Free Autobiography of a Recovering Skinhead by Frank Meeink

always bullied started sticking real close to us. We sure as hell weren’t geniuses, but we were smart enough to recognize a brilliant idea. Maybe we didn’t have to find other skinheads to form our own crew-we could just create our own skinheads. The more the skaters and punks gravitated to us for protection, the more I flashed back to that mosh pit in Lancaster. I had been a “long-hair” on my way into the pit that night, a “long-hair” with my own skinhead bodyguard, but when I came out of that pit, I was a Nazi. Security breeds loyalty, and loyalty is everything. By the end of summer 1989, my loyalties were clear: Louie Lacinzi was my brother, and the white supremacy movement was my family.

    MY MOM AND John must’ve been in shock after they heard I got promoted to ninth grade, because they invited me to move back home. Now, moving back in with my asshole of a stepfather was the second to last thing in the world I wanted to do. I knew I could survive John because I’d done it before. But I wasn’t so sure anymore about the Junior Black Mafia. In fact I was pretty sure I’d be dead the second they saw my shaved head. So the weekend before school started, I took my mom and John up on their offer since it meant I could go to Furness High School, deep in the heart of the Irish district. I noticed right away that things had changed on Tree Street while I’d been gone. I’d been living with my dad; I knew what a house looked like once drugs moved in. I didn’t know then exactly what John and my mom were taking, only that whatever it was glazed over their eyes and slurred their speech. Even the house had changed. The house had never been fancy, but my mom had always kept it clean. It was a disaster. It looked like my dad’s house, like a crack house. But it wasn’t a crack house; it was just a Percocet house then.
    John no longer had the strength or desire to beat on me. He just gave me a speech about how I was going to have to live by the rules, especially since my mom was pregnant again and she couldn’t handle pregnancy, baby Kirsten, and me running wild all at once. Even while they lectured me, I could tell the rules weren’t going to matter anymore, so long as they kept using. But I remembered what it had been like in the past. I’d watched enough Wild Kingdom as a kid to know you still watch your back around a lion even after you shoot him with a tranquilizer. I made a good show of buckling down, good enough, at least, to convince two drunks on downers they could trust me.
    At first, I confided the truth about them using to only a couple people. Louie was the only skinhead I really trusted with that information. Drugs were a big issue in the movement, one I couldn’t afford to be associated with so soon after joining even by association with my parents. Neo-Nazi skinheads hate drugs because they think drugs are a “nigger” thing. Part of the
ZOG conspiracy theory says that some whites, especially poor whites like my parents, get caught up in drugs because there’s this big plot to use drugs to weaken white resistance. That part of the theory gives white addicts a little bit of an out; they’re not just druggies, they’re actually victims of ZOG. But you only hear that part of the theory getting bounced around among skinheads when they’re having a really serious bull session. The other 99.9% of the time, they see a stoned white person, and they call them a “wigger.”
    My cousin Jimmy was the only other guy I talked to about my mom and John. I trusted him with my secret. I trusted him with my life. And I trusted that if I played my cards right, I could get Jimmy to become a skinhead, too. Even though the skaters and the young punks on South Street were loving Louie and me for backing off the SHARPs, and even though my cousin Jimmy was a punk who loved to skate, I knew that tack wasn’t going to work on him. Jimmy didn’t fear SHARPs. Jimmy was a rare breed, a near perfect blend of seething