Autobiography of a Recovering Skinhead (31 page)

I went out every night, with or without Louie. Sometimes I went down to Second and Porter so I could make money on the side while I got fucked up. Other nights, I just went across the street to a neighborhood dive. One evening, I left the bar to make a run down South Street. I wasn’t looking for anybody in particular, just a change of scenery. I ran into an ex-SHARP who’d been my sworn enemy back in the day. One look at his outfit, though, and I knew he wasn’t a Sharpie anymore. Of course, he could tell I wasn’t a Nazi anymore, either. So we started shooting the shit about how we’d both changed and what had happened to everybody else who used to haunt South Street. We were gossiping like a couple old ladies, when he said, “I still can’t believe Brian killed himself.”

“Brian who?”

“Your Brian. Brian Stugen.”

The shock must’ve registered on my face, because he said, “You knew, right?”

“Yeah,” I lied, ashamed of the truth. I fought back tears and said, “I haven’t heard the details, though.”

Stug hung himself. He’d been so enormous during our days with the terror squad that I couldn’t imagine a rope strong enough to hold his weight without snapping before his neck did. But according to the former SHARP, Stug was so strung out on
heroin, he was nothing but skin, bones, and wasted veins by the time he committed suicide.

For the second time in less than a year, Nina held me together as the pain washed over me. I laid my head on her stomach and prayed that our child would never feel the kind of pain Stug felt before he hung himself, the kind of pain Matt felt before he shot himself, the kind of pain I felt before I grabbed that rusty knife in Terre Haute. “It’ll be okay,” I whispered to the baby inside Nina’s belly.

Nina was getting close to her due date when we realized there was no way both of us and a baby were going to fit in that tiny studio in University City. I found us a new place in Clifton Heights. If the guys from Strike Force had stopped in for a visit, they would’ve stroked out. Nina and me were the only white people in the entire complex.

I was still unpacking when Nina called me to meet her at the hospital. During a routine checkup, the doctor realized she’d developed toxemia; he decided to induce labor. I ran for the nearest bus. For once I was going to be there when one of my kids was born.

When I stepped onto the labor ward, there in the middle of the hallway were Nanny and Pop, all my Bertone aunts and uncles and even some of my cousins. I hadn’t seen most of them since I’d gotten home from prison. I’d been too ashamed. They were all so good, so successful, so normal. And I was like my dad, a black sheep. But those were my issues, not theirs. None of that mattered to the Bertones; all that mattered was having me back. They rushed me with hugs and kisses and “How have you been?” and “Where have you been?” and “We’ve missed you so much” and “We love you.” Then somebody asked, “How did you know to come down?”

After a few confusing minutes, we all finally realized what was going on. My aunt was having a baby down the hall from where Nina was having our baby. Nina met the entire Bertone clan between contractions. Needless to say, Nanny and Pop were nice
as could be, but a little overwhelmed that they were meeting my girlfriend for the first time while she was giving birth to their great-grandson.

Nina and I named our son Matthew Francis. Like me, he was named after his father and a ghost. Nanny and Pop didn’t know the significance of my son’s first name, but they were thrilled by his middle name. Pop beamed as he held his little namesake. Matt was the first of Nanny and Pop’s great-grandchildren they’d actually met. They’d only seen pictures of Riley. They didn’t know Jake existed. Watching them fuss over little Matt, I didn’t have the heart to tell them he wasn’t their first great-grandson.

For a high school senior and an addict, Nina and I did all right by our newborn son. We kept things as normal as possible at home. Matt was too little, of course, to realize his mommy was doing homework between feedings. And even at seventeen, Nina wasn’t quite hardcore enough to realize how many drugs daddy was doing when mommy wasn’t looking.

Being with Matt every day made me miss Riley so bad I couldn’t stand it. So early that summer, after Nina finished school, we dropped Matt off with my mom and boarded a bus for a three-day excursion to Illinois. Jessica was great to both of us, and Riley was like heaven. I didn’t have much money to spare, but with Nina’s blessing I gave Jessica the little bit I had.

On the long ride back to Philly, Nina and I couldn’t wait to get to Matt. Partly, we just missed him, but partly we were worried. The rowhouse on Tree Street wasn’t exactly Romper Room. But my mom had been our only option: at only three months, our son was too young to make the long trip. But I needed to see my daughter. And Nina needed to meet my daughter, because it was looking more and more like Nina would soon be Riley’s stepmom.

When we walked in the front door, the rowhouse was a disaster. Although my mom swore she and John had been perfect grandparents, evidence of their imperfections was scattered around the room: empty beer bottles on the coffee table,
stubbed-out joints in the ashtrays. But Matt was okay. He was upstairs sleeping, wearing a clean diaper and clean jammies, with Kirsten and Hayley playing house nearby. Still, I was furious. How dare they get fucked up when they were supposed to be looking after my son? At that point, I couldn’t see that I was doing the exact same thing.

NO MATTER HOW MANY TIMES I SCREWED UP, BARRY Morrison never wavered in his belief that I could make a difference if I kept sharing my story. Barry continued to arrange speaking engagements for me during the crazy year when I was juggling Maria and Nina and the birth of my two sons. By the time Matt was born in 1997, I was speaking for the ADL as often as once a week.

Driving back to Philly after one of my speaking engagements, I got the best idea of my life. Mike Boni, a pretty big-time lawyer associated with the ADL, was my chauffeur that evening. Mike felt like a brother to me-an older brother succeeding in a world I could barely imagine, but still a brother. We talked sports nonstop. That a guy like Mike Boni seemed to think I was worth talking to gave me hope that maybe I could make good one day. I think that’s probably why I talked about my big idea with him in the car that night instead of letting it float out the window into the darkness.

The idea was simple: take black kids and white kids from different parts of Philly, kids who’d otherwise grow up to hate each other, and put them in the one place where they’d have to work together to make it out. Where is that place? Center ice.

The more speeches I’d given, the more I’d realized that my real turning point had been playing football on that prison league. If it weren’t for being trapped in prison with no escape
other than that league, I never would’ve spoken to guys like Jello and Little G, let alone come to think of them as friends.

“I think maybe we could do the same thing with hockey,” I said to Mike.

“ Why hockey?”

“Because the key to making it work is the kids can’t know how to skate when they join up. With football or baseball, if you’re a fast runner or good with a ball, you’ve got an edge before you even start. But in hockey, none of that matters if you don’t know how to stand up on skates.” I got so excited I was practically screaming in Mike’s ear. “Just think about it. We could take the shit that keeps them different and erase it with the one thing they’d have in common. No matter what color they are, they’re all going to be landing on their asses. Even ice, man, even fucking ice.”

Mike said, “We’ve got to talk to Barry about this.”

Barry Morrison loved it. He called one of his contacts at the Philadelphia Flyers, and they loved it, too. The next thing I knew, Ed Snider-
the
Ed Snider, owner of the Flyers-gave the green light to my idea, Harmony Through Hockey. Barry called Mike and me in to go over the details. The ADL would provide the educational materials and the volunteers. The Flyers would supply the equipment and most of the publicity. The City Department of Recreation would let us use one of their rinks, more if it took off.

“Are you shitting me?” I asked Barry.

“No,” he replied. “There is one other thing we need to discuss, though.”

I braced myself, figuring it had to be bad news.

“The Flyers are hoping you’ll be the head coach for the program.”

That moment may be the closest to heaven I ever get. The Philadelphia Flyers wanted me. Me! The kid who used to spend months stealing supplies to build forts tall enough that he could climb up to catch a glimpse of their arena. The kid who once stole a Pathmark shopping cart and sunk it halfway into a pond
so when the water froze he’d have a place to practice his slapshots. The kid who took nails to the face and got checked out into parking lots just so he could pretend he was one of the Broad Street Bullies. The Philadelphia Flyers wanted me!

Several months before the league’s first season was set to start, I went to Barry’s office and said, “We’ve got a problem.” I pointed to my neck. It had dawned on me the night before when I saw myself as I passed a mirror. How could I stand in front of little kids with a swastika on my neck and expect them to believe me when I said it’s bad to hate? I did it all the time when I spoke for the ADL, but except for that first group of seventh- graders, those audiences were older. Still, one of the most frequent questions I got was, “If you’re no longer a skinhead, why do you still have those tattoos?” I always wanted to say, “Because they ain’t lick-ons out of a Cracker Jack box.” But the truth was that even real tattoos can be removed. And so long as there was a swastika on my neck and the word “skinhead” on my knuckles, a lot of people doubted I’d really changed.

“Let me think about it,” Barry said.

He called a few days later with an answer to my problem. Barry had explained my situation to other ADL people, and he’d found a lady doctor who’d lost family in the Holocaust. When Barry told her about my tattoos and my life, she agreed to see me and see what could be done.

“You got any idea what that laser shit costs? I can’t afford that.”

“We’ve never been able to compensate you much for the times you’ve spoken for the ADL,” Barry said in his gentle way. “But this we can help you with. It’s not going to cost you anything.”

Except a little pain. Make that a lot of pain. Getting tattoos hurts; getting rid of tattoos hurts like fucking hell. Once a month for nearly a year, I laid on a table in the doctor’s office, clenching my teeth for more than an hour while she zapped away on me. Each flash of the laser bit a few more millimeters off the five-inch circle swastika on my neck. Every time the doc fired
the gun, another piece of my past popped like a pimple and shot inky, bloody slime onto the towels draped around me. The swastika was the worst going on, and it was the worst coming off – that tattoo alone took half a dozen rounds with the laser, but by the time I skated onto the ice for the first Harmony Through Hockey practice, only a shadow of Nazism lingered on my neck.

My gig with Harmony Through Hockey was a fantasy come to life. I scored a free pass to come and go in the Flyers’ front offices. I got free ice time every day at the West Oak Lane rink. The building wasn’t well maintained, but the ice was. More importantly, I got to spend every afternoon hanging out with these cool little kids, talking about life and the lessons I’d learned the hard way. Some days, the Flyers sent their trainers down to the West Oak Lane rink to work with the Harmony Through Hockey kids. I wish I had pictures of the looks on the kids’ faces, and on mine, the first time those professional NHL skating coaches arrived to give us private lessons. We had the same looks when the Flyers gave us free tickets for a “field trip” to one of their games.

The ADL supported the program just as much as the Flyers did. They sent their own brand of trainers to almost every one of our practices. After the kids came off the ice, the ADL staffers and I would gather them in a circle in the locker room and have amazing heart-to-heart conversations with them. The kids opened up about how racism affected their lives. They felt safe in that locker room discussing the very thing I’d become a skinhead to avoid: their feelings. We had twenty kids, both boys and girls, in our first test-run season. Ten were black, ten were white. The only real snag we ran into was an oversight; the rink supervisor forgot to ask the kids if they knew how to skate before letting them sign up. A couple of the white kids did, and as I feared that almost blew my whole “even ice” idea. But we worked through it in the locker room conversations. It got the kids talking about how some kids got certain advantages because of what neighborhood they lived in. The kids decided as
a group that that wasn’t fair; they also decided that basketball wasn’t a “black” sport and hockey wasn’t a “white” sport. The kids learned a lot that first season, the least of which was how to play hockey.

Before the season ended, a local television show called “Philly After Midnight” asked me if I’d come on and talk about Harmony Through Hockey. I agreed, hoping the publicity would help us get more kids involved in the second season. When I walked into the studio, I thought for a second all that acid I’d dropped was finally catching up to me: I thought I was having a flashback. In a way, I was. It was the same studio where I’d stood shoulder-to-shoulder with John Cook and Louie Lacinzi a few years earlier, during the taping of a skinhead story for morning television.

The production crew already had me hooked up to a mic when they mentioned I wasn’t going to be the only guest that night. Then the host walked on the set practically arm-in-arm with a black militant professor from a local university.

“Three, two, one, and we’re live.”

If I hadn’t thought to wear my Harmony Through Hockey jersey that night, I’m not sure anybody watching would’ ve even known the name of the hockey program. The host had no intention of talking about Harmony Through Hockey and not much intention to let me speak. It was an ambush, and I walked into it as blindly as that closet Sharpie had walked into my apartment in Springfield. The professor slammed theories at me like the butt end of a shotgun. I ain’t seen a tape of that show, but how I felt that night is burned in my mind. The professor’s main point was that I was ignorant; my whole life was nothing more than a reaction to false stereotypes I held about people I didn’t even know. According to the professor, that kind of ignorance isn’t something a person could overcome; it was who I am.