The first time I was ever in a fight, a real fight, was in kindergarten. The other party was Matthew. He was the most violent kid in our school; so violent the teacher had to slip drugs into his yogurt every day at lunch. His illness was profound. I did not understand this at the time. One day I made a pun on his last name, and he kicked me when I turned my back. I pulled myself up from the ground, turned, and said through gritted teeth, "Just remember, you hit me first." Those were the exact words; I said them deliberately, in the best action hero voice I could, and then tackled him, pinning him to the floor. I grabbed his head and pounded it into the carpet-concealed concrete. A teacher eventually pulled us apart. I was sent to the principal’s office. In there, I cried and felt so much shame that it seemed too much for my slender frame. At the same time, though, I wondered if there wasn’t something even more dramatic I could’ve said before I started pounding Matthew’s face into the floor.

Fourteen years later I am reading The White Knights, by William Vollmann, an account of time spent among the skinheads of San Francisco. "If you gotta’ fight somebody, you gotta’ fight ‘em. Never back down," says the skinhead. I’ve always believed that myself. Matters of honor, settled in the old way: fists and feet, broken faces, winner and loser. Every year since kindergarten I’d gotten into at least one fight, and every time I’d end up in the principal’s office, and my mom would come pick me up and I would cry for the shame of it all. I tried very hard not to get into trouble. If you’ve gotta’ fight somebody, though, you’ve gotta’ fight ‘em. No ill turn goes unreturned. Them’s the rules, founded in the good old days of King Arthur and Audie Murphy and Theseus who slew the Minotaur. These things I read in the luminescent library in Langley, Washington. The hero never backs down, because he is right. He is right because he is small. He is small because the world is big, and the only way to be big is to never back down, and to fight whatever the world throws at you. That’s what makes the hero the hero. That’s what makes a man a man. These things I believed, and I see the White Knights, the S. F. Skinz, the American Front, acting out, on a tribal scale, the whole sordid history of my past life. I see, and I ask "why?"

"Hey dude, don’t call me no fucking bully," Dagger says. "I got fucked with by bullies when I was growing up, man." This is from The White Knights. This is something I understand. The San Francisco Skinz, as they call themselves, are forever victims, the injured party, the righteous heroes. "The Skinz said they didn’t start anything. It was the others who started things, who talked rude to them and didn’t get out of the way." "Even though she’d started, he got convicted of assault." There is something juvenile in this, in the "he started it," routine, but I understand why it’s always someone else who started it. The hero can never start the fight, never for real. If the skinheads had started the fights, they’d just be stupid pointless fights. The insult before the injury is what makes it more than that: a just war. I too have never started a fight in my life, and even as I say this truthfully, I admit that no conflict need have happened if I hadn’t wanted to be a hero and still give a good licking at the same time.

In 7th grade, at the tenderest age of 13, I was called down to the principal’s office for a particular incident of violence on my part. "A threat to the student body," is what they called me. "Immediate expulsion," they told me, ominously. "It doesn’t look good for me," I said, all the while my gut filling up with shame. This was around the time of Columbine, and schools were sensitive to violent behaviors and threats to the student body. I knew that and I was deathly afraid. The skinheads drink heavily, and use drugs, and play the victims, which is perhaps why they show no signs of shame. Is there shame? Vollmann never shows any, at least not explicitly. Maybe the skinheads really don’t have any shame. Maybe not having shame is what makes a skinhead a skinhead, aside, of course, from the shiny boots and shaved head.

It was in early adolescence that my love of computer games grew from casual fascination into expensive habit. Day of Defeat was my particular pleasure. It was World War II, a forever-war, a Valhalla where the dead came magically back to the life at the end of every round to fight again. I could be German or I could be American, fighting it out on the famous French battlefields,. This is what I remember, and understand, when Dickie, the skinhead, thinks about himself fighting the big war. "Sometimes Dickie is with them and sometimes he must be against this force that struck down the ole Reich…" I never cared for the Reich, but I understand the ambivalence of the fighter who cannot fight anywhere for real except in his head, or if he lives in the year 2001, on the screen of a computer.

When you are small, the ignored and maligned, you want to be the hero, and you hope the world will throw something at you big enough so that all the hero-stuff in you will have the chance to come out, and everyone might look at you in wonder. When I felt small as a 13-year-old boy with a mean streak and no paying attention, I had to make my own battles to fight, online or otherwise. Being twenty with no job, no home, and no future, probably doesn’t feel too different, "for it is a lonely thing to be a skinhead, so lonely that only other doomed soldiers can imagine it." That’s what the maladjusted teenagers are. That’s why they gorge themselves on pixilated violence, and, on occasion, real violence, dressed in camouflage costume (costume because these things never take place in a forest, but on the cable news stage).

The smallness gets to the skinheads. "Kill, maim, and destroy!" says tiny Marisa, gleefully, "I want to sucker punch somebody!" The delight in breaking the norms is part of the skinhead appeal. If you cannot succeed in following the rules, you can succeed easily and spectacularly in violating them, with oh-so-much killing and maiming and big loud tattoos, and feel big for a moment. To do so is to feel power, just like breaking a face. "What more could anyone yearn for in his guts than the chance to hurt somebody else, jawkicking a soul to screaming subhumanness in order to reiterate that I live?" When I was 15 I stood over a vanquished enemy 100 pounds heavier and inches taller than me, and I lived, even though the next day and every day I was just another face in the halls of the school, schedule dictated, grades assigned, utterly powerless. The skinhead cannot propel himself into the middle class, into polite society, for whatever reason (poor family, mean father, no brains, no future), and so he propels his fist into the face of the bar patron rather than give it a real honest shot. For that one moment, he is being efficacious, enacting change, getting noticed, if only by one person in an alley whose nose will never be quite symmetrical again. The power is a power of one, person to person, because youth and brute strength are all a skinhead’s got to apply to the environment.

The skinheads are young and many are homeless, literally lost boys. They work the most menial of jobs. "The skinheads were doomed to carry lumber and cement around in open pits, never trusted enough for the class jobs of hanging sheet rock in warm middle-income bedrooms." There are no old skinheads, it seems, just young and dirt-poor bootboys working the yard to keep the booze coming. To them, this mean economic reality is sublimated into something proper. "You aren’t a man unless you bust your ass," says Dagger. Lacking marketable skills and refusing marketable behavior, the skinhead makes for himself another opportunity to be the hero. The hero, as I mentioned, is small, like Theseus facing down the Minotaur, and so too is the mythical American working man. This myth justifies the failure to get a decent job by denying that such a job was decent in the first place. In the same way, my combat and alienation was supported by the myths of teenage misfit who’s destined for bigger and better things. There are other myths, too: the skinhead myth of the race war, of fighting communists and punks and upholding the American way of life. Of course, race wars and violent suppression of communists and anarchists isn’t part of what most American would call their way of life.

This is the irony and the paradox of the skinheads. They claim to defend the American Way. They write "America Front- For a Strong America," on school walls in spray paint. They claim to be good decent Republicans, fighting to protect America against the degenerates of the world, and they’ll get high and drunk and fight the good fight. They see no irony in this. It’s the myth that makes the violence and the attitude signify more than nothing. Being small and poor, the skins become big by trying to attach what they do to something bigger, some larger cause or struggle. The anguish of being marginalized is piggybacked onto the lumbering sphinx of the American Dream; the poverty of the life of the skinhead is offered up to the myth so that the skinhead will not have to do deal with it. One day, though, the skinhead has to reckon with it. Maybe it’s when his girl has her baby, maybe it’s when he finds a good job, and maybe he never reckons with it except by dying. It has to happen, though, for the skinheads to all are twenty, and only getting older.

That there are no old skinheads, or at least no skinheads over thirty, speaks to the skinhead way of life as a phase. They are called bootboys, not bootmen, because they live in Neverland. The girls are not girls, but bootwomen, as if to suggest that there’s a need for mothers, for women, even if that’s only 16-year-old Marisa. "Dan-L loved her Mom. Most other Skinz did too," it is reported. Like my own phase of petulant violence and desperate meanness, the time in Neverland, in Valhalla, of eternal consequence-free combat, can’t sustain a life indefinitely. Eventually the language fails, the mythology comes apart in one kind of Ragnarok or another. Even the Skinz themselves know it, as they write on a tombstone "RIP – S.F. SKINZ," to mourn one more generation passed into adulthood. When I was 17, I had an epiphany; a moment when the old language of teenagerdom collapsed. For me, it was a purely intellectual crisis. For a skinhead there are, as mentioned, many events that might trigger such a crisis, but it can’t be helped. Maturity will find them in one form or another, or they’ll die (death being the ultimately maturity).

"The mark of an immature man is wanting to die nobly for a cause. The mark of a mature man is to live humbly for one," says Wilhelm Steckel. The immature man must find a cause to die for, because if he’s going to die, he’s going to die a hero, big and loud. Dying a hero is a way to avoid shame and "real," death. It’s a way to avoid maturity. Fear the desperately small and immature, like Dickie and Dagger, like me at age 14, like the young men (always young men) who show up to school dressed in camouflage, armed and ready to kill the world, if only they had a gun large enough, like all the skinheads everywhere. Fear the man who says, "My dream is to build a cabinet in my room and get me a badass gun collection, one for every skinhead. And one day, we’ll all just go to the window and open up." Fear them, because there’s nothing that can be done for them; no rule or aid will ever convince them to grow up. They can at best be locked away, but they cannot be cured by anyone except themselves.

I call myself old now, even though I’ve lived only twenty years. All the same, my friends call me a curmudgeon. Repose is my watchword now; dignity and repose, and reconciling the shame of my youthful folly. In my repose I think of who I was, and I think of the skinheads. The S. F. Skinz, immature, pure Id, reveling in the false power of breaking rules and faces, believing, paradoxically, that they’re upholding the old rules of chivalry and honor as they do so. They can never admit how small they are in the wide world, how pitiable their condition is, because to be a skinhead is to have no shame, to be a child, a boy. To at last admit shame, to have the strength to bear the weight of shame and smallness upright, with dignity; might that then be called maturity?