Authors note: Hi this is Timothy Maher, the creator of this piece. I wanted to write this piece because of the movie "American History X" directed by Tony Kaye. My character is a skinhead that went from going to hate music concerts into joining the Aryan Brotherhood. I really enjoyed researching this piece even though the topic may be sensitive. It was really hard to think of a name for the character so I left it out of the work, he is unnamed to have you focus on his story and not who he is. I don't think that adding a name to him adds to my work, as it would stereotype Aryan Brotherhood members. For the story, I read many graphic events that happened to past members and I really wanted to incorporate this information into my character. The trauma that occured for each of them and their upbringing changed them, and I wanted to have the reader know this. The violence in my writing is carefully selected because I did not want to glorify it, the text may be highly disturbing, read at your own risk.

For the annotative overlay >> Annotative Overlay

Once a skinhead, always a skinhead. My captain told me this after I got into prison for a minor drug charge that I took the hit for. To start my morale journey, I would like to start where I think started it all. Growing up in Los Angeles, I had no father figure. I guess that he could not handle having a kid, and my mom shouldn't have either. I don’t think she hated me, but most of the time I had to fend for myself. She was shooting up drugs or finding a way to get her next fix. This included whoever came with her whenever she came home. Those men did anything and everything they wanted to me, they beat me nearly every day until I could run away. I have always thought this was the root of my evil. Many of the men that my mom brought home were black. I only slept in my mom’s house when I needed to sleep. I needed an escape from this, and that is when I got into music and concerts that came with them.

Entering high school, I met Josh. He showed me my first view of hate when we went to my first concert. Little did I know that it was a hate rock concert, but at the time it was love at first sight. I came from a very low economic background and this was the very first time anyone cared for me, I felt wanted and needed when I started to hang out with Josh and his friends. He was a member of a local Aryan Brotherhood group that his brother ran. Josh’s brother groomed me to join the group, he always invited me to events they would be at, and made me feel wanted, something no one gave me. They gave me alcohol whenever I asked, and before long I was with Josh every day. Throughout high school, I changed my appearance to fit in with Josh and the group. By the time I was sixteen, I was wearing my heart on my sleeve; I shaved my head, wearing military boots and wanted to get a tattoo, preferably one showing my true feelings. I wanted to show the greater good of being in the gang.

I started to believe the lyrics, and how much easier my life would be like if blacks and Jews were not on earth. I hated everybody and anybody that was not white; I got into fights at school and as a result the school suspended me most of the time from causing most of them. This was until I got expelled. Ten days after my seventeenth birthday I got expelled for pulling a knife on a classmate. He disrespected me and I needed to threaten him or it would not stop. My mom finally had enough courage to kick me out, and I asked Josh if I can live with him. He was in the same boat as me; he did not get expelled but dropped out when his mother died. This hate that grew let me into the street group where I would sell narcotics, I was the lowest of the low, literally and figuratively. But then I was having the best time of my life. I did not care about my future. I still partied, but now I had a formal role in the group. I sold narcotics to only whites because blacks should not even be close to our neighborhood. I was always on the lookout for blacks; I felt I was a part of something greater when I looked for rival group members. My position in the gang led me to do many dangerous things, I was the lowest on the totem pole. I had to fight others for my spot, and at the time I would do anything to stay in the group. Many instances of in-fighting occur between members, most of the time it takes place over a girl or some stupid nonsense. But my greatest sorrow took place when I had to beat up a member who associated himself with a black man regularly. I felt like I was carrying out a righteous act when I kept on kicking him. He was crying under the constant pain from my steel-toed boots going right into his abdomen. I felt I did something right in my life of wrong, but now all I see is a copycat of all the men that damaged me.

This period of my life changed when the police busted me for selling drugs, I had a minimum of two years to serve in prison. I was only nineteen and did not know what to feel. Once I was in the can my hatred for blacks and jews went full force. I got six tattoos in the first month and was still working from the inside for the group. I joined the Aryan Brotherhood for protection as a white man from the nasty blacks and Mexican gangs that tried to suffocate us. They outnumbered us two to one, but I would do anything I could to protect my white brothers. This changed when I found out I became a father six months into my two-year sentence. On the outside, I knocked up my girlfriend Brie and only found out after she had given birth to my son. My early childhood played thought my head, I did not want my child to have to go though what I did. I wanted to end the cycle of hate in its tracks. The only thing separating me from my son was the walls enslaving me in jail. I knew society would not accept me with my tattoos and criminal record, but I wanted to be a changed man so that my child can prosper unlike me. Soon I had a falling-out with Josh and the brotherhood.

I stopped writing to Josh and never gave a second thought to it. I spent the rest of my sentence in the library, trying to finish my GED so I could get a job after getting out. But one last thing had to happen before the brotherhood allowed me to escape the past. Because I had stopped hanging around the Aryan Brotherhood, I started talking to many ethnicities. It's indescribable the amount of hate I used to have, I used to think of these normal human beings as below trash. Josh had finally had enough when he found out I spent time with blacks. His father’s death came from the hands of a black man when he was a year old. To make matters worse, his mother committed suicide on the tenth anniversary of his passing. I said earlier his mother died, but I only found this information out after I turned forty. His high position as a captain came from many years of work in the group and he asked for my death. I can see where he came from, I knew first hand how it felt to want to murder someone for associating themselves with blacks. But that did not matter now, I would take my punishment.

Luckily I survived their brutal attack, I had fourteen broken bones and a concussion to show for it. A guard heard my whimpering cries and stopped them before they could do me in. Because they attacked me, I was transferred me to a new jail after two months of recovery. Once I got out of jail I met rejection head-on. No place wanted to hire someone with face tattoos and antisemitism symbols all over their bodies. I wanted to find work long term and to get my feet wet I started working construction. I had to support my child as best as I could and hopefully get together with Brie. I regret the decisions that failed me in my youth. Working with a therapist has helped ease my mortal wounds.