trained 55 men for one of the toughest sniping units in the armed forces. His body count is
unestablished, although its number is thick.
Schechter describes himself as such: “I am a blue-collar tramp, a dream chasing
scumbag forever compromised and contradicting myself. Since my service in the Middle East I
have developed a few debilitating social phobias. However, I yearn to be the center of attention.
Having so many inner contradictions has led me into the darker, more introspective years of my
life… I claw at the veneer of what people try to force feed me and what has become the desired,
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acceptable lifestyle. This is what I struggle against and I will suffer until either it, or I, am
destroyed.”
We haven’t had a real conversation in over 10 years, although one of the first things he
related was that he’d kept some post-apocalyptic prose I did in 9th grade taped inside his war
journal. Bombs are exploding, machine guns fired, half the city is burning, and Schechter’s sitting
on the steps of a Mosque, writing poetry in a Wagnerian trance with his assault rifle delicately
beside him: “Sandstorms and tears, Finally appreciating teenage lust, In angst-filled teenage
loss… My mothers face is wet, and Screams from inside a family portrait- Hiding from wayward
lies… Making peace with the stars, I lay back, atop a machinery of hate- and I know I will never
find the solace I have here, now… It is cold around moist feet in the night, And nail heads dig
round, wise heads into my sore and solemn back… Soon life will change, and in the silence we
will all be children…”
THE LONG U-HAUL EASTWARD
SATURDAY, MAY 26th, 7am; Schechter, Skinhead Eddie & I shove off for Wallington
Borough, New Jersey – a Polish grotto so miniscule it doesn’t appear on the map. Schechter is
expatriating himself from Detroit today and never looking back. He’s setting up shop on a new
life with his girlfriend who’s already secured an apartment. He’s restarting his band Street Crime
with a new group of players, completing work on his first book, and planning to enjoy the New
York life whenever possible.
Street Crime is definitely going to be a niche-minded sell. Being a Marine and coming
back to the hardcore punk underground, fully supporting the war and having a nationalistic punk
band is a real hamper, since it’s such a viciously recalcitrant world. He’s in a good position
though because his brother runs Sound Riot Studios and is a manager of some sort for My
Chemical Romance. This also means we have free unlimited access to a quarter-million dollar
studio in Brooklyn.
New York is only a stones through from Wallington Borough, and I have high
expectations. No matter how miniscule your day is, every slice of Manhattan is an adventure. I
have a list of over 50 bands from the area, many of whom are located in Brooklyn and Queens. It
seems that all of New York has been stomping like the rows of a hockey game for my arrival. The
main message I received through Greg of Paragon Records (and black/death act Dimentianon):
‘Just fucking get to Duff’s Brooklyn. Everything will be taken care of -- blood, metal, and Satan.
What more could you ask for?”
It’s a 13 hour drive, and we’re halfway there before I even am even able to crack Schechter’s ice-
hard wall of punctuality. Like so many vets I’ve known, he has that gung ho attitude of ‘get it
done, stick to plan, keep moving forward.’ He’s a no-bullshit sort of character, drilled into his
world. You don’t even need to talk about Iraq to tell he’s haunted. My manifest presence is only
scraping that barrier.
The difference Jeff has with every other vet is that we both grew up in the highest
population of Arabs outside the Middle East. Our neighborhood (East Dearborn) is referred to as
“Little Lebanon,” where 80% of grown adults are Arab, and 65% of the youth are too. Many
business signs are in that weird cursive writing, and all high schools are predominantly Arabic.
We both bounced between East and West Dearborn where the cultural lines are rigidly divided,
but it is a point of pride to always claim East Dearborn, and that’s where I’ve always considered
home.
As much hope is propagandically injected into our “friends & allies in the Middle East,”
it only makes the two of us sardonically chuckle. Growing up in Dearborn was a vicious thing,
and the racism was explosive. It’s not that the average person plays into racism. It’s not even
about skin color -- it’s about panoramic, corrosive attitudes
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No matter how flowery the utopian-minded try and make it sound, to the vast majority of
mainline Arab culture – at least culturally -- any non-Muslim is an infidel. Again, this is not true
for all per se, because the last thing I want to be accused of is being a racist bigot. If anything, I
hung out with more arabs, black, & mexicans kids then I ever did the honkies.
What I speak of is a vile omnipresent stereotype who consider the infidel to have no soul,
to be a mongrel letch. You can lie and cheat the infidel, because they are worms for exploitation.
They are terrible with women in this aspect especially, sexually harassing everything in macho
overdrive. They come from a man’s world. Having no real media backbone in the USA, their
youth have symbiotically adopted hip hop & g-thug culture for the most part, yet many stay
totalitarian in their Old World habits.
Here is an ugly example of our upbringing in the early-late 90’s. Say you’re a teenager
alone in East Dearborn and run into a group of arab kids. 70% of the time they’ll start drama,
guarunteed. They never fight clean, and they always jump you in packs. Then they call out their
cousins, friends, family. It’s brutal and ridiculous. One time I was literally cornered in a garage, 5
against 30. The only thing that broke it up was a crazy ‘Nam vet with an AK-47. It’s a long but
kinda not really so long story…
Our high school had a divided population; constant threats like a prison courtyard. Edsel
Ford was featured on the news several times for race riots I’d witnessed firsthand. Sickly, it was
the only true point of school unity – blacks, whites, & mexicans all pitted against the arabs.
There was a long period of tension when the head jocks started going toe to toe with the
biggest of them -- all these steroid meatheads on both sides making threats like pro wrestlers.
There were shootings, jumpings, assaults. You got used to people walking past you saying, “Hey
white boy, Jihad is coming. Wulla we’re going to kill you.”
Greenfield Road juts through the city line. On one side it’s Baghdad; the other it’s
Compton. Sickly, just as in high school, anti-arab sentiment is one of the few solid items of
black/white unity. The brothers harbor more animosity towards Arabs then white people in and of
themselves -- especially since 911. I’ve worked on large crews of inner city folks and you’d be
distrubed by the sort of conversations I’ve been privy to.
This global explosion of terrorism was no surprise to either Schechter or myself. We
were living in the post-911 world since day one. You’d tell adults that you suspected militant
groups were rooting in your neighborhood, and you’d be threatened with mental hospitalization
or worse. Rumble after rumble, you’d wage the ground war of what’s to come with fists and
boots…
Then you graduate, you calm it down. You don’t talk about it anymore, and the world is
oblivious: They want you to go to college, become a man -- this white-picket fence deal. You
keep reading about al Qaeda’s initiatives in the major newspapers and see it coming from ten
million miles away. No matter what course you take in life, this is going to shake the world to its
very foundations. Then one day you wake up and planes are flying into The World Trade Center,
and all of America now lives in your paranoid delusion…
That’s exactly what’s going through Schechter’s head when he says, “Well, you know... One thing
I wanted to bring you out here for… Growing up where we did…”
“How do you deal with it, you mean? How do you even begin to tell people?”
“How do you deal with that? Then going from who we were as kids and becoming…
From anarchist punk to borderline American fascist… Heh, heh… But you see I don’t take
anything back. I never felt more alive, I was a beast. And now I’m just here, driving in civilian
clothes… It’s all fucked man…”
That’s all I can pull from him because his defense mechanism rides high, and he goes
right back to spewing lines from The Big Lebowski. He explains the enigma of ’95 -- he never got
expelled over hash brownies. Some macho Arab kid was slamming his own girlfriends’ head into
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a locker repeatedly. When Jeff stood up for her, 6 backed him into a corner and pulled a
switchblade. Security broke it up and his father dragged them to Texas.
When I explain everything that went down until graduation – all the fights, the guns, the
drugs, the deaths, suicides and prison terms -- he just keeps driving quietly... He lets out a big
sigh and pulls into a rest stop in the Pennsylvania Hills. He says nothing, hops out the truck, and
wanders off for 15 minutes. Just observing the environment; looking at the grass, the sky. The
world he abandoned and the world he now enters collide like glaciers…
THE EAST COAST Oi FEST
SATURDAY, May 26th; Somewhere in Pennsylvania at the major skinhead event of the summer.
The East Coast Oi Fest maintains 4 stages & 60 bands over two days. We came here for Skinhead
Eddie, who is going to be my sidekick for the week.
He’s so non-threatening it’s great. He hates white power, is a traditional SHARP, and is
Jeff’s best friend. He kind of reminds me of a 5 foot 6 Paul Giamatti. He’s another Michigan boy
the spins dub reggae downtown Detroit. He’s got the burgundy stompers nicely shined, the
workpants, the derby cap. He’s the sort of fella you want to go fishing with.
The Oi Fest is not my world in the slightest, and I’m not pretending to feign knowledge
of the lineup. The only bands I’ve even heard of are Reagan Youth, Flatfoot 56, and The
Templars. It’s an intimidating scene. The club is drenched in humidity, walls dripping with sweat
and Pabst. There are like 300 bulldog skins in Lonsdale’s & suspenders stomping around. The
testosterone is so heavy you can taste the mace of a coming riot. These guys are beating the living
shit out of each other in the circle pit, and there are very few who don’t look the type.
The night rolls on and the vibe is tedious, all these onstage rah-rah working class
declarations. Outside I try to interview the guitarist from Wretched Ones, but he’s one of those
“you have to talk to the other guy about that” guys.
Across the alley are a group of six unclassifiable sort-of punk kids. They hitched from
Northern California over 20 states in a two-week mission to come here. Their reward is being
trash-talked by a mob of skins for their tye-dye shirts. The main antagonist is this 17 year old
black kid skin doing a ‘I’m so fucking punk rockkk’ number on them. What a turd, with his white
laces & suspenders. He probably drove 20 minutes to come here.
Eddie marches up drunk & jolly, repeating a line I blurted earlier: ‘Hey Bartek, you know
it’s not gay so long as you’re jacking each other off to Hatebreed. It’s so macho it cancels out the
faggotry. HAHAHA!!!’ A voice from the gaggle of dolts rises with an explosion of anger: “YOU
GOT A PROBLEM WITH HATEBREED MOTHERFUCKER?!?” Just get me out of here…
DRUNKEN NIGHT OUT
The second you hop off the PATH train and hustle your way through The Port Authority, you
have to push your way through a swathe of humanity climbing endless flights of stairs. Once you
emerge into the thick of Manhattan, it’s like being thrown directly into a grueling mushroom trip
where you have to keep moving forward at all costs.
The first sight is usually the one that cripples the unprepared. One minute you’re in an
underground subway that ranks of electrical burnt-rubber like the bumper-car ring of a carnival.
The next you’re surrounded by a hollow road of mountains far as the eye can see. Everything is
70 stories tall, 100,000 people are rushing in cold, self-centered circles, and every inch of
sidewalk hosts a conman or grill cart hustling beef kabobs & roasted peanuts. Welcome to
Manhattan, the 21st century bazaar…
The thing with New York is that it doesn’t really come alive until 2am. Sure, there is
always non-stop action, but a true New York night is accented by those fond occasions when you
wander into random people drunker then you are, and find yourself on a bench at 5am chatting
with some total creep who’s laughing about all the broads he’s sodomized. You’ve no idea who
either of each other are, but it really doesn’t matter, because at any moment the next hammered
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freak will join your party, and all three of you will be pissing in public yelling at pedestrians with
your cocks in your hands.
This is the goal Skinhead Eddie and I intend to reach. We’ve already killed the flask of
vodka, and keep ducking into the alleyways slamming Mickey’s 40’s and Sparks tall-cans. This is
his first visit to NYC, and I’m playing tour guide of the Lower East Side. I was here once before,
living briefly with a Rod Stewart record producer in 2004.
Schechter and I form a strange dichotomy for Eddie to be trapped between. On one hand
you have the pure Marine, on the other a Gutter Colonel. We both live like we’re in a perpetual
war, and both are highly militaristic. My boots are polished same as his, my survival skills just as
McGyveresque, and we’re both as weirdly punctual & disciplined. Eddie feels like a human ping-
pong ball.
We are polar opposites in the underground. Eddie’s a wool-dyed skin, and I’m as loose as
they come. He’s christened me ‘The Crust King’ and keeps knocking “food” out of my hands
when I try picking scraps from the trash. “Dammit Eddie, I eat for entertainment. How else do
you expect me to last in this place with $80 to my name?”
By 6pm we’re so drunk that we’re running around Central Park trying to find the pigeon lady
from Home Alone 2. Manhattan feels like a backdrop from The Fifth Element – this bubble-
wrapped, cattle Tokyo gone awry… Three more Sparks tall cans and Eddie is pissing a river on
the sidewalk. A polite upper-class lady in a trench lifts her coat and politely skips the bubbling <