Romantic Violence

by Christian Picciolini

  My mom brought my grandparents in as a last resort to try and dissuade me. She knew I still had a soft spot for Nonna and Nonno and wouldn’t lose my temper if they were there.

  My grandmother tried to convince me to change my mind. “Christian, why don’t you go to school or find a nice job instead? You’re such a good boy,” she pleaded. “War is not a good place for anyone. Ask Nonno. He can tell you.” Her motherly warmth and calmness were always so comforting. I missed it.

  As Nonna played my surrogate mother growing up, the adopted fatherly responsibilities fell to my grandfather, Nonno. But not even his dreadful firsthand accounts of his time in the Second World War could dissuade me once I’d made up my mind to enlist.

  A man of few words, Nonno interrupted my grandmother. “It’s not a place for you. You have a good heart.” I wasn’t so sure. “You will come back different.”

  I was counting on that.

  Respecting my grandparents and their wishes was something I did without question when I was a small child, and I also understood that they were wiser than either of my parents—or me for that matter. But the world was a different place than the one they’d known in the old country at my age. I envied my grandfather for going to war, fighting as a bombardier in the Italian air force under Mussolini in exotic and far-off places like Egypt and Libya and Belgium. I respected that and I wanted to earn the same type of respect he had.

  We were in a constant war within our own borders now, regardless of whether we wore military camouflage and desert boots or a bomber jacket and Doc Martens. I would go to the army and come back stronger. Tougher. Smarter. And more equipped to fight my own battles. I railed hard against my family’s wishes, driven by the belief that I knew something they didn’t.

  Eventually they all caved. Big surprise.

  And so the day came. I waited for the recruiter to pick me up and take me in for my army physical and have my parents sign off on my enlistment form. But he was late.

  Half an hour late.

  An hour.

  I called the recruiting office to see what the holdup was. Seemed my recruiter had been reassigned to another station in Albuquerque two days earlier. “But don’t worry, young man, we’ll send someone else to come over to pick you up right away,” the staff sergeant assured me.

  “Don’t bother,” I said indignantly. “Fuck you people.”

  It felt good saying that to the government.

  Meanwhile, at the community college where I’d started my final course to earn my high school diploma, to my amazement, school was actually interesting. I was taking a Criminal Justice 101 course to fulfill my remaining two credits. Struck me as cool to have a class ending in 101. For the first time, I was treated as an adult inside an institution of learning. It was college. An open campus. Nobody was shoving rules down my throat. Teachers never insisted I show up. Or forced me go to detention for not doing homework or for cutting a class that bored me to death.

  Without much effort, I aced the course. I, a mere high school senior—a truant and delinquent and menace—was the only one in my entire college class to get an A. It felt good. Real good. The first time in my whole student life a grade meant something to me. I had to bite my lip when the professor talked about the demographics of race in the prison system and the lopsided incarceration ratio of blacks to whites, but it was tolerable. I could have explained the reasons for this better than him. But I didn’t.

  At the end of the semester, I’d completed the credit requirements and I was eligible to receive my high school diploma.

  But I could not participate in the graduation ceremony, which was taking place at Eisenhower.

  The school had filed for an order of protection—a restraining order against me. The directive was to arrest me on sight if I stepped foot on school property.

  And so my high school years, those golden days that are supposed to be the best life has to offer, came to an end. Good riddance.

  I’d learned about leadership. Instilling fear. Intimidation tactics. Organizing people. The law. Justice. Playing the system. How to use a weapon. The power of violence. Standing up for my beliefs. Marketing my brand. Putting my words into action. But it hadn’t been school that taught me those skills.

  What a joke the American school system was. It didn’t teach anything valuable and it had no idea how to keep kids engaged.

  Clark had explained to me in one of his early letters how the modern school system hadn’t changed much since the 1950s, except that the instructional theories administrators used now favored uneducated minorities and kept white students at lower reading and comprehension levels. It made no sense that teachers were being forced to teach at the level of the lowest common denominator, rather than challenging the bright kids while the dumb ones got held back.

  Yet somehow I managed to graduate, despite being kicked out of four different high schools, one more than once.

  While the other subservient robots stood on stage getting their diplomas, I enjoyed my own private liberation from the shackles that had bound me for far, far too long.

  Christian, White American Youth rehearsal and confiscated SHARP patch, 1991

  14

  GO AWAY

  Finally. No more school. I hadn’t given a rat’s ass about it anyway, but still it had loomed over me like a noose. Happens to all kids. It dominates our lives. The only freedom we have is summer.

  But I’d graduated.

  Independence stretched out like a pure endless sky, despite the gnawing fact that I wouldn’t turn eighteen for yet another five months. Gone were the dark clouds of gutless teachers and administrators and homework and exams and being forced to sit in a classroom full of ridiculous ideas and people I’d never associate with by choice. I hadn’t wasted time on homework and I’d cut classes and entire days and weeks, but there was always some kind of consequence. Whether I ignored the consequences or not didn’t make them go away. They annoyed me. But all that was over now.

  My life was becoming my own, and I could devote myself full-time to being the man I was destined to be.

  I had to expand my base. It wasn’t enough to pick up kids around Blue Island anymore. Not even enough that my name had spread to skinhead groups across the country and into Canada. Time to focus on my band. No doubt music could make me stronger than ever. With school a thing of the past, we could start performing at rallies outside of Chicago, inciting people on a larger scale. Maybe even Europe.

  So I threw myself into WAY, lining up whatever gigs I could. We spent hours writing new lyrics, figuring out beats, piecing together songs. Music was a means to an end, the end being more control.

  Our second show was in the living room of a fellow skinhead’s home—lots of teenagers, cheap wood paneling, linoleum floors. Small place had a tough time holding that many people. A mix of Blue Island skins and Beverly guys. Kubiak was there entertaining some of the younger recruits. Punk girls. WAY had only been together for six months, but it didn’t matter. We just had to play fast and loud and get people moving and we’d be fine. There’d be beer, too, which always helps make marginal musicians sound good.

  Took only a verse of inciting words and a few power chords into the first tune to win the crowd’s approval. They were slamdancing, thrusting out their arms in Nazi salutes, nodding their heads aggressively to the beat, motivated by our songs. My words. Tremendously powerful feeling. We were a gang united through music and I’d never felt anything like it.

  I could have sung all night.

  But around midnight a beer bottle came crashing through the front window of the house. We dropped our instruments and filed out into the front yard looking for revenge. Across the street appeared a cadre of dark silhouettes, wearing hoodies pulled over their heads and hockey and ski masks to cover their faces. Bats, chains with padlocks, lead pipes, and hockey sticks clutched in their hands. Ambush.

  Fucking Antis. Young and old, male and female. Skins. Punks. Straight Edge k
ids. SHARPs. Two dozen or so about thirty yards away, backlit by a glowing amber porch light as if their souls were on fire. The rest of our troops from inside joined us on the lawn. The tension hovered, approaching DEFCON Level One, fingers at the ready on the nuclear button. At least twenty of us lined up, ready to do battle, the fury of the music still drumming in our heads.

  Another bottle crashed at Kubiak’s feet, spraying shards of glass against his fourteen-eyelet oxblood boots. We breathed one deep collective breath and, as if a battle horn sounded, charged the enemy. Our Doc Martens stampeding, we marched at full speed into the night, across the black pavement. One line of warriors set to clash with the enemy.

  Most of the opposition retreated, scattering at the sight of fury on our faces. We flew full-speed and caught up before they made it to the corner. Some had shown up solely to intimidate us through a show of numbers. They had no courage to fight. They fled like cowards.

  Others turned and stood their ground. Put up a solid fight. Knuckles connected with noses, jaws, and cheekbones. Cries of pain and attrition filled the night as we struck each other down, like avenging angels in Doc Marten boots.

  I turned from one person to another, punching with all my power. This was the enemy. No mercy.

  I swung around and came face to face with April Crenshaw. She and her husband Jerry were the leaders of SHARP in Chicago, but he’d run off and left her there to fend for herself.

  She read the rage in my eyes. Tears and mascara mixed and began rolling murky, black streaks down her face as she backpedaled, pleading for me not to hurt her.

  I’d never hit a girl, but she needed to learn a lesson. So instead I tore her SHARP patch from her bomber jacket. My trophy. Better than drawing blood. And to humiliate her further, I made her take off her boots and hand them over to me in a final recognition of her defeat. I took a box cutter to the laces. Made her slide them off and hand them to me. A crowd of my soldiers gathered.

  No skinhead ever gives up his or her boots.

  Until then.

  She rose, barefoot in fishnet stockings. I resisted an urge to kick her symbolically in her ass as she retreated. Off she went, a skinhead specter disappearing into the solitary night.

  They’d lost.

  We’d beaten down her crew. Our main skinhead adversaries in Chicago. And without so much as laying a finger on her, I’d humiliated their leader. More of a blow than any physical injury we’d caused.

  Police sirens ripped through the darkness and when the first wave of cops arrived they arrested what remaining SHARP skins were laying around, for criminal damage to property. The ones who didn’t run were covered in bruises, some unable to get to their feet.

  Kubiak’s friendly hand reached out to pull me out of the fray. “Get inside. Away from the cops. Danny’s on his way and said he’d take care of it.”

  I retreated inside the house. Not out of fear, but because my freedom was essential. My crew needed me. I’d be no good to anyone locked up. Going to jail was for soldiers, not generals. Everybody knew this. I wouldn’t get pinched like Clark had.

  When the police banged on the door looking for me, I was nowhere to be seen.

  “We didn’t do anything, officer,” I hear one of our girls say. “Just having a small get-together, and then a bottle flew through the window…”

  “Where’s Picciolini, smartass?” the lead detective asked, pushing his nose past the girl in the doorway to find Kubiak.

  “Haven’t seen him, Danny,” Kubiak replied.

  “You better get home before Mom and Dad find out what you’ve been up to tonight,” he whispered. “And tell your idiot friend hiding in the closet to stay off the streets for a while.”

  “Yessir, Officer Kubiak,” the younger Kubiak quipped.

  “Have a good night, Mein Führer,” I said from behind the closet door. It helped to have someone on the inside looking out after us.

  Seemed like days before I came down from the high of the show and brawl. If this was where I could take people with music, we’d be invincible.

  A few days later I decided to make a mark of a different sort. Every kid in the area knew me. Respected me. But I wanted the respect due me from adults. The very people whose children I was trying to protect.

  I entered a car in the spectator’s derby held at Raceway Park. The same racetrack where I’d flyered cars in the early days before Clark was sent to prison. Good attendance. Excellent exposure. And rednecks loved racism.

  I bought an olive green, four-door Chevy Caprice junker from Kubiak’s neighbor and set to work making my car the most striking heavy metal hate machine anybody would ever see. I’d gotten a small raise at the pizza job and picked up a few extra nights a week. The car cost me a hundred and fifty bucks—half of a week’s pay—but the attention it would get would be worth so much more.

  I painted it matte black with a roller and flat house paint, except for “88”—Hitler’s number—in white on the doors. Nazi SS lightning bolts were in red spray paint on the rear quarter panels, two crossed hammers rising from flames on the hood. “White Pride” in large letters lay across the back bumper. A badass car with a powerful message. Like Carmine’s. I had no doubt I’d win the derby and my cause would be further spotlighted in the news. White power would rule.

  One of the few requirements for getting on the track, aside from removing all windows but the windshield, was that cars had to have a metal bar welded along the inside of the driver’s door for safety. This presented a problem because, oddly enough, there wasn’t a welder among my wide range of blue-collar acquaintances. I can’t tell you how many people I asked, how many leads I followed, how many phone calls I made or doors I knocked on. I was determined to get my car into that derby and broadcast my message and, by doing so, spread the notion that white people shouldn’t be scared to stand up for their race.

  While I worked on the heap and continued my search for a welder, the car sat in plain view in my parents’ driveway. My parents weren’t remotely happy about it, but, as usual, they backed down.

  The marked-up race car attracted a ton of attention, though, exactly as I wanted it to, and soon enough a CBS news crew came out to the house to do a story on it.

  Nonno, my elderly grandfather who lived across the street, was outside tending to his yard when the news van showed up and a cameraman and reporter piled out.

  He dropped his gardening tools as they surrounded my car in the driveway. He barely spoke English. They descended on him. Shoved a camera and microphone in his face.

  “Do you know who this car belongs to? How do you feel about having this type of hate in your neighborhood? Is this crossing the first amendment freedom of speech line?”

  My grandfather might not have understood English well, but he certainly understood the frenetic attitude, and he knew they weren’t there to give me any awards for my artistic creation. It had been four years since I’d paid much attention to him or Nonna. I had work to do. I was too busy to look after them or visit, despite there only being a hundred yards between us.

  But I was his grandson. Nothing else mattered. “Go,” he said in his broken English. “He is good boy. Go away. Leave alone! Go! Now!”

  And this frail old man from Italy drove the buzzards away.

  They didn’t come back.

  He never said a word about it to me, and my car continued to stand proudly in my parents’ driveway, steadily gathering public nuisance citations from the city. I eventually gave up on finding a welder and sold the car for fifty bucks to another kid on the block who painted over everything I’d done and raced it in the derby.

  I didn’t bother to find out how he’d finished, but I was sure he hadn’t done well. He’d robbed the car of its power.

  Christian, local newspaper clipping, 1991

  15

  POLICE OPPRESSION

  I purchased my next gun unlawfully and without a permit. Ironically, I bought it off the street from a Mexica
n illegal. A .380 caliber semiautomatic handgun. I threw the old, busted .25 that Kubiak had given me into the Blue Island canal one night after failing to get it to load ammunition properly.

  Until you grip a loaded gun in your hand, you don’t know power. It’s a surreal feeling. Dangerous. Exciting. Exhilarating.

  Holding my pistol, I felt I could conquer the world.

  I loved it.

  I talked to Bill Rudolph—an older Chicago neo-Nazi who I’d originally met through Carmine—about getting more guns. He worked in a bread factory, like a true blue American would, and responded by giving me a co-worker’s stolen wallet, complete with Illinois driver’s license.

  “Use this,” he told me. “First thing you gotta do is get a permit to buy a gun.”

  I didn’t look a thing like the Mexican guy on the stolen license and pointed it out.

  He scoffed at my inexperience. “You think anybody gives a shit if that’s you or not? You fill out a firearm application and go to the ghetto to have some fat nigger bitch notarize it. She won’t even look at the picture on the license. They collect the money and don’t ask any questions.”

  I couldn’t believe that would be the case, but I’d be damned if I’d show any fear. What’s the worst they could do? Call the cops and charge me for having a stolen ID? It’s not as if the cops and I were strangers. They didn’t scare me. Instead, I must have worried them. They routinely stopped me on the street for doing nothing more than walking on the sidewalk on my way to buy smokes or standing on the corner waiting for a ride from one of my friends. I’d even heard that when the local Blue Island and Chicago city councils held town hall meetings, my name came up as an agenda item to discuss. These morons didn’t exactly know what white power skinheads were all about, but they knew trouble when they saw it. And, to them, I embodied the spirit of the trouble that skinheads were bringing to the area.