The Gift of Our Wounds

by Arno Michaelis

  The small, intimate atmosphere of Marquette motivated me. I still gravitated toward sports, but my social circle grew beyond the boundaries of athletics. I played ball and joined the Indian Students’ Association. My classes were spiritual in nature but nondenominational and focused on religious philosophy and history and social justice, which I loved. I joined in conversations about important issues. I opened my mind to the views of some of my more white-collar, conservative-thinking classmates, but I found my voice speaking for blue-collar and marginalized communities.

  Although it was a Jesuit college, we were encouraged to question all religions, and I was a contentious student, constantly challenging details of the Bible, the Quran, the Torah and Talmud, and every other book of scripture. I asked things like “How could Methuselah have lived 969 years?” and “How could men be turned into monkeys and swine?” and “How could a river flow upstream?” Until one day, when a particularly patient professor challenged me to appreciate the scriptures for the lessons and guidance they offered rather than scrutinize every detail. His wise advice led me on the path back to my roots.

  What I discovered in reading and rereading our scriptures was that the precepts of my religion really appealed to me. Our founder and prophet, Guru Nanak, was a really cool dude. Five hundred years ago, he traveled the world with his universal message of oneness and love—of a common brotherhood and absolute equality among all people, regardless of caste or creed or country. His religion was a way of life; one lived with peace and joy, honesty and optimism, and in service to others, especially those who were marginalized—in reverence to God. It became the basis of Sikhism.

  The last line of the Sikh prayer called the Ardaas is Nanak Naam Chardi Kala, teraa bhane sarbaht da bhala. That line invokes the basic principles of the Sikh philosophy. Translated from Punjabi, it means, “In God’s name, we shall be relentlessly optimistic because we want peace and prosperity for all people.” I’d recited that line my whole life during daily prayers without ever really thinking much about the meaning. Now, as I continued on my journey to find myself, those prayerful words stirred deep within me. Why hadn’t I seen it all along? My Sikh religion was the answer to a prayer. I wanted to live with hope and optimism for me and for all people.

  What better way to live?

  Arno

  Busy Bob’s Diner on the south side of Milwaukee is quiet, except for the faggot in the pink shirt crying into the pay phone. It’s 2:30 in the morning and my crew and I are hammered and starving. We’re about to dig into our burgers and this guy is such a mess that snot’s dripping from his nose. Fucking hell. I should have knocked his teeth out on my way back from the bathroom, but I didn’t want to catch AIDS.

  “Hey, cocksucker!” I say, loud enough so everyone can hear. Eyes dart from me to him and then into space. “I said, ‘Hey, cocksucker!’ You don’t know your name?”

  The guy wipes his nose with the back of his hand, but doesn’t respond. I’m gonna kill this motherfucking degenerate. He snivels some more. My heart beats with excitement. I can feel a confrontation coming on. We all watch as he pulls a cigarette from the pack in his breast pocket. It’s one of those long, slim cigarettes; the kind girls smoke.

  One of my buddies can’t take anymore. He grabs the pickle from his plate and tosses it. The pickle sticks to the homo’s cheek and we roll with laughter. That seems to get his attention. He stops his whining, wipes the pickle off his face, and glares at us. We watch with amusement as he reaches for a coffee can filled with sand and a couple of days’ worth of cigarette butts. “Who threw the fucking pickle?” he asks, raising the can as if he’s going to throw it. He can’t be serious. Is he really challenging us?

  I jump out of the booth and leap toward him, my steel-toed Doc Martens hitting the floor with a thwack! A chair goes flying. He looks stunned. No way am I going to hit him with my bare hands and get his blood on me, so I throw on my flight jacket, then wind up and slam the point of my elbow into his eye. I hear the snap and crack of his shattering eye socket. It sounds like a solid base hit. He cups his hand over his eye and drops to the floor, where he writhes a bit before losing consciousness. Almost like magic, the whole side of his face swells up and turns reddish purple. Right there in front of us! A broken orbital. Nice! I kick him in the side with my boot and spit on him. My crew follows suit, kicking and spitting, kicking and spitting. When everyone has taken a turn, we run out of the diner, laughing like hell.

  Telling this story makes me feel like crying, but that is who I was for the seven years I called myself a white power skinhead. I hated anyone who wasn’t white, straight, and on the same page as me. The page with “Fourteen Words,” the slogan that sums up the white supremacist philosophy: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.” Homosexuals were on our hit list. They were as loathsome as blacks, Jews, and race traitors. As much as it pains me to acknowledge who I was, I have come to live by the words of Ida B. Wells-Barnett, who so wisely said, “The way to right wrongs is to turn the light of truth upon them.” Amen. The truth is my salvation.

  By the time I left that gay man on the diner floor, I had stomped my way into the white power movement and was on my way to becoming a founder of the Northern Hammerskins.

  Four years had passed since the jocks cut off my rattail on the eighth-grade playground. In the best of scenarios, that trauma should have taught me empathy for the people I’d bullied over the years. But that’s not what happened. I had tasted victimhood and determined never to be someone’s prey again.

  Instead, I rode the river of violence and hate until I nearly drowned.

  Punk

  With my breakdancing days behind me, I went in search of something else to feed my adrenaline addiction. That’s when I discovered the phenomenon of punk rock. My friend’s older brother was blasting an album by FEAR, and the needle dropped on a song called “I Don’t Care About You.” I don’t care about you … Fuck you!… I don’t care about you. I’d never heard the word “fuck” used in a song before and I was awestruck.

  By then, my contempt for propriety and mainstream culture was as obvious as the giant chip on my shoulder, and the hard-edged, anti-establishment, all-about-pissing-people-off punk subculture was right up my alley. Milwaukee had a strong punk scene, and I found my way to my first live show at a bowling alley between Mequon and downtown Milwaukee. Experiencing live punk was like nothing I’d ever seen. It was wonderfully chaotic. The music was so loud it stung your ears, and the crowd, a collection of the city’s outcasts, had fucking attitude. The atmosphere was perfectly obnoxious, with everyone pushing and shoving each other and stomping the floor like jackhammers. A pastime that encouraged hitting and getting hit? I fit right in and made friends quickly.

  My parents had lost all control of me. I was a freshman in high school and doing whatever I felt like doing. With a new crew and a new lease on life, my days became about finding the next DIY show, where fledgling local punk bands played in garages and basements and other small venues. Our idea of fun was getting wasted, beating each other up, and setting our armpit hair on fire. Bonus points if it was your own. In Mom’s eyes, I could do no wrong, even when I was doing pretty much everything wrong. I was her firstborn. I couldn’t be that fucked up! Dad tried to rein me in, but his attempt at heavy-handedness after a childhood of running wild made me even more determined to revolt. The truth is, I loved rebelling. For me, it felt like scratching poison ivy. When my father put his foot down and forbade me from leaving the house at night, my rote response was, “Try to fucking stop me.” The one time he tried, I cursed him out, shoved him to the ground, and walked off. I didn’t give a rat’s ass what he or anyone else thought of me. My focus was satiating my thirst for thrills. And figuring out where my next buzz was coming from.

  I was already in the honeymoon phase of my relationship with drinking by then. Beer was my go-to, but I’d gulp down whatever I could get my hands on, whenever I could get it. Dad had a liquor cabinet
and I’d pour shots from every bottle into an empty gallon milk jug and mix it all together. When the jug was a third full, I’d drink half and ride my bicycle drunk to share what was left over with my friends, crashing all along the way.

  Wouldn’t you know it? My favorite local punk band, Stolen Youth, was straight edge, a wing of the punk community that rejected cigarettes, drugs, sex, and alcohol. I loved their music and went to every one of their shows. Their message was, “Don’t go to college. College steals your youth.” When the lead singer went off to college, the other members asked me to take his place. I was stoked, except that a condition of my joining was that I had to quit drinking.

  I already had a reputation for rowdy drunkenness by then, and the band members said they couldn’t afford to muddy their cred. They were willing to take a chance on me, if I promised to stop. I told them thanks, but no thanks. I wasn’t giving up beer, not even to be in a punk band. I guess because they needed someone who knew the words to their songs, they decided to relax the rule. All I had to do was promise not to be drunk onstage. No deal, I said. I didn’t make promises I couldn’t keep. Finally, we struck a compromise. I agreed I wouldn’t bring beer onstage while I was performing. So I drank myself stupid before and after every show.

  The band rocked on until the rest of them left for college; everyone but me. I got in tight with a crew of hardcore punks I knew and their band from West Bend, a city just north of Milwaukee. Their only rule was that fighting and getting fucked up were required. I hitched rides to all of their shows and after-parties that summer. My connections led me to the punk scenes in the cities of Racine and Kenosha, the heart and soul of Wisconsin punk. The Kenosha punk world was especially decadent and dysfunctional. It was like one big maladapted family gone berserk. We ranged in age from thirteen to thirties and had more in common than we should have, namely booze, drugs, and a thirst for mayhem. Our basic existence was getting wasted and going to punk shows, where we’d pummel each other in the name of having fun.

  When fall rolled around, my parents dragged me, kicking and screaming, back to Homestead High for the start of my sophomore year. That’s when everything really started going to hell. I had always gotten straight A’s, because A’s were pretty easy for me. But school had come to seem so banal compared to my crazy punk life that, even when I did go to class, I used the time to disrupt the lessons and taunt my teachers. My aim was to provoke them into physical fights. “C’mon! Take a swing!” I’d say, getting up in their faces and challenging them. I didn’t get any takers, which only gassed up my general frustration. It was inevitable that my grades would eventually tank, and, when my A’s dove to C’s and then D’s and F’s, I just stopped going to school. My parents were at a loss for what to do. Mom and Dad appealed to me to get my shit together. I had too much potential to let it all slip away.

  Not one to be idle, I spent the rest of the school year immersed in the punk world. I managed bands and promoted local punk shows, with some success. I was a juvenile delinquent with visions of grandeur. I was a bona fide fucking genius! There was nothing I couldn’t do. The first show I planned was at a VFW hall on the south side of Milwaukee. I lied and said it was for a birthday party. The crusty old guys at the bar looked pretty freaked out when a couple of hundred punk rockers with spiked hair, bullet belts, and combat boots showed up on the appointed night to rock out to the band. For four straight hours, the frenzied music and screamed lyrics reverberated off the hall walls. It was pandemonium, with people slam dancing and throwing shit and punching each other, all for kicks. People got hurt, a bunch of shit got broken, and we left the place in shambles, which meant the show was a rousing success. The VFW made enough from the bar to cover the damage and then some. My take was a pile of cash that I spent on a weeklong party with my friends.

  Where were my parents? Between a rock and a hard place, to use an old cliché. No matter what they tried, the outcome was the same. I stayed away for days at a time and went home when I needed to eat or sleep. Neither physical nor emotional restraints could hold me back from my perpetual quest for chaos. I was unmanageable and no one could figure out how to contain me, much less control the spiral I was in.

  Whatever little was left of my relationship with my family went to shit that summer. I’d organized a tour for a band I “managed” called Nuclear Overdose, NOD for short, and really fucked it up. Every show fell through because we were drunk most of the time and I hadn’t confirmed the gigs with the promoters. We packed up two vans and went on the tour anyway. By the time we reached Indianapolis, our traveling money had dried up. We’d spent everything we had on gas and beer and we’d eaten our way through the two flats of generic cream of mushroom soup we brought for the road. Broke and stranded, all fourteen of us crashed at the home of a Mexican girl I was sleeping with until, one day, her mother got fed up with our drunken nonsense and screamed at us to “Sal de aquí! Sal de aquí!” (Get out of here!) All that was left to do was panhandle, and we learned really fast that none of us were very good at it. Finally, one of the guys got up the courage to call his parents and convince them to wire enough money to get us back home.

  We made our way back to Milwaukee, arriving shortly after my parents and brother had left on a two-week vacation to drive across country to my grandpa’s place in Washington State. I’d forgotten they were going. Hallelujah! I had the run of the house! I sent the call out to the entire Wisco punk scene.

  So began a huge punk rager in our pretty suburban home in the nothing-ever-happens-here town of Mequon. It was ten straight days of drunkenness and debauchery. Bands from Kenosha came to play in the basement and we all got fucked up in whatever way we could. We started by chugging bottles of Mad Dog 20/20, a cheap, high-octane wine that tasted like cough syrup mixed with aftershave. When that was depleted, we huffed rubber cement out of an empty bread bag until I felt like my lungs were cemented together. We smoked pot from a bong my friend Chad made from a mayonnaise jar and, when the weed ran out, I smoked cat shit from the litter box, just to see what would happen. Wasted out of our minds, we broke dishes, threw food on the walls, and crushed lit cigarettes on the floor. People came and went at all hours. One night, someone took Dad’s riding lawnmower for a joy ride and carved a swath through my mother’s prized vegetable garden. This was my parents’ home, my brother’s home, my home, but nothing was sacred to me. I was such a degenerate that I rented out my parents’ bedroom for anyone who wanted to hook up. I shudder to think about what happened in their bed, and what condition they found it in.

  With all of the laws we broke and damage we caused, I’m surprised we weren’t arrested. The cops dropped by a couple of times, but never came in (thank God), and the mom of another girl I was dating came beating at the door, threatening to call the cops until I sent her daughter out. Other than that, we were pretty much left alone to wreak havoc, and wreak havoc we did.

  On day ten of Arno’s Great Adventure, Mom’s friend Cindy dropped by to check on the place. What she found was like a scene from the movie Animal House. Cindy stood there with her mouth agape. She couldn’t find words. If I could feel feelings back then, I would have felt sorry for her. But all I could think of was getting out of there, and fast.

  Rather than face my parents, I took off to Racine and squatted in the basement of a run-down house where Chad’s mom was shacked up with a biker dude. Chad had a homemade tattoo gun, and I began my love affair with ink there. I began identifying myself as a skinhead, a tougher, slicker offshoot of the punk subculture, and one of my first tattoos was an eight-point chaos symbol with the word “Skins” scrawled across the bottom. The two S’s were in the form of SS bolts, the symbol of Hitler’s paramilitary organization, not because it meant anything to me at that point but just because it looked cool. Another was an upside-down cross with the word “Amen” inked above it, because somewhere along my path of destruction, I’d decided I hated Christianity.

  After three or four weeks, my heartbroken mother tracked me down and bro
ught me home. I went willingly, on the condition that I would not have to return to school. I was dead to my father and brother, but Mom would have agreed to anything to get me back. “If you’re not going back to high school, I’ll get you a job,” she said. And she did, printing t-shirts for a Jewish friend of hers who sold bootleg rock shirts.

  I kept the job, but soon left the tensions of home to live in the city with a group of hardcore punks and skins who were renting a house in Riverwest, a mixed neighborhood that buffered the posh east side from the inner city. It was a party place and where I wanted to be. The address was 700 E. Wright Street, and we took to calling ourselves “The 700 Club,” a mocking play on the Christian television program hosted by evangelist Pat Robertson. When I should have been attending my junior year of high school, I was working the third shift printing t-shirts and partying with my five roommates at our little den of iniquity. My life consisted of working, drinking, street fighting, and crashing around the local punk scene. But that wasn’t enough excitement to keep me satisfied for very long.

  Traditional punk was a rejection of mainstream values. It was anti-establishment and pro–working class. That was okay for a while, but I was growing tired of it. Sometimes it seemed like there were more subgenres than followers. Anarcho punk. Death rock. Emo punk. Hardcore. Cow punk. Even Christian punk. I despised the emergence of “peace punks.” They annoyed the shit out of me, with their snooty high-mindedness and starry-eyed rhetoric about peace, love, and justice for all. Their mere existence kindled my rebellious gene, and their whiny, self-righteous rants made me want to do wrong. True to my antagonistic nature, I did everything I could think of to incite them. They launched a protest against Coors beer because Coors didn’t “hire black people,” so Coors was the only beer I would drink. And, just to be a dick, I wore a Coors baseball cap when I was around them. That’s how I rolled.