up having a big debate about something. After a few minutes, one of them ran over to the blacks. Then a couple of the blacks ran with him back over to the Puerto Ricans. After a few more minutes, one of the black kids sprinted up to me.
“You’re playing for the Puerto Ricans.”
“Playing what?” I asked.
“Football.”
I didn’t care. And I didn’t mind playing for the Puerto Ricans. It’d pass the time. Besides, there weren’t enough white inmates to field a third team. I joined the Puerto Ricans in their huddle. I didn’t know going into the game, but there wasn’t one single guy on the Puerto Rican team who’d been at Sleighton Farms long enough to remember when their losing streak had started. The problem wasn’t that they were bad players so much as it was that a couple guys on the black team were really good players. We couldn’t have been more than three plays in when I broke through the line and ran for a touchdown.
It was like I was Jesus walking on water. The second I crossed into the end zone, my teammates forgot about my politics. They started screaming and cheering and jumping up and down. I wouldn’t have been surprised if one of them would have asked me to start dating his sister.
When it was all over, the black players slunk back toward the barracks with their heads hanging low. The Puerto Ricans gathered by the fence, rehashing every play of the game. I went back to my spot in the middle. I was trying to scrape some of the mud off my Docs when a black kid who’d sat off by himself during the game called out to me.
“Yo, skinhead!”
I looked his way.
“You didn’t drop one ball, did you?” he asked.
“Dropping balls is against my religion.”
“Then I’m thinking the brothers need to get themselves converted.”
I couldn’t help but laugh. I said, “I don’t think ‘the brothers’ would like my church.”
“I don’t know, man. If you kick their asses like that again tomorrow, they’re either going to convert or kill you.”
“Then I guess they’re going to have to convert,” I said.
Locked up in my room that night, I kept replaying the game and the days leading up to it. I’d always been a pretty good
football player, but I’d never played like that before. I let all my rage come steaming out of my feet. I just ran and ran and ran, and there wasn’t a single guy on the field who could catch me. I was too fucking pissed about being locked up in Sleighton Farms to be caught.
I kept playing for the Puerto Ricans. I liked some of them better than most of the white guys I met at Sleighton Farms. At least the Puerto Ricans and me could talk football. The other white dudes in there were lumps. I sat with them if I didn’t feel like sitting alone in the mess hall, but that was about it. Yard time playing for the Puerto Ricans was all the social life I needed.
I never again played football like I did that first day, but I played well enough to even the field a little. The Puerto Ricans and me won at least a couple games a week. And after they got over being pissy about it, I think some of the guys on the black team kind of enjoyed having me around to compete against. A kid I’d stiff-armed in my first game stayed pissed off, though. His name was Maurice, and he was a leader of the black kids at Sleighton Farms on and off the football field. Maurice never missed a chance to bump into me in the halls. I’d been at Sleighton Farms a couple weeks when two new white kids arrived from Kensington, the section of North Philly that’s home to the heroin-infested slum known as the Badlands. They spotted me right off and tried to snuggle up next to me. I guess they thought the lone Nazi would be their savior if all hell broke loose. They thought wrong. I would’ ve taken a punch for any Puerto Rican in that joint before I would’ve broken a toenail for doped-out wiggers from the Badlands.
They showed their true colors the next day when they cozied up with Maurice and his buddies in the mess hall. I kept my distance, stayed in the middle by myself, but I went on full alert whenever those Badlands jerks came near me. I knew in my gut they were trying to start trouble. One of my Puerto Rican teammates confirmed my suspicions.
“They’re working with Maurice. That dude’s got it out for you.”
“I figured. Youse know when they’re gonna move on me?”
“Sorry, man,” he said. “But if I hear more, I’ll let you know.”
THERE WERE A shitload of restrictions on phone calls in juvie lock up. As best as I could tell, I could only make calls on my own dime, and I could only take calls from my lawyer or my mom since she was my official guardian. Well, I didn’t have a dime in my pocket the night I got arrested, and it’s not like I could call anybody to send me money without one. I also didn’t have a lawyer, at least not one I knew about. And my mom took her sweet time checking up on me. I must have been at Sleighton Farms close to two months before she finally got in touch.
I wanted to scream, “Where the fuck have you been, bitch?” But I had an even more important question to ask.
“Did you let Nanny and Pop know I’m okay?”
“I called them right after the cops called me,” my mom said. “I told them your dad was going to have to cough up the money to get your sorry ass out of this mess. I haven’t heard from him.”
I was so relieved that Nanny and Pop knew I was okay. I’d been thinking about them every damn day while I was at Sleighton Farms. It had killed me to think they’d spent two months worrying that I was dead in some alley. My mom, of course, hadn’t been worried I was dead. She’d known exactly where I was the last two months, and she was pissed-time had done nothing to calm her down. She fucking unloaded on me over the phone. I was a spoiled brat. I was a no account piece of shit like my father. I was ruining her life just like I always had. But once she got it out of her system, she promised she’d sign the papers to get me out so I could be home in time for Easter. Easter was only a week or two away.
I made the idiot mistake of telling people I was getting out. Thank God for my friend from the football team. He gave me the heads-up that Maurice was going to get me while he still had the chance. Then he told me to sneak upstairs and put my bar
of soap out on my window ledge, so it’d be cold and hard as a rock by the time everybody came back up to the unit after dinner.
“Stick it inside a sock,” he said. “Wind the sock around your knuckles, and, man, whatever you do, don’t take your eyes off that door.”
After dinner, I left my door slightly open, shoved my pillow under the covers, and turned off the light. To anyone peeking in from the hallway, it would look like I’d dozed off early. I stood next to the door, my back plastered against the wall, the rock-hard soap tucked into the toe of a tube sock, the sock twisted around my hand.
Maurice was the first to cross the threshold. When he lunged for the bed, I slammed the door behind him so I wouldn’t have his friends jumping me from behind. I jumped Maurice from behind, though, while he was trying to jump me in my sleep. I pounded the hell out of him with that soap-sock. Shut out in the hall, his friends, the same guys who’d been planning to jump me, too, started screaming for the guards. “That Nazi bastard’s got Maurice!”
The guards were kind of rough with me when they first busted into my room. I was on top and definitely getting the better of Maurice. Then Maurice put the nail in his own coffin.
“I was just minding my own business, and that fucking skinhead jumped me.”
“You were minding your own business in his room?” a guard asked. Busted. Maurice and his cronies got sent to Sleighton Farm’s version of solitary confinement. I never saw them again; I got released before they did.
I didn’t get home in time for Easter, though. My mom never did show up to sign the papers for me. The only reason I got out of Sleighton Farms was because my case came up. I was transferred straight from Sleighton Farms to my hearing. Nobody gave me anything different to wear other than what I’d had on the night I was arrested. I did what I could to make my skinhead get up look less like a skinhead get up. I rolled my flight jacket into a ball
and tucked it under my arm. I’d been wearing one of my good Fred Perry shirts and luckily it didn’t have any patches on it. I uncuffed my Levis so they’d cover most of my Docs.
When I arrived at the courtroom, I saw Louie, Matt, and Stug all dressed up like little princes, sitting in a row at the defense table with four guys in suits. I figured the suits had to be the lawyers, even though one of them looked like he could’ve still been in high school. “Maybe he’s a helper,” I thought. I turned to scan the crowd. My mom was sitting in the back row looking like she wanted to kill somebody. The guard sat me down hard on the empty chair at the end of the table. Louie reached over and tapped my leg.
“Youse all right?” he asked. At that moment, that meant the world to me. Louie cared what the hell had happened to me the last two months even if my own fucking mom didn’t.
“Hello, Mr. Meeink,” the high-school looking suit said to me. “I’m with the Public Defender’s Office. I’ll be representing you today.”
“Great,” I thought, “Doogie Howser, PD, is the only thing standing between me and three years in juvie.”
“There’s no need to be worried,” he said. “I’ve reviewed the files very carefully. We should be able to clear this up this afternoon.”
I wasn’t so sure about that, but what did I know? I don’t remember nobody telling me anything about my case until that moment. And most of what was said at the hearing went over my head. The parts I did understand, like “assault,” didn’t sound too good for me. Even worse was the way all the other defense lawyers seemed to be trying to make the thing out like it was all my fault, like I was the ringleader since I was the one from South Philly and the other three guys were from the suburbs. That was such total bullshit. Louie’s mom had bought a house in the suburbs all of maybe eighteen months earlier and he didn’t even sleep there half the time. And Matt and Stug would’ve battled like South Philly thugs even if they’d grown up in Paducah.
But from the way the judge kept looking at me, I don’t think he cared.
As it turned out, neither did Doogie. When he finally got his turn for his big speech, he talked about inconsistent witness testimony, the absence of any prior criminal records in reference to his juvenile client, and Scott Windham. He talked a lot about Scott Windham and the Nazi Alliance dudes who’d been with him that night. He talked about how they were much older than I was, how they were hardened criminals, and how they were responsible not just for the attack, but for dragging all the minors, including Mr. City-Boy me, into the middle of it. The other defense lawyers must have liked the theory, because in the end they joined up with Doogie and all four of them did exactly what Scott Windham had told me to do-they rolled like a ball.
It worked. The judge threw out the assault charges. Nobody was going to juvie. But nobody was getting off free, either. The judge rattled off the string of minor charges he wasn’t going to drop. Most of them had to do with us being underage and blind drunk. The judge released us one at a time, taking a few minutes to give each of us and our parents a lecture. I was last in line. He was letting me go, but he clearly hadn’t let go of the hired-gun lawyers’ idea that I was more at fault than the other guys simply because I was the only official city kid.