“Holy shit,” I said.
Kubiak shrugged. “I’m not sure it works, but what the hell, you pull it on anyone, they won’t know. They’ll back down, I guarantee it.”
I tucked it in my waistband where nobody could see it and walked home, conscious of the metal against my skin with every step.
I let myself into my basement flat and sat down on my bed. Took the gun out. Stuck it back in my waistband and drew it over and over, practicing so I could draw quickly when the time came. I aimed it. Watched myself in the mirror. Hard. That’s how I looked. Hard. That’s what I was.
I heard my mother shuffling outside the door, calling for me. Spying on me again. Always there when it was convenient for her. My dad, too. But when I needed them most—the times when I adopted the applause from the other parents as they cheered on their own children—they were markedly absent. I was over it, even though they never copped to their failures. I pointed my gun at the door, imagining what my mother would do if she opened it and met the barrel of my gun. “I’m sleeping. Leave me alone,” I answered.
With everything that was happening on a national level, I knew I had to stay well informed. So I turned to The Turner Diaries that Clark had given me for an education on survival. Clark called it “the Bible of white revolutionaries.” William Pierce, a visionary, the leader of the white nationalist group National Alliance, wrote it under the pen name Andrew MacDonald in 1978. The novel was written in journal form and chronicles Turner’s part in the violent overthrow of the U.S. government and the societal cleansing of all Jews and non-whites. It was nothing less than an ingenious prophecy about what would happen in the not-too-distant future if white people didn’t wake up now and take action.
I read the captivating account of our chilling future in less than six hours. To say it inspired me would be an understatement. It incited me to the point that I wanted to mimic the heroic protagonist in every action he took.
I would be Earl Turner, ready to take on my own government through violent means if that’s what it took to set the world straight and protect what I loved.
First, though, I had a minor annoyance to deal with at PIE. A spook named Damarcus—typical nigger name—with a bad attitude. Real gangbanger thug looking for trouble, always running his mouth. Walking down the hallway one day he had the balls to deliberately step in my way and bump me. He held his ground as if it was his right and I should step aside. I struck first. Landed a blow splitting the bridge of his nose and grappled him into a headlock, ramming his nappy-haired head into the lockers before he knew what hit him. Dragging him bleeding from one side of the hallway to the other, I smashed his head against the steel doors. The goddamn lesbian gym teacher and the janitor got between us and broke it up. Some other teachers held me back and marched me to the principal’s office. Oh, boy, I was shaking. Yeah, right.
It was the end of my time at PIE. I’d chewed it up and spit it out.
A week after I got expelled, I returned and spray-painted “Niggers Go Home” in two-foot white letters across the school’s front doors in case they hadn’t gotten the point when Damarcus’ head got banged up until he had more bumps and lumps than pearly white teeth.
The cops knew it was me. Of course it was. Everybody knew it. But they were unnerved by me at this point and were certain that targeting me would cause a backlash from my crew, since I’d managed to recruit more than a half dozen students during my brief time at PIE. Uneasy about the influence I’d amassed and certain there wasn’t a thing they could do without hard evidence, they let it die. Couldn’t prove it. And even if they could, what could they do about it? A few nights in jail wouldn’t stop me.
No school left for me at this point but the Blue Island public school system. Broke my mother’s heart. She wanted me to be a doctor. Only the best private schools for her precious son. And now I’d be in a public school. Eisenhower. The horrible school she’d attended as a young sixteen-year-old immigrant. Hardly a place for someone special like me.
I never forgot the stories she told me about her youth and not fitting in, getting picked on for being different. But she needn’t have worried, because I felt her pain. And I wouldn’t ever let that happen to me—or her—again. It wasn’t like I had any intention of spending much time there anyway.
I had more critical priorities on my mind. Periodic tables and verb conjugation and calculating the sum of the angles in a triangle held exactly zero interest.
White revolution was my primary course of study.
Christian, 1989
9
HEAR THE CALL
One pivotal thing happened during my time at Eisenhower. I met Tracy, who became the portal to an entirely new level of violence. But this time the perceived enemy was white like me. This turned out to be ideal for building my status in and around Blue Island.
Tracy was a year older than me. Pretty and unabashedly outspoken. Long brown hair and a petite, tight body. She smoked and drank and her innocence had vanished like aerosol hair spray long before we’d met. Abrasive as they come, she lived with her single mom, who she tormented more than I did my parents. Quite a feat.
She didn’t go to Eisenhower, and she lived in Beverly, a predominantly Irish South Side neighborhood in the southwest corner of Chicago next to Blue Island. Kids from both neighborhoods lived only blocks apart, but were more likely to spit or throw beer bottles at each other than trade pleasantries when our paths crossed. Few friendships existed between the two groups, and while it wasn’t exactly a Romeo and Juliet situation if people from the different neighborhoods dated, there was an unspoken rule against it that few ignored.
What did I care? There sure as hell was no way anybody would tell me who I could and could not mess around with. Same with Tracy. She was a hell-raiser through and through. Fact that I came from Blue Island, had a reputation as a brawler, and was an outspoken racist made me irresistible. She even overlooked the fact I had been the captain of Eisenhower’s football team, which was far too mainstream for a certified, self-proclaimed rebel bitch like her.
Not long after Tracy and I began dating, her mother had her picked up and committed to an alcoholism treatment facility for a week for being wasted and hurling a cordless phone at her head. Tracy gave her mother all sorts of stress. Not to mention stitches.
When Tracy got out of rehab, I made off with my parents’ car and drove over to her house to make up for lost time. I’d gotten to be a decent driver over the last few months, despite still not being old enough to have my driver’s license.
The first time I “borrowed” my mom’s Ford Taurus at thirteen, I nearly wrecked it when I drove full speed the wrong direction on a major one-way thoroughfare. Little Tony, who’d taught me the basics of how to drive up and down High Street, quickly yanked the steering wheel to avoid an oncoming car that would surely have crushed us in a head-on collision. After that, the only careless driving I did were the occasional donuts in the St. Donatus parking lot.
Taking the car after my parents went to sleep had become easier after the first few times. I’d swiped the keys from my dad’s coat and made copies at the hardware store. Buddy had even seen me pulling into the driveway very early one morning while he was watching Saturday morning cartoons, but only smiled at me from the window and never squealed. My parents never questioned me about taking the car. I’m sure they suspected it but were too afraid to confront me, knowing that I’d take the argument far beyond just taking the car and do something really reckless to piss them off even more. Especially my dad. I’d threatened him with physical violence the last time he tried to punish me over something trivial; since then, he hardly spoke to me anymore.
There me and Tracy were, sitting on her front steps making out the night she got out of alcohol rehab, not doing a damn thing to piss anybody off, when six drunken Irish Beverly Boys—a bunch of guys not unlike the High Street Boys, but violent and with more balls—settled themselves across the street in an open field. “The Pr
airie,” as it was locally known, was the home base of the Beverly group. It was a large open stretch of flat land that belonged to the adjacent St. Walter parish. It was their St. Donatus parking lot. Beverly kids gathered in the field nightly. Surrounded by stone Irish bungalows, it was infamously known for the drinking and parties that took place more or less in plain sight of everyone’s parents, which consisted primarily of Chicago’s Irish cops and firefighters, union tradesmen, and their weary wives.
So this same night, right after Tracy gets home, these fools are out getting hammered in the Prairie. Acting tough and calling out to her.
“Hey, Tracy, got a phone handy? Your mom called, said she wants it back.” Howls.
“Why didn’t you pick up the telephone when I called, Tracy? Guess you couldn’t hear it since it’s all busted up.”
Not exactly fighting words, but this was my girl, and I wasn’t about to listen to this crap from a pack of drunken micks.
I rose. Tracy took my hand, trying to pull me back down. “There’s six of them,” she cautioned. “And they’re trashed.”
I pulled my hand away. “So what? They’re getting on my goddamn nerves.”
The Beverly Boys had a reputation for being tough, hot-tempered Irish lads, but that didn’t deter me.
Fists clenched, I walked off into the black night, determined to shut them up. The second I reached them, without saying a word, I pulled my arm back and swung at the first human shadow I saw. They were on me faster than skate punks on speed. Coming at me from all sides. One tried to throw me to the ground, but the others were too close and broke my fall. I swung with a roundhouse punch, quickly calculating the odds were good that with this many people on me, my blow would land on someone. My fist collided with someone’s face, and I was rewarded by the familiar warmth of fresh blood. I took a sharp blow to the gut. Pissed at the gall, I drove my head hard up into someone’s chin, knocking him down. He grabbed at the darkness as he fell, taking someone with him. I took a barrage of quick, steady blows to my head, shoulders, kidney. One punch landed squarely in my abdomen and knocked the wind out of me. I doubled over.
“Had enough?” someone huffed.
Tracy was watching. I’d fight until I was unconscious. I sucked in my breath, sprung back up and landed a punch solidly on someone’s jaw. Watched him reel back. I kept throwing rapid punches and connecting. My fists were throbbing. Seconds seemed like hours.
“Fellas. Give it up,” someone from the Beverly group yelled. “He’s fucking nuts. He ain’t worth our time.”
They retreated into the blackness. Tracy, beside me now, grabbed my arm and held her body against mine. I was out of breath.
“Let them go,” she said. “They quit. Not you.”
“Tell her you’re sorry,” I bellowed after them.
“Over your mother’s dead dago body,” someone echoed from the ether.
Fighting words. “Come back and say that to my face, you fucking Irish faggot,” I hollered.
They disappeared across the Prairie. Drama over.
For the night.
But the gauntlet had been thrown and the call to war issued. They knew it. I knew it. Tracy knew it.
By morning, the news that six Beverly Boys jumped me and couldn’t take me down had spread all over Blue Island and Beverly.
My Blue Island friends were out for blood. “Six of them attacked one of us? They’re fucking dead,” became a rallying cry.
The Beverly crew prepared for battle.
Never mind we were all white. Race didn’t matter. This was about turf. Respect. And a statement that when someone messed with one of our own, there would be a war.
A war.
I’d started a fucking war.
Once again I slotted myself perfectly into the role of protagonist—or antagonist, depending on who you were talking to. Pitting my tribe against the other. The thrill of combat was supreme. Commanding a legion of soldiers, a group intent on achieving a singular goal, felt natural to me. It didn’t matter if the opposition involved another sports team, a gang of wetbacks, or a rival neighborhood. There needed to be sides. And I needed to lead the one that won.
The power was extreme.
The most intense thing I’d ever felt.
Christian cutting a new recruit’s hair, 1989
10
WHITE PRIDE
The skinheads in Blue Island were a gang. Like the Latin Kings. Gangster Disciples. The Vice Lords.
We traveled in groups. Watched each other’s backs. Instigated fights when reason to didn’t exist. Protected our turf. One night a bunch of us chased Rooney, an obnoxiously ballsy kid from the Beverly group, down an alley and cornered him next to a pickup truck loaded full of construction debris. As he evaded my grasp and tried to run, I grabbed a brick from the truck bed and hurled it at him, striking him square in the base of the neck from about ten yards away. From that night on, the Beverly guys referred to me as “Brickolini.”
The Blue Island–Beverly war didn’t directly play into my plans to save the white race, but because of it, my prominence as a leader, as someone capable of controlling the activities of a large area and everyone in it, had become certain.
The Blue Island crew—the remaining CASH skinheads, Kubiak, and the dozen or so teenagers I’d recruited in the time since Clark had gone to prison—and the Beverly Boys waged an all-out war against each other for the rest of my sophomore year in high school. For some reason, it didn’t occur to us that we had more in common than not. Like my skinhead pals, the Beverly kids were racist. Their Irish families had kept Beverly fairly white and proudly proclaimed it was one of the last white bastions in the city of Chicago. Their politically connected parents had made sure of that. Most of the Beverly crowd also had short-cropped hair and had begun sporting skinhead attire—combat boots and bomber jackets.
But it didn’t matter. Both of our groups needed a conduit for our aggressive agendas. And, because of that, we found it easy to hate each other’s guts.
Almost as much as we both hated niggers.
From my first day at Eisenhower, teachers kept their wary eyes on me, waiting for me to screw up. Like most other brainwashed lemmings who called themselves adults, the teachers were ignorant of the danger the white race was in and instead of seeing me as their hero trying to protect their sorry asses, they trembled when they saw me coming and castigated me for my beliefs and actions behind my back. They were afraid of me, of what I might do to disrupt the peace of the school or their classrooms. This gave me yet more power. Fear and power went hand in hand.
I cut more classes than I attended. Called the teachers out on their lies when I did decide to show up. Let them know they were as worthless as the nonsensical liberal propaganda they tried in vain to shove down our throats.
“Extremist” and “neo-Nazi” were whispered in the halls when I walked by.
“Mr. Picciolini, can you please turn your T-shirt inside out?” pleaded Señor Anderson, my third period Spanish teacher.
Without looking up or interrupting my etching of a giant swastika on the back of my Spanish workbook, I replied, “No.”
“White pride,” he whispered. “Those words are inappropriate and offensive to the other students. Por favor! Can you please turn your shirt inside out or I’ll have to write you up again.”
“A lot of good that’ll do,” I laughed. “What’s wrong with my shirt stating that I’m proud to be white?”
“It’s upsetting the other students. Will you please just follow the rules so I don’t have to report you?”
Stupid me. I hadn’t realized there were rules forbidding me to respect my heritage. “Tell you what, I’ll make you a deal. If you want me to cover up my shirt, even though it’s my right to wear it, then tell the spooks to turn their Malcolm X or ‘It’s a black thing, you wouldn’t understand’ shirts inside out. Better yet, start teaching all these beaners in this school to speak English instead of forcing us to le
arn their fucking foreign language.”
“Te lo ruego. I beg you. Please cover the shirt or turn it inside out.”
“Okay, okay. I’ll put my jacket on,” I conceded with a smirk.
“Gracias. Where was I, people? Repeat after me please. Buenos días. ¿Cuánto cuestan los pantalones rojos?”
I grinned as I put on my black bomber jacket and zipped it up over my shirt, making sure to smooth out the breast where I had sewn a vintage World War II swastika patch the night before.
¡Viva la revolución!
Only thing I was missing at this stage was a tattoo. Clothes alone weren’t satisfying enough anymore. Tattoos showing my dedication to the cause became an obsession. Trouble was, I wasn’t eighteen yet. My parents would never sign a permission slip, nor would I ask them to. I was a full-fledged adult in my mind, taking on issues that even most grown people weren’t qualified to handle, and I sure as hell didn’t need their consent for anything. But my mother would be pissed if she spotted a tattoo. She’d taken to snooping on me more and more. Going through my dresser drawers and dirty laundry when I was out. Freaking out over my T-shirts with racist overtones. She didn’t have a clue what I was about, even though she was sure I was up to something dangerous.
I liked to keep her off my back, and a tattoo would make her quadruple her spying. I’d only be able to keep it hidden for so long. But I’d show Buddy. He’d like it and think it was cool and beg me to draw one on him too.
I’d heard from several punk kids about Bob Oslon’s Fine Line Tattoos on the North Side of the city. Age meant nothing to him, money everything.
“Tell him you’re eighteen, and he probably won’t ask any questions,” Kubiak told me. I took his advice and went to Oslon’s tattoo parlor—a small hole-in-the-wall on the North Side of Chicago with a buzzing neon sign and a flaking, hand-painted front window.
Romantic Violence Page 11
