Nazi Literature in the Americas (New Directions Paperbook) (11 page)

THE ARYAN BROTHERHOOD

T
HOMAS
R.
M
URCHISON
, alias T
HE
T
EXAN

Las Cruces (Texas), 1923–Walla Walla Prison (Oregon), 1979

M
urchison’s life was
marked from an early age by incarceration. Con-man, car thief, drug dealer and
all-round opportunist, he dabbled in a broad range of delinquent activities
without developing a particular specialty. It was not ideology that brought him
into contact with the Aryan Brotherhood but his repeated prison spells and an
implacable will to survive. Given his frail constitution and temperamental
aversion to violence, his existence would not have been viable without the
support of a group. Although never a leader, he had the honor of establishing
the first literary magazine to serve as an organ for the Brotherhood, which he
always referred to as “an order for knights of misfortune.” The first number of
Literature Behind Bars
, edited by Markus Patterson, Roger Tyler and
Thomas R. Murchison, was printed in 1967 at the Crawford penitentiary in
Virginia. As well as letters, and news from the prison and Crawford county, the
magazine, made up of four tabloid pages, contained some poems (or song lyrics)
and three stories. The stories, signed “The Texan,” were widely praised:
burlesque and fantastic in tone, they portrayed members of the Brotherhood,
prisoners or ex-prisoners, fighting the Forces of Evil, in the guise of corrupt
politicians or aliens from outer space cunningly disguised as human beings.

The magazine was a success, and in spite of some official opposition
set an example for prisoners in other institutions. Murchison’s protracted and
largely hapless criminal career allowed him to contribute to most of the
resulting publications, whether as an active editorial board member, or as a
correspondent in another prison.

During his brief periods of freedom, he barely glanced at the
newspaper and tried not to associate with ex-prisoners from the Brotherhood. In
prison he read Western novels by Zane Grey and others. His favorite writer was
Mark Twain. He once wrote that penitentiaries and jail cells had been his
Mississippi. He died of pulmonary emphysema. His work, published piecemeal in
magazines, consists of more than fifty short stories and a seventy-line poem
dedicated to a weasel.

J
OHN
L
EE
B
ROOK

Napa, California, 1950–Los Angeles, 1997

W
idely regarded as the
best writer of the Aryan Brotherhood, and one of the best Californian poets of
the late twentieth century, John Lee Brook learned to read and write in the cold
classrooms of a prison at the age of eighteen. Up until then his life could be
described as a series of misdemeanors without rhyme or reason: normal enough
behavior for a poor, white, Californian teenager from a damaged family (father
unknown, mother still a kid when she got pregnant, working in poorly paid jobs).
Having acquired literacy skills, John Lee Brook became an entirely different
kind of criminal: he got into drug dealing, pimping, stealing luxury cars,
kidnapping and assassination. In 1990 he was accused of the murder of Jack
Brooke and his two bodyguards. At the trial he began by proclaiming his
innocence. But surprisingly, ten minutes after climbing into the witness box, he
interrupted the attorney, admitted all the charges and declared himself guilty
of four unsolved and by then all but forgotten murders. The victims were the
pornographer Adolfo Pantoliano, the porn star Suzy Webster, the porn actor Dan
Carmine, and the poet Arthur Crane. The first three had been killed four years
before the trial; the fourth in 1989. Brook was condemned to death. After
various appeals, supported by influential members of the Californian literary
community, he was executed in April 1997. According to eye witnesses, he spent
his last hours very calmly reading his own poems.

His body of work, which comprises five books, is soundly built; it
echoes Whitman, makes abundant use of colloquialisms, and has strong affinities
with the new narrative poetry, while remaining open to other North American
schools and trends. His favorite themes, which recur with a sometimes obsessive
frequency throughout his work, are the extreme poverty of certain sectors of the
white population, African Americans and sexual abuse in the prison system,
Mexicans (always portrayed as diminutive devils or mysterious cooks), the
absence of women, motorcycle clubs considered the inheritors of the frontier
spirit, gangster hierarchies on the streets and in prison, the decadence of
America, and solitary warriors.

The following poems merit special attention:

—“Vindication of John L. Brook,” the first of a series of torrential
texts, all more than 500 lines long, which the author used to describe as
“broken novels.” In the “Vindication” Brook is already fully formed as a poet,
although he was only twenty when he wrote it. The poem is about the diseases of
youth, and the only proper way to cure them.

—“Street without a Name,” a text in which quotations from MacLeish and
Conrad Aiken are combined with the menus of the Orange County jail and the
pederastic dreams of a literature professor who taught classes for the prisoners
on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

—“Santino and Me,” fragments of conversations between the poet and his
parole officer, Lou Santino, relating to sports (which is the most American
sport?), whores, the lives of movie stars, and prison celebrities and their
moral authority both inside and outside.

—“Charlie” (one such prison celebrity), a brief and “concrete” but
nonetheless affectionate portrait of Charles Manson, whom the author met, it
seems, in 1992.

—“Lady Companions,” an epiphany featuring psychopaths, serial killers,
various mentally deranged individuals, bipolar sufferers obsessed with the
American dream, sleepwalkers and stealthy hunters.

—“The Bad,” an insight into the world of natural born killers,
portrayed by Brook as “Ignoble beings children possessed by will in an iron
labyrinth or desert Vulnerable as pigs in a cage full of lionesses . . .”

This final poem, dated 1985 and published in his third book of poetry
(
Solitude
, 1986), was the subject of two controversial studies in
the
Southern California Journal of Psychology
and the
Berkeley
Psychology Magazine
.

THE FABULOUS
SCHIAFFINO BOYS

I
TALO
S
CHIAFFINO

Buenos Aires, 1948–Buenos Aires, 1982

I
t is probably true to say
that no poet has ever been more diligent than Italo Schiaffino, not among his
contemporaries in Buenos Aires at any rate, in spite of which was he was
eventually overshadowed by the growing reputation of his younger brother,
Argentino Schiaffino, also a poet.

The boys came from a humble family, and there were only two passions
in Italo’s life: soccer and literature. At fifteen, two years after leaving
school to work as an errand boy in Don Ercole Massantonio’s hardware store, he
joined Enzo Raúl Castiglione’s gang, one of the many groups of Boca Juniors
hooligans that existed at the time.

He soon made headway. In 1968, when Castiglione was imprisoned, Italo
Schiaffino took over the leadership of the group and wrote his first poem (his
first recorded poem, in any case) and his first manifesto. Entitled
Cower,
Hounds!
, the poem is 300 lines long, and his friends from the gang
could recite the highlights by heart. Basically, it is a war poem; in the words
of Schiaffino, “a kind of
Iliad
for the Boca boys.” A thousand copies
were printed in 1969 with money raised by subscription. The edition contained a
preface by Dr. Pérez Heredia in which he welcomed the new poet to the
Argentinean Parnassus. The manifesto was a different matter. In five pages,
Schiaffino outlined the situation of soccer in Argentina, lamented the crisis,
identified the guilty parties (the Jewish plutocracy, which hadn’t produced a
single good player, and the Red intelligentsia, responsible for the nation’s
decadence). He indicated the danger and explained the ways to exorcize it. The
manifesto was called
The Time of Argentinean Youth
, and in the words of
Schiaffino it was “a kind of Latin American version of von Clausewitz, a wake-up
call to the nation’s inquiring minds.” It soon became obligatory reading among
the hard-line members of Castiglione’s old gang.

In 1971, Schiaffino visited the widow Mendiluce, but there are no
records, photographic or written, of their meeting. In 1972, he published
The Path to Glory
, a series of forty-five poems, each one examining
the life of a different Boca Juniors player. Like
Cower, Hounds!
the
book included an obliging preface by Dr. Pérez Heredia and a
nihil
obstat
issued by the vice-president of the soccer club. The publication
was financed by the members of Schiaffino’s gang, who paid a subscription, and
the remaining copies were sold in the vicinity of Boca’s Bombonera stadium on
match days. This time the sportswriters paid him some attention: two magazines
deemed
The Path to Glory
worthy of a review, and when Dr. Pestalozzi’s
radio program
100% Soccer
organized a round table on the critical state
of the national game, Schiaffino was invited to participate. On the radio, in
the company of well-known sports personalities, he was restrained.

In 1975 he delivered his next collection of poetry to the printer.
Entitled
Like Wild Bulls
, it has a gaucho-like tone, which can
reasonably be attributed to the influence of Hernández, Giraldes and Carriego.
In it, Schiaffino recounts, sometimes in great detail, how he led the gang on
excursions to various places in the province of Buenos Aires, as well as on two
trips to Córdoba and Rosario, which resulted in victories for the visiting team
and their hoarse supporters as well as sundry skirmishes, none of which
degenerated into street battles, although a number of lessons were administered
to isolated elements of the “enemy forces.” In spite of its eminently bellicose
tone,
Like Wild Bulls
is Schiaffino’s most successful work. Exhibiting
a degree of freedom and spontaneity unmatched elsewhere in his writing, it gives
the reader a clear sense of the young poet’s character and his bond with “the
virginal spaces of the Fatherland.”

In 1975, after the fusion of his gang with those of Honesto García and
Juan Carlos Lentini, Schiaffino launched the triennial magazine
With Boca
, which thenceforth was to
serve as a mouthpiece for the expression and diffusion of his ideas. In the
first number of 1976, he published “Jews Out”: out of the soccer stadiums
naturally, not out of Argentina, but the essay was widely misunderstood and
earned him many enemies. As did “Memoirs of a Malcontent Fan,” published in the
third number of 1976, in which Schiaffino, pretending to be a River Plate fan,
pokes fun at the players and supporters of Boca’s traditional rival. Parts II,
III and IV of the “Memoirs” followed in the first and third numbers of 1977 and
the first number of 1978. Unanimously acclaimed by the readers of
With
Boca
, they were quoted by Colonel (retired) Persio de la Fuente in an
article on the idiom of the Latin American picaresque in the
University of
Buenos Aires Semiotics Review
.

1978 was Schiaffino’s year of glory. Argentina won the World Cup for
the first time and the gang celebrated in the streets, which were transformed
for the occasion into a vast parade ground. It was the year of “A Toast to the
Boys,” an excessive, allegorical poem, in which Schiaffino imagines a country
setting forth to meet its destiny, united like one huge soccer gang. It was also
the year in which “respectable,” “adult” avenues opened up for him: his poem was
widely reviewed, and not just in sports magazines. A Buenos Aires radio station
offered him a job as a commentator; a newspaper with close links to the
government offered him a weekly column on youth issues. Schiaffino accepted all
the offers but before long his impetuous pen had alienated everyone. At the
radio station and the newspaper it soon became clear that leading the Boca boys
was more important to Schiaffino than being on any payroll. Broken ribs and
windows resulted from the conflict, and the first of a long series of prison
terms.

Without the support of his benefactors, Schiaffino’s lyric inspiration
seems to have dried up. From 1978 to 1982, he devoted himself almost exclusively
to the gang and to bringing out
With Boca
, in which he continued to
rail against the ills besetting soccer and Argentina.

His authority over the fan base remained undiminished. Under his
leadership the Boca gang grew in numbers and strength as never before. His
prestige, albeit obscure and secret, was unrivalled: the family album still
contains photos of Schiaffino with players and club officials.

He died of a heart attack in 1982, while listening to one of the last
reports on the Falklands War.

A
RGENTINO
(“F
ATSO
”)
S
CHIAFFINO

Buenos Aires, 1956–Detroit, 2015

T
he arc of Argentino
Schiaffino’s life has prompted comparisons, over the years, with varied and
often incompatible figures from the worlds of literature and sports. Thus, in
1978, a certain Palito Kruger, writing in the third number of
With
Boca
, asserted that Schiaffino’s life and work were comparable to those of
Rimbaud. In 1982, in a different number of the same magazine, Argentino
Schiaffino was referred to as the Latin American equivalent of Dionisio
Ridruejo. In the preface to his 1995 anthology
Occult Poets of
Argentina
, Professor González Irujo put him on a par with Baldomero
Fernández, and with his own personal friends. Letters to Buenos Aires newspapers
hailed him as the only civic figure in the same league as Maradona. And in 2015,
a short death notice written by John Castellano for a newspaper in Selma
(Alabama) coupled him with the tragic figure of Ringo Bonavena.

All the comparisons are justified, to a certain degree, by the ups and
downs of Argentino Schiaffino’s life and work.

We know that he grew up in the shadow of his brother, who taught him
to love soccer, recruited him as a Boca fan, and interested him in the mysteries
of poetry. The two brothers were, however, notably different. Italo Schiaffino
was tall, well built, authoritarian, unemotional and unimaginative. He cut an
imposing figure: wiry, angular, with a slightly cadaverous air, although from
the age of twenty-eight, perhaps because of a hormonal imbalance, he began to
grow dangerously fat, eventually reaching a fatal degree of obesity. Argentino
Schiaffino was on the shorter side of average, plump (thence the affectionate
nickname “Fatso,” by which he was known until the day he died), sociable and
bold by nature, charismatic though hardly authoritarian.

He began to write poetry at the age of thirteen. At sixteen, while his
elder brother was making his name with
The Path to Glory
, he produced
fifty mimeographed copies of his first book, at his own expense and risk. It was
a series of thirty epigrams entitled
Anthology of the Best Argentinean
Jokes
; over one weekend he personally sold all the copies to members of
the Boca gangs. In April 1973, employing the same editorial strategy, he
published his story “The Invasion of Chile,” an exercise in black humor (some
passages resemble a splatter movie script) about a hypothetical war between the
two republics. In December of the same year he published the manifesto
We’re
Not Going to Take It
, in which he attacked the league’s umpires, whom
he accused of bias, lack of physical fitness, and, in some cases, of drug
use.

He began the year 1974 by publishing the collection
Iron
Youth
(fifty mimeographed copies): dense, militaristic poems with
marching-song rhythms, which, if nothing else, obliged Schiaffino to venture
beyond the bounds of his natural thematic domains: soccer and humor. He followed
up with a play
, The Presidential Summit, or What Can We Do to Turn This
Around?
In this five-act farce, heads of state and diplomats from
various Latin American nations meet in a hotel room somewhere in Germany to
discuss options for restoring the natural and traditional supremacy of Latin
American soccer, which is under threat from the European total-football
approach. The play, which is extremely long, recalls a certain strain of
avant-garde theater, from Adamov, Genet and Grotowski to Copi and Savary,
although it is unlikely (though not impossible) that Fatso ever set foot in the
sort of establishment given to the production of such plays. The following are
only a few of the scenes: 1. A monologue about the etymology of the words
“peace” and “art” delivered by the Venezuelan cultural attaché. 2. The rape of
the Nicaraguan ambassador in one of the hotel bathrooms by the presidents of
Nicaragua, Colombia and Haiti. 3. A tango danced by the presidents of Argentina
and Chile. 4. The Uruguayan ambassador’s peculiar interpretation of the
prophecies of Nostradamus. 5. A masturbation contest organized by the
presidents, with three categories: thickness (won by the Ecuadorian ambassador);
length (won by the Brazilian ambassador); and, most importantly, distance
covered by semen (won by the Argentinean ambassador). 6. The president of Costa
Rica’s subsequent irritation and condemnation of such contests as “scatology in
the poorest taste.” 7. The arrival of the German whores. 8. Mass brawling, chaos
and exhaustion. 9. The arrival of the dawn, a “pink dawn that intensifies the
fatigue of the bigwigs who finally come to understand their defeat.” 10. The
president of Argentina’s solitary breakfast, after which he lets off a series of
resounding farts, then climbs into bed and falls asleep.

In the same year, 1974, Argentino Schiaffino managed to publish two
more works. A short manifesto in
With Boca
, entitled “Satisfactory
Solutions,” which is, in a sense, a sequel to
The Presidential Summit
(Latin America should respond to total football, he suggests, by physically
eliminating its finest exponents, that is to say, assassinating Cruyf,
Beckenbauer, et cetera). And a new collection of poems (a hundred mimeographed
copies):
Spectacle in the Sky
, a series of short, light—one might
almost say winged—poems about the stars of Boca Juniors down through the years,
not unlike Italo Schiaffino’s famous book
The Path to Glory
. The theme
is the same, the technique is similar, some metaphors are identical, yet where
the elder brother’s work is ruled by rigor and the determination to record a
history of striving, the younger brother yields to the pleasure of discovering
images and rhymes, treats the old legends humorously but not without affection,
applies a light touch where Italo was grave, and mounts a powerful and
occasionally opulent verbal display. This book probably contains the best of
Argentino Schiaffino’s work.

Some years of literary silence followed. In 1975 he got married and
started working in an auto repair shop. After which he is said to have
hitch-hiked to Patagonia, read everything he could lay his hands on, submerged
himself in the study of the history of the Americas, and experimented with
psychotropic drugs, but what we know for certain is that he was there with his
brother’s gang every week, whether the game was at home or away, cheering with
the best of them. During this period he is also said to have participated in the
activities of Captain Antonio Lacouture’s death squad, driving and repairing a
small fleet of cars kept at a villa on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, but of
this there is no proof.

During the 1978 World Cup, which was hosted by Argentina, Fatso
resurfaced with a long poem entitled
Champions
(1,000 mimeographed
copies, which he sold himself at the stadium’s entrances and exits): a rather
difficult and occasionally muddled text, which jumps abruptly from free verse to
alexandrines, to distichs, to rhyming couplets and sometimes even to catalectics
(when exploring the ins and outs of the Argentinean selection it adopts the tone
of Lorca’s
Romancero gitano
, and when examining the rival teams it
veers between the devious advice of old Vizcacha in
Martin Fierro
and
Manrique’s straightforward predictions in the “Coplas”). The book sold out in
two weeks.

Then there was another long period of literary silence. In 1982, as he
was to reveal in his autobiography, he tried to enlist as a volunteer to fight
the British in the Falklands. He was unsuccessful. Shortly afterward, he
traveled to Spain for the World Cup with a group of die-hard fans. After the
defeat of the Argentinean team by Italy, he was arrested in a Barcelona hotel,
on charges of assault, attempted homicide, robbery and disorderly conduct. He
spent three months in Barcelona’s Model Prison along with five other Argentinean
soccer fans, before being released for want of evidence. On his return, the Boca
gang hailed him as their new leader, but uninspired by this promotion he
generously delegated the role to Dr. Morazán and the contractor Scotti Cabello.
Nevertheless, his moral authority over the followers of his late brother would
remain undiminished to the end of his life, a life that for many of the younger
fans had begun to take on the aura of legend.

With Boca
folded in 1983, despite the best efforts of Dr.
Morazán, thus depriving Fatso of his sole means of public expression; the
deprivation, however, would prove beneficial in the long term. In 1984, a small
politico-literary publisher, Black & White, brought out a volume entitled
Impenitent Memoirs
, Argentino Schiaffino’s first venture beyond the
realm of self-publication, which was greeted with indifference by the literary
set. It is a small volume of stories in a decidedly naturalistic mode. In less
than four pages, the longest story evokes mornings and evenings spent playing
soccer in a working-class neighborhood of Buenos Aires. The characters are four
children who call themselves the Four Gauchos of the Apocalypse, and a number of
hagiographers have taken their experiences to reflect the childhood of the
Schiaffino brothers. The shortest story occupies less than half a page: jocular
in tone and larded with Buenos Aires slang, it describes a sickness or a heart
attack or perhaps simply a bout of melancholy afflicting some nameless, distant
person in the course of an ordinary afternoon.

In 1985, the collection of stories
Crazy Blunders
appeared
under the same imprint. At only 56 pages, it was even slimmer than its
predecessor, to which, at first glance, it appeared to be an epilogue. This book
did, however, attract some critical attention. One review summarily dispatched
it as cretinous. One tore it to shreds, but without impugning Schiaffino’s feel
for language. Two other reviewers (there were only four in all) were forthright
and more or less enthusiastic in their praise.

Black & White went bankrupt soon afterwards, and Schiaffino seems
to have lapsed not only into silence, as on previous occasions, but also into
anonymity. It was suggested that his disappearance could be explained by the
fact that he owned half or at least a significant proportion of the shares in
Black & White. How Schiaffino got hold of enough money to have a substantial
stake in a publishing company remains a mystery. There was some talk of funds
obtained during the dictatorship, wealth stolen and secreted, undisclosed
sources of income, but nothing could be proved.

In 1987 Argentino Schiaffino reappeared at the helm of the Boca gang.
He had separated from his wife and was working as a waiter in a downtown
restaurant on Corrientes, where his proverbial good humor soon made him one of
the neighborhood’s favorite characters. At the end of the year he published
three stories, none of which exceeded seven pages, in a mimeographed collection
entitled
The Great Buenos Aires Restaurant Novel
, which he sold without
compunction to his clients. The first story is about a Lebanese who arrives in
Buenos Aires and looks for a solid business in which to invest his savings. He
falls in love with an Argentinean woman who works as a butcher, and together
they decide to open a restaurant specializing in meat of all kinds. Everything
goes well until the Lebanese man’s poor relatives start turning up. In the end
the butcher solves the problem by liquidating the relatives one by one, with the
help of her kitchen hand and lover, nicknamed Monkey. The story ends with an
apparently bucolic scene: the butcher, her husband and Monkey set off to spend a
day in the country and prepare a barbecue under the wide open skies of the
Fatherland. The second story is about an old magnate in the Buenos Aires
restaurant business who wants to find his last love, and with that objective
scours nightclubs, brothels, the houses of friends with grown-up daughters, et
cetera. He finally discovers the woman of his dreams in his first restaurant: a
twenty-year-old tango singer, blind since birth. The third story is about a
group of friends dining in a restaurant which belongs to one of them and has
been closed to the public for the evening. At first the occasion seems to be a
stag night, then a celebration of something one of the friends has achieved,
then a wake, then a gastronomical gathering with no other purpose than to enjoy
good Argentinean cooking, and finally appears to be a trap set for a traitor by
all or almost all the others, although, beyond vague mentions of trust, eternal
friendship, loyalty and honor, we never learn what the supposed traitor has
betrayed. The story is ambiguous and based entirely on the conversation of the
diners at the table, whose number declines as the evening wears on, while their
words become increasingly pompous and cruel, or, on the contrary, clipped,
laconic and sharp. Regrettably, the story comes to a predictable, not to say
gratuitously violent, end: the traitor is hacked to pieces in the restaurant
bathroom.

Nineteen eighty-seven was also the year in which Schiaffino’s long
poem “Solitude” (640 lines) was published at the expense of Dr. Morazán, who
penned a preface illustrated by his niece Miss Bertha Macchio Morazán with four
India-ink drawings.
Solitude
is an odd, desperate, turbulent text,
which casts some light on obscure stretches of its author’s biography. The
events take place during the 1986 World Cup, both in the host nation, Mexico,
and in Argentina. Schiaffino, who is the poem’s unrivaled protagonist, reflects
on the “solitude of the champions” in a seedy, out-of-the-way hotel in Buenos
Aires, which sometimes seems to be an abandoned ranch far out on the vast
pampas. Then we see him flying to Mexico on Aerolineas Argentinas, accompanied
by “two black guards,” members of his gang, perhaps, or threatening figures. His
time in Mexico is largely divided between bars of the most disreputable variety,
where he is able to verify
in situ
the devastating effects of
miscegenation (although he generally gets on well with “Mexican drunks,” who see
in him a “snail prince, master of a ruined tower”) and the provincial boarding
houses where he finds lodging as he follows the movements of the boys in blue
and white. The final victory of the Argentinean team is an apotheosis:
Schiaffino sees an enormous light hovering over Aztec stadium like a flying
saucer and transparent figures emerging from the light, accompanied by little
dogs with human faces and flaming fur, restrained on metallic leashes by the
transparent beings. He also sees a finger, “roughly thirty yards long,” perhaps
ominously pointing the way, perhaps simply indicating a cloud in the vast sky.
The party continues in the “flood-locked” streets of the Mexican capital, and
ends with an exhausted Fatso returning to the solitude of his boarding-house
room and passing out.