The Gift of Our Wounds Page 16

  The prayer room was a sea of colors from the different cultures represented. I looked out over the crowd, wondering how I, a former white supremacist, would be received. So many in the temple had been affected by the August attack. Some had been there when Page went on his rampage. Many had family members and friends who were injured. I couldn’t imagine having gone through what they did, and then welcoming someone with the same past as the person who attacked their temple. If I expected blank stares or even looks of disapproval, I didn’t see any. All I saw were expressions of encouragement and expectation and, dare I say, even love.

  I listened with humility as Pardeep stood to introduce me. “My brother, Arno Michaelis,” he said. I felt my throat tighten. Sometimes I wondered how I was so fortunate to be in the company of such a benevolent man. My hands shook as I began to speak, but I soon found the strength to deliver my message.

  I’ve been very much honored to travel the country and the world talking about mistakes I’ve made and what I learned.… Initiating discussions with people of all ethnicities and walks of life in hopes that my mistakes can be learned from. One of the questions I am most often asked is, “How did I get out?” and “What led me to leave hate groups?” The answer is exhaustion. It’s exhausting to practice hate and violence. And kindness. My father and mother let me know I was loved no matter how horrible I became. People I claimed to hate treated me with kindness when I didn’t deserve it. Black. Jewish, Latino. Gay. The second most asked question I get is, “Will you ever go back?” My answer is, “Absolutely not.” Because being a racist sucks. It sucks to deny the world around you and your connection to it.

  My healing, I said, helped me to open myself up to the beauty of the world, the beauty of all cultures and all spiritual traditions. “To the point that I am incredibly humbled and honored to stand here today and call Pardeep and Amardeep my brothers, and to engage with them to bring forth the gift of their wounds.”

  TEN

  JANESVILLE

  When all other methods fail, it is proper to hold the sword in hand.

  Guru Gobind Singh

  Arno

  It was our first trip together, a two-hour drive on a frigid March afternoon to Wisconsin farm country. Our mission: to talk about race relations in a town notorious for its association with the Ku Klux Klan. I picked up Par in my weathered Toyota 4Runner, its hatchback lashed closed with climbing rope, the odometer with as many miles as it is from here to the moon. Par had a newer car, but he was kind enough to let me drive when I told him I got carsick as a passenger. If he noticed the big, red scar above the windshield from loading my canoe on top or the multiple dents in the body from blazing through blizzards with death metal on blast, he didn’t mention it. He seemed, as he did every time we’d been together over the last four months, content to be in the moment, wherever that happened to be.

  I’d never met anyone as easygoing and grateful for being alive as Pardeep. While I had come a long way to feeling likewise, there always seemed to be a bit more weather in my skies. Back in my fighting days, I usually led with my face, and had since been diagnosed with post-concussion syndrome. The symptoms are chronic migraines, slurred speech, loss of balance, and, I’m sorry to say, moodiness. My bad moods, like passing storms, had become less frequent as I’d worked to cultivate inner peace, but sometimes the simplest annoyances—an early morning wake-up call, for instance—could still evoke downright hostility from me. Not Par. I’d never seen him angry. His unfailing good humor was at once maddening and awe-inspiring.

  A few weeks after I spoke at the Gurudwara, Par had invited me to join him for a talk at Cudahy High School. It was our first time speaking together under the banner of Serve 2 Unite, and we’d made such an impact on the audience of a thousand teenagers that the local media came calling. A single news column about our budding but unlikely friendship precipitated invitations to more speaking gigs. This one came from the Rock County Diversity Council to speak in Janesville.

  The road to Janesville was paved with memories I would have rather forgotten. I was anxious about the trip. The last time I’d been there was twenty-one years earlier, during my previous life, when television host Geraldo Rivera was filming a segment for his show about Wisconsin’s white power movement. I was my hateful self then and I’d gone with some of my white power skinhead clan to kick up some dust, along with fellow haters from around the Midwest. “Hate in the Heartland” put Janesville on the map, not in a good way, and it had never fully recovered.

  I was dubious about returning, but not only because it was yet another ugly chapter from my past that I had to face down. I was worried about Par. From what I knew, Rock County, where Janesville was located, had recently seen a resurgence of hate groups, and our speaking engagement had been publicized in the local paper. Back in the day, my crew would have made sure we were there to taunt the traitor and his little brown-skinned foreigner buddy.

  If our first pit stop was a forecast of what was ahead, I feared not much had changed from the time I was there. We were somewhere between Milwaukee and Janesville when we stopped for gas. Par went to the restroom while I trolled for my third or fourth Diet Coke of the day. As I was looking around, I came across a bumper sticker for sale that read, “Illegal Alien Hunting License.” I had to read it twice for it to register. When it did, I felt the heat of my anger travel from my neck to my forehead. I was steamed.

  I hadn’t heard Par come up behind me until he spoke. “You know it’s not a Sikh who owns this gas station,” he quipped, nodding toward the bumper sticker. He seemed as unruffled as I was incensed. What grace this man has, I thought. Not only did I respect him wildly, I cared about him and I felt protective of his dignity. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’m kind of used to it.” But how could I let the moment pass without doing something to illuminate how fucking ignorant it was to push that hateful bullshit?

  The middle-aged white lady behind the register saw me coming with the bumper sticker in my hand. I placed it on the counter in front of her. “Is the idea of hunting people funny?” I asked politely. “You do realize you’re advocating the killing of people, don’t you?” Her face turned bright red. She stuttered and stammered, finally blurting out, “Oh … um … they just put those there. We’re not in charge of what the stickers say.” Bad answer, lady. “You decide whether you sell them or not,” I said, looking her straight in the eye. “You should be ashamed of yourself.” I turned to walk out, leaving her standing there with her mouth hanging open.

  As much as I felt the need to defend Pardeep’s honor, I would have had the same reaction if I’d been alone. See something; say something. That was my motto when it came to prejudice. It was as steeped in my soul as hatred had been when I was a racist thug. Dr. King got it right when he wrote, “Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.” Part of my redemption was to point out sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity wherever I saw it, the way that the nice, elderly black lady at McDonald’s had once done for me.

  Walking out of the store, I noticed Par had an extra spring in his step. “What?” I asked. He grinned and slapped my shoulder like I had just hit a home run. “Damn, Michaelis!” he said. “Let ’em know what’s up!”

  We climbed back into the truck and roared out of the station, hip-hop music blasting. As we traveled south toward what was historically a hotbed of Wisconsin hate groups, my concern for Pardeep’s well-being deepened. I wasn’t sure he really understood what he was getting into when he decided to work with me, but he already had two strikes against him. He was brown and hanging with a race traitor.

  Turning the music down a notch, I broached the subject with him. “Did I ever tell you about the last time I went to Janesville?” I asked. Of course, I hadn’t. I hadn’t known him long enough to spit out all of the details of my ugly past. I had given him the general picture, but the particulars were tough to rehash and I wanted to nurture our new friendship, not alienate him.


  It was back in 1992, the same day that Geraldo came to town. I was headed toward the end of my racist skinhead days, I just didn’t know it yet. My skinhead crew rolled down to Janesville to help “save the white race.” Racial tensions had been smoldering in the town for months prior to that and flared up when the Klan placed ads in the local newspaper, soliciting new members. When a Klan leader announced publicly that he was holding a rally and cross burning on his property, Geraldo, who had a history of inciting white supremacists and brawling for ratings, was all over it.

  Three years before Geraldo headed to Janesville, a neo-Nazi skinhead had broken his nose during a scuffle on his show. I thought I could do even better to make our point. The really fucked-up thing was that I’d convinced myself that going to Janesville for some street hooligan bullshit had something to do with being a good father. By acting out in racist, violent ways, I was somehow protecting the future of my white child.

  I let out a nervous laugh, the one that sounded like machine-gun fire. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw that Pardeep had turned away from the window and was staring at me. Was he interested? Or was he wondering why he was even there? Why he had ever agreed to travel this road with me?

  I needed to make sure that Pardeep understood the kind of people we were likely to encounter, so I cleared my throat and continued. I’d gone to Janesville with the intention of fighting with Geraldo, but I’d never gotten close enough to do any damage. That privilege had fallen to some farmer from Illinois, a Klansman who looked like he couldn’t fight his way out of a paper bag. Turns out he couldn’t. The Imperial Wizard’s homeboy called Geraldo a spic and dirty Jew and threw the first punch. Geraldo went apeshit and decked him.

  Pardeep let out a laugh. “C’mon, dude!” he cried. “How the fuck is someone going to get beat up by Geraldo?”

  It was my turn to laugh. “The dude just threw some limp-ass punch, and Geraldo took him down and hit him a bunch of times—pretty soundly kicked his ass. So that made it suck even worse. If one of us got into it with Geraldo we would have whooped his ass!”

  “Especially you!” Pardeep said.

  “Oh yeah, especially me!” I said. “I was pretty confident I could have fucked up Geraldo.”

  Par knew enough about my past to know how revved up I used to get about fighting. He also knew I still felt a Pavlovian thrill at the idea of physical combat. The last time I put my hands on someone was 1995 on New Year’s Eve, at the beginning of my transition from violent racist to erudite egalitarian, when a white guy used the word “nigger.” I broke my hand on his orbital bone in the process of knocking him out and it felt good. Truth was, I missed fighting. There was no feeling quite like the adrenaline rush that comes with getting hit and hitting back. But now that I was an official emissary for peaceful coexistence, it probably wouldn’t be cool if I hauled off and belted someone every time they said something stupid—even if they deserved it. Now when the urge to fight stirred within me, I observed it and let it pass. My Buddhist training helped.

  As we merged onto 43 South, Par picked up the conversation again. “Why are you nervous about going to Janesville?” he asked. It was as though he could read my thoughts, which was creepy in a nice sort of way. He knew where I had been going with the conversation all along.

  “You’re right,” I said. “I am nervous, but not for me. I’m worried about you.” I told Par that it was possible we were headed into a beehive of hateful racists. For my whole life, I had walked a fine line between foolhardy and fearless. I was in danger when I was doing the deeds of the movement, and now I was in danger for having turned my back on them. There was only one kind of person that white supremacists hated more than browns, blacks, Jews, and gays, and that was people like me. A white guy who was once with them and was now working against them. Add to that equation a brown-skinned partner who most of those fools would mistake for Muslim and we were wanted men.

  It wasn’t as if Pardeep didn’t know about danger. When he was a cop he’d walked the beat in some of Milwaukee’s most forbidding neighborhoods. And he certainly understood that hate groups were capable of using extreme violence to get their point across. His family, after all, was a victim of it.

  “I just had to let you know, and I know you know this already, but you are taking your life in your hands every time you go to do a gig with me,” I said. “What we’re doing is going to ruffle people’s feathers. I don’t want to sound ominous or paranoid. It’s just how it is.”

  The tone in the car grew quiet. Par seemed to be mulling over what I’d said. “I get it,” he said, finally. “I get that there are risks, but there are risks to everything we do in life. We’ve been given this—and I hate to say it this way—but it’s almost a reluctant responsibility. If we don’t do what we’re doing, we’re not doing what we’re meant to do and that’s a much bigger fear for me than losing my life. I don’t know if it’s something we were asked to do by a higher power, but ever since we met I feel like we have a responsibility to right some wrongs—either of our own choosing, or someone else’s choosing. I’m not going to sit at home and think, ‘This happened, but I didn’t do anything about it ’cause I was scared.’”

  Par’s insight was Sikh wisdom. His religion taught that the only valid fear in life is the fear of God, and when one accepts that, all other fears retreat. I loved that philosophy. I told him that I wasn’t particularly afraid to die, either. I had always lived on the edge without giving much thought to consequences. What I did agonize over was how my death would affect my family, especially Autumn.

  I’d been thinking about my daughter the night before in anticipation of our trip to Janesville. I was never as scared as I should have been when I was giving talks that were critical of my former comrades, and, considering where we were going, I probably should have given more thought to security. Before I went to sleep, I had written Autumn a letter—in case something happened. I told her how much I loved her and how proud I was to call her my daughter. I asked her to celebrate my life and what I’d accomplished with my peace work rather than mourn my death. I’d hidden the letter in my room. “On the top left shelf by my TV, there’s a papier-mâché teddy bear she made when she was a kid,” I said to Pardeep. “The letter is rolled up under the teddy bear’s arm. So if I get killed, I need you to make sure she gets it.”

  Pardeep nodded solemnly. “I will,” he said. “I hope I never have to give her that letter, and we’ll work to see that day doesn’t happen. But one of the biggest lessons I’ve learned from August 5 is that when someone you love passes away, they’ve already given you what they needed to give you for you to move on and be productive.”

  Satwant Kaleka’s gift had been teaching Pardeep the love and dedication it took to step into his shoes. Pardeep didn’t know he had it in him until after his dad was gone. “I never thought I’d be able to do whatever was needed at the temple, or take care of the businesses, and Mom,” he said. “There was just so much added responsibility. What I realized was that all of the tools and values I needed to get through what happened were already ingrained in me. Dad had already given me all those things before he died. You have given your daughter that foundation, too. The letter is there, and it will help her understand, but I think she already knows how you feel.”

  My eyes welled up, as they often did when I thought about my Autumn. She was grown, a wonderful, smart, caring young woman. Pardeep had a good point. Everything I’d written she already knew. I had raised her as best I could, loved her fiercely, and taught her how to survive by being confident, kind, and compassionate. Writing the letter had really been as much for my comfort as hers. “All the same,” I said, “I think the letter can make a difference—it can help bring all those points home.”

  Pardeep agreed. He told me about his father’s writings that he’d discovered after his death. They had provided him with a treasure trove of insight into his dad’s thoughts and feelings. Satwant’s reflections—about everything from the pain of leaving his hom
eland, to his struggles of integrating into American culture and the heartbreak he felt over cutting his sons’ hair—were like a window into his soul.

  “He wrote that when we got our hair cut, he cried after we went to bed because he had ultimately made a decision that went against our religion,” Pardeep said. “He did that for us. For Amardeep and me. He would never have told us that, but he wrote it. His notes told me more about his feelings than he ever did. My dad wasn’t that way. For him, for a lot of guys, we can’t express ourselves. So, you’re right, Arno. It’s good to write it down.”

  Pardeep stared out the window at the passing fields of corn cut low, occasional yellow stalks poking out of the snow. Dusk was upon us and the vast, open landscape was tinted gray. It was beautiful, in a Wisconsin winter kind of way.

  “I think I’m going to write a letter, too,” he said after a few minutes. “I’m going to write to Jaspreet and the kids to let them know how I feel. So, if anything happens to me, you make sure they get those letters, too. Okay?”

  “Word,” I said.

  We drove on in silence for a bit. I thought to myself how cool it was that a white guy who was born into the American dream and a brown guy who’d had to endure immense struggles to achieve it could have so much in common. We are one was a principle of the Sikh faith that Par had shared with me, and we’d chosen to emphasize it in our relationship and in our work for Serve 2 Unite. I truly believed in it. Having opened myself up to other cultures and befriended people with diverse backgrounds, I’d learned that we are all so much more alike than we are different.

  So many people close themselves off from the world around them, as I once had, and never discover the joy that comes with having an open heart. It’s normal to fear what we don’t know, but not knowing isn’t necessarily a cause for fear. In my own transformation, I’d found that everything I was afraid of in my early life—the people I’d hated because they looked different, the cultures and religions I’d discriminated against because they weren’t mine—were the same people and cultures and religions I was drawn to once I was exposed to them. I now looked at skin as multicolored curtains that opened up to like hearts. Once I understood that, the window dressings were no longer scary to me. I embraced the human race, and that had set me free from the restrictions of hate.