Read Online Autobiography of a Recovering Skinhead by Frank Meeink - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Frank Meeink
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branches all over the country. All that started changing, though, right around the time I joined the movement.
Romantic Violence was the first American neo-Nazi crew. They formed in Chicago in 1984, and other crews started organizing soon after. This was a decade before the internet, so it took a while for everybody to get connected. Still, within a few years, the crew leaders found each other, mostly at white-power concerts or at rallies held by groups like Aryan Nations or the KKK. In time, some of the crew leaders started taking some of their cues from their enemies. Nazi skinheads hated minority gangs like the Latin Kings and the Gangster Disciples but they
couldn’t deny that the structure of those gangs was what was helping them spread so quickly into new turf, including the once all-white neighborhoods the skinheads wanted back. So in the late 1980s, some skinhead crews followed suit. The crew leaders started building the alliances that became national gangs by the mid-1990s.
Even though The Uprise had never had branches in other cities, its remaining members helped Louie and me understand that the world of skinheads was a lot bigger than we’d imagined. According to those guys, there were several thousand actual neo-Nazi skinheads in the United States then, and by “actual” I mean guys who’d gone through formal training and initiation periods with real crews like the Eastern Nazi Alliance. As “freshcuts,” or initiates, they had worn white laces in their Doc Martens to declare that they were willing to fight for the Aryan bloodline. Not until they had spilled the blood of some Sharpie “ZOG dupe” or some minority “mud,” had they graduated to red laces and full rank within their crew.
Louie and I had both been blood red from the start, and we were hell bent on keeping it that way. Before the summer of 1989 rolled to a close, Louie and I came to an understanding about our future together as skinheads. We were going to form our own crew, and our crew was going to blow The Uprise the hell out of the record books. It was our silent pact, because kids who grow up in places like South Philly don’t talk about their goals. They see too many dreamers get burned to set themselves up for public humiliation. In South Philly, dashed dreams are right up there with deformities for getting a guy pegged with an embarrassing nickname for the rest of his life. I could just see myself thirty years into the future if I’d shot my mouth off about my Nazi aspirations then failed to deliver. I’d wind up hanging on some corner bitching about my arthritis to Tommy “Earbow” Petanzi and Mikey “Muffin Ass” McCarthy.
“Shut up about it already, Eva Braun,” they’d say.
That’s when some young corner punk would pipe up and ask, “Why do youse guys call him ‘Eva Braun’?”
“Frankie got fucked by Hitler, too.”
Thankfully, Louie and I didn’t have to talk about our vision for the future to know we totally agreed on what it ought to look like.
Most nights, we scammed beer and history lessons off The Uprise vets for a few hours. When they got bored with us, we’d head over to South Street and scam beer and club passes off the older punks who still remembered me as one of the little skater kids from back when Jimmy and me used to show off our Ollies for the dudes waiting in line to get in the clubs. There were about a dozen SHARPs on South Street then. They thought they owned the place because the skaters and the young punks feared them. Then Louie and I showed up. We didn’t care that the SHARPs had us outnumbered; we got in their faces. That’s when we realized most of those South Street SHARPs commuted in each night from their pretty houses out in the suburbs. Louie and me reeked of South Philly. We weren’t commuters.
For about a month, we glared and dropped threats, nothing more. It was enough. South Street buzzed about how Louie and I had put the SHARPs in their place. Kids the SHARPs had
Romantic Violence was the first American neo-Nazi crew. They formed in Chicago in 1984, and other crews started organizing soon after. This was a decade before the internet, so it took a while for everybody to get connected. Still, within a few years, the crew leaders found each other, mostly at white-power concerts or at rallies held by groups like Aryan Nations or the KKK. In time, some of the crew leaders started taking some of their cues from their enemies. Nazi skinheads hated minority gangs like the Latin Kings and the Gangster Disciples but they
couldn’t deny that the structure of those gangs was what was helping them spread so quickly into new turf, including the once all-white neighborhoods the skinheads wanted back. So in the late 1980s, some skinhead crews followed suit. The crew leaders started building the alliances that became national gangs by the mid-1990s.
Even though The Uprise had never had branches in other cities, its remaining members helped Louie and me understand that the world of skinheads was a lot bigger than we’d imagined. According to those guys, there were several thousand actual neo-Nazi skinheads in the United States then, and by “actual” I mean guys who’d gone through formal training and initiation periods with real crews like the Eastern Nazi Alliance. As “freshcuts,” or initiates, they had worn white laces in their Doc Martens to declare that they were willing to fight for the Aryan bloodline. Not until they had spilled the blood of some Sharpie “ZOG dupe” or some minority “mud,” had they graduated to red laces and full rank within their crew.
Louie and I had both been blood red from the start, and we were hell bent on keeping it that way. Before the summer of 1989 rolled to a close, Louie and I came to an understanding about our future together as skinheads. We were going to form our own crew, and our crew was going to blow The Uprise the hell out of the record books. It was our silent pact, because kids who grow up in places like South Philly don’t talk about their goals. They see too many dreamers get burned to set themselves up for public humiliation. In South Philly, dashed dreams are right up there with deformities for getting a guy pegged with an embarrassing nickname for the rest of his life. I could just see myself thirty years into the future if I’d shot my mouth off about my Nazi aspirations then failed to deliver. I’d wind up hanging on some corner bitching about my arthritis to Tommy “Earbow” Petanzi and Mikey “Muffin Ass” McCarthy.
“Shut up about it already, Eva Braun,” they’d say.
That’s when some young corner punk would pipe up and ask, “Why do youse guys call him ‘Eva Braun’?”
“Frankie got fucked by Hitler, too.”
Thankfully, Louie and I didn’t have to talk about our vision for the future to know we totally agreed on what it ought to look like.
Most nights, we scammed beer and history lessons off The Uprise vets for a few hours. When they got bored with us, we’d head over to South Street and scam beer and club passes off the older punks who still remembered me as one of the little skater kids from back when Jimmy and me used to show off our Ollies for the dudes waiting in line to get in the clubs. There were about a dozen SHARPs on South Street then. They thought they owned the place because the skaters and the young punks feared them. Then Louie and I showed up. We didn’t care that the SHARPs had us outnumbered; we got in their faces. That’s when we realized most of those South Street SHARPs commuted in each night from their pretty houses out in the suburbs. Louie and me reeked of South Philly. We weren’t commuters.
For about a month, we glared and dropped threats, nothing more. It was enough. South Street buzzed about how Louie and I had put the SHARPs in their place. Kids the SHARPs had
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