Hawthorne Books Blog

Excerpt of Interview with Jody M. Roy, Ph.D., and Frank Meeink from Autobiography of a Recovering Skinhead

Jody M. Roy and Frank Meeink on the road...

We thought it’d be nice to include an excerpt from Autobiography of a Recovering Skinhead since we’ve been mailing out review copies and pre-sale orders for the past few weeks. For those of you who’ve ordered the book but haven’t received it yet — here’s a taste of what’s to come.

I learned heaps from this back-of-the-book interview that Autobiography of a Recovering Skinhead editor Adam O’Connor Rodriguez conducted after the manuscript was delivered. The interview is an up close and personal way into the research as well as into Jody M. Roy’s writing process.

If you want to read the entire interview you’ll have to buy the book. From now until April 1st, 2010 the only place to purchase it is directly from us here. Added bonus: no shipping and handling. Not to mention you’ll be supporting a vibrant, small press. Don’t mind if we say so ourselves.

Without further ado…

Excerpted interview from Autobiography of a Recovering Skinhead:

Adam O’Connor Rodriguez (AOR)
Jody M. Roy, Ph.D. (JMR)
Frank Meeink (FR)

AOR How did this project come about?

FM Jody came to me first on another book project she was working on and asked if I’d be interested in being interviewed for a chapter for the book. I said sure – she was recommended by a good friend of ours, Quay Hanna. She drove down to my house from Wisconsin; it’s about a six hour drive, and first thing, we went out to dinner and talked and she reminded me again that I was just a chapter in the book and I assured her I knew that I was more than a chapter. She laughed and said, “We’ll look into that later on.” That was our first real meeting.

JMR Frank’s response was slightly more colorful than “I’m more than a chapter” but that was the essence of it. For that particular project, the day after we had dinner together, we sat for about two and a half or three hours of interview, just sort of a basic run-through of everything, and I was convinced by the end that yes, Frank was more than a chapter, no doubt about that. But also, Frank seemed comfortable talking about the book project even at that point.

FM What I really felt comfortable with was two things: one, that she knew the lingo. I’d tried to work on this project with other people before, but to have to describe and define every piece of the movement – like what SHARPs are, Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice – to have to define all that stuff bogged me down talking until I wasn’t enjoying it. But when I talked to Jody, she would sometimes know more of the history than I did.

And second, she knew other things, like that some people have businesses in civil rights and sometimes those groups will use fear to get more donations. When I talked to her about that, she knew what I was talking about already; she knew what I was getting at. So I felt comfortable enough that I could say whatever I wanted, because I wouldn’t say something like that around most people. Of course, most civil rights groups are very legitimate, great groups, but when I said that some weren’t, she knew exactly what I was talking about. And I remember thinking right then that I felt comfortable with her.

AOR What was the process you used to get the story from spoken to written?

JMR We had that first short interview for the other project and we decided we’d move forward, but I had to finish working on the other project, some work I was doing wearing my academic hat. We actually got started about a year and a half later, just because of things we both had on our plates at the time. Step one was to do a great deal of interviewing, but also to do some site visits. This was a gut instinct on my part – I believed Frank would remember things better if he could see them. You have to remember – for four and a half years, Frank was pretty itinerant, at times homeless. There aren’t the kinds of records most people would have from their teenage years. We can’t look in the high school yearbook. We can’t look at family pictures in photo albums. We can’t cross-reference things to a grade sheet. Trying to pin things down and get the discussion going, it seemed it might be better if we left the home and office space and got in the car.

In October of 2005, I picked Frank up and we started toward the end of the story – we did Indiana and Illinois. It was our first trip ever together and it was quite a commitment. We were on the road for six days, twenty-four hours a day of work on the book interrupted only by sleep, naps really. I had Frank on tape basically the whole time, whether he was talking about things that had happened in Philly when he was a little kid or talking like, “Wow, I’m standing in the parking lot of Crazy Cate’s for the first time in fifteen years” – we captured it all. Part of that was so that I could go back and piece the timelines together, but it was also of course to capture his voice, because I needed tons of exposure to that.

After that trip, we went back to our separate corners, and I went into research mode really trying to nail down the dates. The following May, we spent seven or eight days on the East Coast doing the same thing – interviewing people, visiting the scenes of various events. And that was important for me because I had to get a feel for what some of these places looked like. One example: having not grown up on the East Coast, my concept of an urban alley is based on Chicago or St. Louis or Indianapolis. I had no idea that what Frank considers an alley, I would consider an outdoor hallway; I needed to see the compression of South Philly and how close things are to even begin to evoke that sense of space within the book. That trip was very important for that purpose. It was also important to meet people and capture their voices for purposes of dialogue in the book.

Somewhere in between those two trips, we realized we were off by a year on the time layout for the book and for his life. It took months to figure that out. As Frank talks openly about in the book, he not only was itinerant, he also lied about his age as a teen – it’s not like we could ask somebody, “Well, what was Frank doing when he was sixteen,” because when Frank was sixteen, people thought he was eighteen or nineteen. For several years, the timelines are convoluted and without touch points. Ultimately, what became the touch points were the arrest dates and counting back from that to Crazy Cate’s and counting back back back and realizing we had an extra year in there. We were off base due to confusion about his age and lying about his age when he was a teenager, and also because he just doesn’t have the date markers most people rely on. Frank can’t assume it was summer when something happened because he wasn’t in school then; he dropped out at fourteen. Actually, his memories of what was going on in sports and what songs were playing heavy rotation on the radio became very important. Without Guns-N-Roses, we never would’ve figured out parts of that timeline.

FM And on the lying about my age – most of my life I was either running, head of, or hanging with older guys, which included older girls. So most of my life, I wanted the girls to think I was older, so I was fourteen telling everyone I’m sixteen because the girls we’re hanging with are sixteen.

JMR Whenever we’d try to nail down when these things happened, I’d be talking to someone for the book and I’d ask, “Do you know how old Frank was when this happened?” And the universal answer was sixteen. Frank was sixteen for about five years according to most people who knew him. Figuring out the timeline was the hardest part of the book. We rarely were able to pinpoint a particular week or something; unless somebody keeps a daily record from birth on, they’re not going to be able to do that. But to get it into some kind of causal order was a key issue to me, and that took a long time. So after we got that down and did the site visits and the interviews and everything else, then I started the original rough draft. After that it’s been I draft and proof, then Frank reads and gives me feedback, then draft, proof, read, feedback, again and again for about two years, until we decided to move with it.

FM With the timeline, since I’ve been speaking about my life for the past ten or fifteen years, I remember when Jody and I first started this project, I thought, “Well, I’ve been telling this story, but am I standing on a stage as the fisherman who’s been telling people the fish was two foot big when really it was just one foot?” What was good about our trips was that it seemed like the fish really was two foot, because to hear other people tell their versions of the story, they actually make me sound worse – in my version of the story, I threw a lucky punch one night. But in other people’s versions, I was an animal. That was one of the good things about interviewing other people and me being very open and telling them they could say anything they wanted about me. Sometimes when Jody would do interviews, I’d leave so they could be as honest as they wanted about me.

*****

AOR You were incarcerated in an adult prison as a seventeen year old kid. How did doing that time shape who you are?

FM I learned to become a man in there. In the movement, I was surrounded by boys; even the older guys were scared little boys. And when I went to prison, I met people who were real men. Real men in the fact that they handled themselves like men. I didn’t even know how to shave. A dude had to teach me how to shave in there. I only had a little goatee then, but I’d never shaven in my life; my father never gave me that lesson, my stepfather never gave me that lesson, and I’ll never forget that prison is where I learned to shave; it’s where I learned to talk a little deeper and mean a little bit more about what I say. I don’t want to put forward that guys in prison are great representatives of men because, even when I give talks I’ll say that they’re not the real tough guys – the real tough guys are the men who pay their bills and take their kids fishing every weekend, those are the real tough guys.

I definitely became a man in there, and I learned that up until that point, I feared men because of my stepfather – I had a fear of men. And once I got in prison and learned that I can handle myself and do it with a streetwise dignity, that fear went away. Until then, I was always afraid of adult men. If you were a friend of mine and you had a dad, I didn’t want to be around the room with him – for one, I was probably trying to recruit you into the movement, so I didn’t want your dad to be involved in our talk, but I also had this fear that all fathers and father figures were mean. But in prison, I learned that I am a man and not all men are like that.

JMR One of the things I’ve noticed in Frank, and this is coming from that fear as a child that lingers, is that as a kid on Tree Street, the only time Frank could eat comfortably was very late at night after John was asleep or passed out. And I’ve noticed now, having spent a lot of time with Frank, that he still consumes nearly half of his calories in any twenty-four hour period standing at the kitchen cupboard in the middle of the night, or eating pickles out of the fridge or if we’re on the road, raiding hotel vending machines, because it’s safe.

FM I still do that every night, I wake up and I have to go downstairs and eat, because my body tells me, “ Yo, this is the time that you normally eat” and I do – I feel comfortable eating what I want, and my wife even says she knows there’s some issues there, like sometimes subconsciously I still might even hide what I ate, because when I was a kid, I wasn’t allowed to go downstairs and eat, so if I ate something that came in a wrapper, I had to bury the wrapper at the bottom of the trash. I still do that, and I don’t know if that’s a fear of men or habit.

JMR The fear of men issue was overcome from everything I’ve seen. But some patterns that started because of that fear are still there, and that’s a behavior pattern I don’t think he’ll ever shake – it’s not like he’s eating at 2:00 a.m. because he’s scared of who’s actually in the room, it’s that his whole experience from ages ten through thirteen was so intense that it programmed certain behaviors that will always be there. It’s as if your stomach is only comfortable eating at that time.

FM It’s even hard for me today to discipline my kids forcefully and not think, “Am I treating them like my stepfather treated me?” I know I’m not; I know I treat my children a million times better than I was treated, but when it comes time to discipline them – and I don’t hit my kids or anything – I make sure to not cut too deep with my words. And sometimes I think maybe I need to do that; that they need to see I’m really disappointed in something they did but I can’t go there because my biggest fear is that they’re going to go to their bedrooms and feel what I felt. And it’s hard to go up to that line, but I have to do it daily with them.

To read more of this interview purchase the book Autobiography of a Recovering Skinhead from the Hawthorne Books website.