Romantic Violence

by Christian Picciolini

  “Don’t shoot!” one of the gunmen yelled. “It’s Steve!” Steve was a young probationary Hammerskin, arriving late for the vigil.

  I set my weapon down, leaned my back against the wall. For the third time in my life, I’d almost shot someone. Each time, someone innocent. I shook to think how closely we’d come to opening fire on a friend. This only increased my anger that someone was threatening my family.

  How dare they put me in this situation?

  Fuming, I ordered everyone back to their positions. We resumed our patrol. Hours passed, but nothing ever happened.

  By morning we were exhausted from lack of sleep, aggravated from the pointless watch, and Lisa was furious at me for worrying her for no good reason.

  Without being able to pinpoint when it had begun to turn bad, married life wasn’t all that much fun anymore. I adored Devin and still treasured my marriage, but Lisa and I rarely agreed on anything any longer. We began arguing all the time about my extracurricular activities. I looked for reasons to go away because the fights wore me down.

  One such weekend in the winter of 1993 I drove to a concert in Buffalo, New York, to blow off some steam from another one of our arguments. A high-energy skinhead show promised to give me a break from all the domestic drama. No Alibi from Buffalo set up the show and invited The Voice from Philly. Aggravated Assault from Atlantic City joined the bill. Music and beer propelled the crowd and, before we knew it, some skinheads took advantage of the copious amounts of liquid courage they’d ingested and a ragtag army of drunken warrior wannabes took to the tenement building across the street from the venue. They busted down doors and beat and dragged some black and Latino families forcefully out of bed in the middle of the night. Just for fun. Police sirens sliced through the darkness. I exited the bar from the back door and retreated into the shadows, inching my way to my car parked down the street so I could safely disappear back home to Chicago. I had no interest in partaking in the senseless brutality of the night. And I couldn’t afford to get arrested. Again. The next time I got pinched would surely mean prison time for me.

  Whether or not I still had reservations about the whole white power skinhead movement, I found it very hard to let go. It had been my entire identity from the age of fourteen and I still savored my role as a leader.

  By August of 1993, Big Ed from Bound For Glory had pegged me to take over management of the Northern Hammerskins organization. It meant I’d oversee the Hammerskin Nation operations for all of the northern U.S. states. Nearly two hundred skinheads would be under my direct command.

  Big Ed had been leading the group for four years already, but wanted to focus more on his band’s exploits, since they’d been touring and recording almost non-stop since our groundbreaking concert together in Germany. It was his sole responsibility as existing director to name his successor and he had no qualms about passing the baton to me. He knew I deserved it. I’d even stepped in from time to time to help him manage the role when he was busy on the road or in the studio with his band. Although it was never made official, I had more or less assumed the interim position of director for the Northern Hammerskins in his absence.

  The next month, while I was at Big Ed’s home in St. Paul, Minnesota, transitioning the role, we received a call from the Blood & Honour skinhead crew in England with unimaginable news. Skrewdriver’s lead singer and driving force, Ian Stuart, had been tragically killed in a car crash that morning. We were stunned. Ian Stuart was an inspirational folk hero to many skinheads, including a huge role model for me. I’d never had the opportunity to meet Ian in person, but the few letters we traded back and forth were always cordial and inspiring. He was intelligent, influential, and an undisputed pioneer for skinhead music, racist or otherwise.

  There was some suspicion the British government or anti-racists were involved in orchestrating his death by tampering with the car he’d been driving in, but no evidence ever surfaced to back up these theories. Nevertheless, Ian Stuart’s death kicked white power skinheads all over the world back into motion, focusing our mission and binding us more tightly for a while. But I think we all knew the movement would never be the same without Ian’s voice.

  I thought for a moment about Clark Martell. The man who’d been responsible for introducing me to the boisterous music of Skrewdriver and the skinhead lifestyle when I was a young boy, all of thirteen-and-a-half years old. Where might he be? I’d only stayed in contact for a short time with Clark during his lengthy incarceration, but I’d heard he’d since been granted an early release to a halfway house far north of the Chicago city limits.

  The letters he’d sent had gotten too bizarre and his artwork too lewd. I stopped responding after the first few years. His mail continued to arrive like clockwork for four years until it eventually tapered off to nothing. The last bit of correspondence I remembered opening came with a Polaroid picture of his new prison tattoo—on the center of his forehead was a freshly inked German eagle holding a swastika. In it, Clark looked old. Haggard. Sick. On the back of the photo was a simple, hand-drawn smiley face with the barely legible words, “See ya when I see ya! Long live the Aryan Goddess! 14/88. CM.” Before long, I discovered other folks had been receiving similar disturbing packages from Clark and his once mythical cachet quickly evaporated.

  While I sat and mourned the passing of Ian Stuart, I wondered where the man who had promised to save my life would find his own safety. Word spread that shortly after his release from prison, Clark had fled the halfway house and made his way into Michigan where he’d gotten into a row at the Detroit clubhouse and stabbed a Hammerskin with a screwdriver. The irony wasn’t lost on me.

  Chaos Records, 1994

  22

  ORGANIZED CHAOS

  Collecting an unemployment check and selling a few compact discs may have taken some of the sting out of being laid off from my road construction job every winter, but Lisa and I were still barely scraping by financially. Sometimes hardly even speaking to each other, both exhausted from the constant fighting. The wonderment and magic of being newlyweds and a having a baby as part of our family had been eroded by the harsh reality of diapers and more bills and little money and time for each other. Marriage wasn’t the bliss we so naively expected when we’d first gotten together as teenagers. Our mobile home honeymoon vacation was over.

  When she got angry, Lisa would let me know she wished she’d gone to college instead of marrying me.

  “I’m home all day long doing laundry and cleaning the house and I never leave to do anything but buy baby food and diapers!” she’d argue. “Why don’t you pitch in and help instead of going to your stupid skinhead meetings and running around with your useless friends?”

  “You mean the ones I hardly get to hang out with anymore because I’m working seventy-hour weeks? Those friends?” I would counter.

  Inevitably she’d cry. And then the baby would cry. “God, I wish I’d gone to school so I could go out and get a real job. So I wouldn’t have to depend on you to raise my child.”

  “Your child? Your child!” I got so angry I threw my dinner plate in the sink, smashing it to pieces. “He’s our child, Lisa, and I support you both so you don’t have to work. So you can sit at home on your ass all day.” I didn’t really believe that, and things would always spiral down quickly from there.

  Lisa would begin shrieking at the top of her lungs for the whole neighborhood to hear.

  “You are an absent father and husband! You don’t know what it’s like to raise a child,” she cried. “Everything has been handed to you your whole life and you don’t even appreciate it. You are a spoiled brat. I know you resent your mother and father for not being there and now you’ve become exactly like them. Grow some fucking balls and be a man! You’re just a child. You don’t deserve a family. Devin doesn’t even know who you are and, frankly, I don’t want him to!”

  And on and on she would go, her voice rising in volume with each poisonous jab, without so much as taking a
pause to breathe.

  That was usually my cue to grab the car keys and slam the door on my way out. Her words hurt me and I was afraid of not being able to control my temper. I never hit her, but I could begin to feel myself wanting to. So I’d leave for fear of losing control and physically hurting her or saying something I could never take back.

  A few hours later I’d come home after finding one of my skinheads to drink and commiserate with. Lisa would be locked in the bedroom with Devin and I’d sleep it off on the couch until it was time for work the next morning.

  I found it painstaking to look for work, or toil all day at a job that I felt was getting me nowhere, and then have to go home to a resentful wife and fussy baby. We fell into the same pattern most young couples do when the real world calls. Forget about flowers and romance and dreaming of the future and the rosy life we’d have together. The reality was that we were too young and immature to handle the responsibility of marriage and raising a child. And while we both loved Devin with every single ounce of our being and wanted genuinely to be a loving, happy union of three, neither Lisa nor I had much enthusiasm for doing the things that would bring a healthy relationship to fruition.

  Lisa claimed she felt trapped and that she never slept while I was away attending to movement business. She became resolute in her objections to anything at all I did with skinheads. Not only did she despise the racism, she worried constantly that I was going to end up in jail or dead, leaving her to fend for our child herself.

  In our calmer moments, we talked about how we were growing apart. How we both felt overburdened with responsibilities. Both continued to imply that the other one had it easier. And after expending every possible avenue, our ultimate solution to save our marriage was to do yet another foolish thing. We selfishly rationalized that if we had another child, we’d somehow create an opportunity to bind us closer to each other and thus repair our fractured relationship. So, we began to make love with another baby in mind. This did rekindle our affection for each other and it gave us a new purpose, and when Devin was a little over a year old, Lisa was expecting again.

  Big Ed called late one night, shortly after we received the news that Lisa was pregnant, to congratulate me and set a date to meet again. With his busy traveling schedule and the sudden news of Ian Stuart’s passing, we hadn’t gotten around to formally finalizing the leadership transfer of the Northern Hammerskins to me.

  “The last thing we need to do to make this official is get you on the phone with Shane Becker.” Becker was national director for the Hammerskin Nation and one of the Dallas Hammerskin founders who’d been at the Naperville meeting in 1988. “It’ll be tricky since he’s still in prison, but if we set a date and a specific time window for you to be by your phone we can make it work.”

  “Ed, I’ve actually been meaning to call you about that.” I hemmed and hawed before actually getting to the point. “With work and the new baby and all, I’m going to have to bow out of the running.”

  “Well, that’s disappointing.” I could tell in his voice, without him saying the actual words, that he understood my dilemma. We were close friends and I’d confided in him multiple times about my marital woes. “I understand. Take care of that family and come see us soon in St. Paul. Julie and the kids would love some company.”

  “Will do, Ed. Please send the girls my love.”

  The next day, while I was packing a lunch before heading to work, I received a call from a Texas correctional institution. It was Shane Becker asking if I’d reconsider. After a few pleasantries, I politely declined the offer and wished him well.

  I tried my best not to dwell on it too much, at least publicly, but walking away from the directorship role for the Northern Hammerskins pained me. I had worked so incredibly hard to establish myself as a prominent national leader within the white power movement and now, in one fell swoop, I had stymied my own hopes for making that reality happen. But I couldn’t let the disappointment wash over me. Even if I hadn’t turned it down, I’d be giving up so much more. On the home front, I had vowed to make my marriage work. And on the frontlines, I still had work to do. I had to find a way to make both work.

  I was still importing white power CDs from Europe to supplement my income and selling so much of it on the side, the idea to open a record store and to be my own boss took root. Not only could my shop carry music, I could sell posters, T-shirts, boots and braces, and other accessories I knew skins and punks would buy. I could use my entrepreneurial knack to both feed my family and keep the local skinhead scene going strong, without having to leave either behind.

  My leadership and steadfast involvement over the last six years had helped grow the American white power movement from its earliest roots—the legacy bestowed upon me by the founding triumvirate of Clark Martell, Carmine Paterno, and Chase Sargent—but between the responsibilities of working and taking care of a family and Lisa’s fears for my safety, I found little time anymore for rallies, recruiting new members, maintaining the crew, and the things that had catapulted me into a leadership position in the first place.

  With a store selling our unique brand of music and feeding our culture, I could contribute to the cause in a different, but still significant way. The music I’d sell would keep us straight on our priorities, it would inspire newcomers to join our mission, and the flexibility of being my own boss would allow me to spend more time with my family.

  Lisa didn’t initially object to me opening a store, although she wasn’t so sure it would work. But she agreed we needed the money, so I was able to convince her my idea would ease our financial troubles and give us time to work on our marriage. After what seemed like months of debates, and me pointing out the advantages, Lisa decided to go along with it. It wouldn’t be easy. And a small shop wouldn’t guarantee us riches, but what more could we lose?

  Hungry for professional fulfillment in my life, desperate to earn a better living, wanting an opportunity to prove my capabilities as a husband and father, I gambled our paltry savings and a small three thousand dollar loan from her mother and ramped up my idea quickly. I headed out to find the perfect spot for Chaos Records—the name I’d settled on months earlier—the rhythm of wild success pounding in my head. The thought that this would support my expanding family while still allowing me to remain connected to the movement filled me with purpose once again.

  I signed a cheap lease for a vacant storefront near a busy intersection just west of Blue Island’s border. The space had been sitting empty for a while, a fact I used to negotiate a favorable deal on the rent. I built out the inside of the store myself, from counters to racks to shelving, and paid an artist friend from high school fifty bucks to airbrush the walls with apocalyptic images better suiting the giant neon “anarchy” sign glowing in the window. I hung dozens of busted vinyl records from the ceiling with fishing line, plastered my old punk rock posters all over the walls, and tiled the floor in a black and white checkerboard ska pattern. I spent weeks carefully choosing and ordering my music inventory—all independent or underground music you couldn’t find anyplace else in the area, at least not at mainstream record shops like Record Town or Sam Goody. I had no interest in competing with mainstream consumerism.

  While selling white power music was my bread and butter, I also carried more run-of-the-mill Oi!, punk, ska, hardcore, rockabilly, and black metal music. This was a business, after all. I needed a diverse inventory that would bring paying customers through the doors. But it was the white power inventory and my regular skinhead customers that were my mainstay and kept me in business.

  Cops were onto the store the moment it opened. Squad cars routinely lurked in the parking lot, the police expecting trouble. I was selling subversive music that few, if any, other shops in the country sold. They were no doubt concerned my store would be a front for bad stuff. Perhaps it was one of Chaos Records’ two taglines that I used in print advertisements and spray-painted on the walls inside the store that roused their ire: “
The Revolution Starts Here” and “Fuck Peace. I Want Chaos!”

  Had they known me at all, they would have seen that while I was still looked upon by the movement as the chief Chicago figurehead among white power skinheads, I had little involvement with any daily activities. I had transferred most of those activities to veterans in my crew. I no longer wrote letters or sent out pamphlets. Hadn’t been to an out-of-state gathering in almost a year and I’d stopped recruiting altogether. The glory of both my bands had faded. I stayed in the background while the remaining crew floated unattended for the most part. I’d been leading from behind for some time, and while there were others within my crew still pounding the pavement, our diminished numbers were evident.

  I had a hard time letting go. My selfishness and insecurity made damn sure I hadn’t groomed an heir apparent to take over the gang in my absence. Sure, there was pressure from Kubiak and some of the other guys to be more involved, but for the most part they understood I had a family to support. After all, a main tenet of the fourteen words that we lived by was to build a future for our children.

  I’d pitched it to my crew as more of a retirement from the streets, but the truth was I’d run out of gas, leaving me idle and fatigued. Still, nobody questioned my allegiance.

  Not long after I opened the record store, a couple of undercover cops wandered in. Talk about conspicuous. In waltzed two narcs in their early thirties wearing street clothes, apathetic and clean-cut as soldiers in boot camp.

  Smirking, I walked over to them, held my hand out, and said in my politest tone, “Nice to meet you, officers. Let me guess, you’re either here to pick up the new Cradle of Filth album or to buy tickets for the Anal Cunt in-store acoustic show we’re having next week. Either way, I can help you. Cash or credit?”

  Red-faced, they looked at each other, shrugged and said, “You got us.” They turned around and left.