“Are you depressed?”
Of course. I just spent my kid’s food money on cocaine.
“Do you ever feel like killing yourself?”
I ain’t doing nobody much good alive.
“Are drugs ruining your life?”
Ding!
Without even getting up off the loveseat, I grabbed the phone. I dialed the number on the television.
“Charter -Fairmount Hospital. How may I help you?”
“I saw your ad on TV. I think I need help.”
“Do you believe you have a problem with drugs or alcohol?”
“Both.”
“Are you currently using and, if so, what are you using?” She sounded like she was reading off a script.
“Oxycontin.” I said.
I could hear her typing my answer into a computer.
“And a lot of cocaine.”
Clickety-click-click on the keyboard. She waited to see if I was going to keep going. Finally, she asked, “Is that all?”
“Does beer count?”
“Yes.” Click-click-clickety-click-click and save.
She sweetly assured me I’d called the right place and that a counselor would be waiting for me to arrive; she even told me exactly which buses to take to get there.
The counselor who met me in the lobby looked a little more streetwise than the lady who answered the phone had sounded. He led me back to an office and asked me what felt like a million questions. At one point, he wanted to know, “Do you ever feel like you might hurt yourself or others?” That counselor had heard it all before; he wasn’t shocked when I confessed my history of suicide attempts. He prodded me forward. “Other than yourself, who have you thought about hurting?”
“The dude who kissed my girlfriend.”
The counselor looked up from the notes he was scribbling and asked, “When you’ve thought about hurting another person, have you ever acted on those feelings?”
I almost told the guy to go get a fresh notebook, but I wasn’t
sure what kind of deal Charter -Fairmount had with the cops. I had a bad fucking history mixing psychiatry with law enforcement. I promised the counselor I wasn’t planning to do anything to the dude who’d kissed Nina, but I wasn’t willing to make the same promise about myself. He gave me a room assignment in Charter’s inpatient rehab center.
I smoked my first cigarette in rehab. That was the one vice I’d managed to avoid, but when I lost all the others, I needed something. So long as there are addicts and alcoholics trying to get clean and sober, Marlboro will never go out of business. Neither will Folgers.
Rehab made me miss prison. When I wasn’t one-on-one with the counselor or chainsmoking my way through mandatory twelve-step meetings, I spent most of my time playing Spades with some older black dudes. One day, we were throwing cards and swapping “my life sucks worse than your life” stories when a Puerto Rican junkie sitting on a nearby couch said, “You got some real pain.” Then he leaned close so the others couldn’t hear and whispered, “Heroin will make it all go away.” He fell back onto the couch and pretended to nod out. The other card players recognized what he was doing and cracked up laughing. I didn’t laugh; I couldn’t stop staring at the smile that dude had on his face just from remembering his last shot of junk.
After thirty days in the inpatient rehab unit, Charter released me to a halfway house in Kensington. The location surprised me. The large, dilapidated house was only a few blocks off the Badlands, Philly’s heroin district. I guess that made it convenient for junkies wanting to relapse. I’m not sure what I was expecting to find at the halfway house, only that it sure as shit wasn’t Muffin Ass McCarthy. He’d disappeared from Second and Porter a year earlier. A few of the guys accused him of running off with a bunch of money, but the rest of us thought he’d wandered off and died. As it turned out, he’d snuck away to rehab and worked his way up to being the resident-supervisor of a halfway house in North Philly. Muffin Ass hooked me up with one of the best
rooms in the place, which pissed off other residents. They gave me the cold shoulder for a couple weeks until curiosity got the best of them. They had to talk to me to get the scoop on their favorite soap opera: “Frankie and the Baby Mamas.”
Nina and Matt came to visit me often. She didn’t actually come out and say she wanted to get back together, but she gave me hope just by showing up. Of course, every other guy in the halfway house drooled all over himself every time Nina strutted through the front door. Then one day, to my complete shock, in walked Maria carrying Jake. She hadn’t even known I was getting clean when she called my dad looking for me; she’d just decided Jake should meet his father. My dad told Maria where she could find me. The halfway house crew flipped out when the second gorgeous Italian girl blew through the front door carrying one of my sons. I would’ve told the guys about my third kid with a hot Italian mom out in Illinois, but it would’ve seemed like bragging. Instead, I begged them to help keep Nina and Maria from finding out about each other. The situation was a logistical nightmare. I never knew when either girl would show up, and I couldn’t tell either what was going on. I had no intention of getting back with Maria, but I wanted to see Jake. I knew Maria would take Jake away again if she knew Nina was still in the picture. And I was afraid if Nina found out about Maria visiting, she might get pissed and give up on me for good. Things were going too good between me and Nina to chance it. Every time she visited, I got my hopes up that would be the day she’d ask me to get back together. So did the other residents. They’d huddle up on the other end of the community room, pretend they weren’t eavesdropping, and hang on her every word.
None of us, not the boys, sure as hell not me, saw the big plot twist coming: while we were all trying to predict Nina’s next move, Maria fell for Muffin Ass. Next thing I knew, he asked for permission to adopt Jake. If it’d been on television, that episode of “Frankie and the Baby Mamas” wouldve won a Daytime Emmy. I wished Muffin Ass all the luck in the world with
Maria, figuring he’d need it, and told him I’d sign Jake over to him if him and Maria made it work. I didn’t want to give Jake up, but I didn’t want Jake not to have a dad. Muffin Ass seemed like a good solution.
FOR SEVERAL MONTHS, I stayed clean and sober on the marijuana maintenance plan. I didn’t drink or do any drug that involved snorting or swallowing. I just smoked Marlboro Lights and pot like the other guys recovering at the halfway house. We were all absolutely convinced pot didn’t count because pot’s not a real drug like cocaine or Oxycontin or heroin. Of course, we were stoned when we came up with that theory.
I was still living in the halfway house when Angelica Vitale, the lady producer from
Hard Copy
, called the ADL again. She explained she wanted to interview me because there was a new movie coming out that sounded a lot like my life. I agreed to the interview after I read the plot summary she sent over. It creeped me out. I’d done an informal interview with a movie producer a year earlier, but nothing had come of it. The producer had heard about a speech I gave in LA and wanted to ask me some questions, pretty basic stuff. That’s all there was to it. Then theatres started showing previews for
American History X
. The movie producer who interviewed me isn’t listed anywhere in the credits of that movie. I don’t think she stole my story. In fact, around the same time as Ms. Vitale called me, the movie producer called again, kind of pissed off. She asked me why I’d sold my story to somebody else. I don’t think she believed me when I said I hadn’t.
American History X
isn’t my story. It’s every skinhead’s story to some extent. And that’s why Ms. Vitale wanted to interview me;
Hard Copy
wanted to see if the movie really stacked up against the reality of a guy like me. Still leery after my media disasters, I agreed to talk to her on the condition that she had to mention Harmony Through Hockey in the segment.
Hard Copy
aired their story about me, including a really
nice spotlight on Harmony Through Hockey, the same day
Amer – ican History X
debuted. Angelica Vitale scored tickets so I could see the movie the first night it played in Philly. Nobody at the premier knew who I was, which was a relief because I didn’t know how I was going to react. Seeing the movie was surreal to say the least. I sat in the darkness watching pieces of my life unfold before my eyes. But it wasn’t me; it was the actor Ed Norton. And it was every other kid who ever got sucked up into the white supremacy movement.
I became a minor celebrity after the movie came out and
Hard Copy
aired their interview with me. The ADL’s phones rang off the hook with requests for me to speak. I was so in demand I practically needed an assistant to keep track of whether I was coming or going. I got an agent instead. Admire Entertainment represents professional speakers. I’d never thought of myself as a professional speaker. At best, I was a professional used furniture mover who sometimes told stories about his crazy life into a microphone. But Admire didn’t see it that way: they’d heard about my life, and they’d sent one of their agents to watch me speak. They asked what I was getting paid for my lectures.
“Two-hundred dollars a day,” I bragged.
“We can get you two-thousand dollars a speech.”
I damn near fainted, but I had sense enough not to agree to anything over the phone. I couldn’t afford a lawyer, so my friend Mike Boni came to my rescue. He reviewed the contracts and even had a teleconference with one of the agents to go over some details. When he was sure everything was legit, he said, “Frank, this is your big break. You’ve earned it. Take it.”
So I did. Admire booked three or four engagements for me every month, mostly at colleges, all over the nation. The only limit I put on speaking was it couldn’t interfere with Harmony Through Hockey. I still suited up for practice with the kids almost every day during the season. But I no longer saw the same kids every day; the program got so big we were running it at several different rinks. Nearly eighty kids were involved. Things
were going great for me professionally. I was a professional. I had agents. I worked with the Flyers. I was racking up frequent-flyer miles. I was raking it in.
And I had not one clue in hell what to do with it. Half the people I’d grown up around didn’t have checking accounts, so what the hell did I know about investment portfolios? I figured I was a financial wizard so long as I was less than two months behind on my rent at the halfway house. The rest of the money just slipped through my fingers. I spent some on my kids, gave some to their mothers, even used some to travel to Illinois to see Riley a few times. But, mostly, I partied it away.
I stopped going to twelve-step meetings after the third time in a week I said, “Hi. My name is Frank and I’m an alcoholic. It’s been… ” I’d look down at my fancy new watch, “six hours since my last drink.” The first couple nights, the recovery crowd tried to talk me back up onto the wagon. The third night, an older guy who’d been sober something like twenty years said, “You can’t party like that and say you’re in recovery.”
I proved him wrong. I stormed out of the meeting, found the nearest bar, got totally shit-faced, and declared to the drunk sitting next to me, “I’m in recovery.”
He hoisted his glass. “Me, too!”
I felt sick the next morning, not just from the hangover. I promised myself I’d get back on the right path. And I did. Every time. I’d stay clean for a couple of weeks, then I’d go on some insane bender. I’d down a month’s worth of beer, oxy, acid, weed, anything and everything I could afford and survive, into one gigantic high from hell. Then I’d wake up a few days later, sober up enough to realize what I’d done, and vow to get right back on the path to recovery.
I always cleaned up before a major speech or a big interview. Angelica Vitale had restored my faith in the media, and her
Hard Copy
story had opened a lot of doors for me. I appeared in a VH1 documentary about kids and hate groups. MTV talked to me for their “Stop the Violence” campaign. Both A&E and the
Discovery Channel used clips of me in specials about skinheads. When some movement lowlifes dragged James Byrd, Jr., to his death in Texas,
The Today Show
brought me to New York so Katie Couric could interview me.
Not long after that, I returned to New York for an ADL speaking gig. Even after I signed with Admire Entertainment, I still did a lot of work for the ADL. They couldn’t pay the kind of fees my agent got me for speaking at universities, but the ADL could do something even better: they could get me in front of the audiences that most needed to hear my story, the audiences I felt most comfortable talking to. One of those audiences was a bunch of inmates in a juvenile detention center in New York City. Back in my hotel room after the speech, I stared lustfully at the minibar. I couldn’t do that to Barry again. I had to get out of there. So I dialed Angelica Vitale’s number. She sounded thrilled to hear from me and invited me to join her and her boyfriend for dinner.
“I don’t want to horn in,” I said.
“You’d be helping me out,” Angelica replied. “One of my good friends from high school is in town. We’re picking her up in about an hour. Come with us. That way she won’t feel like the third wheel. Besides, you’ll like Valerie. She’s really nice.”
I was nervous that “really nice” might be code for “butt ugly,” but I didn’t have anything better to do, so I agreed. Angelica almost ran me over when she screeched a TV production van up onto the curb in front of my hotel. She gave me a hug around the neck through the driver’s side window and introduced me to her boyfriend, another behind-the-scenes television type, sitting in the front seat. He didn’t look too thrilled to be stuck with my South Philly ass for the night. Angelica told me to climb in the back.
When I popped the door open, the most gorgeous woman I’d ever seen in person in my entire fucking life smiled at me.
“I’m Valerie Doyle.” Her long blond hair tumbled down the front of her cashmere sweater.