Romantic Violence

by Christian Picciolini

  Not knowing exactly what the hell a capitalist was, or what “docile” meant, my nervous instinct was to take a swift draw from the joint and involuntarily cough smoke straight into his face.

  With stunning, ninja-like speed, this guy with the penetrating gray eyes smacked the back of my head with one hand and simultaneously snatched the joint from my lips with the other, crushing it with his shiny black boot.

  I was speechless. Frozen. I turned to Scully, but he’d vanished.

  Blood retreated like flowing ice water through my veins and pooled in my heavy, tingling extremities. Shaking my head to regain my composure, I mustered enough confidence and tried to save face in front of Carmine. “What…what do you know…and who the hell are you, anyway? You’re not my father,” I sputtered. My voice sounded weak in my ears.

  The stubbly, sharp-jawed man straightened up and gripped my shoulder firmly, drawing me in toward him. “What’s your name, son?” His voice was steady and earnest.

  I stammered nervously into lukewarm, broken pieces. “Christian…Chris…Picciolini.”

  “That’s a fine Italian name,” he said, his voice suddenly sounding kind. I braced myself for the inevitable knockout punchline. Sensing my nervousness, he leaned in and said, “Your ancestors were quite exquisite warriors. Leaders of men. You should be proud of your name.” From my experience in Oak Forest, I wasn’t, though. “Did you know the Roman army, the Centurion commanders specifically, are considered among the greatest white European warriors in the history of mankind?” I didn’t. He took out a folded piece of paper and a pen from his jeans pocket and scribbled the word “Centurion” on it. “And Roman women are divine goddesses,” he added with a sly smile. That much I knew. I cracked a slight grin as he thrust the paper into my hand. “Go to the library and look it up. Then come find me and tell me what you’ve learned about yourself and your glorious people.”

  In the background, Carmine was leaning against his rumbling Firebird, glossed boots with white straight-laces covering his crossed ankles. He looked different. Focused. Pinching his cigarette and exhaling a thick, steely plume of smoke, he could have been James Dean. “The kid’s cool, Clark. They’re waiting for us. We should go.”

  “Well, Christian Picciolini,” he said, grasping my clammy hand, “I’m Clark Martell, and I’m going to save your fucking life.”

  With that, he nodded to Carmine, who jumped into his car and pulled it up alongside us. As quickly as he’d arrived, this guy climbed back inside the roaring beast, and he and Carmine tore off down the alley like a burning phoenix, leaving me surrounded by a cloud of exhaust and confusion.

  Clark Martell. I’d heard his name around the neighborhood before—most likely from Carmine—but I hadn’t paid much attention. Now I made it my business to find out everything I could.

  I started with the piece of paper he’d handed me. Scrawled on the back was the word “Centurion,” but the front side revealed a photocopied flyer for a mail-order service called “Romantic Violence” that sold Skrewdriver tapes and other music for “white people with guts” through a post office box in Blue Island. The typed handbill described Skrewdriver’s tunes as “marching music, fighting music, spirit-scaring white power rock and roll music from the finest white nationalist skinhead band in the West.” That was the first time I ever heard the term “white power.”

  Martell’s clothes marked him as a skinhead. Skrewdriver was a skinhead band and I’d seen what they looked like on the back of Carmine’s albums; I’d even seen a couple of skinheads at Naked Raygun shows, so I knew enough to recognize one when I saw one. Carmine told me they were a spinoff from the London punk rock and hooligan subcultures and that some skinheads were about more than just music and causing a ruckus at soccer matches. But I didn’t particularly care. I didn’t feel called to action by the lyrics dominating their songs, words that spoke about politics, police oppression, war and history, and British unemployment. I didn’t relate.

  Skinheads dressed sharp. Tough. They looked intimidating and were rowdier than punk rockers. They wore British Dr. Martens work boots like their factory-worker fathers, slim denim jeans or tailored Sta-Prest work trousers, and thin suspenders they referred to as “braces.” They shaved their heads and got tattoos and lived in England and a few other places in Europe, but there weren’t many in the United States that I knew of. Certainly not in Blue Island.

  I wanted to learn more. So I took the city bus to the mall bookstore and shoplifted a copy of the only book I could find on the topic, appropriately titled Skinhead, by a British photographer named Nick Knight. In it, I discovered skinheads, or “skins,” first appeared in London sometime in the 1960s among working-class teenagers reacting against hippie culture. Upon further investigation, I learned skinheads were pissed off about the lack of jobs and opportunities to make a decent living, so they rebelled against what they believed were the causes of those problems. They didn’t fall for the “flower power” notions of peace and love, and they blamed everyone from politicians to immigrants for their troubles. They shaved their heads, both to distinguish themselves from their hippie counterparts, and to keep their opponents from grabbing their hair during their frequent street fights.

  While I learned that not all skinheads were violent—many factions just adopted the music and look, not the nationalist politics or aggressive attitudes towards immigrants—I learned those that were prone to violence typically attacked beatniks, gays, upper-class students, and local Pakistanis, who, they claimed, were taking their much-desired jobs. In the early ’70s, Scotland Yard cracked down on skinheads in London, and more or less put an end to their riotous activities.

  For a while.

  Then, thanks to Ian Stuart, whose Skrewdriver lyrics I’d practically ignored as their music beats pulsed through my veins, the more radical offshoot of skinheads made a comeback in the mid-’80s. Stuart formed a political youth action group called White Noise. That, in turn, led to affiliations with the British National Front, a neo-fascist political organization, and the creation of a right-wing music coalition called Rock Against Communism. Skrewdriver shed their initial punk rock aesthetic and soon became the most well-known nationalist skinhead band in Europe.

  The ideologies expressed in their music found an instant audience with many punks and skins who had become disenfranchised with the soaring levels of immigration and unemployment in 1980s England. Add to that feelings of alienation and a strong desire to disrupt a system that seemed the source of many of their problems, and many skinheads adopted more radical right-wing politics—and the pro-white nationalist skinhead subculture was born.

  To parlay the sudden popularity of the band, Skrewdriver left their independent British record label Chiswick Records—where they were labelmates with more mainstream punk acts such as Motörhead and The Damned—and secured a recording contract with Rock-O-Rama Records, a West German record company specializing in edgier and more extreme Oi! music, a British brand of skinhead-styled punk rock. As a result of that partnership, Skrewdriver’s racist skinhead message reached throughout Europe and Canada and their music then became available through Martell’s mail-order service in the United States.

  Carmine told me Martell had even arranged for Skrewdriver to come the United States to perform, the plan foiled when several members of the band couldn’t acquire travel visas. Martell, with Carmine’s help, settled for being the sole conduit to import Skrewdriver and other Rock-O-Rama records into the United States. And so, the Romantic Violence mail-order service became the first in the United States to distribute white power music in America.

  It was 1987 and while I’d seen a handful of skinheads—some even non-racist, black and Asian ones—throwing kids around in the pit at Naked Raygun and other punk rock shows, I’d never actually met one in person. That’s because this guy who’d smacked my head, having borrowed and adopted the style in 1984 from his radical British counterparts, was only one of a few dozen existing in America.


  “Be glad Clark took an interest in you,” Carmine told me. “He knows what’s going on. He’s sick of watching white people lose ground to all the affirmative action job discrimination bullshit and seeing minorities mess up clean white neighborhoods like Blue Island. He does something about it, too. Doesn’t sit back and let shit happen.”

  “How does he feel about Italians?” I asked clumsily.

  “What, you don’t think Italians are white?” Carmine laughed. “Who do you think taught all those fucking pasty Krauts and Limeys to be civilized? If it weren’t for the Roman Empire and its 1,500-year rule, most of Europe would still be living like savages and have black skin like the invading nigger Moors of Northern Africa. Thanks to us Italians, ethnic Europeans today are still white…Italians, Germans, Greeks, English, the fucking Spaniards and the drunk Irish, the Nordics…the whole goddamn lot of us.” He pulled out a Marlboro cigarette, lit it, and offered me one.

  “Thanks,” I took a shallow drag, more interested in what he was saying than the smoke in my hand.

  “Even those pansy French bastards,” he hacked. “Though, on second thought, maybe we should’ve let them fuckers go. Regardless, if you’re a native European, you’re white. White power! And don’t you forget it.”

  “So Clark’s a…white power…skinhead?” I asked, still not exactly clear on what exactly that meant.

  “Yeah, but he’s more than that. He’s a neo-Nazi skinhead, here to save white people from everyone who’s trying to destroy us, like the Jews and niggers. After he moved to Chicago from Montana, where he’s originally from, Clark worked with the American Nazi Party. But he thinks they’re a bunch of kooky old white guys who just sit around and complain about how bad things are, so he’s using skinhead music to get the message out to younger people. We have a band.”

  “We?”

  “Clark, Shane Krupp, and Chase Sargent…you know them from the neighborhood, right? And me. Final Solution. You’ve gotta hear us. You’ll love it. Ain’t nobody else doin’ it and we’ve already played a few shows around town. People are starting to listen to what Clark says about whites needing to watch their backs and fight back.”

  “Like who? I mean, who’s hanging out with him?” I wanted Carmine to keep talking.

  “Look around, man. Pay attention. Those shaved heads you see hanging out in this alley aren’t some bullshit fashion statement like punk rock has become. They’re about showing the world what we’re about. Our message is spreading. Word is getting around. And it’s starting here, in Blue Island, right before your eyes. We’re going to take our country back.”

  I had no reason to doubt him.

  Carmine further explained that Martell believed firmly in the supremacy of the white race over other ethnicities. He was sick of “muds”—as he referred to all non-white people—moving into quiet white neighborhoods, bringing crime, and taking jobs. Martell despised drugs, because he saw them as a tool that blacks and fat-cat Jews with political agendas used to enslave white people, and keep them dumb—docile. Like Adolf Hitler had done for Germany, Martell—and now Carmine, and a small, but expanding group of Chicago skinhead guys and girls—wanted to stop Jews, blacks, Mexicans, and “queers”—who Martell considered sub-human—from poisoning white culture in America. He was especially adamant about recruiting and protecting white women, so they could continue to propagate the white race.

  “So…what…he’s going around warning people?” I asked, trying to figure out what Martell was really all about.

  “For the last two years, he’s been putting together the first white power skinhead crew in the country, that’s what,” Carmine replied. Leaning forward and dropping his cigarette before crushing it with his boot, Carmine said in an uncharacteristically low voice, “And he’s doing a shitload more than that.”

  I kept digging. “Really? Like what?”

  He paused, considering how much I should know. “He’s catching heat from the cops for some serious stuff that happened this past spring.”

  Again I pushed for details. But Carmine wouldn’t say anything more.

  I thought the skinhead look was cool, and their music pumped me up. But, aside from getting roughed up a bit when my bike got stolen, I had no real beef with blacks, or even Mexicans—let alone Jews or gay people. I’d never even met any. I was just happy to finally be living in the same neighborhood as my friends.

  I didn’t see much racism in our community, although, because most families had come from the same small village in Italy, there was an overwhelming amount of Italian pride and we tended to stick together.

  My High Street friends and I had chased black kids out of the St. Donatus carnival before, but not as a racist or political act; we simply didn’t want outsiders messing with our rituals. Some Mexican families had moved onto our block, and our parents and grandparents weren’t too happy about it, so we did hear the random “there goes the neighborhood” remarks. But there was no significant racial tension that I was aware of.

  So was I initially drawn to Martell’s racist agenda? Not really.

  But he was magnetic. Charming. I wanted to be like him, and like Carmine and the other people I saw them hanging around with. Why? Because Martell was the first adult—even though he was only twenty-six years old when I met him—who had ever disciplined me and provided a valid explanation for doing so. He hadn’t asserted his authority without good reason. When he scolded me for smoking pot in the alley, it was because he thought it was bad for me and took the time to explain the consequences; it wasn’t merely, “Put that joint out, because it’s illegal, and I’m an adult, and I said so.” This persuaded me that he wanted what was best for my future—so much so that he’d smacked my head. Just like my dad did.

  And so, I changed my behavior: I swore off weed, even though I had barely been introduced to it. When Martell and Carmine and their friends were in the alley listening to music or monkeying with their cars, I made sure I was in visible proximity. I followed Martell around and observed his mannerisms. His racial rhetoric sank in, too. Some of my High Street friends had begun moving away to the suburbs. Was that because Blue Island was less safe now, with other races moving in? My new bike had been stolen by black kids, after all.

  I looked at my neighborhood, family, and friends with wary eyes questioning all of the things I’d once taken for granted. I’d never liked school, which made it easy to accept that teachers lied to us about history—presented it the way that suited them. Maybe Martell knew something about Jews they weren’t teaching us in school. Maybe he was right when he claimed the people who wrote the history books were all Jews—and fed us a bunch of altered historical bullshit. Blacks were certainly tied to the increase in crime. I knew that firsthand.

  Aside from seeing him with Carmine, Martell kept cropping up more and more in neighborhood discussions. His intensity scared people, cops included. Conversations stopped when he walked into a room. That was something I admired. Intentionally or not, Clark Martell had made me a whole new person. I wanted to carry his weight.

  By the end of the summer, when Carmine was busy working his job at a local muffler repair shop, Clark would regularly task me with going to the post office or running off copies of flyers and literature for him. He had begun publishing a newsletter called Skrewdriver News that he handed out in front of concert venues when trying to recruit punk rock kids. I’d over-deliver by cheating the copy counts when it came time to pay the cashier. That typically meant we got at least two times what we’d paid for.

  Clark would reward me when I did particularly well. He’d give me a pair of his secondhand boots, or a faded Skrewdriver T-shirt, or more music cassettes, which he seemed to have an abundance of. I ate it all up and would squirrel these gifts away so my mom couldn’t find them. Then, one day, Clark handed me a tattered red paperback titled The Turner Diaries. Until then, I hadn’t read even one of the books my teachers assigned in school, and I’d faked my way through every book report.
But I couldn’t wait to read the gift from Clark.

  I had been comfortable as a High Street Boy, but now, I had awoken to the larger world, and wanted more than to just fit into it. I wanted to matter. Ever since I was a lonely little kid, playing make-believe in my grandparents’ coat closet, I’d felt called to do something truly big. Now I wanted people to look up to me, the way I looked up to Clark, and for as noble a reason: saving the white race. The more I thought about him and his mission, the more it appealed to me. This was important.

  Like most people who are caught up in someone’s charisma, I looked for evidence that Clark was right, not wrong. I visited bookstores and sat and read books from the shelves, and took an interest in history and current events. Sure enough, I concluded that giving college scholarships to minorities meant passing over more deserving white kids. I noticed lots of muds, blacks and Mexicans mostly, working labor jobs and in restaurants—which seemed to prove whites were being shoved aside in favor of lesser-paid illegal immigrants. In place of trustworthy families from Italy, strangers with different ways of living had moved in. I soon began perceiving life through Clark’s shrewd lens, and started to believe Blue Island, my beloved home, was in danger.

  My family and friends didn’t listen to my new ideas. My parents weren’t concerned. They shrugged me off and changed the subject. That made it clear they needed to be protected.

  A seed began to germinate inside of me. The racist skinhead movement had only just begun in the United States, born right here in my own Blue Island backyard. I could become part of the new movement, spread the word, win Clark’s full acceptance and the respect that came from being on the cutting edge of something significant.

  Rapidly, living for innocent fun faded, playing Wiffle ball and riding bikes with the High Street Boys didn’t seem exciting anymore, and the need to live for a greater purpose came sharply into focus.