Christian in his Nazi frat-boy dorm room, 1989
7
ALLEGIANCE
By the end of my freshman year of high school, I came and went as I damn well pleased. I snatched the keys and took my mom’s car out for joyrides as if I owned it, unhindered by the fact that I was still legally too young to drive. Showed no respect in my speech or demeanor toward my parents, swearing at my father, walking out of the room whenever my mother tried confronting me about it.
They had stopped making any real efforts to interfere in my life after the last time my father had tried to smack the back of my head.
I’d come home drunk, well after midnight one school night. My parents were perched at the front door waiting for me as I stumbled in.
My dad pounced on me before I was able to fully cross the threshold. “Where the hell have you been?”
I chuckled and retorted, “Where the hell have you been?”
My father’s irritation quickly intensified to anger as my reaction to his scolding manifested as an apathetic fit of laughter. I brushed him off and made my way to my bedroom. As I entered the kitchen, my father caught up to me and drew his hand back to slap my head. I may have been impaired at the time, slower in my reflexes, but I’d become conditioned to never let him fully out of my periphery when he was incensed. Before he could fully commit his swing, I turned and grabbed his arm mid-recoil and pinned the rest of his body hard against the refrigerator with my forearm. A ceramic vase with some acrylic flowers that rested atop the fridge came toppling down and crashed into pieces on the floor next to my hysterical mother.
“Don’t you ever fucking raise your hand to me again or I’ll hit you back ten times harder than you’ve ever hit me. And it won’t be a little love tap on the back of the head. Do you understand me?”
I pushed him away and continued stammering down the narrow hallway until I reached my bedroom, slamming the door hard. Immediately, I heard my mother wail in a way I’d never heard before. Now, what the hell is she screaming about, I thought.
“My God! Christian, open the door!” My father stood outside my room, crying for me to unlock the door, pounding, trying frantically to turn the knob. My mom had unfortunately been just a step behind me as she laid her hand on the doorframe to stop me from slamming it. I’d crushed her middle finger in the doorjamb and she was bleeding profusely, dripping on the ceramic floor.
“I’m sorry. But next time leave me the fuck alone,” was all I said when I opened the door and realized what had happened. Needless to say, my words did not match how I felt. I was torn up over it, but couldn’t come up with anything sincere to say to express how remorseful I really was. I was angry with my father and my unfortunate mother had borne the brunt of my attack.
My father wrapped my mom’s bloody hand in a towel and drove her to the emergency room to get stitches.
The loud ruckus woke four-year-old Buddy. He started to cry as he wiped the sleep from his eyes and emerged from his room to see the anguish on my mom’s face and the blood running down her arm.
I quickly let him into my bedroom, pulling him up into my arms to avoid the small pool of blood on the floor, and consoled him as we sat on my bed in the dark room. “Why is Mamma crying, Buddy?” he sniffled.
“Because I made a mistake, Buddy.” I couldn’t lie to him. “She’ll be okay. They’ll be back soon.”
“Okay.” He rubbed his tired eyes. “Can I sleep in here with you tonight? I’m scared.”
“Yeah, of course. Why are you scared, Buddy?” I wiped his tears with my thumb and held him close.
He was starting to doze off. “Because you smell like beer and you’re fighting with Dad.”
I kissed him on his forehead as his heavy eyelids shut.
I spent the rest of the night lying next to Buddy with a clenched chest and a lump in my throat, crying quietly inside and feeling deep regret for the pain I’d caused my mother. She never mentioned anything about the incident to me afterwards, though I could sense how hurt she was by my actions. I never found the right words to apologize to her.
My father didn’t stop giving me grief about it, but he never laid a hand on me again after that night.
Right before Marist let out for the summer, I let my parents know they’d better enroll me in a different school for my sophomore year. “I’m not going back to that mental prison.”
“Christian,” my mother whined. “Don’t call such a nice Catholic school a prison. You did just fine there and of course you’ll go back.”
“No way. They’re sheep. And you shouldn’t even want me to go back. They wasted your precious work time calling you because I skipped school one day. Bullshit.”
“It was silly for you to do that,” my mother said. “But your father and I straightened it out for you, didn’t we?”
“Straightened it out?” I said contemptuously. “What you did was lie.”
“We protected you. What did you want us to do? Let them suspend our son?” my father said.
“The point is, you lied. Exactly like they do. You didn’t straighten anything out and I don’t need you to protect me. It’s a prison, and I’m not going back. You should be glad. You won’t have to lie for me anymore.”
“Wait and see,” my mother said, trying to gently embrace me. I snapped my body back, letting her know to keep her hands off me. She backed off, adding, “By the time summer is over, you will see it’s the best school. A fine Catholic school. That’s what you deserve.”
No way was I going to waste another year in a school with teachers trying to shove their liberal propaganda and tedious religious dogma down my throat.
By now my parents knew I was becoming something else, no longer their innocent little boy, but they assumed it was a teenage phase and didn’t push back hard enough to realize it wasn’t. Had they stopped to look more carefully, they might have seen I’d substituted the attention I once longed for from them with something far more sinister.
My parents’ two-flat building had a good-sized private garden apartment that sat unrented, just accumulating boxes of clothing and old furniture. With some elbow grease and paint it would make a great little place to live. Without asking for permission, I commandeered the space. I gathered some free scrap material from the lumberyard and framed out a bedroom and living area.
Neither of my parents liked this idea, of course. My mother hated the notion I could now come and go as I pleased through a separate entrance. She wouldn’t even be able to hear the door open or close, and I could have anybody I wanted down there. But neither of my parents stood up to me. They didn’t have the courage anymore to go beyond trying to guilt me with a few forceful words.
First thing I did was have Jessica over. Tall, voluptuous Jessica with her long legs, dark eyes, and apple-red cheeks. Her full mouth and soft lips. My Nazi cheerleader girlfriend.
The first time I snuck her into my basement apartment, the two of us laughed so hard we nearly wet our pants. The place wasn’t finished yet, but we couldn’t keep our hands off each other. Nearly every night and some days during school, we took advantage of the freedom that came with my having my own place.
Late one night while we were having sex, we heard my mother snooping by the front entrance. We must have been louder than we thought. I tried to pull my jeans on with one hand and shoved Jessica, as she was getting dressed, out the window with the other, while my mom banged on the door like she was the damn FBI serving a felony warrant.
“Christian! Christian, open the door. What are you doing that takes you so long to answer me?”
The second Jessica’s foot was outside, I shut the window and zipping my pants, went to unlock the door. “What’s your problem?” I snapped. “Can’t you let me sleep?”
Suspecting something was amiss, my mother barged in and took her sweet time checking out my place. What the hell was she going to do if Jessica was in there, anyway? When was the last time I listened to her about anything
? But shit, who needed the aggravation? At most, my parents would try to force me to move back in with them. An unbearable thought that I’d never agree to anyway.
By the time my mother was satisfied that her suspicions were unfounded and I had finished laying a guilt trip on her for waking me up and always being on my back, I went out to find Jessica. She was nowhere in sight. Obviously, she’d decided to walk the three miles home in the dark by herself.
Real chivalrous of me. Especially knowing that niggers were out there everywhere just looking for a beautiful white girl like her to rape. No fucking way. I’d kill someone if they so much as looked at her. They couldn’t treat my girlfriend that way. Who did those nigger assholes think they were, anyway? Luckily nothing happened.
Jessica and I didn’t last long after that night.
I worked quickly, motivated and driven by plans beyond what any other kid, even the High Street Boys, dared to concern themselves with.
Buddy, still a stout little guy full of wonder, would come down to look around. Just like I used to follow my grandfather around when he was building something in his workshop, my chunky little five-year-old brother watched me put up the walls in my new domain. He tried to help me paint. I let him hang out, like Nonno had let me when he was working. Buddy made a mess, but so what? It’s how he’d learn. Watching his fifteen-year-old big brother would teach him all he needed to know.
Within two weeks, the place was ready. I used some of the old furniture my parents kept in storage, and decorated my walls with neon beer signs and Nazi and Confederate flags for which I’d traded my old baseball card collection at the flea market.
“Can I live here with you, Buddy?” my little brother would ask. Of course he’d want to. I was his cool older brother. He’d want to do everything I did.
“I would love that, Buddy,” I said, patting his little head, “But I’m sure Mom and Dad would really miss you if you didn’t live with them.”
“But I miss you,” he said, his voice quivering. “Why did you have to move out?”
I was hit with a bitter wave of sadness brought about by the genuine innocence in his round brown eyes. Trying to respond without letting the lump forming in my throat get the best of me, I got on one knee and hugged him tightly. “Well, there are some things that I need to do and sometimes it’s best if I do them alone.”
His bottom lip trembled. He fought back tears, wanting to be tough like me. But he wasn’t a tough kid. Even at his tender age, I’d been much tougher than him. More independent.
The lump in my throat was making it hard to talk. “Why don’t you go and see what Mamma made you for dinner?” Holding back my emotions, I tried to comfort him.
He was still a mama’s boy in many ways. Closer to her than I’d been. And why the hell wouldn’t he be? She’d actually made time for him. I shouldn’t be so mad at her, though, I thought. Maybe at my dad, either. Because of my beliefs, I’d begun to reconcile that my parents needed to work long hours when I was a little kid. Providing for the family and all that. That’s what respectable white people were supposed to do. I understood that now. And even if we didn’t get along, I was going to see they could hold on to all they’d worked so hard for.
“Hey, you’ll be right upstairs,” I told him. “You can come down any time.”
His round brown eyes lit up. “Really, Buddy?”
“Sure, Buddy.” I patted his head. “We can even come up with a secret knock.”
“Really?”
“You bet.” I held my hand up for a high five. “Now get outta here,” I said. “Go eat some dinner.”
I shut the door behind him and leaned my back up against it as I wiped a tear from my eye. Then, taking a look around, I cleared my throat and grinned. I had my Nazi frat-boy dorm room.
I turned my attention fully to skinhead activities. Marched into the Blue Island post office, filled out an application, laid down twenty bucks, and took over a vacant slot next to the now-abandoned Romantic Violence post office box. I immediately began communicating through mail with other skinheads across the country. There was no World Wide Web then, but the opportunity to build a network was there if you played it right and were willing to put in the work.
To be a leader, I knew I needed to show initiative, establish myself as an entrepreneur. Be innovative. I sorted the leaflets I’d been collecting from the older skinheads, and began photocopying them at the local convenience store, mailing them off to other skinheads with post office boxes halfway across the world. In the envelope I’d always include a handwritten note asking the recipient to pass along the literature to someone new after they’d read it, hoping to continue the chain indefinitely.
The first correspondence I sent out contained a copy of one of Clark’s earliest writings about skinheads. I clipped the article from one of WAR leader Tom Metzger’s White Aryan Resistance newsletters:
How we gnashed our teeth in misery before. Helpless with broken limbs as the beast did its dance of death upon our children and piled their bodies high. How we cried out for help, for vengeance, for life. And yet our plea went unanswered for years, until it came—the plan of salvation, the hope of redemption; we became warrior skinheads!
The literature that came in provided the addresses of other pro-white organizations, which I added to my mailing list. Ku Klux Klan. American Nazi Party. Aryan Nations. American Front. Church of the Creator. National Alliance.
As soon as I received a new flyer or newsletter, I reprinted copies and mailed them to other groups on my list, delivered them in bulk to other skinheads, or handed them out to local kids—skaters, punks, stoners—anyone who I thought might be interested in getting off their lame asses and doing some good fighting for their future. I missed no opportunity to market the ideology of white supremacy. Now that Clark was doing hard time in prison and Carmine, Chase, and the rest of the original crew were avoiding the spotlight, I added my own words and contact information to anything I copied, personalizing the message about defending ourselves against inferior races as I spread information about rallies and meetings. I made sure my name and post office box address were on every piece of literature I sent out.
The summer of 1988 had proven to be a watershed moment, not only for me personally, but also for the burgeoning American neo-Nazi skinhead movement at large. I had established myself as an integral cog in the machine moments before the storm clouds gathered. White power groups began sprouting up like weeds in metropolitan areas across the country and, with the rapidly increasing numbers and the hottest summer temperatures recorded in over a century, utter pandemonium erupted.
American Front skins in Portland beat an Ethiopian immigrant student to death with a baseball bat. At least one Los Angeles skinhead was being tried for murder in another case involving a minority. The arid weather incited the brand new Tulsa, Oklahoma, Hammerskin crew who were particularly intent on causing as much violent mayhem as they could. They took great pleasure in targeting minorities and homeless people for random beatings, or “boot parties,” as they called them. The detailed letters they’d sent me seemed to describe an endless supply of fodder for their vicious recreational activities. And, closer to home, six original CASH members, including Clark Martell, had been formally sentenced to lengthy terms in penitentiaries across the Midwest for charges including aggravated assault, criminal damage to property, and home invasion—a Class X felony in Illinois.
Truth be told, while we may have publicly tried to wrap our politics in flowery catchphrases like “white pride” and “pro-white” for the sake of positive marketing to the unwitting masses, internally we fucking hated anyone that wasn’t white and willing to fight vehemently against those who weren’t.
Those few months in 1988 became known in skinhead circles as the “Summer of Hate.”
Indeed it was.
Since the widely-publicized Angie Streckler and Kristallnacht trials had resulted in a significant chunk of the CASH skins being imprisoned, the
time was as good as any for me to make my mark. By now I’d become the only remaining active associate from the original CASH crew and I began inheriting pieces of what Clark and Carmine and Chase had left behind. Still too young to be on the cops’ radar, it wasn’t long before any new recruits began to look to me for leadership and direction.
Becoming the de facto leader of the second wave of Chicago white power skinheads took little serious effort. Blue Island was an easy place to recruit. Most kids and their families were barely making ends meet from one paycheck to the next and they lived in a neighborhood that was rapidly deteriorating economically. Kids in Blue Island liked to let loose and blow off steam. Girls were plentiful and willing to hang out. The guys were into music and could easily be made to relate to the message I was peddling.
What we were doing was magnetic. Like attracting moths to a flame. We partied, made sure we were seen, bowed to no authority. I pushed the skinhead lifestyle to the limits. Eager to sharpen my street fighting skills at every opportunity, I picked fights with anyone I thought I could intimidate or outpunch. We were gentlemen thugs intent on having a good time while on duty protecting our race. And our numbers grew rapidly.
One of my best recruiting scores was Al Kubiak.
Kubiak was a natural-born bruiser who loved to fight. He was solid and muscular, with a baby-faced grin that seemed to smile even wider when he was throwing punches. We hadn’t liked each other much during my High Street days, when we’d been given to cursing at each other rather than sharing a beer or a kind word. He was a spoiled kid from the West Side of Blue Island, which made him an enemy of us East Siders.
We couldn’t stand him and his group of friends, so if we caught them on our side of Western Avenue we’d try and chase them out.
Not keen on running away from confrontation himself, Kubiak always stood and fought while his friends ran, coming to blows or backing down only if one of us happened to be carrying a baseball bat or a hockey stick. Every time we saw each other we called each other every foul name we could think of, but somehow we never threw fists. Now we were on the same team. He’d come to me after a party asking if he could become a skinhead. I think he just wanted more people to terrorize. But I knew I could use his muscle, so we put our past differences aside and became fast pals.
Romantic Violence Page 9
