The Gift of Our Wounds Read online

  The way I saw it, if the movement was going the drastically leftist way of the peace punks, I was taking my act to the right. I wanted to fight and break shit and beat people up, not rock against racism, and even the skinhead subculture wasn’t tough enough to accommodate my simmering hostility toward the world. At that point, I hated everything. I hated rules and conformity. I hated the idea of religion. I hated government. I hated my former friends. I hated home because it was in a fucking mundane suburb and I thrived in the grit of city life. I was a drunken street thug, full of vim and venom, looking for a place to land.

  Skrewdriver

  I was standing outside of a hardcore punk show on an Indian summer night in 1987 when I found what I thought I was looking for. I was outside smoking cigarettes and drinking Coors when my skinhead buddy Pat’s girlfriend called out to me. “Hey, Arno! Listen to this!” she said, handing me her headphones. Jane had just returned to Milwaukee from driving a tour van to New York for an Italian hardcore punk group called the Cheetah Chrome Motherfuckers. She’d bailed after a week on the tour, apparently because the group held a grudge against personal hygiene and the stench in the van was untenable. On her way back, she’d stopped over in Chicago to see some punk friends and ended up hanging out with members of the Chicago Area Skinheads.

  CASH, as they were known, were not your ordinary apolitical skinheads. They were a bloodthirsty racist gang from the south suburbs of Chicago with a reputation for violence and depravity, but at least they brushed their teeth, shined their boots, and washed their clothes. Their leader was an ex-con named Clark Martell, a pioneer in the fledgling American racist skinhead movement. He was Mansonesque: super smart, charismatic, manipulative, and batshit crazy. Like Manson’s, his followers were lost teenagers who worshipped him, and he had an affinity for surrounding himself with young females. He’d dialed in on Jane, and she came home with a bootleg cassette of the British skinhead group Skrewdriver, the standard bearers of white power music.

  I took the headphones from her Walkman and cranked up the volume.

  … The streets are still, the final battle has ended

  Flushed with the fight, we proudly hail the dawn

  See over the streets, the White man’s emblem is waving

  Triumphant standards of a race reborn.

  The song was “Hail the New Dawn,” and the first time I heard those seething lyrics, I was swept away. The simple, chugging bar chords and chants of “HAIL! HAIL!” in the front man’s gravelly voice sent chills through me. It was so passionate. So angry! Glorious!

  I was smitten, just as German teenagers were a half century earlier when Hitler used music as a recruiting tool. The racist lyrics spoke to me.

  Are we gonna sit and let them come?

  Have they got the white man on the run?

  Multi-racial society is a mess.

  We ain’t gonna take much more of this.

  What do we need? White power!

  Was I still holding a grudge against my old homies from the eighth grade, my breakdancing buddies who hadn’t come to my defense when the jocks chopped off my rattail? Probably, because I would have bled for them if they had been the victims. But this sensation was much deeper and more dangerous than any teenage grudge. It was almost like I’d been possessed.

  Skrewdriver was in constant rotation after that. The more I listened, the deeper and faster I fell under its spell. I embraced its anti-Semitic, anti-foreigner, anti-black, anti-gay, anti-anyone-who-didn’t-support-white-power ideals. It made me feel part of something greater than myself. I had finally found an intention that matched my craving for violence. After all, like Jane had said, what more righteous fight was there than the one to save our race?

  Milwaukee seemed as good a place as any to launch my new mission, considering its reputation as a hotbed of racial tension. The city always made the list of the most physically and socially segregated cities in the country, thus the nickname “the Selma of the North.” That kind of divide makes for endemic ignorance and friction among the races, and we had plenty of both. Old-timers still openly repeated the joke about the 16th Street Viaduct, the span that connects the black side of the city to the white side. The joke goes that it links Africa to Europe, which makes it the longest bridge in the world.

  I was somewhat aware of the racial divide growing up, but there was nothing in my background that would have foretold the path I was on. Dad was politically conservative (how many times had I heard him say that Reagan was “the best thing since sliced bread”?), but I don’t recall him ever saying anything particularly racist, and Mom was a downright bleeding-heart liberal. She would have died if she’d known what I was getting myself into.

  With Jane’s encouragement, Pat and I gravitated toward the white power world. We weeded out the punks from our house and named ourselves the Skinhead Army of Milwaukee (SHAM). Mom embroidered the acronym on my flight jacket, with no idea what it meant. We stole a copy of Hitler’s autobiographical manifesto, Mein Kampf, from the local library, thinking it could be a primer for our gang, but the writing was so bad I couldn’t get more than a few pages in. Instead, white power songs guided us. Pat, our friend Clayton, and I formed our own skinhead band called One Way. We titled a song “One Way” and used it in our recruiting efforts. “One way, the right way, the white way!” Music was always the best way to attract other disaffected teenagers who could easily be swayed to our way of thinking. A typical recruit was a poor white kid from a blue-collar family who was either outnumbered by minorities at his school or rejected by his richer, more popular white peers. We offered them the opportunity to provide us with a continuous supply of beer in exchange for a place to fit in. It was us against the world. We shaved our heads and wore t-shirts with swastikas and the words “White Power!” proudly. Jews and mud races (anyone who wasn’t white) were the butt of our jokes.

  On most days, our tribe got all tanked up, tied up the red laces on our steel-toed Doc Marten boots, the symbol of all good racist skinheads, and wreaked havoc on our city streets. A good day consisted of manhunts along Downer Avenue, with a lot of fag bashing and at least one good racially charged street brawl. The truth is, we were just a bunch of Milwaukee street thugs who gave ourselves a title and adopted a cause that legitimized our drunken violence. It felt hollow to me. Empty. Same old. I needed something bigger to identify with. Something with more excitement. More passion!

  My continuing quest for fucked-upness soon led me to the place where real haters played. And it was there I found my new niche.

  Hammerskins

  The letter arrived at our post office box in May 1988. Anonymous PO boxes were how groups in the fledgling racist skinhead network connected. “Sieg Heil, Comrade!” it began. “I am from the Confederate Hammerskins of Dallas. We are hearing about your brave fight for our race and we would like to come and visit.” Fucking right they wanted to come and visit! Our crew was the scourge of the North! I didn’t care that the letter was sloppily written on a lined sheet of paper torn from a notebook. What mattered was what it meant. We had made a name for ourselves. We were King Shit and we’d let everyone know it. Now our skinhead counterparts were looking to us for leadership. Pat and I responded immediately. “Sieg Heil, Comrade!” we wrote. “Yes! Come!”

  Our group, which included me, Pat, and Jane the Alpha Bitch, had recently moved from the 700 Club in Riverwest—which we’d trashed to the tune of uninhabitable—to a house on Amy Place on the south side of Milwaukee. Angus Porter arrived on a Greyhound bus. His reputation as a ruthless street soldier preceded him, and he didn’t disappoint. He presented like a pit bull, short and solidly built with a menacing stare that said, “Don’t even think about it, motherfucker.” With the word SKINHEAD tattooed across his forehead and white power icons inked on his biceps, he looked really legit—the way a real racist skinhead was supposed to look. He had our attention before he ever spoke.

  Angus and his brother were pioneers in the racist skinhead movement in the US, which h
ad only really surfaced a few years earlier. They’d founded the notorious Confederate Hammerskins less than a year before and had earned the hard-fought honor of a mention in the Anti-Defamation League’s special report entitled “Young and Violent: The Growing Menace of America’s Neo-Nazi Skinheads.” Now that was worth its weight in gold in street cred. They’d recruited dozens of troops in the south and shaken up Dallas with bold attacks on blacks, Hispanics, and Jews. They were flourishing in Texas and making headlines with their violent exploits, and they were looking to expand. Angus explained that their plan was to set the standard for skinheads across the United States by bringing together the toughest of us under one umbrella. We told him we were interested in hearing more.

  On his first night in Milwaukee, we all went drinking at a section of the lake where the metalheads hung out. The evening was going swimmingly. We got blind, rip-roaring drunk and even recruited a couple of metalheads while we were there. It was late when we headed home. The streets were dark and no one was around. We were traveling in a deserted area, under an overpass, when what sounded like a gunshot or a rock hit our car. Our friend Will slammed on the brakes and we all jumped out. A couple of kids who were dressed like punks took off and we went in pursuit of them. We caught them before they could climb the embankment and pulled them back down to where the car was parked. Pat beat one kid while I took on the other. They were crying and screaming like babies when Angus joined in.

  We thrashed those little punks into bloody unconsciousness then jumped back in the car and went home to continue our night of partying. Angus won mega points with us for his performance. He was as ferocious as we were. The way we fought also convinced him that we were the perfect crew for his master plan.

  With that settled, Angus decided to hang around for a while. We had plenty of beer and plenty of fights to pick in our “diverse” neighborhood to keep him busy. After the bloodbath under the overpass, we started keeping count of our altercations. One weekend we counted twenty-five. We fought hard and we fought dirty, with our bare hands, with baseball bats, with knives and razors and bricks and anything else that could win the war. If there were ten of us and we came upon one unlucky black guy who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, he felt the fury of ten pairs of boots stomping on his back.

  Our skinhead girls were as tough as we were. We got our crew together for a picnic by the lake one day and the girls left to fetch more beer. While they were out, some middle-aged white guy commented that they looked like a bunch of dykes. Wrong thing to say to a crew of skinhead girls, asshole! Skinhead girls fight dirty. They jumped him and beat him to the ground. When he cried for mercy, they all took turns kicking him in the head. They came back to the picnic with ear-to-ear grins, and we all celebrated with beer and songs.

  In war, there is no such thing as a fair fight. We won some and we lost some, and each one was a measure of our worth. It was easy to win a ten-on-one beatdown, and we always did, but when you’re hopelessly outnumbered, that’s what separates the men from the boys. At least that’s what we told ourselves when we lost one.

  That’s what happened one night that summer of 1988 when our crew went looking for trouble at a festival on Downer Avenue. Downer was where our nemeses, the anti-racist skinhead group we called Baldies, hung out. We existed to fight each other. I thought they were a bunch of wusses. Every time we tangled, they called the cops. It had gotten to the point where all we had to do was set foot on Downer and the cops would arrive and shoo us away. It was infuriating. Our way of life depended on conflict. Without a good fight to be had, what was the point?

  We went to the festival looking for the Baldies but discovered that we had many more enemies than we knew. It wasn’t just the Baldies who were tired of our bullshit. People from all over the festival ganged up on us. Some were students from Marquette. Some were our neighbors. Blacks. Jews. Gays. It must have been a hundred to our thirty. A magnificent melee ensued. I squared off with a black dude who whipped my ass. He was blasting me in the face and I couldn’t even get close to him. It was rare when I got knocked down or out, but I saw stars that night. The cops finally swarmed in and we made news. Sometimes getting publicity was better than winning. We couldn’t buy the kind of attention we got from a headline. Our numbers always increased afterward.

  Angus was really enjoying his time with us, but, sadly, his stay was cut short when he and Pat got into a gunfight with a carload of kids who attempted a drive-by shooting at our house.

  I was working my shift at the t-shirt place that night, but I heard all about what went down from Jane when I got home. A week or so earlier, a bunch of us were sitting on the porch, drinking of course. It was one of our favorite pastimes, and we did it so often that we called ourselves “porch honkies,” a play on the racial slur “porch monkeys.” People in the neighborhood hated us, and for good reason. We commented out loud about everyone who passed, and never was it neighborly. On that day, we were doing our thing, drinking and carrying on, when someone took a shot at us from the alley. Most of the blast hit the side of the house. You could see the pellets of birdshot in the aluminum siding. The rest of it was embedded in Angus’s face. The Milwaukee gang squad was there before the smoke cleared. Squads were always cruising nearby. We only found out later that the Milwaukee PD had us under constant surveillance. It was clear they had no intention of helping us that day, but they issued a warning: We were in gangbanger territory and on the radar of the Latin Kings, they said. Word on the street was that there were going to be some dead skinheads in the neighborhood. We’d better watch it, “because those guys don’t fuck around.”

  We didn’t either. We armed ourselves with rifles a friend “obtained” for us and started a round-the-clock watch. There wasn’t a moment that one of us wasn’t stationed at a window with a rifle pointing outside. Pat and Angus had been holding down the fort, and a carload of high school kids drove past, they said later to get a glimpse of the neo-Nazis they’d heard about on the news. Our guys watched as the car slowed down and the kids threw bottles at the house. The kid in the front passenger seat leaned out the window holding a handgun. Pat fired at the car from an upstairs window. Angus followed up with a couple of shots that shattered the car windows. The kids raced off, but the cops were able to track them to a nearby emergency room across the city where the one kid was being treated for a gunshot and the others for shrapnel wounds from flying glass. A search of their car turned up knives, bats, and sticks, but no gun, which was bad news for our guys.

  At trial, Angus was repentant and was sentenced to eighteen months in a detention facility. Pat was unapologetic, even defiant, and got ten years in state prison.

  That left me to move things forward. I had always acted in tandem with Pat, but now I was on my own. Everything that happened to him affirmed the white supremacist narrative: the law and the Constitution were meaningless under the Jewish master plan to bury white people under a tide of mud races. I was more determined than ever to do my part to stop that from happening.

  More and more tattoos of white power ideology found their way onto my skin: swastikas on the middle finger of my right hand and on the side of my right calf; the bust of an SS soldier with the words “White Power” on my right forearm. I vowed to uphold the white supremacist code 14/88: fourteen for the number of words in the movement’s core belief that “we must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children”; eighty-eight for “Heil Hitler,” as H is the eighth letter of the alphabet.

  I met with racist skinheads from Chicago, St. Paul, and Detroit and invited them to join us under the Northern Hammerskins flag, just as we had envisioned during our talks with Angus. Our political agenda was inspired by the doctrine of the Führer himself: preserve and promote the white race by any means necessary, even if it meant killing our enemies.

  We wore the Northern Hammers emblem proudly on our jackets: a circle of thirteen white stars on a field of colonial blue, emboldened with twin clawed hammer
s, crossed. Ironically, it was the hijacked symbol used for a fictitious neo-Nazi group in the film Pink Floyd: The Wall. The fact that we copied a contradictory symbol to represent our movement and made it our own was poetic in a way. Hitler had appropriated the swastika, after all. It wasn’t his idea. He stole an ancient religious icon that had been synonymous with positivity and good fortune and made it the symbol of Nazism. If it was good enough for Hitler …

  The Northern Hammerskins were smarter, more sophisticated street fighters. We strategized and recruited susceptible white kids by going into neighborhoods that were already simmering with racial tension and posting flyers—which were shipped to us by Tom Metzger, the notorious white supremacist “celebrity” from California who founded the revolutionary organization White Aryan Resistance (WAR)—with swastikas and crude warnings to Jews, blacks, and gay people. Our new recruits were assigned white power readings and encouraged to educate themselves on our ideals.

  We were still urban warriors who preyed violently on blacks, Jews, and homosexuals and launched attacks on our race traitor counterparts, but I told myself that being part of the movement was no longer just a reason to brawl.

  It was who I had become: a white man willing to sacrifice everything to save his race.

  David Duke

  The 1988 presidential election was a boon for white supremacy—at least that’s the way we saw it in our cloistered culture. David Duke, a right-wing extremist whose résumé included a stint as grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, was running as a third-party candidate. Even though he didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell, he was on the ballot with George H. W. Bush and Michael Dukakis, which gave him a platform for his pro-white agenda.