Romantic Violence

by Christian Picciolini

  I didn’t exactly have a plan about how I was going to make friends with these guys. I guess I figured if I hung around nearby and talked to them more, it had to happen eventually. So that’s what I did.

  After watching a baseball game at Schrei Field, I’d ride up to High Street on my little red bike and fall in with them, not saying much, but I listened to them talk and once in a while I’d say a few words. When I saw them playing softball in the St. Donatus parking lot, I’d jog out to the outfield to shag a few balls and would join the game by default. I played alongside them more than with them, but to me that was the same as being friends.

  Almost.

  Little Tony liked to ridicule me. He’d put me in my place when I tagged him out by making fun of my little bike. In fact, everyone made fun of my bike. They also mocked me for my small size, pointing out I was short for my age, for not living in the same neighborhood, or for going to a “rich kid” school.

  I had to prove myself if they were going to take me seriously.

  I reached my limit the day I rode up to a serious game of Wiffle ball already in progress.

  “Well, if it isn’t little baby Christian,” Little Tony mocked, punctuating his comment by hocking a loogie on the asphalt. The spit wasn’t personal. We all did that as much as we possibly could. In fact, we had a spitting fascination—saliva, sunflower seeds, gum, anything we could get in and out of our mouths was fair game.

  “Nice bike there,” Callahan chided. “For a baby.” The guys cracked up laughing.

  I swung my leg over the bike and let it drop to the ground. “Can I play?” I asked, ignoring their jabs.

  I’d posed this question a dozen times before, as had everybody else who showed up once a game was in progress, but this time my question brought laughter.

  “Game’s locked,” taunted Little Tony.

  “Locked tight,” Big Tony reiterated, spitting.

  “Nice little toy bike,” Chuck Zanecki cut in.

  That did it. I was sick to death of them making fun of my bike and pointing out it was pretty small for a twelve-year-old.

  Without another word, I picked up my bike in one hand and took the steps of the adjacent church building two at a time. When I reached beyond the uppermost stair, I spun around on my heel, mounted the offending bicycle, pedaled as hard and fast as I could, and when I hit the landing at the top of the steps, I released my grip and leapt off. The little red bike soared through the air as I watched, transfixed, feeling both thrilled and pained that I was destroying some intrinsic part of me. Before I could blink, my once-beloved red bicycle crashed against the pavement, bouncing on every third stair on its way down to the parking lot below. A small part of my heart broke as what had once been my passage to freedom somersaulted down the steps, hitting the asphalt hard enough to snap the chain.

  I bolted to pick it up again, my cold eyes meeting the stunned silence of the High Street crew.

  Again I climbed the steps and tore towards them with the little red bike at my side, running even harder, more furiously this time, letting it coast from the top of the landing.

  When the bike tumbled down the steps and smashed to a stop the second time, the hushed silence erupted into howls, and Little Tony, Big Tony, Chuck Zanecki, Callahan, and Scully ran up after me.

  In a wild frenzy, we took turns throwing what was left of the bicycle down those stairs over and over and over until the crimson paint stained the church steps like blood and the pedals and handlebars fragmented away from the frame.

  The shattered pieces of my childhood lay scattered across the St. Donatus parking lot.

  I was one of them now. One of the High Street Boys.

  A month later when I was riding back from a pickup baseball game, a group of three black kids from the other side of Blue Island stopped me and beat me up. They stole the brand new black and red Schwinn with mag wheels I’d just bought a month before with my thirteenth birthday money. I don’t remember much from that day, except I was angry and disappointed in myself for not doing more to protect my new bike from them. Rage swept through me that someone could come into my neighborhood and take what belonged to me.

  I got a black eye over it, but my pride was hurt more than anything. My mother was incensed anyone would do that to me, my father berated me and punctuated his words with slaps to the back of my head saying I was stupid for getting my new bike stolen, and my baby brother cried because somebody had punched me. I had to keep reassuring Buddy my eye didn’t hurt, it only looked bad.

  A couple of days later some stoner kid from the West Side of Blue Island told me he’d seen the bike in a shady apartment complex on the outskirts of town, so I went over to check it out. Sure enough, I saw my bike on a third floor balcony in a row of apartment houses we considered the “Blue Island Projects.”

  Without thinking of the potential consequences of my actions, I flew up the stairs and pounded on the door. A black man more than twice my size and at least ten times stronger opened up.

  “Damn. Why you bangin’ like you’s da muhfuggin’ cops, white boy?”

  “That’s my bike on your balcony, sir,” I told him. “I’d like it back.”

  He looked puzzled for about three seconds, before bellowing out a boy’s name.

  The boy, who I took to be his son, appeared faster than I could come up with a plan if he denied the allegation. This giant of a man lunged for his son, grabbing him by the collar.

  “This boy say dat’s his bike out there. Dat true?”

  The kid must have known there was no point in lying because he immediately nodded and recoiled. Whack! His dad backhanded him so hard he fell down. Without missing a beat, he yanked the kid back to his feet and smacked him again. I stood there watching, my mouth open, torn between feelings of vindication and regret. I didn’t think it was right to hit a child that way, but then again, the kid and his friends had beat me up. I had one nasty black eye to prove it. Even more so, he’d stolen the new bike I’d bought with my own money to replace the little red one we’d trashed a few weeks before.

  Once this towering man had reduced his kid to a crumpled, wailing heap on the floor, he stepped over him, walked out to the balcony, and came back with my bike.

  “Be more careful wit’ it next time,” he told me. I didn’t dare point out the injustice of blaming me for something his kid did. I’d seen the power of his fist and sure didn’t want to be on the other end of it.

  The real impact didn’t sink in until I showed up to school on Monday. I’d expected everybody in my eighth grade class to make my puffy black eye the butt of their jokes, but instead they studied me like some artifact. They weren’t particularly interested in knowing who won; the mere fact I’d been involved in a fight serious enough to end up with a gnarly-looking black eye elevated me out of obscurity and placed me on a momentary pedestal.

  And it seriously angered Goliath.

  My fist throbbed the moment it slammed into his face the first time. A sudden unexpected crack, an explosion of red, then no sound at all. My vision fish-eyed and I paused to think of how the fresh smattering of blood felt oddly comforting on my stinging knuckles. In an instant, my hearing flooded back and I found myself straddling the fetal heap of Goliath. Recoiling on pure adrenaline and the swelling auditory encouragement from the spectators, I pounded him four or five more times until he surrendered, his face covered in streaks of blood.

  On spent legs I stood over Jake Reilly. And while he wept, my heart pounded out of my chest. My dehydrated mouth murmured something before my trembling limbs led me back to my skateboard and I hastily sped away.

  I stopped after struggling to ride a few blocks and collapsed on some grass alongside the road. I pulled off my T-shirt and wiped my bloody knuckles on it before ditching it in a trashcan. As I sat on the curb inspecting my tender fists, I was overcome with a sudden rush of emotion. Relief streamed down my face.

  I knew at that moment something inside of me had begun to
change. My innocence and insecurity had cracked and were giving way to entitlement and a sense of duty. I had brought down a giant. I could do anything.

  When I got back to the house, rather than asking me why I wasn’t wearing a shirt, my parents sat me down and gave me the best news I could ever have imagined.

  Moving to Blue Island was no big deal.

  Moving to Blue Island was a huge deal.

  It was no big deal because I had considered it my real home for most of my life.

  It was a huge deal because now I got to hang out with my new High Street pals every day. No way could I ever again be considered an outsider.

  I belonged.

  I graduated in 1987 from St. Damian, bloodied its proverbial nose and flipped Oak Forest off on my way out of town, ready, at last, to be where I belonged, with people like me. Both Italian and American, almost each and every one of us. And, as far as I was concerned, the best people on earth.

  Various Romantic Violence, Chicago Area Skinheads, and Final Solution flyers, circa 1987

  4

  WHITE POWER

  Carmine Paterno had been one of my idols since I was old enough to have one. His father was Nonno’s best friend, so Carmine had been at least a small part of my life in Blue Island for as long as I could remember. He was brash and boisterous and stood proud at not much more than five-and-a-half feet. Stocky. Built like an American bulldog, his demeanor was no less fierce. He played the drums and drove a muscle car. He was six years older than me, and if I could have had a big brother, I would have picked Carmine.

  Carmine always thought to pay attention to me when he and his father visited with my grandfather over beers in the garage that served as Nonno’s workshop. He never treated me like I was beneath him simply because I was younger. He swore when I thought swearing was a sin, and smoked and drank openly in front of adults when I was still buying candy cigarettes and root beer from the corner store on High Street.

  “Is that a tattoo, Carmine?” I asked when I saw the fresh ink on his arm.

  The new design was a burning torch wrapped with a banner and some words I couldn’t make out. “Yeah, I just got it last week,” he replied after draining his Old Style can of its last drops of beer.

  “What does it say?” I asked wide-eyed, trying to get a closer look.

  He lifted his sleeve to show me the full design. “It says, ‘The Power and the Glory.’ It’s the name of a song by a band from England called Cockney Rejects.”

  I thought the band’s name was funny but I didn’t dare laugh at Carmine. “That’s sweet!” For the rest of the afternoon I hung out behind the garage singing to myself what I thought the chorus might be for a song with that name.

  By the time I was thirteen, Carmine had firmly established himself as one of the coolest guys on the whole East Side of Blue Island.

  My pal Scully lived directly across the alley from Carmine, and was mentored by him into ever-deepening levels of defiance. With his finger firmly on the pulse of underground music, Carmine would make Scully bootleg cassette copies of albums from the best punk bands the moment they hit the Chicago scene—The Effigies, Naked Raygun, Bhopal Stiffs, Big Black, Articles of Faith.

  Those dubbed mixtapes got Scully and me hooked on punk rock music, and we began to collect vinyl albums of any punk bands we could get our hands on, local or otherwise, competing to buy every new release and imported record we were lucky enough to come across.

  Scully seemed to find out about those bands first, thanks primarily to Carmine. Anybody he thought was worth listening to won our immediate respect. Cockney Rejects. The Clash. Ramones. The Pogues. Stray Cats. Joan Jett and the Blackhearts. Angelic Upstarts. X. Sham 69. Combat 84. The 4-Skins. The Business. Cock Sparrer. Bad Religion. Social Distortion.

  Scully and I drew the bands’ names and their logos all over our ripped jeans, white tees, and Chuck Taylor high-tops. When my mom found my marked-up clothes she threw them out, sure they would turn me into a delinquent. So I hid them. Before I left the house, I tossed them out my bedroom window and changed in the alley before going anywhere.

  Punk rock became a part of our lives in a way that outsiders, especially adults, never understood. It spoke to us and allowed us to speak when we didn’t feel we had a voice. It was uncensored and raw and proved it was okay to be lonely or angry or confused about being a teenager in the world. Music was the common link allowing us all to see we were not lost and alone. In it we found each other, and through it we collectively directed our teen angst at a grown-up society we saw as intolerant of us.

  The punk scene provided us with an alternative to lame, manufactured, popular culture and it promoted individual creativity and personal action, albeit through rebellion. Through punk lyrics we found release from the pressures of growing up. Watching our parents, we caught depressing glimpses of who we were sentenced to become someday. Slamdancing—moshing—to the driving rhythms was an outlet for our pent-up energy, anger, frustration, and insecurities. We were just kids looking to belong. To something. To be accepted, despite the bitter promise of the boring world our parents had built for us.

  It was exciting to be a part of something in the mid-1980s that wasn’t characterized by mass conformity, Top-Siders, neon popped collars, and endless brown corduroy everything. Punk rebellion felt natural—right—important. It was alluring.

  Naked Raygun concerts were our go-to reprieve from the ordinary. Hailing from Chicago, the band performed in clubs and rented halls and Scully and I attended every concert we could. It hardly mattered where they were playing, we’d hop on a train to the North Side of the city and go to a five-dollar all-ages show at Cabaret Metro or sneak our way past the bouncers into an adults-only gig at Club Dreamerz or Cubby Bear.

  The concerts were exhilarating. Colorful mohawks, combat boots, and ratty clothes riddled with safety pins were the fashion mainstay for the hundreds of embittered punks that crammed the venues they played. The energy in the band’s songs was electric and the crowd swayed as if the surge of power lit a fuse and ignited our collective aggression. Our sweaty bodies, driven into each other by razor sharp guitars and wild drumbeats, pulsed and swirled in unison, packed like sardines in front of the stage. A never-ending stream of willful youths clad in bullet belts and studded denim jackets dove from the edge of the stage into our eager arms in the pit where we awaited their tumbling, sweat-slippery frames. The electric energy in the room was profound and we felt alive with every distorted power chord.

  Along with Naked Raygun, Carmine also blasted music from a group called Skrewdriver all over the neighborhood, and I fell hard for the edgy British punk band the moment I heard them—their tunes and beats, the slick way they dressed, and the raspy voice of Ian Stuart, their gruff lead singer. His songs were different than those of other punk bands, unlike anything I’d ever heard. They brought life to a different and wildly more exciting level. They had something to say, and Ian Stuart voiced it with unmatched intensity. But that was inconsequential. I became too engrossed in the energy of the music itself, and I barely registered their lyrics.

  I stand and watch my country

  Going down the drain

  We are all at fault

  We are all to blame

  We’re letting them take over

  We just let ’em come

  Once we had an empire

  And now we’ve got a slum

  Are we going to sit and let them come?

  Have they got the white man on the run?

  My benign appreciation of Skrewdriver’s music screeched to an abrupt halt the night I met Clark Martell.

  Early one evening, Scully and I stood zoning out, high on weed, staring at a squawking ebony crow perched atop one of the twisted light posts that lined the alley behind his house. We passed a joint back and forth, giggling like little girls.

  The garages on either side of the narrow dead-end alley were crammed with a myriad of old furniture, stacked boxes of orph
aned Mason jar lids, piles of plastic nativity sets, and unraveling lawn chairs. With no space left inside for even half a Yugo to squeeze in, we weren’t worried about anybody pulling up on us. As far as we were concerned, these deserted backstreets existed solely as a gathering place for us kids—and chatty, odd blackbirds.

  “Hey, Scully,” I said, face pointed to the sky as I studied the winged intruder looking down on us from atop the flickering streetlight. “Do you think that old crow knows what we’re doing?”

  He laughed. “I don’t know, man. But that’s a seriously dumb question.”

  As Scully craned his neck to look up at the watchful bird, the shotgun roar of a car bursting up the alley broke the calm.

  “Shit!” He tossed the joint.

  I retrieved it. “Chill out, man. It’s only Carmine.”

  But as it turned out, I was wrong.

  Carmine’s primer-black 1969 Pontiac Firebird screeched to a skidding halt in the gravel beside us. I gawked at the stark contrast of the white death’s-head skull freshly spray-painted on the corner of the matte hood. Damn. Could anyone be cooler than Carmine?

  With the intermittent amber glow of the streetlamp lighting the car from above, the passenger door snapped open, and this older dude with a shaved head and black combat boots headed straight toward us. He wasn’t unnaturally tall or imposing physically, but his closely cropped hair and shiny boots smacked of authority. Over a crisp white T-shirt, thin scarlet suspenders held up his bleach-spotted jeans.

  He stepped across the beam of headlights and swiftly closed the distance between us. You’d have thought he’d turned in that alley specifically to hunt us down. I pulled back, wondering what the hell we’d done to piss this guy off.

  Inches from me, he stopped and leaned in close, his beady, ashen eyes holding mine. The whites surrounding his granite pupils looked old, timeworn. Intense. Barely opening his mouth, he spoke softly, with a listen-closely-now attitude. “Don’t you know that’s exactly what the capitalists and Jews want you to do, so they can keep you docile?”