The Gift of Our Wounds

by Arno Michaelis

  What remained of my resolve was melting away with each swish of the wipers. How could I subject my family to more fear and uncertainty than they were already feeling? To what end? Mom and Jaspreet were right. This had been a crazy idea.

  I threw the car into drive. Just as I did—as if on cue—a tall, lanky man dressed in dark clothing and a hoodie covering his head walked out of the mist. Holding my foot on the brake, I watched as he crossed the street. I didn’t think he could see me, not in the dark and the rain. I figured it had to be Arno, and when he ducked into the Thai restaurant I was certain it was. Was it by chance that he appeared at the exact moment I was preparing to leave? My Sikh religion taught that all things happen according to the will of God. I remembered reading an analogy comparing the Sikh philosophy of fate to the orbiting of the earth. Although the earth revolves around and is influenced by the sun, it also has its own motion. So whatever it was that brought me here, I thought, the next move was mine.

  I shifted back into park, turned off the engine, and stepped out into the street.

  Arno

  For once in my life, I was actually on time. I took my usual table by the window and ordered a pot of tea. I was nervous as shit. I could barely guide the tea from the pot into the cup without spilling it on the table. I didn’t know exactly why Pardeep wanted to talk, except that it had to do with the Sikh temple shooting. What was I going to say? That I was sorry about his father and the others who were massacred by someone who, more than likely, had been influenced by me? I was drowning in sorrow, but what could that possibly mean to him? How would I explain the twisted ideology that led a member of my former racist skinhead crew to that sacred place in the quiet Milwaukee suburb of Oak Creek with the intention of such violence? Or the misplaced rage that drove him to fire at the innocent people inside? If that was what this grieving son was looking for, giving him answers was the least I could do.

  I had been atoning for my history of hatred for almost two decades, and it never got easier to acknowledge the dreadful things I did in the name of saving my race. Speaking the truth about white supremacy and the people who adopted the hateful philosophy was part of my self-imposed penance for having drunk the Kool-Aid myself as a younger man. I didn’t practice hate anymore. My heart was pure and my only intention was to promote the basic goodness of humanity and try to prevent other young people from making the same terrible mistakes I had.

  I was certain Pardeep would question the genuineness of my transformation from violent racist to peace activist, an inevitability whenever I talked about my past. I always answered the same: “I’ve given the world a reason to mistrust me. I don’t blame you for questioning my motives or my sincerity. By all means, scrutinize what I do.” Answering for my past sins had become my mission, my full-time job, my whole life. I’d traveled around the country and the world talking about my life after hate in an effort to encourage harmony among all people.

  But this was different. I was about to meet a man whose life had been tragically altered by someone with the belief system I once held. I was still plagued by nightmares about steel-toed boots and smashed skulls, and besieged by shame and guilt for the damage I did. Damage, I was sorry to say, that wouldn’t die with me but would endure for as long as there were people willing to embrace the hateful rhetoric I once preached at rallies and bellowed in white power songs I wrote and performed. People like Wade Michael Page, the man who murdered Pardeep’s father.

  Waiting for Pardeep, I wondered if I should tell him that I’d doubled up on my sleeping pills after the temple attack because nighttime unleashed a lurking sense that I had a hand in causing it. Or that I lived in dread of the start of Racial Holy War because I was certain that was Wade Page’s goal and his martyrdom would encourage others to follow in his footsteps?

  As the moments ticked by, I wondered if Pardeep would show. I worried that he wouldn’t, but I couldn’t blame him if he didn’t. I’m not sure that I would have the courage if I were in his shoes. Fucking hell, the guts it took for him just to reach out to me was awe-inspiring.

  Keng, my favorite waitress, stopped by the table, breaking my train of thought. Was I waiting for someone? she asked, filling my cup with tea.

  The bells on the restaurant door jangled. I looked up and saw a good-looking guy with brown skin, buzzed-off black hair, and tape over his left eye.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I think that’s him now.”

  Pardeep

  When I walked through the door I saw Arno in a friendly conversation with an Asian waitress and sighed with relief. I couldn’t imagine the guy who killed my dad chatting with a “foreigner.” I walked over to the table and extended my hand. “Arno? I’m Pardeep.” Arno stood to greet me. He was much taller than he’d looked as I walked into the restaurant. His eyes twinkled with warmth, which surprised me. Somehow I expected empty or maybe even angry eyes. My mind raced with the things I wanted to ask him. What do you know about the assault on the temple? Do you know the shooter? What would motivate Page to do what he did?

  I stood across from Arno, anxious to get the formalities out of the way and pursue what I was there for, but he spoke first. “Dude!” he cried. “What happened to your eye? Did you get into a brawl?” His voice sounded as if he chewed on gravel and his question caught me off guard. In my anxiety over our meeting, I’d completely forgotten about the tape over my left eye. Instinctively, I reached up and touched it. “Oh, this,” I said, taking a moment to explain.

  I had injured my eye while I was bathing my little girl. A hook on the end of a loofah brush somehow ended up in the white of my eyeball and through my eyelid. “Just like a hooked fish,” I said. Arno cringed. “Fucking hell, man!” he said. “That’s awful! I thought I was the only fool clumsy enough for that kind of shit to happen!”

  I said the emergency room doctor told me I was lucky to have sight in that eye. Arno’s concern seemed genuine. We sat down across from each other. He picked up the steaming pot from the table and poured me a cup of tea. I couldn’t help but notice the sleeves of tattoos covering his arms. The image of this inked-up tough guy with the rasping voice looking sympathetic and pouring Thai tea into delicate little cups struck me as paradoxical and almost funny. It would have seemed more normal if he’d grunted and cracked open a bottle of Bud. But I was about to learn that many things about Arno weren’t what they seemed.

  Arno had this way about him that made me feel like I’d known him forever. We eased into a conversation about our backgrounds and our kids. We discovered that his teenage daughter, Autumn, and my eight-year-old girl, Amaris, were both a bit OCD and shared the quirky habit of having to have the toes of their socks line up perfectly straight. Arno was a little rough around the edges. He used the F bomb the way teenagers abuse the word “like,” yet he oozed kindness and compassion. When he talked about Autumn, he turned to mush. It seemed inconceivable to me that this warm, personable guy—someone who seemed hurt that I was hurt, who teared up talking about his child—was once the image of the monster that murdered my father.

  As one cup of tea turned into two and three, I told Arno about my experience as a poor kid coming from India to live in America and how I’d thrown myself into school and sports as a way to integrate into my new culture. He shared that, unlike me, he was given all the opportunities of growing up in a white, middle-class American family but, at an early age, had chosen to shun them in favor of wreaking havoc on the streets.

  Two hours passed and we were getting on so well that I almost felt embarrassed to ask what I’d come for. But I had to ask.

  Arno

  We talked about a lot of shit. Pardeep was one of the coolest guys I’d ever met. He was funny and smart and engaging—and the eye I could see was warm. I was struck by what seemed like a contradiction that he could be so chill when just a couple of months earlier his father had been murdered. At times over the course of the evening I had to remind myself why we were meeting. After two or three hours of nonstop talking about everyth
ing except what we were there for, he finally asked if I’d known Wade Michael Page.

  I said I didn’t think I’d ever met Page, but I knew him intimately. Watching the news coverage, my heart sank, and I wondered if it was possible that I had recruited him into the racist skinhead movement. Photos showed him with the same steel-toed boots and racist tattoos that fed me when I lived in the white power world. I was certain he chose the temple because the people who worshipped there were a visual example of everything he believed was wrong with our country. When I discovered he was a “patched” member of Hammerskin Nation, the racist skinhead group I cofounded, I lay awake, asking myself, Did I unleash this monster on the world? But comparing the dates, I realized I left the movement long before he joined. That didn’t excuse me from accepting responsibility for what he did. If nothing else, I helped to create the environment that created Wade Michael Page, a regret that will follow me to my grave.

  Page became an official member of Hammerskin Nation ten months before he stalked into the Sikh temple and systematically executed Pardeep’s father and the others. I knew the disdain that darkened Page’s heart. No one’s heart was darker than mine back when my life’s goal was to kick off a Racial Holy War, which was the goal of all white supremacists. I was a teenager when I heeded the radical racist battle cry, “Fourteen Words,” as composed by the late David Lane, one of the most ferocious racists in the history of the white power movement. “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.” Those words had been my belief system, my religion, and my reason for being until I was in my mid-twenties.

  I immersed myself in racist dogma beginning at the age of sixteen, and by the time I was eighteen I had bragging rights as a founding member of the largest white power skinhead organization in the world. During those years, I fought with my bare hands and steel-toed boots and thrashed strangers for the sole reason that their skin was darker than mine. The enemy was anyone who we decided threatened our people. Once, I pummeled a man because I suspected he was gay until he was limp and whimpering; then, as an encore, I fed him my boots while my crew whistled and cheered. The only difference between Wade Page and me was that I hadn’t murdered anyone, at least not that I knew of.

  I told Pardeep that, during my time in the trenches, I’d reeled in hundreds of street warriors by dangling the promise of “a whiter and brighter world.” I’d influenced thousands more with racist lyrics I composed and performed as the frontman for a notorious white power band, Centurion. As ashamed as I was to admit it, back then it warmed my heart to stomp across a stage and see dozens of fellow skinheads gesturing at me with straight-armed Nazi salutes and shouting “Sieg Heil!” Hail Victory! My band’s claim to fame was that our crowds were so violent that someone was always carried away in an ambulance. I fed my followers anti-foreigner, anti-black, anti-gay, anti-Semitic, anti-anyone-who-didn’t-fit-into-our-crude-worldview propaganda with the same zeal as anyone fighting for a righteous cause. “Those people”—just like the people in the Sikh temple—were considered fair game in our war to save our endangered white race.

  I explained to Pardeep that the only way out of the quagmire of racial prejudice was practice. We practice tennis, or piano, or writing to become familiar with it. The more we practice something, the more natural it becomes. It was no different with hate. Wade Page practiced it until he was so twisted and miserable that only homicide followed by suicide seemed to make sense. The antidote was getting people to practice loving kindness, I said. That had become my life’s mission.

  Page was an asshole, just like I had been. I was just sorry he didn’t get to experience the acts of kindness and compassion that had helped me to turn my life around. It might have helped him to realize—as I did—before he resorted to killing others that his racist beliefs were bullshit and his hatred was killing him.

  Pardeep listened intently. Our talk had helped him make sense of the senselessness of his father’s death. “But how do I move forward from it?” he asked. I was afraid of the question. Afraid I might break down and cry.

  I said I often raised the subject of “continuance” in my talks. I believed that all the actions we took in our lives had reactions—even after we were gone. Everything he’d described about his father—his love of family, the dedication to his community, his fierce determination to achieve the American dream—could be used for good. “Your father could live on through your work,” I said.

  Yes, Pardeep said. After the shooting he and his family had brainstormed ways they could refocus the tragedy for good. From those conversations had emerged an organization he named Serve 2 Unite, whose purpose it was, in the spirit of Sikhism, to promote understanding and peaceful coexistence for all people. That was a big task, I said, smiling, and it was the same message I had in mind when I founded my nonprofit, Life After Hate, three years earlier. I’d recruited a team of other former white supremacists to my board, and we could barely keep up with the demand for our services.

  Maybe Pardeep and I could join together sometime to promote the message.

  “Wouldn’t that be something? A brown Sikh and a former racist skinhead, together, talking about unity and oneness.”

  Pardeep seemed to dig the idea.

  TWO

  EARLY LIVES

  Every Gurudwara will have four doors, one to the north, south, east, and west. All are welcome.

  Martyr Guru Arjun Dev Ji

  Arno

  My mom called me “wild child.” I was her firstborn, and she wasn’t quite sure what to do with me. I kept her on her toes and often in the process of pulling her hair out because I was always moving, always doing something I wasn’t supposed to. I was barely able to walk before I began toddling down the stairs from our apartment to my parents’ tavern and climbing up on the bar for the bottle of grenadine. I loved the sweet, syrupy stuff, and as many times as my mother moved it, I could always find it and top it off with a blast from the soda gun. Mom didn’t know how to discipline me, so she usually looked the other way and let me be me. I’m not sure it would have made much difference if she had been a strict disciplinarian, because I think I was born nuts.

  We moved to our house in Mequon, a white, upper-middle-class town just north of Milwaukee, when I was eighteen months going on four or five years. It was a bland tract house with a striking two-story A-frame addition that Mom designed and Dad and his cousin built. As my dad was laying the last bundle of shingles on the peak of the roof, I watched from my swing set a short distance away. The way he tells it, out of the blue, I started screaming. I was a very loud kid who screamed all the time, mostly just for the hell of it, but apparently this was different. Convinced I was dying, Dad leapt off the roof to come to my rescue, badly spraining his ankle in the process. When he finally got to me, I pointed to the source of my terror: a ladybug had landed on my arm. Despite his throbbing ankle, Dad chuckled and gave me a hug. For him, it was just another day in the life of raising a quirky kid.

  I could pretty much do anything I wanted, and that included things like raiding the medicine cabinet, which resulted in a frantic trip to the ER to have my stomach pumped, and climbing on top of the gas stove after lighting all of the burners. Once, I smeared my bedroom walls with Vaseline and shook baby powder all over them. Another time, I placed a raw egg on my sleeping mother’s pillow and waited until she rolled over and broke it. I thought it was hilarious. She probably didn’t, but lovingly took it in stride, just as my dad did.

  My first real victim was my little brother, Zack. He was as quiet and sweet as I was loud and rambunctious. I would crash and bang my way into situations with no mind of the mess in my wake, while Zack was an unobtrusive observer of life. He would sit in relative silence for hours at a time, content with the elegant simplicity of his surroundings. My parents even became worried that he had a learning disability because his subdued behavior was so disparate from that of his hellion big brother. So while I threw my weight around and generally raised Hades and mayhem
, Zack conducted himself with patience and grace. His first words were “Thank you.” Mine was “No.” His existence, along with everyone else’s, was incidental to my thrill seeking. He was there for my amusement, which typically consisted of escalating forms of physical and psychological torture.

  Zack was two years younger than me and a toddler when I began provoking him by taking away his toys and food, then pinching and slapping him when he cried. As we grew, so did the intensity and wickedness of my abuse. Like a lot of kids, Zack hated the pungent taste of mustard, so I would pin him down and squirt yellow French’s from the squeeze bottle into his nose until it came out his mouth, then finish him off by dripping huge gobs of spit in his eyes. I initiated Mustard Torture at every opportunity, sometimes to the point that Zack would snap and chase me around the house with a kitchen knife, which I found all the more amusing.

  Someone else might have called me a destructive little fucker. Mom chose to see me as “different” and “extremely precocious.” She was stunned when, during her first preschool parent-teacher conference, the teacher said that I was a joy to have in class. She was so stunned, in fact, that she felt compelled to ask, “Are you talking about the little blond kid?” Apparently I was a terror with a heart, though, because I took it upon myself to help the kids with special needs and protect them from rival bullies.

  By kindergarten, I was an accomplished bully myself. Sometimes I wonder how many people mention the school bus bully when they’re sitting in their therapist’s office today. People like Timothy Bailey. I tormented that poor kid. We rode the kindergarten bus together. With his big Coke-bottle glasses and perpetual snotty nose, he was an obvious target. I punched him in the nose every time he got on the bus, and, every time, his mom showed up and yelled at me. I’d see her coming and hide in the back of the bus, and she’d point at me and shout, “I see you back there, Arnie Michaelis! You leave my son alone!” I got a big rush from all the chaos. So Timothy got on the bus the next day and the whole scene played out again. It was like Groundhog Day.