The Gift of Our Wounds

by Arno Michaelis

  Alicia came home one day when Autumn was around eighteen months old and announced she was moving to Key West to be near her two older daughters, who lived with her estranged husband. I couldn’t bear the thought of losing Autumn. “Fuck that,” I said. “She’s my kid and she’s not going with you.” Alicia put up some resistance, and we finally settled on joint custody. Autumn would spend six months with me in our townhouse in Wisconsin and the rest of the year with Alicia in Florida. When it came time for her to go to Key West, I protested and Alicia didn’t push back.

  Then it was Autumn and me.

  I was twenty-three and an out-of-control, alcoholic single parent. But I loved my kid. I lived for her, because without her I didn’t care what happened to me. She was my little buddy, vocal and sweet. Before I knew it, she was walking and talking. A genius, just like me! While I put in my time printing t-shirts, Mom watched over her. Otherwise she went everywhere with me. That’s not to say I was Father of the Year. Hardly. I didn’t even know what that meant. I continued to live in a haze of alcohol-fueled instability and irresponsibility. I worshipped my child, but not as much as the high I was constantly chasing. At home in the evenings, I’d play Legos with her, then plop her down in front of the TV to watch Scooby-Doo while I listened to white power music and swilled every last bottle of cheap beer in my twelve-pack. I hosted wild parties at our house where everyone got wasted and crazy. Autumn was super social and my crew looked after her, as if they were any more capable than me. I shudder to think of what could have happened while I was living so recklessly.

  Maybe it was a blessing when I got evicted after noise complaint number thirty-two. I had nowhere to go but home and, once again, my mother saved my ass. What would I have done without her support? I’m certain I wouldn’t have made it to the age of twenty-four. No matter how selfish and destructive I was or how many bad choices I made or the damage I’d done to people I supposedly loved, and who loved me, my mother never turned her back on me, and this time was no exception. She took us in without hesitation.

  During some of my more sober moments with my daughter, I thought back to the times that others had shown me kindness; often when I least deserved it, usually from the people I professed to hate. Kindnesses I’d made myself overlook when they happened, because how could I hate people who were being so nice to me? My Jewish boss had always been fair even though I wore swastikas on my clothes. My Latino coworkers always tried to engage me in friendly conversations. A black colleague once offered me his sandwich when I was so broke I couldn’t afford lunch—even though he knew I was a racist skinhead.

  A person I could never forget was an older black lady behind the counter at McDonald’s. As much as I tried to get her out of my head, she slipped from my subconscious into my thoughts at the most random times. It had been years since our encounter, yet I could still see her warm smile as clearly as if she were standing opposite me again.

  It was during my early racist skinhead days that we crossed paths. I was working in the t-shirt factory, and on paydays I would treat myself to a Big Mac. One night I was at a party and they had a homemade tattoo machine. I got a swastika tattooed on my middle finger. The next time I went to McDonald’s, the old black lady was there. It had been easy enough to hide the sleeves of white power ink I had, but not the one on my finger. “What’ll you have today, honey?” she asked, her eyes literally shimmering with humanity. Placing my order, I found myself shoving my hands in my pockets so she wouldn’t see the tattoo. When it came time to pay, I fiddled every which way with my wallet in an attempt to hide it, but her eyes went right to my guilty hand. She looked up and our eyes met. I don’t know why I cared about what she thought of me, but I was ashamed she’d seen the swastika. I expected the cold shoulder or a lecture. Instead, the kindly woman looked at me with compassion. “That’s not who you are. You’re better than that,” she said softly, in the way that a doting grandmother might. I grabbed my burger and fled.

  By the time I got to the bus stop, I had talked myself into remembering what it was I stood for and why. The conspiracy to wipe out the white race is real. It’s them or us. The future of our white children is at stake.

  I never went back.

  As the months passed and my daughter grew into an active toddler, I spent less time thinking about a Racial Holy War and more about her and the world the way I wanted her to see it. She was bright eyed and innocent, not cynical and angry the way I was. She didn’t see race. She saw people. She had an open heart and offered unconditional love to everyone. Everywhere we went, people were taken with her. How could I ignore the kindheartedness she brought out in others with her pure intentions and inviting smile? How could I ignore the way people of every race and creed reciprocated her goodwill?

  I began having serious doubts about “my way” when my little girl’s way looked and felt so much better. At the same time, I was haunted by the idea that if I continued on the path I was on, as a racial holy warrior, I was bound for either prison or death. Most of my crew had self-destructed by then. Comrades had been murdered. I lost count of how many were incarcerated, but there were probably only ten or fifteen of us who were still active. I wondered, how did that help secure the future for all white children? How would being locked up or dead help my white child? I was all she had. We were all each other had.

  Through my daughter, I was forced to have more contact with the world outside of my white power bubble. At the park. At the grocery store. On the playground. The more people I interacted with—people of all kinds—the harder it was to deny a truth I faced daily: people could be good and kind, regardless of their race or religion. I had witnessed it with my own eyes, over and over again. I wasn’t ready to turn my back on the movement—it was all I had known for my entire adult life—but I was having serious doubts about it.

  Then, a defining moment: it happened after a racist skinhead concert in Racine. I’d left Autumn at home with Mom that night. The concert was a tribute to Ian Stuart of Skrewdriver, who’d died in a car crash in England the year before. My band was on the program along with four or five others. Several hundred skinheads attended. When it was over, my buddy Joe Rowan, the lead singer of the group Nordic Thunder, left for an after-party. He stopped to pick up beer at a local convenience store and got into a war of words with a black gangbanger inside. Joe’s skinhead group and the black guy’s crew all joined in the pissing match. It escalated, and Joe was shot and killed.

  Word filtered back to us quickly: the enemy killed our brother. We needed to call the troops into action. If not a Racial Holy War now, then when? Not me, I thought. I have to have a future for the sake of my child.

  I went home and watched Autumn sleep. She looked angelic, lying there under her soft, pink covers. I don’t know if the tears running down my cheeks were for Joe or for us, but I silently vowed to my sleeping child that I was going to leave the movement. Lately, I’d felt as if I were just going through the motions anyway. I didn’t have the fiery passion to match the white power rhetoric anymore. I had already known, somewhere deep in my psyche, that I had to leave, if for no other reason than my daughter. I just hadn’t known when or how or why it was going to happen. Joe was the excuse I’d been waiting for. He was the second friend I’d lost in the so-called race war.

  The first was four years earlier. I’d recruited a kid named Chuck Miller from a poor neighborhood in Kenosha, and we’d become good friends. Like all of us, he’d been looking for a place to belong and we’d indoctrinated him into our crew. He reminded me a lot of myself, and I sort of looked after him. One night, he and a few of his buddies went to a bar where Latino gang members hung out. I don’t know which side started it, but there had been a brawl. The Latino guys took off, but they drove back to the bar just as Chuck was leaving to walk to his buddy’s house. One of them popped off a shot that slammed through Chuck’s back and pierced his heart. He died right there on the street. Now Joe was gone, too, and what the fuck for?

  I had had enough. W
hat had their deaths proven? What had they accomplished by dying for “the cause”? What was the cause? Was it real or something cooked up by a group of angry losers? In the months since I’d started doubting, I’d opened myself up to the people from every group I’d professed to hate. Jews. Gays. Blacks. People I’d once called Muds. I guess that made me a race traitor, but I had begun to discover that I liked not hating people. It was a lot less exhausting. And guess what? The exposure led me to the discovery that “the enemy” wasn’t planning and perpetrating the extermination of the white race. He was busy making a living and raising a family; struggling through life, just like me. The white power ideology was starting to smell a lot like bullshit.

  I confessed my doubts to my longtime friend Will from my Church of the Creator crew. I didn’t believe in what we were doing anymore. It was unnecessary. For seven years I hadn’t had a conversation with anyone who wasn’t white, and the only interaction I’d had with white people outside of the movement was to proselytize to them. I’d been so deep into the movement that I hadn’t been able to see anything outside of it. I wasn’t even sure that my thoughts were my own anymore, but even if they were, they had changed. I’d met the enemy, spent time with him, gotten to know him, and he wasn’t what we had been taught to believe. People were people. There were good and bad in every ethnic group. I was tired of hating. Tired of hurting people. Tired of watching friends die. For what?

  Will gave me the same worn-out talking points. White people were superior, so it was our responsibility to take charge and save our race. The Jews had a grand plan to extinguish whites so they could take control of the inferior races and ultimately the world. As the superior race, it was our responsibility to stop what was happening or our children would be forced to face the dire consequences of living in a muddy society. I had my doubts. Nevertheless, the movement had wiped me out and I needed to be there for my daughter. “I’m in the real world now and I’m not going back,” I said. Will shook his head. I thought he looked sad. I wondered if he had his own doubts, his own regrets about the path we’d been on. I turned and walked away.

  I began easing out. I left Centurion and spent less time with my racist skinhead friends. I had a daughter I had to focus on; that was my excuse. I didn’t have time to attend Sunday meetings or hatecore concerts.

  The rave culture was taking shape at about that time, and one of my friends from the old days convinced me to give it a try. The culture was the polar opposite of white power. One of its founding philosophies was called P.L.U.R.: Peace, Love, Unity, and Respect. Think modern-day hippies fucked up on ecstasy. Peace, love, and more love. Please leave all of your prejudice and hatred at the door. Talk about culture shock! I thought I’d hate it, the way I’d once loathed the peace punks, but I went to my first party and got hooked. I loved the house music, the beautiful, friendly girls, and the free-flowing supply of molly. It was romantic. Very Hunter Thompson–esque.

  Neo-hippies were much nicer to hang out with than neo-Nazis. For the first time in years, I began to feel optimistic about life. I hadn’t lost my appetite for drugs and alcohol, but I had lost my taste for fighting and ugly racial slurs. It was much nicer to be with a blend of people than the same small clutch of white people. Sometimes I felt as if I’d broken out of prison. I felt free, like I was discovering the world all over again.

  Did I ever really believe in the “new dawn” that Skrewdriver sang about? Or Ben Klassen’s grand plan for a whiter and brighter world? I wasn’t so sure. I thought I was a believer when I was in the throes of the movement, pursuing the twisted goal of an all-white world that had consumed me for so long. But I’d never really questioned the white power rhetoric. I’d never stopped hating long enough to step back and analyze what I was doing or why because, had I done that, I would have realized the answers didn’t make sense.

  Now I questioned everything. Who decided who was white and who wasn’t? Who said white was the superior race? Ben Klassen? Tom Metzger? What made them authorities? Metzger repaired TVs for a living. Klassen invented a fucking can opener. In just a few months, I’d met plenty of people who were brighter and far more successful than those guys, who didn’t subscribe to their racial or political beliefs. I wondered how Klassen and Metzger would answer, who was going to fight the billions of non-whites in the Racial Holy War they promised? The white power army of a few thousand street fighters? Why were a relative few white power believers right and the rest of the world wrong?

  When had hate ever trumped love?

  With new friends and my eyes beginning to open, I began to see the futility, the absolute madness, of hating based on someone’s race or religion or sexual orientation. I thought about how many of my former friends were lost to death and prison because of an ideology based on fear and lies. I wondered, had it not been for my child and being able to see the world through her eyes, even just a glimpse, would I have succumbed to the same pointless fate of many of my former comrades? I was certain I would have.

  Autumn was headed for her third birthday when I left the white power movement for good. As old friends had dropped away, new opportunities presented themselves. Once blinded by bigotry but now with eyes wide open, I sought out experiences involving people for whom I had once harbored a vicious hatred.

  People of all stripes and colors populated the rave scene. I began to appreciate the beauty of a slanted eye. An aquiline nose. Full lips. By living in an opposing universe, one in which I felt safe to explore different ideas and beliefs, I discovered the fear that had motivated me to hurt innocent people was based on desperate propaganda and not reality. I was learning that the world was filled with good people, some of whom I once would have attacked because of my warped views of humanity. Oftentimes they were the same people who now forgave and accepted me.

  I loved the rave scene, but, ultimately, it was living in my daughter’s world that showed me how terribly wrong I had been for the past seven years of my life. One particular occasion really drove the epiphany home.

  Autumn was in daycare, and I’d arrived early one day to pick her up. Watching her with the other kids, I got a hitch in my throat. What struck me was how they played together. They were children. Not black children or white children but kids who were romping and giggling and enjoying each other’s company. As I sat there waiting, a young black man around my age came in to pick up his daughter. He called to her, and she leapt into his arms and hugged him, the same way my little girl hugged me. I watched his smile grow bigger and wider as he listened to his daughter gleefully recount her day. It was the same kind of loving smile I got when I was with my daughter.

  Watching that dad and his little girl made me think about all of the people I’d hurt. Moms and dads and brothers and sisters. Good people I’d battered and broken for no reason other than the color of their skin. It could have been the father of the little girl sitting next to me I’d left for dead. And for what? What would that have done to her? To him? To experience such hatred in their loving existence? My eyes filled with tears. The man swooped his daughter up and away, I imagined to their happy home.

  As tears spilled down my cheeks, I mourned all of the time I’d lost hating others when what I’d really felt was hatred for myself. I looked over at Autumn saying goodbye to her friends and was overcome with love. The depth of feeling I had for my child had awakened in me the dormant empathy I didn’t remember I had—not since grade school when I took kids with disabilities under my wing. My daughter had given me the gift of a second chance.

  If only I could learn to forgive myself.

  Pardeep

  When the first images of the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center flashed on the TV screen, I feared we would have to reintroduce ourselves to the community. As American as we felt, people were sure to have questions because of the way we looked. I was working at Dad’s gas station, having graduated from Marquette but before I started training at the Milwaukee police academy. I was fortunate I could be at the station to help my pare
nts with whatever situation arose after the attacks. Indian Sikhs were often mistaken for Middle Easterners because their skin was brown and they wore turbans. After 9/11, the comparison became dangerous. That’s when I learned that no matter how accepted we felt in our new culture, a single incident could spark tension and create division.

  Four days after the towers fell, a Sikh gas station owner in Arizona was murdered in retaliation for the attacks because his killer thought he looked like a terrorist. We were warned about people who wanted to kill “towel heads.” Some of our customers were curious about our background and our beliefs, and I always took time to explain. It surprised me how little people knew about our religion, that it is the gentlest of all faiths and based on tenets of equality, brotherhood, and working for the well-being of all people. Sikhs are probably the last people on earth to resort to unjustified violence.

  I think the reason our community supported us so roundly when so many others around the country were blindly rejected because of how they looked is because of Dad’s deep belief in the Sikh spirit of Seva, which means service to others without consideration of personal benefit. I remember after the attacks, gas stations around the city jacked up their prices, sometimes doubling the cost of a gallon of gas because the world financial market was in chaos and no one knew when their next delivery would be. We kept our price the same. If we ran out, so be it, Dad said, and I agreed. It was our community and our neighbors. We were all Americans and we all suffered that day. For years afterward, our customers thanked us for not taking advantage of that terrible tragedy for monetary gain.

  Our Sikh scriptures say, “One who performs selfless service, without thought of reward, shall attain his Lord and Master. You shall find peace doing Seva.” My father was always doing something for someone, and he never expected anything in return. I think his example is what led me to pursue policing as a career. I really believed I could make a difference in people’s lives.