It all came to a head when a black student and I got into a fierce verbal argument in art class when he refused to move away from the door as I tried to enter the classroom. Of course, the queer art teacher assumed it was my fault and sent me to the office to be reprimanded, but not the other kid. I sat there waiting outside the principal’s door, stewing for a few minutes, before coming to my senses.
That lowlife nigger instigator wasn’t going to stay in class while I got expelled for something he’d started, which would mean I definitely would not graduate. There were no schools left for me to transfer to and even I didn’t want to be a dropout like the losers I saw hanging out in front of the Blue Island liquor stores and at the St. Anthony’s flophouse in the middle of the day.
Incensed, I pushed back my chair outside the office, knocking it to the floor with a loud bang. If this was going to be my last stand, I might as well go out with guns blazing. I tore up two flights of stairs and threw open the heavy door to the art room with a wall-shaking rattle. As every wide-eyed, startled face in the room turned to make sense of the sudden commotion, I flew across the classroom so fast my Docs hardly hit the floor before I tackled the arrogant fucker who was perched triumphantly on his tall art stool.
“I write the rules here, you fucking nigger,” I roared, dragging him to the ground by his neck and slamming my fist into his terrified black face. “Worthless piece of welfare shit. Your day just got real shitty.” I punctuated my words with vicious blasts to his cheekbone and eye socket.
Shrieking, out of their minds, the other students in the class scattered toward the walls. Drafting tables flew into bystander bodies, knocking some girls to the floor, as I held my target down and began choking him with the bottom rung of the stool he’d been sitting on seconds earlier.
In a flash, the wrestling coach and the head security guard, who’d seen me barge in as they were meeting just steps away down the hall, pounced on me to try and pull me off. I fought back against them relentlessly while my adversary lay curled in a fetal heap beneath me. A row of art supply shelves and a dozen jars full of acrylic paint came crashing down around us creating a furious Jackson Pollack-esque array of rainbow colors.
“Get the hell off me,” I grunted as the two large black men struggled to lift me to my feet. While I attempted to evade their grasp, I punctuated each profanity coming from mouth with stomps to this kid’s throat. Because I was younger and accustomed to grappling, they couldn’t pull me away until I decided I’d caused enough damage.
When I’d had enough, they yanked me to my feet and half-shoved, half-dragged me out of the classroom and down the hall back to the principal’s office. The still-hefty former wrestling champ held me partially immobilized in a full nelson headlock while the security guard kept my body from swinging. As I was hauled away kicking and screaming through the hallway and down two flights of stairs by these two sizable men, classroom doors swung open like falling dominoes. Teachers craned their necks out into the corridor, curious to make sense of the raucous turmoil that my steel-toed boots caused as they dented lockers along the way.
After they got me back to the office and waited for me to cool off, guess whose side the black principal was on?
“I understand you made some dreadful remarks,” she said, trying hard to hold in her contempt for me. I could tell because her hands shook and her voice cracked and pitched higher as she tried to keep calm. “Want to tell me why you would say such unconscionable things, Mr. Picciolini?”
I erupted with a barrage of hate so venomous that if the spit that formed from my words had landed on an open wound on her body, she would have been poisoned on the spot. “I don’t have to tell you shit. Fuck you, you filthy nigger bitch,” I seethed, conveniently disregarding that this particular “filthy nigger bitch” had “Dr.” and “Ph.D.” attached to the front and back end of her name. “You can take your bleeding-heart, liberal bullshit and stick it up your fat black cunt.” I inched toward her with each toxic stab of my tongue. “I run this godforsaken school whether I’m in it or not. So, fuck you! Expel me!”
The black security guard who’d dragged me into her office leapt to wedge himself between us. He tore his glasses off his gorilla face and slammed them down on the principal’s desk so hard that he mangled the frame and sent one of the shattered lens fragments flying toward the ceiling. Ready to take me on. He got so close to my face that I could smell the mustard from his lunch on his breath become more acrid with every word he used.
“Who you calling nigger, son?” he barked, grabbing me by the shirt and slamming me back against the wall, knocking me on my ass. “Know who the real nigger is? You!” Angry projectiles of saliva shot out with every other word. “I stood up against ignorant people like you and beat down your racist kind in the ’60s on the streets of Chicago and, with God as my witness, I’ll do the same now.”
I was on my feet before he finished his sentence. But as I rose up he threw me back down and immobilized me by pressing his strong body against mine, his arms locked around my elbows, keeping me pinned between the wall and a tall metal file cabinet in the corner of the room.
The frightened principal picked up the phone and dialed 911. Within minutes, a police siren was wailing outside the building. “We’ll see who gets arrested,” I spit. “You can’t abuse a student like this. Your black asses are all going to jail and getting fired. You’ll be sorry!”
But when the two Blue Island police officers rushed into the room, they didn’t care that a black adult was assaulting a white teenager. These brainwashed white cops were traitors to their race, puppets of the corrupt ZOG government that controlled our lives, believing the rent-a-cop security guard over me. The cops threw me down to the ground and pressed their knees into the small of my back and neck while they wrenched my arms behind me and handcuffed my wrists together. After they jerked me to my feet, the two of them marched me down the hallway toward the main entrance of the school where their flashing squad car was parked.
Almost by divine design, the bell signaling the end of class rang and students began pouring into the hallway at the same exact moment we exited the office. Their innocent chatter stopped as they saw the cops leading me out. The dense crowd parted to clear a path and I suddenly felt like a young Bobby De Niro in the grand finale scene of a Martin Scorsese gangster flick as the needle dropped into the opening grooves of a Rolling Stones tune. Everything moved in slow motion and friendly hands reached out to pat my back, some outstretched in Nazi salute to encourage me. Others threw poisonous stares of contempt at the condemned man being led to the gallows. Smiles of admiration and sneers of disdain greeted me as I swiveled my head, breathing it all in. Smiling. Nobody would forget this day. This victorious march of fate. I’d shown everyone how little authority meant and how nothing short of handcuffs could hold me back.
Though the school or the kid I pummeled never pressed criminal charges, there weren’t many options left when it came to my education. So I didn’t go to school for almost a month while my parents scrambled from school board director to administrator to see what possibilities remained, if any. Absolutely nobody wanted me, even though I only had six months left to graduation.
While the other kids my age were in school being brainwashed, I worked on strengthening my empire. I needed more soldiers. I continued to get the word out through my post office box. I was hungry to expand, recruiting harder and more effectively than Clark ever had. This was my time.
In November I got arrested again. Some Anti pussy named Hector Diaz went crying to the cops and pressed charges against me, saying I’d beat him up. Lies. Not that I wouldn’t, but I hadn’t. No doubt I would have if the opportunity had presented itself, though. Instead, this scrawny Puerto Rican scumbag gutter punk had fabricated a story about me hurting him to make sure I couldn’t.
This hardly helped my parents with their efforts to get me back into school.
I had to appear in court for my arraignment shortly a
fter my arrest. Made sure I dressed real nice. Wore a long-sleeve shirt covering up my tattoos, treated the judge with the utmost feigned respect. He set bond. The trial was a ways off, but I knew to stay away from Diaz.
The false battery charges against me only made me more driven than ever. I’d been in court now. Put in handcuffs multiple times. Like the older guys. Couldn’t get more legit than this. I needed to branch out. I pondered different ways, and had a flash of inspiration when listening to Skrewdriver one day.
Son of a bitch! Why hadn’t I thought about music earlier? Music was the seed, growth hormone, and harvest of the skinhead movement all in one.
Nothing like a driving bass, crunching guitars, and calls for white revolution shouted over and over and over to bring out the beast in people. Music had been a key part of the skinhead subculture from day one. It almost single-handedly inspired it. Skrewdriver. Clark and Carmine’s Final Solution. Bully Boys. Arresting Officers. No Remorse. Brutal Attack. Haken Kreuz. The Midtown Bootboys. Bound For Glory. All pioneering white power bands, some even American, though most were now defunct. No reason I couldn’t get in on the action. It was a wide open market. I jotted down lyrics, making up choruses in my head. Tried them out in front of the mirror.
I could do it. No—not could—I would do it. All I needed were a few guys with instruments and some balls. The thought of having my own white power band was intoxicating. I could taste the glory, hear the deafening roar of the crowd. With my ambition and growing network, notoriety would surely follow.
Never mind that I had little musical background.
“A band?” my mother asked when I announced I’d be practicing in the basement and we’d be making some noise. “But you aren’t a musician. You quit piano lessons when you were ten.”
“This is different. This is real music. Music people will listen to. Something that matters.”
“I’ll listen to your band, Buddy,” my little brother chimed in.
“What instrument will you play? You don’t even have a harmonica. Or are you going to bang on pans like when you were a little boy?” My mom thought she was a riot.
Buddy pulled two long wooden spoons from the utensil drawer and started to bang them on the counter like drumsticks.
I ignored her amusement. “I’ll find other people to play the instruments. I’ll sing and write the lyrics. I’m the one who makes things happen.”
Her ears perked up. She liked the sound of that. Relieved. Proved she’d been right about me after all. Those posters, those Nazi flags, those ugly T-shirts and big boots were a passing phase and would be a thing of the past now that I’d settle down to be a musician. This pleased her and kept her off my back, while she continued waiting to hear if the alternative school for fuck-ups was going to let me enroll in January when the final semester began.
I traded my old punk rock record collection for some microphones, cables, and a beat-up PA system from a bingo hall, easily talked a few of the local guys I knew who played instruments into forming a band, and our group was born. Modeled us after Skrewdriver with more of an American hardcore vibe than traditional British Oi! music.
I was the vocalist and songwriter. The rest of the band was made up of former Eisenhower classmates. Rick, a long-haired heavy metal kid who’d taken years of lessons, agreed to play guitar. Larry—Rick’s best friend—brought over his drum set. Davey, a promising skateboarder in the neighborhood and the only one I knew with an electric bass guitar, rounded out the group.
None of the other three were remotely skinheads or neo-Nazis, but they were white power sympathizers that hung around and partied with us on the weekends. They had no objection to racist lyrics since they hung around with some of the same people I knew from Blue Island and shared the same views about minorities as I did. They were all psyched to be in a band, and I convinced them the fastest way to get noticed was through playing skinhead music. “There’s only one or two other white power bands in the U.S. right now. We’ll make history. The British skinhead bands are folk heroes. We’ll be better than them.”
I pointed out that not all Skrewdriver songs were about hate. “They’re about social justice, man. They don’t only do ‘fuck-you-nigger’ songs. They sing about white pride and patriotism, fighting against communism, breaking the capitalist system. That kind of knowledge can change the world. And we can be part of that.”
Without much debate, I named us White American Youth—WAY for short. Perfect name considering I was going to use our music to show white kids the way out of their sleepwalk.
We took up residence for the remainder of the winter in my basement pad, practicing, learning how to play together, imitating bands we liked by rehearsing their tunes, drinking, getting original songs down. We’d stay up all hours, Buddy slipping in as often as he could to be part of this exciting new world.
“Hey, Buddy, can I sing into the microphone?” he’d ask.
“I’m working right now. Maybe later.” The look on his dejected face clearly displayed his hurt feelings. Sometimes I’d see him peeking through the window when we practiced. Once I caught him in the garage jumping around singing some of my lyrics into a flashlight.
My father would come down when we got really loud, tell us to shut up, it was too late for all the noise.
“Leave us the fuck alone. Go back upstairs,” I’d order, and the rest of the guys in the band would watch with their mouths wide open as my father obeyed, cursing me under his breath. I was relentless in my perseverance to piss off my dad. I resented him for not being there for me when I was a kid more than I did my mother. While he was always in the background, I didn’t really get to know him and he never made an effort to know me. Asserting his authority—although it didn’t carry any weight due to his lackluster parenting track record—was a prime cue for me to lash out. He’d failed me as a father and I’d pounce on any opportunity to punish him for it. I was in control.
My time for music was curtailed in February when Ombudsman Alternative School agreed to let me enroll and finish out the year. But I knew I was onto something big and school hadn’t ever held me back before. WAY, I was certain, would continue.
Ombudsman was a privately run remedial alternative education school with all of fifty kids in the whole student body. A mix of degenerates. Dumb kids who couldn’t read. Gangbangers. Drug dealers. Underage pregnant girls. The hopeless cases everyone had given up on. Who’d given up on themselves.
What the hell was I doing here?
I didn’t have many credits left to complete before graduation, so I knew it’d be a breeze. But it was downright insulting to have been lumped in with such a bunch of derelict losers.
Ombudsman had two sessions a day, each lasting four hours. I was in the second session and spent the whole wasted afternoon sitting in front of a green-screen computer terminal clicking through reading comprehension questions about stories not even as deep and difficult as those I’d read to my baby brother when he was growing up.
The teachers figured out pretty fast that I was an asset to them. Smart kid like me with all those advanced high school classes under his belt made a handy tutor for the brain-dead zombies they had trouble reaching, thereby reducing the load the instructors carried. All I had to do was show up and help them administer spelling tests from time to time to graduate.
This was as close to acceptable as high school was ever likely to get. I wrote songs and even applied to a few colleges during classroom downtime. I was smart enough. Why not? I’d find hundreds more students to recruit on a university campus. Everyone is looking for something to believe in. They just needed a gentle nudge in the right direction.
In the meantime, I kept WAY focused on making music, which wasn’t all that easy. The other guys weren’t into it as much as I was and with them in school all day, time to practice was hard to come by.
And I had serious commitments. To the white race and my crew.
Christian and the Marietta, Georgia, cre
w, 1990
13
VANGUARD
Now that I was seventeen years old and had my driver’s license, I found opportunities to travel out of state to meet other skinheads from around the country who I’d corresponded with. My new part-time job working at a pizza parlor in Beverly gave me the financial means to get around, and some friends and I drove down to Georgia to hang out and network. One of the guys in my crew who’d recently been discharged from the army was dating a skinhead girl who lived there, and we stayed at a house in Marietta, Georgia, owned by a veteran neo-Nazi skin named Teddy Dalrymple.
Marietta was one of the hottest places in the country for recruiting skinheads. It was almost child’s play. White supremacy had been part of Marietta history ever since the Reconstruction era Ku Klux Klan began immediately after the Civil War ended. It grew in popularity and remained ingrained as part of the culture.
Dalrymple lived in a dilapidated wood-framed shanty at the end of Blanche Drive in Marietta that served as a bustling hub for neo-Nazi youth activity throughout the Atlanta area. At any given time you’d find dozens of kids hanging around for meetings, parties, rallies, and any number of other activities. White power skinheads passing through Georgia were always welcome to crash there, and Dalrymple made us feel right at home. He treated me as an equal and gave me tips on scaling our recruiting efforts outside of Chicago. He was a down-home Southern good ol’ boy through and through. Great guy with a round potbelly and giant muttonchops covering his cheeks. Totally inspiring. A redneck maverick, he had the line on every pro-white group in the country and was involved in organizing large-scale marches and protests in support of our cause.
It was at Dalrymple’s house where I met Clay Wallaby, drummer for the legendary English skinhead band Condemned 84—one of my favorite Oi! bands, next to Skrewdriver. Another great guy. An old-school British skin who had fled his home country and was building a new life with an American girl in Marietta. We hung out together some. Drank lots of beer. I admired his musical talent and long-standing dedication to the skinhead movement. He was about more than getting into brawls and kicking ass.
Romantic Violence Page 14