Autobiography of a Recovering Skinhead (17 page)

They really went freaking berserk a few days later when I left the house. They rarely ventured out during the day. They just couldn’t believe I was stupid enough to walk down to the Walgreens in broad daylight for no good reason. I thought I had a great reason: I was bored out of my fucking mind from listening to them yammer nonstop about their big plot.

My hosts would take me out for air sometimes after dark, though. One night, we vandalized a black church. Another, we jumped a junkie shooting up near the old train station downtown. I’d been living in the safehouse for about a month when my guardians took me with them to Aryan Fest, held that year at the Alabama farm of Bill Riccio. I can’t tell you who all Riccio was in bed with, but I can tell you he seemed like one very big dog, or at least one very loud dog, in the white supremacy movement back in the early 1990s, big and loud enough that a film crew came down to Aryan Fest to make a documentary about him. I didn’t see the cameras or Riccio my first day at the festival; appar – ently he was taping interviews inside his house while skinheads
partied down outside to a battle of white power bands. The second day, I was too polluted to notice the cameras. They noticed me, though. If you ever get a chance to check out the documentary
Skinheads USA
, the tattoo of “Strike Force” in the opening scene is a close up of the back of my neck. A little while later, I’m the one with the big swastika,
Sieg-Heiling
in one scene and waving a Confederate battle flag in another. Toward the end of the movie, I’m the one tilting sideways, clinging for dear life to a beer bottle, right on the cusp of passing out.

Like I said, I don’t know what all Riccio was into, but the cops busted him for some of it while Aryan Fest was in full swing. To the skinheads in attendance, Riccio’s arrest was further proof of the ZOG theory: it was the Zionist Occupational Government trying to silence one of our heroes. The crowd went insane, but since we were out in the middle of nowhere, there really wasn’t much we could do other than get even more drunk than we had been the night before and bash the shit out of each other in the mosh pit.

Spending a long weekend with skinheads who knew how to let loose only made Monday morning back in Indianapolis all the more awful. I couldn’t take sitting around in that cell of a safehouse anymore. I busted out again and signed up for work on a concrete crew. The Nazi Alliance had a cow, but they got over it once I offered to fork up some rent money. I used the little cash I had left over to bribe the Indy skinheads into giving me rides. One Saturday, we all went to Chicago for a concert. I have almost no memory of that night: I don’t remember the band that played, where it was, nothing. I don’t even remember the trip back to Indy. All I remember is that standing in line waiting to get into the concert I got drunk with a couple of young skinheads from Springfield, Illinois, and when I woke up back in Indy the next night, I had their phone numbers stuffed in my pocket.

After that, I spent most of my weekends in Springfield, which is about a three-hour drive from Indianapolis. If I couldn’t get a ride from one of the Indy guys, the Springfield skinheads
would make the six-hour roundtrip to get me on Saturdays, then make it again early Monday morning to get me back in time for work. They were so pumped about having a big-city skinhead from the East Coast hanging with them that I think they would’ve driven me to Alaska if I’d asked. Hanging around those small town skinheads made me miss Philly less. They weren’t exactly the terror squad, but they were young, fun, and fearless.

There were only a handful of guys in Springfield who considered themselves skinheads when I first went over for a visit, and only one had any actual ties to the movement. He was a redneck in his early twenties and had connections to Aryan Nations, which was the Vatican of Identity Theology then. The Springfield Aryan Nationalist wasn’t just devoted to Identity, he was obsessed with it, which was both a blessing and a curse for the rest of the skinheads. He was a goldmine of information for people who wanted to listen, but he was a total turnoff for those who didn’t. And that made him a real problem when it came to recruiting, because he tended to go fishing with a club.

I knew better. I knew how to bait a hook, and I knew how to bait and switch. It only took me one walk around Springfield’s White Oaks Mall to find my angle. Springfield had skaters. Springfield had punks. Springfield had goths. And wherever you find skaters, punks, and goths, you can bet you’ll find preps and jocks who like to bully the crap out of them. I’d long since learned there are two ways to form a skinhead crew: find skinheads or make skinheads. I found about half a dozen on my first visit to Springfield, then I convinced them we needed to make some more.

 

TOWARD THE END of one especially boring week in Indy, I couldn’t wait to get back across the state line. So when I overheard my boss talking about going to Illinois, I asked if I could hitch a ride. He said he’d be happy to give me a lift so long as I didn’t mind making a pit stop along the way.

My boss was in the process of relocating to Terre Haute,
which is right on the Indiana-Illinois border. He’d leased a new apartment on the second floor of an old dump of a house. He warned me before he dropped me off that the place was empty. He wasn’t kidding. There was a ratty couch and a clock radio. That was it, other than the twelve pack of beer he bought me. He told me to cool my heels in the apartment while he hooked up with his girlfriend and promised he’d have me in Springfield in no time.

I tried to tune the clock radio to something, anything other than country music. After an hour or so of fighting it, I gave up. I turned the radio off and listened to the analog numbers flop over, flop over, flop over, every sixty seconds, for hours. I watched the sun set on Terre Haute.

After ten o’clock at night, Terre Haute, Indiana, is as quiet as a tomb. In the dead silence, that fucking clock dripped like a faucet. Then it ticked like a bomb.

I ran out of beer around eleven. I hadn’t eaten since the night before, so a dozen beers fucked me up more than usual. I rooted through the closets, hoping to find a gun so I could shoot that fucking clock. The closets were empty. I was empty. I felt dead. I looked out the window to see if the world had ended and nobody told me. A car meandered down the street.

What street? I wondered. What street am I on? I’m in Terre Haute, but where? What’s my boss’s last name? I didn’t know.

A freaky thought popped into my head: no one will know who I am if I die at this moment. I had no ID on me. I’d given my boss a fake name and social security number when he’d hired me. I hadn’t told the Indianapolis Nazi Alliance I was leaving; I hadn’t told the Springfield skinheads how I was getting there. The only people in the world who could rightly identify my body were in Philadelphia. Would they ever even find out if I died in that empty apartment? Would they care?

I staggered into the kitchen and ransacked the cupboards. They were grimy but empty. I tried the drawers. When I shoved my hand to the back of one next to the sink, I felt a wooden handle.
I followed it with my fingers: the blade was wedged so tightly into the seam of the drawer I nearly busted the countertop getting enough leverage to pry it loose. When it broke free, I took that as a sign: I knew what I was supposed to do.

I was wearing my best Ben Sherman shirt and the only Levi’s I owned that weren’t in shreds, so I stripped first. I stood in the middle of the kitchen, naked except for my boxers, staring at the blade. It was dull and rusty. I had to stab at my wrist to get an opening, but once I sawed a few passes back and forth, the blood flowed real nice.

I had blood smeared all over my face and chest by the time I walked out to the balcony. If I hadn’t been so wasted, I probably would have fainted. Instead, I leaned over the railing and watched blood drip from my fingertips down onto the sidewalk. I watched the droplets merge into a small puddle.

My boss’s neighbor screamed when he saw me. Then he apparently called 911 to report I’d murdered somebody. Minutes later, squad cars swarmed the street, and the cops kicked in the apartment door. Two cornered me on the balcony and ordered me to get down on my stomach while the others ran frantically in and out of rooms. It wasn’t until they tried to handcuff me that they saw the gashes and realized the blood was mine.

The emergency room doctors stitched me up and pumped me full of antibiotics. They gave me a tetanus shot that hurt worse than the damn rusty knife had. In the meantime, the cops calmed down the neighbor and assured him the bald, bloody, tattooed stranger he’d seen on the balcony had not actually killed anybody. Then the cops tried to figure out who the bald, bloody, tattooed stranger actually was. I was in no shape to give them a name, real or otherwise. All they knew was I sure as hell wasn’t local.

I woke up the next morning in a starched white bed in a sterile white room. My wrist felt like it was on fire. I pulled it out from under the covers and saw the blood-stained gauze. Then I remembered what I’d done. A nurse came in, escorted by a
burly orderly. She took my temperature, changed my bandages, made me swallow some pills, then asked me if I felt like eating. I said sure. She asked me for my name, and, without thinking, I gave her my real one. She asked for my address; I gave her the only one I could remember: Tree Street.

“Can I leave? Really, I’m feeling okay. Just a little sore,” I said. “I’ve got people waiting for me.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s a seventy-two hour hold.”

“For this little cut? Seriously, it doesn’t even hurt.”

“I’m glad,” she said, smiling gently at me. “But it’s not the cut so much as why you cut yourself that we’re worried about.”

That’s when it hit me: Toto, we ain’t in Kansas anymore.

“Where am I?” I asked, knowing I did not want to hear the answer.

“You’re at the Catherine Hamilton Center, sweetie,” the nurse said.

Later that day, another patient confirmed that I really was where I feared I was. “Most folks around here call it Crazy Cate’s,” he said.

They didn’t pump me for much information that first day. The second day, they must have pumped me full of drugs, because I played along. Taking all those quizzes, I felt like I was back in school. I guess I must’ve flunked, because nobody was talking about letting me go early.

At my big meeting with the head shrink, he shared the results of my tests-I was alcoholic and depressed. No shit, Freud – they brought me in drunk off my ass with slashed wrists. It’s what he said next that made me lose my mind.

“We’ve asked the police to help locate your mother.”

“You called the cops on me?”

“There’s no reason for you to become agitated, Frank,” he said in his annoying shrink voice. “The police only want to help you. They brought you to the emergency room, remember?”

“I don’t have fucking amnesia. They brought me in. I didn’t hurt nobody. Why are you calling the fucking cops?”

“Because you hurt yourself. The police aren’t pursuing this as a criminal matter. They’re simply trying to help us locate your mother. They’re working with the Philadelphia police.”

“The Philly cops?” I panicked. When I shot up out of the chair, the doc looked like maybe he was panicking a little bit, too, even though he still didn’t have a fucking clue about who he was talking to. If that doc had known all the shit I’d done, he wouldn’t have come into that room alone with me. Nobody knew except me, some skinheads, and, I feared, the Philadelphia police.

“Please try to relax. Everyone is trying to help you. You told us you were from Philadelphia. Isn’t that accurate?” He flipped frantically through my file. I hadn’t been there forty-eight hours, but the thing was already close to two inches thick from all those stupid tests. “Here it is. Tree Street for your mother, right?”

“Yes.” I sunk back into the chair.

“We haven’t been able to get an answer by telephone. The police will dispatch an officer to your mother’s home. It’s okay, Frank,” he said. “It will speed the process along. This way, you’ll be reunited with your family sooner.”

Great, just fucking great. If I had as many warrants out on me as I should’ve had, I was totally screwed. The Philly cops weren’t going to call my mom. They were going to have the Terre Haute cops arrest me.

“Am I allowed to make phone calls?” I asked.

“Of course. This is a hospital, not a jail.”

“Not yet,” I thought.

“I want to see if maybe I can reach my grandparents,” I lied.

 

I PEERED OUT the small safety-glass window of my room into the shadowy parking lot two stories below. “Hurry the fuck up, guys,” I thought. I distracted myself with a freshly sharpened pencil. What a stupid thing to give to a guy who’d stabbed himself in the wrist. But who was I to set psych ward policy? I doodled a few swastikas on some notebook paper left over from one of my evaluations. Then I pulled out a clean sheet and scrawled,
“Sorry. You were going to put me in jail instead of help. Thanks, Doc. P.S. Just another problem for me.”

Moments later, I heard the muffled but familiar cadence of combat boots marching up the driveway. I wrapped myself in a bedsheet just as a hail of bricks spider-webbed the glass. I screwed my eyes shut and crashed through the remnants of the window, dropping nearly twenty feet to the ground below. The two overweight orderlies who came thundering outside looked like they were going to shit themselves when they finally realized what was going on. I guess they didn’t know whether to chase me or call the cops, so they just stood there wide-eyed while I sprinted past them. Those poor guys had spent their careers babysitting neurotic housewives and high school bulimics -lucky for me, nobody’d ever trained them on the finer points of locking down a neo-Nazi skinhead.

In Springfield, a girl with ember eyes and olive-oil skin tended my wounds. Jessica didn’t treat me like a boy who’d tried to check himself out for good; she treated me like a man who’d broken free. At first, I loved her just for that. Then I fell in love with her.