Autobiography of a Recovering Skinhead (22 page)

My first trip out to the yard at Big Muddy, I had my eyes peeled for Aryans of any stripe. There were little packs of white
inmates lolling around in different areas, but I knew not all of them could be trusted. Some would be Simon City Royals. The last thing I needed was to have the Aryan Brotherhood’s first impression being me talking to a Folk gang. I scanned ink to get my bearings, looking for the blood-drop cross of the Klan, the shamrock brand of the Brotherhood, or at the very least, Harley Davidson logos.

The Aryan Nationalists and the bikers were so tight inside Big Muddy that I don’t think they even knew who was who for certain. They were like an old married couple that’s been together so long they start looking alike. The head of the bikers was a rabid but unaffiliated racist who went by the nickname Peaches, and the boss of the Aryan Nationalists was a biker named Digger.

When it came to black market business, Peaches called the shots because he had unbelievable connections on the outside and the highest tolerance for pain of any human I’ve ever met. Peaches was one of those dudes like my dad whose attitude made his body seem a lot bigger than it was. But his attitude hadn’t helped much when he took a bad tackle playing football in the yard. His shoulder snapped. From what I heard, he didn’t even flinch. Then he turned the injury into the asset that let him corner the market at Big Muddy. Every week, when his old lady came to visit, she tucked drug orders into his cast. And every week, after his old lady left, his boys yanked that cast off his fractured shoulder to free the drugs, then they crammed him back into it. Needless to say, the shoulder never healed, so the cast never came off, not on doctor’s orders; it only came off on Peaches’ orders every week so his shipments could be delivered.

Digger didn’t share Peaches’ tough-guy reputation, but he had a lot of power because he had rank: supposedly, he’d actually been a sergeant-at-arms with the real Aryan Nations before getting sent up.

Ninety-nine percent of the time, Peaches and Digger called the shots on the day-in-day-out life of ninety-nine percent of
the white inmates at Big Muddy. But they didn’t call the shots for the other one percent. And whenever all hell broke loose, they let that one percent call all the shots. Anytime there was big trouble brewing, Big Muddy’s small Aryan Brotherhood contingent took over. I was never officially introduced to most of them, so I can’t say for sure, but Digger said there were seven or eight actual members of the Aryan Brotherhood at Big Muddy. Seven or eight’s more than enough, especially when they’ve got a couple dozen Aryan Nationalists standing to their right and a couple hundred bikers lined up on their left.

As I made my way toward the white end of the yard, a voice called out, “There’s our boy!”

It was Digger, head of the Aryan Nationalists. As Scooter had promised, he’d heard about me already. Digger made the rounds of introducing me to the twenty or so white supremacists under his command. He always opened with, “This is the kid with the TV show.” After I’d been introduced to all the Aryans, Digger parted the nearby sea of bikers with his enormous girth and formally presented me to Peaches.

“Anything you need, anything you want, all you do is ask me,” Peaches said. He stroked his ZZ Top beard, nodded toward the Aryan Brotherhood pack standing a short distance away, and added, “You ain’t ever alone in here.”

For several weeks, I split my time at Big Muddy between playing football with some of the younger bikers and explaining to my Aryan brothers exactly what in the hell it was that Aryans actually believed. Turned out, a lot of those guys hadn’t really been “in” the movement before getting sent up. They had never been to rallies or meetings or had open access to a Klan library. They were racists, but they didn’t know much about the history and theories of the white supremacy movement. So I gave daily mini-sermons on Identity and earned a lot of respect from my congregation on the bleachers in Big Muddy’s yard.

I didn’t spend all my time with the Aryans, or even with other whites. I’d gotten totally hooked on Spades in the Sangamon
County Jail, so I’d throw cards with anybody up for a game. Before long, I was the regular partner of an old Vice Lord who said I cheated better than any white boy he’d ever met. None of the white guys, not even the Aryan Nationalists, minded that I played cards with the Vice Lords. Sometimes the enemy of my enemy is my card partner.

And no brand of Aryan got bent out of shape when I aimed a three-way phone scam at the Latin King market. In those days, the hot new commodity in telecommunications was three-way calling, and it was hotter than a red poker for inmates. If a prisoner called someone on the outside collect, and they had three-way, then that person could use their other line to link to somebody else. I used a Springfield skinhead’s three-way to call people who wouldn’t accept collect calls from me, like my mother. Another reason inmates wanted three-way access: the third number didn’t register on the prison log.

I guess none of the Latin Kings at Big Muddy knew anybody with three-way calling, because once word got around that I was pulling it off, instead of copying my system, they became my clients. One afternoon, I set up a safe line for a King called Slick Rick.

“ What do I owe you?” he asked when he was done.

“First one’s on me.”

“You’re good shit.” Rick shook my hand. Then he added, “I won’t forget this. I’ll hook you up.”

Slick Rick showed up in my cell that same evening with a joint the size of a Cuban cigar. Even on the outside, I couldn’t have bought incense strong enough to mask the fumes of that mongo doobie. I got so high I went completely stupid. I wandered out onto the tier, where I ran into the lieutenant of the guards, who was sniffing around like a bloodhound. Nothing happened that night. But the next morning I got a form in the mail telling me to report to the Internal Affairs Office the following day. There was a check in the box next to “urine test.” I ran to find
Peaches, figuring the biggest dealer in the yard was my best source for advice.

“How hot are you?” he asked.

“I think I’m still fucking stoned.”

“Tell them you won’t piss. If they give you any shit about it, tell them you got religious reasons. Worst they’ll do is throw you in the hole for a while for bullshitting them, but they can’t make you pee.”

I was still so stoned I figured that since I was going to get busted anyhow for refusing the test, I may as well get completely freaking polluted. I smoked a pinner I had stashed in my cell. Then I visited one of the bikers who brewed hooch.

I was blind drunk when I staggered home.

The damn Internal Affairs Office wouldn’t stop spinning the next morning. I was holding onto my chair for dear life, reeking of booze and pot, when the IA officer asked me politely to pee into a cup.

“My religion forbids me.”

A couple guards marched me to my cell to pack up my stuff, then they moved me into segregation, “seg,” the hole, solitary confinement. It didn’t matter what they called it, I’d been there before. I’d spent my first two months in Sangamon County Jail in solitary. Hell, I’d spent the better part of three years in solitary on Tree Street.

It was the first time I’d really felt incarcerated since entering prison, because prison was recess compared to county jail. Unlike jails, prisons had yards, big yards, with basketball courts, even football fields. In Graham and Big Muddy, I got at least three trips to the yard every day. When I wasn’t outside, I had the run of all the cell blocks in my building. I had junk food from the commissary and all the pot and hooch I could want, thanks to the bikers and my phone scam clientele.

In the hole, all I had at first was a bastard of a hangover and a bad case of
déjà vu
. Then a guard came by with a library cart and told me to pick out a book. I chose Stephen King’s
Pet Sematary
because I’d seen the movie. I read the first couple of pages, then tossed it aside and fell asleep. A few hours later, another cart rattling down the aisle awakened me. The small wire cage in my solid steel door opened, and a food tray appeared.

“You need anything?”

That wasn’t a question a guard would ask. I bent over so I could peek out through the cage. From my odd angle, I couldn’t see the face of the inmate-trustee delivering my rations, only the small blackish-green shamrock tattooed on his hand.

“I’m okay,” I replied.

He asked the same question every day. After two weeks in segregation, I finally replied, “I’ll take whatever youse got. I just gotta lose reality.”

The next morning my breakfast arrived with a side order of yellow pills. I didn’t know what they were, and I didn’t really care, so long as they knocked me out. I swallowed them all.

I bugged out for two straight days. I hadn’t made it past page ten of
Pet Sematary
in two weeks, but on those pills, I sped through to the end within hours. That’s not a book you want to read when you’re already seeing things. I spent the next twenty hours or so completely convinced that Gage, the creepy kid from the book, was hiding under my mattress.

Once I got past the worst of the crazies, I had sense enough to try to work whatever I’d taken out of my system. I had nowhere to run to, so I did push-ups. Thousands of push-ups. So fucking many push-ups I think I permanently altered my metabolism.

I still hadn’t slept, but I was back in my right mind by the second night when my delivery man stopped by again.

“What was that?” I asked.

“Yellowjackets.” That explained a lot.

“I’m in the hole, and you gave me speed?”

The day before my thirty-day stint in solitary came to an end, I was informed that I was being transferred. They never tell
you where you’re going or why, only that you are. The Gaylord next door told me not to sweat it.

“It don’t matter where they send you,” he promised. “If you’re getting deliveries in here, you’re gold anywhere there’s barbed wire.”

EVERYBODY HAD WARNED ME ABOUT MENARD. THE SPADES players in the Sangamon County Jail. My first Gaylord cellie at Graham. The Aryan Nationalists and bikers at Big Muddy. Everybody talked about Menard in lowered voices, like they were at a funeral. But nothing anybody had said prepared me for how I felt as the bus pulled through those gates. There were thousands of guys warehoused inside, but only one mattered, and we all knew it. I tried not to think about him as the bus wound around the yard. I tried to focus on the buildings, the seemingly endless rows of modular cell blocks that descend the cliffs of the Mississippi River like stepping stones into hell, the towering limestone fortress of a main block that has haunted the nightmares of killers for more than a century. Nothing could have prepared me for how I felt when the guards marched me into the madman’s castle in shackles. I was in his house now. Somewhere inside that tomb they call a prison, John Wayne Gacy was sitting on death row, waiting for his final trip to the execution chamber. But at that very moment, he was walking freely inside his cell, and I was the one in chains.

“How fucking rotten do people think I am?” I thought.

I never worried that Gacy was going to get me. It wasn’t like that at all. I never even saw the dude. Nobody ever saw him except the guards. Even if the guards had lost their minds one day and turned him loose in the yard, it wouldn’t have mattered. Gacy wouldn’t have stood a chance man-to-man with any other
inmate in the place. By then, he was nothing but a ball of blubber. Gacy never had been a fighter; he was just a fucking freak who had gotten more than thirty dudes so drunk and drugged they couldn’t fight him off when he fucked them or when he dismembered them. It wasn’t Gacy himself that messed with my head: it was the idea of being in Gacy’s prison. “People think I belong here with him,” I realized as I clanked along in my chains between the guards. “Normal people, nice people, regular people, look at me and think, ‘Society is a better place if that no-good Frankie Meeink is locked up with John Wayne Gacy.’”

I could have handled that, but then this other thought flashed across my mind: they think I belong here because I almost killed that kid. It took a few seconds for the full effect to slam into me. When it did, it felt like a bomb exploded inside my chest. I thought I was having a heart attack.

“Oh my God,” I thought. “I almost fucking killed that kid.”

Menard broke the spell I’d been under since the day of my arrest, maybe since the day I became a skinhead. Menard kicked my ass back to reality.

Reality? I had almost killed that closet Sharpie in Springfield. Reality? I had almost killed a lot of people. As the guards led me toward my cell, I realized, “I belong here.”

Nothing in the fucking world could have prepared me for that.

 

I DIDN’T DO the kind of God-awful time a lot of poor bastards do in Menard. I wasn’t in the main block, where they kept Gacy and the other psychos; I was “on the hill,” with the run-of-the-mill drug dealers, kidnappers, arsonists, rapists, and murderers. I got a nod from a member of the Brotherhood my first day. A couple weeks later, I got told to get back on the bus. As it turned out, Menard had only been a pit stop for me, but nobody bothered to tell me that. Inside the Illinois Department of Corrections, I never knew how long I was going to be anywhere or why I sometimes got told to get on the bus. I spent every waking minute
I was in Menard believing I was going to be in that hellhole for the remainder of my sentence. It was my shortest stay anywhere during my whole stint behind bars, but it was the one that got my attention.

I didn’t let on to anybody that I’d snapped a little at Menard, or that my mini-breakdown had changed me a little. For the first time since I’d brutalized that Sharpie, I stopped being pissed at him for turning on me. A couple of times, I let myself get close to wondering if he was okay. That’s the kind of squishy emotion that can make you a target in prison. Prison is a cage full of predators, and predators prey on the weak. I hardened my shell to compensate.