Autobiography of a Recovering Skinhead (38 page)

The first four times, I came bounding out of rehab promising, “I’ll never drink or drug again.” Everybody who believed me or believed in me got their hearts broken. Addicts are full of “I’ll
never.” An addict’s life is an unbroken chain of broken promises. Real recovery begins with admitting that. I’d always promised myself that this time would be different. I’d always believed myself. I’d always broken my own heart.

The gun was still lying on the table when Nina got to my dad’s house. She couldn’t take her eyes off it. Neither could I.

I’d been one flick of the finger away from blowing my brains out of my skull. My kids had been one twitch on the trigger away from living the rest of their lives wondering, “Why did daddy choose death over me?”

There’s only one “I’ll never” I still trust. I’ll never forget the taste of that gun. It lingered in my mouth as Nina drove me to a rehab center. It lingered when I begged a counselor to admit me. It lingered when I confessed to Valerie that I’d almost taken my life. It lingers still. It’s my only hope. My memory of rock bottom is the only thing standing between me and hell. I am alive today only because I almost took my own life that night. The lingering taste of that gun reminds me that I chose to live.

But not the way I had been living. For the first time, I entered rehab sincerely admitting, “I really am powerless over booze and drugs.” For the first time since I was awaiting trial in 1993, I dropped to my knees and prayed with all my heart, “God, please fucking help me!” For the first time ever, I let go of the lie that I could do it my way, on my own. I handed my life over to God.

I started working on this book a month later. I did my fourth step for real. I didn’t just flash through my memory, picking and choosing the parts I could deal with. I actually revisited my past, all of it. In October, 2005, I drove to Terre Haute, Indiana to find Crazy Cate’s. The staff couldn’t believe that the skinhead who’d jumped out the window nearly fifteen years earlier had finally returned. They showed me the note I left: “PS Just another problem for me.”

When I wrote that note, I was an alcoholic, suicidal, homeless seventeen-year -old skinhead on the run from the cops. The last thing I needed was another problem. So I escaped. Holding
that note again at age thirty, I realized something: I’d spent my life trying to escape my problems. I’d tried to escape by hiding, by running, by leaving. I’d tried to escape by denying, by lying, by conniving. I’d tried to escape by hating, by drinking, by drugging. And every fucking time I tried to escape from my problems, all I’d done was add a new one to the list.

I have had more than a few problems. In fact, it would be fair to say I’ve had more than my fair share of problems. Some were forced on me; most I brought on myself. But you know what? They were all
just
problems. And I’ve survived every damn one of them.

I give God full credit for that. In hindsight, I look back on my life and see all the crazy coincidences, all the once-in-a-lifetime moments that happened at the right time to save me. I can’t write it all off to luck; no one is that lucky.

God has taken mercy I don’t deserve on me, mercy I never showed my victims. Their eyes still haunt me. I can’t remember their faces, but I cannot forget the desperation in their eyes. I pray to God every day to give them peace. And I pray to God never to erase their pain from my memory. I can’t make direct amends to most of the people I so brutally attacked during my skinhead years because I never knew their names. But they are in my heart now when I speak out against hatred. They are the reason I will never stop speaking out against hatred.

I’ve done my best to make amends to the other people I’ve hurt, the people who love me or tried to before I drove them away. I’ve been apologizing to Valerie since the day I met her. I’ve been apologizing to my kids since the day they were born. What I understand now, though, is that apologies only mean something if you stop doing the thing you’re apologizing for. Otherwise, “I’m sorry” is as empty as the promise “I’ll never.”

I’m sorry I can’t end this book happy by promising I’ll never fuck up again. I’ve told the truth about everything else, so why risk lying now? The truth is, odds are I will fuck up again. I am an alcoholic-addict. Today I’m in recovery, but there’s no such
thing as being “recovered.” It took me years to get that through my skull; it took almost blowing my brains out. I have finally learned to accept that I will live each day of the rest of my life either “in recovery” or in hell. For me, there are no other options. Just one choice, one life-or-death choice, to make every single day, one day at a time.

On May 17, 2006, I chose to return to the Badlands. A friend and I drove around for hours, looping back through the intersection of Sommerset and Kensington at least two dozen times. The dealers must’ve thought we were either the choosiest buyers in the history of heroin or the dumbest undercover cops in the city. As we circled the dealers, the junkies, the crack whores, the needle peddlers, and all the other lost souls who haunt the Badlands, I gave my friend, a college professor, a private lecture on how I used to buy, cook, and shoot heroin.

Late that afternoon, I leaned against a wall of windows inside a grade school. Play practice was running late, really late. It could’ve run until midnight for all I cared, because I wasn’t going to leave that spot. Finally, the theatre door burst open.

“Dad!” Matt shouted when he saw me. I wrapped my arms around him.

Someday, when he’s a lot older, I’m going to tell my son the whole story of the thirty-one-year trip I took to surprise him at school. That afternoon, though, all my boy needed to hear was the only thing I wanted to say.

“I love you.”

KEVIN, THE SKINHEAD FRANK TUTORED IN IDENTITY THEOLOGY in a Virginia Beach hotel room, later faced fifty years in a federal penitentiary for a string of bank robberies he committed as part of the Aryan Republican Army (ARA). Kevin turned state’s evidence in the case and has since been released. Some researchers believe that the ARA may have funneled money from their heists to Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, the Oklahoma City bombers.

Louie Lacinzi is a very successful restaurateur on the East Coast.

Jimmy and Shawn live near each other in a rural area of Pennsylvania. Frank visited Shawn once after leaving the movement; they did not discuss their skinhead years. Frank has not seen or heard from Jimmy since 1994.

Less than a dozen of the roughly thirty young men affiliated with Second and Porter in the mid-1990s still live in South Philly. Several are serving time in prison; more than half are dead. Vicey, Muffin Ass, and Earbow are among the living.

Nanny and Pop enjoyed several years of retirement on the Jersey Shore before Nanny passed away in 2009.

Uncle Dave works for an investment firm. Frank keeps in regular touch with him and the rest of the Bertones.

In recent years, Frank has had the opportunity finally to get to know his half-sister, the child his dad fathered in the early 1980s. Raised by her mother, the young woman holds multiple advanced degrees and works at a scientific research facility.

Frank’s dad and stepmother still live in Southwest Philadelphia. Crazy Cha- Cha Chacinzi lived with them until 2006, when he fell in love and moved in with a girlfriend. As it has been for more than thirty years, though, the two men spend most nights together at their favorite bar with the other surviving 68th and Buist boys.

In the spring of 2007, in a dispute over a drug deal, Frank’s cousin Jerry beat John severely, then began to strangle him. Just before John lost consciousness, Jerry released his neck with the words, “You ain’t worth going to prison over.” Since then, Jerry quit dealing and entered a recovery program. He is now clean and sober; he works for the rehab center where he was treated.

Frank’s mom filed for divorce from John in 2007. She called Frank to apologize for not doing it earlier and started methadone therapy in an attempt to break her addiction to Oxycontin. Before the divorce could be finalized, John went missing. After several weeks of searching, Margaret discovered him listed as a “John Doe” in a city morgue. It is believed he suffered a heart attack.

At age seventeen, Frank’s half-sister, Kirsten, had a baby with a nineteen year -old Italian boy. She and her child live with Margaret just a few blocks from Tree Street. The Tree Street rowhouse has been condemned by the City of Philadelphia.

Frank’s half-sister, Hayley, moved in with Frank and Valerie in 2008 and began attending college.

Jessica and Riley still live in Illinois and remain close to Riley’s “uncles.” Riley visits her father during school vacations. Much to the chagrin of the pretty teenager, Frank informs all her male friends that he is both overprotective and an ex-con.

Maria and Muffin Ass dated for several years before parting ways; he never went through with his plan to adopt Jake. In time, Maria met and married a nice man from New Jersey. In 2006, she let Jake spend part of his summer vacation with his father. Frank took Jake to a Bertone family reunion, where he finally was able to introduce Nanny and Pop to their oldest great-grandson.

Nina finished college and is pursuing a masters degree in
disaster medicine and management. Although she no longer counts worms for a living, on weekends Nina performs with a variety arts troupe as a bug eater. Matt now lives full time with Frank and Valerie. Nina visits them often.

Valerie continues to enjoy a successful career as a systems analyst for a major financial firm. She and Frank welcomed the arrival of a baby girl in 2009.

In 2007, Frank Meeink accepted the position of Marketing Coordinator for the American Hockey League team the Iowa Stars, the affiliate of the National Hockey League’s Dallas Stars. In 2008, when the team changed its name to the Iowa Chops and affiliated with the NHL’s Anaheim Ducks, Frank was promoted to Director of Fan Development. In 2009, he resigned his full-time front office job and moved into a support position for the coaching staff, which allowed him to be closer to the ice and, more impor – tantly, closer to his infant daughter. During business hours, Frank is her stay-at-home dad while Valerie is away at the office.

The Stars and later the Chops took over sponsorship of Harmony Through Hockey, with Frank serving as head coach of the program. Frank also regularly plays hockey on a local men’s league. One season, he was part of a line known by the nickname, “The Legal System.” The line consisted of a police officer, an attorney, and Frankie.

Frank still tours on the national lecture circuit. Following one presentation, he thought he recognized a man standing in a bar-restaurant. Frank approached and asked, “So, youse ever been kidnapped?” The “closet Sharpie” Frank attacked in Springfield replied, “ Dude, I saw you on MTV!” Frank apologized for what he had done to the young man in 1992.

In March 2009, Frank was invited to speak at the PODER Reconciliation Forum; other speakers on the roster included Archbishop Desmond Tutu and former Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev. No matter where his travels take him, Frank makes his bed every morning, even in comped hotel rooms. He is staying clean and sober one day at a time.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

THE TERM “SKINHEAD” CAME INTO COMMON USE IN BRITAIN in the late 1960s. “Skinheads” referred to those young men, also known as “hard mods,” who shaved their heads and donned classic workers’ attire in protest of the androgynous style trends and flagrant drug use popularized by “soft mods” like Mick Jagger. Although notoriously violent, Britain’s original skinheads were not defined by racism; rather, working-class pride and anti-elite sentiment bonded skinhead crews, in some cases even across race lines.

Then, in the late 1970s, Ian Stuart, the lead singer of the legendary hard-mod band, Skrewdriver, publicly affiliated himself with the National Front, a neo-Nazi organization. The anti-elite anthems Stuart had bellowed for years were replaced by aggressively racist lyrics. Stuart’s transformation split Britain’s skinhead subculture: while many skinheads followed their musical leader into the white supremacy movement, others turned on Stuart and became adamantly anti-racist.

The skinhead scene was sharply divided into two camps by the time it crossed the Atlantic Ocean in the 1980s. For years, neo-Nazi skinheads and Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice, a.k.a. SHARPs, battled for turf in major US cities. Bolstered by support from the adult white supremacy movement, neo-Nazi skinhead crews grew rapidly. By the late 1980s, several thousand young men had shaved their heads and dressed themselves in the classic look of the British hard mods. They laced their Doc
Marten boots in red to symbolize both the purity of the Aryan blood line for which they fought and the minority, or “mud,” blood they had spilled.

Frank Meeink was only fourteen years old in 1989 when members of a neo-Nazi skinhead crew ritually shaved his head and presented him with a pair of red-laced Doc Marten boots. In the years that followed, Frank emerged as one of the most notoriously violent racist skinheads in America. Today, he is one of the most inspiring anti-racism advocates in the country.

Autobiography of a Recovering Skinhead
is Frank’s story, a story at once poignant and painful, utterly unique and tragically typical. Although the white supremacy movement and American youth culture both have changed since Frank’s years as a teenage skinhead, the social and emotional forces that originally drove him to hate are identical to those that influence too many young people still today, whether they express their hatred by joining a gang or by opening fire inside a school. As such, Frank’s story offers valuable insights into why some people hate, how the dynamics of hatred can be interrupted, and, of course, great hope that others can transform their lives just as Frank has.