The Gift of Our Wounds Read online

  I wasn’t a Duke guy. I thought he was too soft to represent our movement, a “politically correct” white nationalist, if you will. My comrade Will, on the other hand, was head-over-heels enamored with him. Will begged me to go when Duke rented out a conference room at the local Howard Johnson’s for a “town hall”–style campaign appearance. My preference was to stay home and drink copious amounts of beer, but I finally agreed.

  The dingy conference room had stained carpeting and smelled like cigarettes, which was fine by me. It held around a hundred people, but it was less than half full, mostly skinheads and old, white racists who called themselves Populists. Duke was, as I’d expected, too tame for me. In his soft Louisiana drawl, he talked about wanting equal rights for whites, rather than the real issue of expelling the mud races from our land. He wasn’t anti-black, he said, rather “pro-white” and “pro-Christian.” His rote campaign rhetoric struck me as weak and disingenuous, hardly the kind of blatantly racist stuff he spewed during his tenure as the exalted leader of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. That guy, I might have voted for.

  As disenchanted as I was, Will was fucking besotted. When the gig was over and he walked up to introduce himself to the candidate, he was giggling and sputtering like a teenage girl with a crush. I was caught off guard when he invited Duke back to our house, and even more surprised when Duke accepted the invitation.

  The minute we got home we started scrambling to get people there. It was important to Will to show Duke that we had a big crew. We made a bunch of calls and, within the hour, had thirty people in our living room. I don’t know whether it was Duke or the promise of free beer that persuaded them to come.

  Duke arrived right on time, accompanied by two of his cronies. By then we had worn out our welcome on Amy Place and were living between Marquette University and the worst ghetto in the city, on Milwaukee’s north side. The house was made of rotting wood, peeling paint, and a roof that looked like it might collapse with the first fist to the wall (it didn’t), but it had two stories and was big enough to accommodate our growing crew. We’d furnished it with a couple of beat-up couches we found in an alleyway, a half-decent recliner someone had brought from somewhere, and empty cases of returnable beer bottles that doubled as seats.

  Duke took a seat in the good chair.

  I asked if he wanted a beer and he accepted.

  It was Red, White, and Blue in a bottle, a shit beer; the only kind we could afford and the epitome of quantity over quality. I was impressed when he drank and didn’t grimace.

  Duke was a good-looking guy; almost too good looking. His face was different than the pictures I’d seen of him when he was leading the Klan. His features were more chiseled and his hair was bleached blond. I was certain he’d had cosmetic surgery, perhaps to match the newer, softer image he was going for to try to get elected.

  In the privacy of our home, Duke sounded much more militant than he did in public, talking openly about the great Jewish conspiracy to rule the world and the obvious superiority of whites over blacks. I’d heard he was a ladies’ man, and, sure enough, he hit on every skinhead girl there, telling them they were “awfully cute,” and “another reason we have to save the white race!” Because no white guy worth his weight was going to be caught fucking a Negress. That got the skinhead girls all atwitter and elicited a question from one of the guys in the room.

  His name was Rich, a huge muscle dude who lived with his thirteen-year-old female cousin in an obscure house at the end of an alleyway. Rich was super shady and a lot scary. Even Will, who was a badass, was afraid of him. Rich was known for being crass and saying whatever came to his mind. When he raised his hand, grunting like the dorky “Sweathog” Arnold Horshack from the TV comedy Welcome Back, Kotter, I saw Will cringe.

  “Mr. Duke! Oh! Oh! Mr. Duke! What about Whitney Houston? Tell me you wouldn’t eat the peanuts out of her shit!”

  The room fell silent. I suffocated a cackle and looked over at Will, who was as white as a sheet and looked like he was about to keel over.

  Duke looked dumbfounded. It took everything I had not to collapse with raucous laughter. A full twenty or thirty seconds passed before he finally stammered out an answer.

  “Well, um, there are some negresses with enough white blood to be attractive, but that’s beside the point,” he said.

  Way to ruin a perfectly nice evening! Rich was oblivious. I asked Duke if he wanted another beer, but he declined.

  Duke lost the presidential election, needless to say. He managed to get forty-seven thousand votes, but that was less than one half of one percent of the vote. Will was inconsolable, but I was happy about the outcome.

  I thought he was a pussy.

  Martyr’s Day

  We stood in a ring around the blazing bonfire, my crew of Northern Hammer skinheads and our Confederate Hammer comrades, arms raised in crisp Nazi salutes.

  December 8, 1988: Martyr’s Day. Six of us had jammed into my recently purchased used Mercury Monarch and driven twelve hours from Milwaukee to a forest on the outskirts of Tulsa, Oklahoma, to pay tribute to Robert Jay Mathews, who’d martyred himself for the white power movement four years earlier.

  Our master of ceremonies was a guy named Jim Denko, a super-militant exalted cyclops of the Oklahoma Klan and White Aryan Resistance organizer. I wasn’t a fan of the Klan because of its Christian bent, but Denko leaned more toward Odinism—a belief system based in Nordic mythology—and that gave him cred in my book.

  Denko knew how to stir up a crowd.

  Pacing around the fire, he told with determined fury the story of Mathews’s heroism and fiery demise. In 1983, Mathews founded the Bruders Schweigen (Silent Brotherhood), a cadre of hardened men also known as “the Order,” who declared war against the “Zionist Occupied Government” in the name of the white race. Their plan was to establish a war chest by robbing banks and bringing enough attention to the movement to start an armed white revolution. In their short existence, the Order had made a name for themselves with daring armored car heists, the bombing of a Jewish synagogue, and the murder of a Jewish radio personality before the government finally caught up with them.

  In the eyes of his white power comrades, Mathews was a hero to the end. He was hiding out on an island in Puget Sound, Washington, when dozens of federal agents descended on his cabin. Cornered, Mathews refused to surrender. He held the agents off for thirty-six hours before burning to death when they shot flares into his retreat, setting off a fiery blaze. Legend had it that his body was found charred but he was still clutching a rifle in each hand. How noble he was! Denko cried. How brave!

  “Hail Robert Mathews!” fifty-some voices shouted in unison, the glowing orange light of the fire reflected in our eyes. “Hail the Order!”

  Denko gestured dramatically as he described the day in 1983 when the Order was born. At Mathews’s invitation, eight men stood over one of their infant daughters in a barn at Mathews’s Washington State compound and took an oath to do whatever was necessary to protect all white children from the Jews and mud races “and bring total victory to the Aryan race.”

  In their Declaration of War, they wrote, “It is a dark and dismal time in the history of our race.… Evidence abounds that a certain vile, alien people have taken control of our country. How is it that a parasite has gained dominion over its host? Instead of being vigilant, our fathers have slept. What are we to do? How bleak these aliens have made our children’s future.”

  The words sounded like poetry to me.

  Standing before the fire, I thought about how much I’d changed in a short time. A year earlier, I was a street hoodlum, in it for the drinking and the fighting, pretending to be something I wasn’t: someone with an intention for a noble cause. I had talked the white power talk and butted heads with my anti-racist skinhead counterparts, but to what end? What had I really accomplished? What made me worthy of putting myself in the same category as a Robert Jay Mathews, who’d given his life for the fight?

 
Listening to Denko talk about the heroic acts of the brave warriors of the Order seared a deep love for my race on my soul.

  Hearing about Mathews being burned alive, his charred hands still on the triggers of his assault rifles, I knew I had to avenge him by fighting to the death myself. For my people. For our people.

  Denko roared: “We must secure the existence of our people, and a future for white children!” Fourteen words.

  The familiar feeling of hatred surged through my body like a strong electric current, and the image of that symbolic white baby fueled my thirst for violence. I wanted to tear our enemies limb from limb, and I would die doing it. For the future of white children!

  “Whether you were an instigator of the treason or whether you just went along for the ride will make little difference to us,” Mathews wrote in a letter to Congress before he was killed.

  We will not listen to your explanation that you were really on our side all the time. We will only remember that you could have stopped what has happened to America, and, for whatever reason, you did not.

  No, when the day comes, we will not ask whether you swung to the right or whether you swung to the left; we will simply swing you by the neck.

  With those things said, let the battle begin.

  The fire burned ever brighter, driving back the cold and damp of the night.

  Denko read another passage from the Order’s Declaration of War:

  A long forgotten wind is starting to blow. Do you hear the approaching thunder? It is that of the awakened Aryan. War is upon the land. The tyrant’s blood will flow.

  “Hail Robert Mathews!” I shouted, thrusting my right arm in the air. “Hail the Order!”

  Thanksgiving 1989

  The always-eventful Michaelis family Thanksgiving was in full swing and I was finishing the last of a twelve-pack of Huber when someone brought up the name Michael McGee. McGee was a bombastic black Milwaukee alderman and former Black Panther who was always blasting off about evil white people and how he was going to take us out using violence. “Fucking nigger!” I said, shoving another forkful of Grandma Gerry’s cream cheese mashed potatoes into my mouth. “The guy’s talking about picking us off from the freeway overpass! He needs to stay on the north side where he belongs.”

  Mom’s face went gray. I’m sure she’d never used the N-word in her life and she was horrified to hear it spoken at Grandma Gerry’s Thanksgiving table.

  I was going off about how superior white people were to blacks and how Jews were out to get us and that McGee was the best thing that ever happened for our white power recruitment program when Dad cut me off. Drinks all around, he said, hoping to distract me from my continuing racist rant.

  Michaelis Thanksgivings were always at Grandma Gerry’s and always turned into drunken shitstorms. This one was different only because I’d been radicalized since the last holiday gathering and my parents couldn’t make excuses for me anymore. I was eighteen and too old to be the impressionable young man whose behavior Mom had always excused as “going through a stage.” Mom and Dad were as ashamed as I was proud of the person I’d become: a militant racist who was willing to die and kill for a righteous cause.

  I took another swig of beer and, stabbing my finger in the air, continued to make my point. “Look at the north side!” I said. “It used to be a nice neighborhood. Now it’s a hellhole!” My racist skinhead girlfriend, Gina, shook her head in agreement. “Blacks! They’re savages! They destroy everything. They’re going to come and get us if we don’t do something.”

  My sweet mother had had enough. She put her fork down and looked me dead in the eyes. “Well, Mr. Nazi, do you know you are one-sixteenth Indian?” she asked.

  The statement stopped me dead in my tracks. What was she talking about? “How could you say that?” I asked, clenching my teeth in rage. “That’s bullshit! You’re lying!”

  “No,” Mom said. “I’m not.” My great-grandfather—her grandpa—was French Canadian, and we had some Indian blood from his side, she explained.

  “You’re making that up!” I shouted, pounding my fist on the table.

  Grandma Gerry chimed in. “No, it’s true, Arno,” she said.

  Everyone sitting around the table was laughing—everyone except Gina and me. “You’re an Indian!” my brother said, cackling. “You think it’s fun being a Nazi, but you’re an Indian!”

  My stomach churned. Could it be true? Was I … mixed? Was it possible that the identity I had embraced, a racially pure white American male, was a lie? I felt as if my entire world had been yanked out from under me.

  Grabbing Gina’s hand, I stomped off, shouting at everyone to “Fuck off!” before I left.

  I went home and pulled a beer from the refrigerator. I wanted to be alone, I told Gina. Closing the bedroom door behind me, I chugged down the beer without taking a breath. It tasted bitter, to match my mood. I have fucking Indian blood, I thought. Why the fuck did my mother tell me? Everything I stood for was fucked. Everything that meant anything was ruined.

  I smashed the empty bottle on the floor, picked up the jagged neck, and, with one brisk movement, sliced open my wrist. At first it just stung. My heart raced, followed by a feeling of release, as if all of the pressure that was building inside was draining away. Drops of blood hit the bedroom floor. Indian blood? I recoiled. The stinging changed to a searing, throbbing kind of pain that I welcomed. I deserved to suffer for my Indian blood.

  Gina burst through the bedroom door. “What the fuck did you do?” she cried, running out to grab towels from the bathroom. “You drunken idiot!” she shouted as she rushed back in and wrapped my bleeding wrist. “I guess I didn’t do a good enough job,” I said before passing out.

  “Fuck you!” Gina replied.

  I awoke the next morning with my wrist wrapped in gauze and began planning the next time. The next time I would be successful. I had to be. There was nothing left for me in this life. My purpose was gone. My self-esteem was shattered. I was a dirty mongrel, not the white warrior I had been so proud to be. That guy was a fraud and didn’t know it. Now I knew it. Now what?

  Wallowing in the worst depression I’d ever felt, I sat down and wrote a letter to Tom Metzger at his WAR PO box.

  Tom,

  I’m a white power skinhead from Milwaukee. We started the Northern Hammers here, and I sing in a white power band “One Way.” I’ve been racially conscious for about two years now and I’m committed to kill and to die for our great white race.

  Last night my traitorous mother told me that I’m 1/16 Indian.

  I don’t know what to do. My race is everything to me. It’s everything I am. Last night I tried to kill myself by slitting my wrist. I passed out and my girlfriend stopped the bleeding. I wish she didn’t. I still want to kill myself. I don’t know what to do.

  How can I be a warrior for my people when there is mud race in my veins?

  I don’t know what to do.

  Arno

  I couldn’t imagine that the leader of one of the most prestigious white power organizations in existence—one of the most revered white supremacists in the world—would respond. But a few days later, a letter from Metzger came to my PO box.

  Metzger wrote that he knew about the good work my crew and my band were doing for the movement. Music, after all, was the most effective way we had to awaken white youth to what was happening to our race. As for my supposed Indian blood, I had so little I would lose it in a nosebleed. I’d already spilled much more than that in the war to save our race. Rather than be so hard on myself, I needed to get myself back out there and spill the blood of our enemies.

  The letter was like a shot of adrenaline. Metzger had restored my confidence in my whiteness and my will to fight. I vowed that I wouldn’t stop until victory was ours.

  Racist Summer Camp

  The following summer I was invited to attend the inaugural session of Ben Klassen’s School for Gifted Boys. Klassen was the founder and self-proscribed Pontifex Maximus of the Church
of the Creator (COTC). He was an icon in the white power movement, and his book The White Man’s Bible was on the bed stand of every serious white supremacist. The School for Gifted Boys wasn’t so much a school for intellectually superior adolescents as it was a two-week summer camp for promising young racists to learn leadership and paramilitary survivalist skills. And the Church of the Creator wasn’t a typical church where people went to worship, either, but rather what Klassen called “a new religious movement for the survival of the white race exclusively.” Its crest was a “W” capped with a crown and a halo: the “W” stood for the white race, the crown symbolized the superiority or aristocracy of whites, and the halo represented the sanctity of the white gene pool.

  It sounded like an adventure to me.

  I took a road trip to Klassen’s compound in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina with two friends from the Milwaukee white power movement; the three of us were the inaugural class. The school had classrooms and living barracks and was still so new you could smell the wood. Behind it, sitting majestically at the crest of a hill, was Klassen’s sprawling home. He’d obviously made a shitload of money from the Can-O-Matic electric can opener he’d patented as a younger man. I was impressed with his stature and his success. I didn’t know anyone that rich and celebrated, and I was excited to meet him.

  On our first full day there, Klassen came doddering down the hill from his house to the school. He saluted us with the Nazi salute when he entered the classroom and took his place behind a table draped with the COTC flag. I don’t know what I was expecting but he wasn’t it. Klassen was ancient. His pants were hiked up well above his waist, and he was wearing white shoes. He looked like he belonged on a Florida golf course, not the head of a radical racist school where young recruits were taught how to implement and fight a Racial Holy War. And he talked like the 1960s cartoon character Deputy Dawg!

  His fifteen-minute welcome speech felt like half the afternoon. He was deadly dull and a terrible speaker. As uninteresting as he was to listen to, what he said inspired me. Pointing to the portrait of Adolf Hitler (“the greatest leader who ever lived”) on the wall behind him, next to a portrait of himself, Klassen said the mission of the school was about training young recruits for war. His vision was to build an army big enough and mighty enough to accomplish what the Führer had in Germany, except that our task was even more significant because we weren’t just fighting for a country. We were going to save the entire white race.