The Gift of Our Wounds Page 9

  “We have the start of something that is as big as anything that has happened in history and we need leaders,” he said in his plodding, distracted way. “We want to put you through some rigorous training, and education, and discipline.” Therefore, absolutely no cigarettes, drugs, or alcohol were to be brought onto the property. Fucking hell! Good luck with all that, Pontifex, I thought.

  I liked the physical activities at the camp. That’s probably what kept me there for the first couple of days. Our survival lessons were taught by a former Green Beret named Pete and his sidekick, Ben. Pete was a short, solidly built guy with a leathery tan and a handlebar mustache. Ben was probably twenty years younger, with a mop of wavy auburn hair and long, strong limbs honed through his work as a tree surgeon. Both were authentic Appalachian hillbillies, and they knew the mountains the way most people knew their neighborhood. They taught us how to make mantraps and car bombs and took us on “night ops,” where we did things like hike some of the roughest mountain terrain in the pitch dark and rappel down an abandoned mine shaft that was three hundred feet deep with a thirty-foot mouth. It felt like descending into hell.

  Mornings were class time with Klassen, or what he called “Bible Study.” With a huge swastika as a backdrop, he lectured about “Jews, niggers, and the other mud races,” and read passages from The White Man’s Bible, a six-hundred-page tome that set forth the church’s guidelines for achieving “a whiter and brighter world”—the holy book for white supremacists.

  “Just as in our early school days we were repeatedly drilled first in the alphabet, then in words and spelling and in the multiplication tables, as well as other key tools of learning, so too have I repeatedly hammered away from different angles at the key ideas, key issues, the natural laws that must become part of us if the White Race is to survive,” Klassen wrote in The White Man’s Bible. “This book is meant to awaken, to clarify, to give direction and to arouse men to action. Our goal, I repeat, is the survival, expansion and advancement of the great White Race, in short, the resurrection and redemption of our people.”

  The idea was to get us “racially oriented and racially aware.” The classes were mind-numbing until I got used to his humdrum delivery and started really listening to his words.

  Our homework consisted of reading assignments from the Bible, from which we chose our own passages to share in class. Klassen was a prolific writer and I found myself really getting into the readings.

  We must then expel these parasites from our shores. It is our program to ship the niggers back to Africa, and the Mexicans and other mud races back to wherever they came from.

  His prophecies lit a fire under me.

  We must fully realize that as goes America, so goes the White Race.… It is our objective to make this country a rich prosperous and beautiful land for the White Race and the White Race alone, to convert and educate the White Man back to the fundamental truths of race, to accept a racial religion and build a finer better race and finally a Brighter and Whiter World.

  After a week or so, I forgave Klassen his dreary affect and begrudgingly came to respect him for his keen intellect and cogent arguments. I tried not to notice his Western bolo ties and accepted his word that his belt buckle with the Texas Ranger straddling his horse was historically significant because it symbolized what we were about: “The only good Indian was a dead Indian, and the rangers cleansed Texas of Indians and Mexicans,” he said. “We adopt the same view. We want to cleanse the mud races and make [the world] a beautiful home for the white race.”

  Klassen’s personality sucked, but the guy was fucking brilliant. He unabashedly compared himself to such revolutionary thinkers as Darwin and Nietzsche and I had to agree. Anyone who could write a six-hundred-plus-page Bible that kept my attention had to be saying something worth my time.

  I liked that Klassen was vehemently anti-Christian. I had been put off by the emphasis that the Klan was always placing on Christian values. “We all know what happened to the Romans shortly after they were ‘converted’ to Christianity,” he wrote in the Bible. “With their instincts deadened and their thinking perverted into worrying about the spooks in the sky instead of struggling for their own survival and advancement, they soon shrank into oblivion.… They paid the penalty of allowing themselves to be mongrelized and not recognizing their eternal enemy, the Jew.… Let us again make this clear: our every position is and must be from the White Man’s point of view. From the White Man’s point of view the Jews, the niggers, and the mud races are his eternal natural enemies.… At this crucial stage of world history, either the White Race will survive, or the Jews and their enslaved mud races will. It will be one or the other.”

  He knew his stuff about Darwin’s evolutionary theory of natural selection and survival of the species, and he’d spent years studying ways we could contribute to the proliferation of our race. Our race was our religion, he said. “It is the supreme purpose of the Church of the Creator to see to it that it will be the White Race that shall survive,” the Bible said.

  That worked for me.

  The “Commandments of Creativity” became my spiritual guide:

  It is the avowed duty and holy responsibility of each generation to assure and secure for all time the existence of the White Race upon the face of this planet.… Be fruitful and multiply. Do your part in helping to populate the world with your own kind. It is our sacred goal to populate the lands of this earth with White people exclusively.… Remember that the inferior colored races are our deadly enemies, and the most dangerous of all is the Jewish race. It is our immediate objective to relentlessly expand the White Race, and keep shrinking our enemies.

  These were words to live by.

  The church’s blueprint for achieving white domination was as ruthless and malevolent as any radical group out there. It was almost hard to imagine this meek-looking guy developing such a heinous plan. His pro-white agenda advocated genocide against all non-whites and white race traitors, but the way to a “whiter and brighter world” had to be fought militantly, politically, financially, and morally.

  By the end of my stay at camp, I felt like I’d learned valuable lessons from Klassen—first and foremost that we couldn’t win the war by just spilling blood. We had to be smarter and shrewder if we were to build the kind of support we’d need to win the race war.

  I went home to Milwaukee with The White Man’s Bible under my arm and new marching orders for our troops. I realized that if my crew was going to help save our race, we needed to change our way of doing things. We had to get smart. Regroup. Grow up.

  I copied a passage from Klassen’s book of daily affirmations as inspiration for me and my guys.

  A RACIAL HOLY WAR. RAHOWA! is INEVITABLE. It is the ULTIMATE and ONLY solution. No longer can the mud races and the White Race live on the same planet and survive. It is now either them or us. We want to make damn sure it is we who survive. This Planet is from now on all ours, and will be the one and only habitat for our future progeny for all time to come.

  We were about to become more savvy warriors—no less vicious when we had to fight, but more thoughtful about the best way to reach our goal.

  We held weekly strategy meetings and recruited susceptible white kids by going into neighborhoods that were already simmering with racial tension and posting flyers with swastikas and crude warnings to Jews, blacks, and gay people to “beware.” Our new recruits were assigned white power readings and encouraged to educate themselves on the ideology of the movement. We needed to know our stuff if we expected to attract intelligent people with money and power. It was time to get earnest about our mission, and to do what was needed to get the attention of influential people who could give us the credibility we needed to make a real impact.

  We had a Racial Holy War to start. Or, as Klassen liked to call it, RaHoWa.

  Propagandizing and Proselytizing

  The smarter, softer strategy our crew had adopted after Klassen’s summer school had begun to manifest results. We
were still fighting, but less, and mostly as a show of strength to the kids we were most interested in having. We were still drowning in beer, but we were more informed and actually articulate sounding when peddling white power propaganda. Our new level of sophistication aimed for entrée into more mainstream white society, not just the radical fringe, which is what we needed if we had any hope of saving our great race.

  By the summer of 1991 we had enough followers to open the doors to the Milwaukee chapter of the Church of the Creator. The church was a building we rented in a diverse section of downtown. The neighborhood was predominantly Latino, with a gang problem. We prepared for conflict by arming ourselves to the teeth, and I was often stationed as a lookout with a Ruger Mini-14 Ranch Rifle at my side. I don’t remember ever using it, but paranoia was endemic in the movement. The sense of importance that came with thinking there was always someone out to get us fostered our egos and gave us a sense of value.

  Church meetings were held on Sundays. The “sermons” were led by our crew’s elder statesmen and built around readings from The White Man’s Bible. Afterward, the leaders went around the room asking everyone what he or she had done for their race since the last meeting. We weren’t looking for the stock answers that racist skinheads were accustomed to giving, such as “I beat the shit out of someone.” We wanted to hear that someone had recruited a new member, or spent an afternoon rolling up and putting rubber bands around the church’s latest Racial Loyalty newspapers, or that a group had gotten together and distributed thousands of the newspapers in white neighborhoods. We were smarter, more sophisticated racists, and our numbers told us we were doing something right. The church was about propagandizing, proselytizing, and getting as many people as we could out on the streets to recruit. We regularly got anywhere from eighty to a hundred people at a service, but attendance could get as high as 150. We came out after every service, armed and bristling with animosity, but no one wanted to fuck with us.

  I thought I should feel good about what we were accomplishing. But a funny thing happened. As the adrenaline rush I got from daily street brawling began to wane, I found myself fighting off troubling questions—questions I had been suppressing for years. What did the way to Klassen’s “whiter and brighter world” really look like? Were we fighting now so we could kill later? Kill people by the billions? Would we—would I—really have the stomach to pull the trigger on a genocidal scale?

  Each time those questions invaded my brain, I fought them off by reciting the Fourteen Words. We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children. But with the passage of time, the words began sounding just a little hollower, my recitation just a little less impassioned.

  Looking back, I realize that my passion had just begun to wane at that point. The fire within me had turned from white hot to a yellow glow. I blamed it on boredom.

  FOUR

  FORKS IN THE ROAD

  I set out to find flawed men but when I finally peered into myself, there was no man more flawed than me.

  Kabir

  Arno

  I’d known Alicia for six months when she suggested we have a kid. She said it was our responsibility as racially conscious people to bring a white child into the world. The mud races and blacks were pushing out kids at a rate that would shame rats. We were being outbred by non-whites at imposing odds. The world was growing darker, and if we didn’t do something, there would be none of us left. We had to do our part to try to get things back on the white track.

  Who was I to argue?

  I’d met Alicia during services at the Church of the Creator in Milwaukee in late summer of 1991. Word had spread about our church, and racist skinheads from around the world were coming to Milwaukee to see what it was all about. Alicia came with two of her fellow skinheads from the old Chicago gang, CASH, the one led by Clark Martell. I was part of our paramilitary security unit, the White Berets, and I was on lookout duty when I first saw her. Even from my post, in a window five stories up from the entrance, I could see that she was smoking hot. I was smitten before I ever talked to her. When I finally got the chance, the chemistry between us was off the charts. She stayed for the after-party, and we made arrangements to meet up the following weekend at a Bound for Glory concert in Muskegon. She was different than the butch skin-girls I was used to. She was drop-dead gorgeous, with a rockin’ body, pretty little laugh, and only a bit of an edge. We spent the next couple of weekends partying together, and from that point forward we were magically involved.

  Alicia’s name was well known in racist skinhead circles. Three years earlier, she had made headlines as the witness who helped put Clark Martell in prison. She’d been one of Martell’s minions and was with him when he carried out a brutal attack on a girl who’d quit the Chicago gang. What had sent him over the edge, apparently, was that she’d befriended people from different races after she went AWOL. To punish her, Martell rounded up Alicia and four other followers, and they broke into her apartment, beat and pistol-whipped her, then painted a swastika in her blood on the wall. He and the others were charged with felonies and later indicted. Alicia was eight months pregnant when it came time for trial. The district attorney gave her the choice of either testifying against Martell or having her baby in prison. She’d wisely decided to be a witness for the state. Martell was sent away for eleven years, which had effectively gutted the Chicago gang. Afterward, Alicia married the father of her child and they’d had another daughter before separating.

  Ours would be her third child.

  Alicia rented an apartment in Milwaukee, and within two weeks I moved in with her. She got pregnant right away. Her other two kids, who were two and four years old, bounced back and forth between our house and their father’s. With the baby coming, we moved to a bigger place in a borderline neighborhood in west Milwaukee. We were there for just a couple of months when we decided it wasn’t white enough to raise kids and moved again, this time to a townhouse an hour north of the city in one of the whitest suburbs in the state.

  Just before the move, I’d gotten my racist skinhead band, Centurion, up and running. I wrote most of the lyrics to our songs.

  Nigger! Prepare to burn!

  You’ve attacked our people—but now it’s your turn,

  you act so bold—but we’ll slap you down,

  the Legions of Hate will put you underground!…

  Jew boy! Tremble in fear!

  Your days are numbered: Centurion’s here.

  We’ll leave your kind to wither on the vine.

  We’ve made up our minds to be rid of Jew swine!

  Our CD, 14 Words, sold twenty thousand copies, a smashing success by hatecore music standards but hardly enough to support a family. We scraped by on the meager salary I earned at my job at another screen-printing factory and contributions from Alicia’s family. Even with a baby to look forward to, it wasn’t a happy union from the start. We fought constantly over money, my drinking, and the time I spent with the band.

  Alicia went into labor on November 7, 1992. I was in the delivery room when she gave birth. The labor went quickly; before I knew it, a nurse was whisking our daughter away to a baby warmer, but not before I had the chance to look into her magnificent blue eyes. To say it was love at first sight doesn’t begin to describe what I felt. I adored that little being. I had never felt such true, pure love before that moment. This was my little girl! I was a dad! I celebrated by getting wasted at a bar down the street from the hospital. Everyone wanted to buy the new dad a round and I accepted until they threw me out of the place.

  We named our baby Autumn. She was a week old when, after a night of drinking and fighting at a local bar, I came home stinking drunk and covered in someone else’s blood. Alicia let me have it. She tore into me, telling me what a pathetic man and shit father I was, and how I’d let both her and our baby down. My response was the same as it had been when my mother told me I had Indian blood. I drew my combat dagger from the bed stand—a seven-inch knife that was sharp
enough to shave with—and nearly took off my left hand. Lucky for me, Alicia, like Gina on that Thanksgiving night, was versed in first aid. She wrapped a bedsheet around my wrist and knelt on it while she dialed 911. The paramedics were there straightaway and I took a swing at one of them before losing consciousness.

  I woke up in the ICU a couple of days later with a stitched wrist and a resolve to quit drinking. A thirty-day attempt at sobriety after that went out the window in December on my twenty-second birthday. Alicia threw a surprise party, and the booze flowed. “I’ll just have one” turned into the inevitable case-plus of beer, and I was back on the drunk train, speeding further out of control. Once the drinking took over again, so went the shitshow that my life had been since I chugged my first beer at age fourteen. My first priority, I’m ashamed to say, even over my precious child, was getting shitfaced. Alicia berated me constantly. I was a loser. An alcoholic. A no-good, good-for-nothing waste of a human being. As our relationship deteriorated, I spent less time at home and even more with my band. There I was, composing and singing hateful lyrics about killing and dying to protect precious white babies, yet I was shirking my responsibilities for my own infant daughter.

  After a few months of staying home, Alicia took a job as a cocktail waitress in the city, which forced me to be with Autumn more. By then, the baby was crawling and making sweet sounds. She wasn’t the tiny infant I was kind of freaked out by, but this amazing little being who was developing a real personality. As she and I bonded, Alicia and I grew more distant. I suspected she was having an affair. Predictably, our relationship wobbled into a flat spin and crashed nearly as quickly as it had taken off.