Romantic Violence

by Christian Picciolini

  If not for Kubiak’s unwavering racist attitude and eagerness to punch people without provocation, I’d never have given him a second thought. But his skills could come in handy as I was growing our crew. He would be my extra muscle when I needed it. Our commitment to each other grew exponentially over the summer, cemented by our unspoken mutual desire to throw down with every wannabe gangbanger and Anti invading our territory. Kubiak thought nothing of walking up to non-whites and shoving them to provoke a fight. And when he did, I never hesitated to join in the fray.

  Since the Jake Reilly romp in eighth grade, I’d taken to fighting with relative ease and comfort. My training came in the form of almost daily fistfights with anyone I felt threatened the safety of my neighborhood. Violence became pleasurable and I enjoyed dominating the mind game that led to me throwing the first punch and knocking someone flat on his back. It was like a drug. Sometimes Kubiak and I took on three, four, even five guys at once. The bigger, the better. They never saw it coming from such young guys. Our undying allegiance to each other and the element of surprise were definitely on our side. That’s what best friends did together.

  One such testosterone-filled weekend, me and Kubiak and couple of neighborhood guys jumped in a car and headed to the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana, a two-and-a-half-hour drive south of Blue Island, in Central Illinois. An older brother of one of the other guys attended school there and invited us to come hang out and party for the night. The moment we arrived, aided by the fact that we’d been pounding beers the entire drive down, all hell broke loose.

  The four of us arrived at the apartment complex where we were supposed to meet the brother and knocked on the door of the unit number we’d been given. It was loud and clear that a party was underway as the cacophony of music and conversations, even as we approached from down the hall, was deafening. No one answered when we knocked, so we let ourselves in.

  As the four of us entered the overloaded apartment, the largest white human being I’d ever stood next to intercepted us immediately. This enormous, thick-necked, semitruck of a frat guy put his meat-hook hand on my shoulder and lurched me backward to align my face with his.

  “If you jagoffs wanna come in, it’s ten bucks apiece.” His breath stung my eyes like rubbing alcohol and I pulled back.

  “We’re just looking for my brother. He told us to meet him here,” one of our guys said. “His name is…”

  “Hey, punk! Did you hear what I said?” the incredible white hulk cut in. “Twenty bucks.”

  “Twenty bucks?” Kubiak swiped the monster’s hand off my shoulder. “You just said ten, King Kong.”

  He got in Kubiak’s face. “Yeah, but I don’t like you, so now it’s thirty, sunshine.”

  “Yo, Gator, we got a problem here?” Another colossus from the party intervened and blocked our entry. This time it was a tall, lean, muscular black guy in a tank top who was flanked by an equally large, muscled beast of a Samoan guy.

  “No fellas, we’re all good here. I got this,” I acquiesced as I reached toward my back pocket and threw a sideways look at Kubiak who was thinking the same thing I was. Mayhem.

  “Well, I don’t have a twenty. I only have five,” I said, and I cracked Gator square in his jaw with a fistful of brass knuckles from my back pocket.

  Kubiak grabbed the nigger and kicked him in the balls. He went down as Kubiak turned to slug another giant. He grabbed a beer bottle to smash across the other guy’s face.

  The other two skinheads with us started slugging anyone within arm’s length. The stream of people coming at us seemed infinite.

  Before we knew it, the four of us were punching, kicking, and smashing bottles over the heads of half of the University of Illinois football team’s offensive line. These guys were big and strong, but none of them had any fighting experience like we did. The place looked like a tornado had spun through it, with banged-up bodies and furniture strewn everywhere.

  When the apartment and the frat guys were sufficiently destroyed, and the remainder of the party guests had scrambled for the exit, we bolted for the car.

  On our way out of the complex, several of the neutral partygoers and a pizza delivery guy on a bicycle who had witnessed the intense action came up to pat us on the back and revel with us on our intense brawl. Without any remorse, being the testosterone-filled attack dogs we’d trained ourselves to be, we started fighting with them and laid them out on the street as well. Ruthless.

  We were banged up sufficiently, but we were the ones who could still walk out of that place on our own two feet.

  Within minutes, the streets were swarming with dozens of police officers and a legion of campus security vehicles putting up roadblock checkpoints to try and track down the gruesome mob of thugs who were capable of inflicting that much damage and injury to their star football athletes. Lucky for us, they were searching for a large mob, not four dudes in a Honda Accord. We barely made it out of town, re-enacting the brawl and laughing uncontrollably the whole drive home.

  The following Monday, a Blue Island police detective asked me to come down to the station to answer some questions about the incident. Apparently, the Illinois State Police had put out an APB for a dozen or more skinheads who’d brazenly assaulted and sent several University of Illinois football players to the hospital. Immediately all eyes fell on us, since we were the only skinhead crew in the state who were capable of such damage. Barely able to control myself from bellowing at the hilarity of the situation, I told the cops I had no idea who could have done such a thing. “After all, officer, I’m not even sixteen years old and I don’t have a driver’s license or a car. How would I get down there?”

  They couldn’t prove it was us and dropped the investigation, but me and the guys laughed about it for weeks after that.

  It didn’t take many bruised and banged-up bodies for Kubiak and me to establish our notoriety as the two toughest motherfuckers around Blue Island. Every teenager in our neighborhood either looked up to us or feared us. Sometimes both. For the first time I felt completely in control of my own life. I’d yearned for so long to fit in with my peers and now they’d begun to vie for my attention. The ones that had once ignored me now revered me.

  But beyond my own age group, I still wanted the respect of the older skinheads. I wrote to those doing time in prison. They’d eventually get out, and I counted on them standing at my side as an equal when that day came.

  The main person to get to was Clark, though. I still wanted his official blessing. Nothing could top communication with him. Carmine gave me his address without hesitation, and I immediately began a regular correspondence with him in prison. I didn’t expect him to answer, but I thought at least he’d start to appreciate the effort.

  I added the numbers “14” and “88” right above my signature at the end of every letter I mailed out. “14” represented the fourteen words and “H” was the eighth letter of the alphabet, which, translated as “88,” was secret code for “HH” or “Heil Hitler.” Within a few weeks I was communicating not only directly with Clark, but also with dozens of other pro-white activists and prisoners across the country.

  My parents eventually gave up their battle to send me back to Marist for my sophomore year. They still wouldn’t let me go to Eisenhower, the public high school I could find myself tolerating, because it had scarred my mother as a teen. Instead, they enrolled me in an experimental high school called Project Individual Education, colloquially referred to as PIE, a small magnet school that took a sampling of kids from all three Blue Island-area public high schools. PIE was experimental in the sense that they tried to give students more educational freedom. Since it wasn’t one of the primary public high schools in the area, my parents accepted that it was the next best thing to a private school. Buddy laughed at the funny name.

  A few things put PIE above Marist in my book. Teachers seemed more relaxed, at least in theory. No more religion. And if you got good grades, you could “opt ou
t” of going to certain classes. Some kids thought it was cool, but it didn’t make any difference to me. I’d opt out of anything I damn well wanted, good grades or not. The state still gave my parents the authority to decide if or where I attended school, but they sure couldn’t make me do anything I didn’t want to once I was there.

  The one truly great thing about PIE was its connection to Eisenhower. Since both schools belonged to the same district, it meant I would be allowed to play for Eisenhower’s football team with Kubiak. Playing football on a real team was something I’d wanted to do since my High Street days. I loved being a gladiator out on that field, and every game brought the promise of being a hero carried off the field on my teammates’ shoulders. Moreover, Kubiak and I would now be connected through school, as well as Blue Island, our fists, and our beliefs.

  But, despite our impassioned philosophies, none of our white power activity occurred on the football field. In fact, my teammates—an equal mix of white, Mexican, and black players—nominated me as their team captain. A true testament to my unrelenting commitment to whichever mission I chose to undertake. My fierce determination to lead. Perhaps it was my charisma or maybe it was driven in part by fear, but either way their faith in me to provide results on the field was unmistakable.

  Intense competitors, Kubiak and I were determined to win above all else. To win took the strength of a team and, even though most of our teammates were not white, we were able to stay focused for the good of the squad. I learned to work with the black and Mexican kids on the team because I reasoned that these particular minorities weren’t the same ones who were out there destroying our culture. These guys were okay. They were athletes that I learned to trust and football had given me a singular reason to see beyond our differences. When we put those helmets on we all became the color red—Eisenhower Cardinal red. We weren’t black or white or brown. The dichotomy of the situation was never able to eclipse the thrill of combat that I experienced with these brothers-in-arms. Despite our differences, we were out there as a collective unit working together to beat our opponents into submission and we all learned to temporarily put our conflicting ideologies aside. I may have been an extreme racist outside of the locker room, preaching the need to get muds out of our neighborhoods and schools, away from our innocent women, blaming them for polluting our people with drugs, but when the school bell rang and the coach’s whistle signaled the start of football practice, the cognitive dissonance of the situation became a non-issue. We were a team.

  Soon as the games were over, though, Kubiak and I traded our football cleats for Doc Martens boots and were ready to ruthlessly stomp anybody we considered an enemy of our race.

  Christian, 1989

  8

  WHITE REVOLUTION

  I wrote Clark about our frequent fights with the Antis and non-whites and updated him on recruiting progress, knowing he’d be excited to hear I was carrying on his proud tradition. By this time, he was sending me three or four letters a week. I made sure the other skins knew I was in touch with him, to keep their spirits high, but I kept the content of his letters to myself.

  To my dismay, as time passed, his packages arrived full of explicit pencil drawings of naked skinhead women attached to stories he had written that read like a Third Reich Penthouse Forum. Didn’t seem right he’d send me that weird shit. I tried to ignore it. Then whole notebooks full of erotic stories he’d written and illustrated started showing up. He became obsessed with a Chicago skinhead girl named Reina, who he claimed to have knocked up before going to prison, and titled his pornographic love story Right As Reina in tribute. I’m not sure she knew about it or if she was really even pregnant with his child, but he epitomized her as the ultimate skinhead woman and wrote that she was the “goddess of all white women.”

  Clark also shared stories about how the prison guards treated him poorly and ranted about how he thought he was going mad.

  The guards wouldn’t let me out into the yard again today. The coons and queers get all the special privileges like extra juice and clean socks. I want clean socks too. I am not an animal. I am a warrior. God wants me to have clean socks and I’ll have them if I want. I took a shit into my hands this morning and smeared my whole body with it so that I could look like a nigger and get an extra juice or package of bologna and some clean socks. But they didn’t buy my ruse. The goons made it into my cell and bashed me before I was able to castrate myself with a sharpened salad tong I stole from the chow hall yesterday. I’m writing you this letter from the psych ward. For God and Hitler and Reina! Hail Warrior Skinheads—C.M. 14/88.

  Clark’s letters embarrassed me, and I began to believe that he wasn’t quite right in the head. For the short period that I’d known him he never struck me as a jokester, so it was hard to distinguish if Clark was serious about what he claimed in his letters or if he actually did try to castrate himself with salad tongs. I never really wanted to ask. It made me uncomfortable, so I avoided thinking about it altogether.

  I kept my thoughts private, though, to protect his reputation—CASH’s reputation. And what the hell, I rationalized, maybe it wasn’t true insanity I was seeing. Maybe it was just desperation from being locked up. He was the first person—the Aryan Johnny Appleseed—to bring the white power skinhead lifestyle to America, and people still trembled when they heard his name. Media bulletins always reported he was a top neo-Nazi sociopath, “one of the most terrifying men in America,” and that was tough. The stuff of heroes and revolutionaries. Being crazy was pathetic, so I kept those suspicions to myself and burned his notebooks and most of his letters after I read them.

  In November of my sophomore year, television talk show host Geraldo Rivera invited three skinheads, as well as John Metzger—the leader of the White Aryan Resistance’s Aryan Youth Movement—to appear on his show. Media lackey that Geraldo is, he named the episode Young Hate Mongers. To up his ratings, he also invited Roy Innis, a full-of-himself nigger troublemaker who chaired the Congress of Racial Equality—CORE—and some “we are God’s chosen people” kike rabbi.

  Not long into the show Metzger called Innis an “Uncle Tom” for helping push the U.S. government’s multiracial agenda and also criticized him for not admitting that blacks were a detriment to civilized white culture. But rather than own up to it, Innis went crazy, jumped out of his chair, and began choking Metzger on stage. Naturally, Metzger defended himself—his goddamn constitutional right to do so. Geraldo got back on stage as all hell broke loose and a skinhead in the crowd threw a chair in his general direction catching him square in the face, busting his spic nose wide open. The braver people in the audience streamed up on stage and joined in the melee; others in the audience acted like lunatics, scared to death, not knowing what to do as they huddled in a back corner of the studio.

  This made national news on every television network, every newspaper, magazine, and radio station. Pundits and shock jocks rehashed the clip over and over again. And did this event prove we were barbarians like the media had hoped? Absolutely not. The three neo-Nazi skinheads and Metzger were well dressed. Clean-cut. Intelligent. Clearly stating our purpose, defending our ideals. The nigger proved himself to be the instigator. The rabbi an afterthought.

  We didn’t do drugs. We believed in supporting our families through honest hard work. Our sense of pride was relentless. Our hearts genuinely wanted what was best for the white race, but nobody got that.

  The newspapers—all owned by a bunch of Jews—focused only on the racist violence. Soon after, media reports began cropping up accusing white power skinheads of attacking people in malls, pulling race-mixing couples out of their cars, and of course they dragged up every old irrelevant crime they could find. The press called us animals, portrayed us as vicious monsters attacking innocent people indiscriminately, for no reason. Headlines contained words like: “Amoral thugs.” “Outlaws.” “Hatemongers.” “Cockroaches.” What we stood for was vilified as an ideology of hate. A philosophy of fear.
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br />   Soon after, another talk show host, some puppet named Richard Bey with a show called People Are Talking, tried to piggyback on Geraldo’s ratings and invited some Antis onto his show to spout off about their racist skinhead counterparts. He kicked off the show with a guest claiming neo-Nazi skinheads accosted him on a New York subway and when he refused to join them, they beat him and threatened to throw his two-month-old baby down the steps. Only a moron would think they’d actually throw an innocent white baby down a flight of subway stairs, but idiots prevailed and again the media sensationalized stories about what a bunch of violent, bloodthirsty, hateful monsters we were. Of course we were violent. We had to be. Revolution has a price. But hateful monsters? They were only partly right. We weren’t monsters. But we did hate the enemies that were working to destroy us. Hate wasn’t the impetus, however; it was the manifestation of our desperate struggle to defend what we held dear—our ardent pride in the white race. We were heroes trying to save people. Patriots. Why the hell couldn’t anybody understand that?

  My frustration with the sensationalist media inspired me even further, proved that I was on the right track and part of something special. Bigger than Blue Island where it began. Bigger than Chicago. Even Illinois. Our skinhead numbers were growing rapidly and we were making ourselves known nationwide.

  Kubiak thought it was time to be armed. Nothing fancy. He handed me a rusty semiautomatic .25 caliber pistol that he stole from his uncle.

  The gun didn’t weigh much, but it was heavy in my hand. It made my heart beat faster. Power surged through my fingertips, tightening around the cold steel. Life or death sealed within my grip. I straightened my arm, held it out, felt the beat of the weapon join with my own.