Nazi punks, fuck off! The night of a small-town rebellion
By Hiya Swanhuyser
The Phoenix Theater in Petaluma, California features music a little outside the mainstream; it’s punk-famous. The Circle Jerks played to a packed house there recently, and the teenage audience maintained a fifty-foot-wide mosh pit for the entire show.
The place may not be known to Taylor Swift fans, but for the last 40 years, it’s been an important stop for touring punk, Goth, ska, metal, and indie bands. Fans of crossover thrash like Dirty Rotten Imbeciles/D.R.I. or the funk-tinged hardcore punk of Victim’s Family know it well. Emo-goth hardcore band AFI recorded a video there. More importantly for the local music ecosystem, newer, younger bands play almost every weekend—Moms with Bangs and Gas Money are regulars.
Everybody’s Building
Built in 1904, the opera house turned movie theater turned music venue is also a community center of sorts, a safe space for creative kids. On a recent weekday afternoon, the theater lobby slowly fills up with kids wielding skateboards and musical instruments as the nearby schools let out. Many of the teens wear huge, wide jeans and curly mop-top haircuts. It quickly gets louder, especially from the several nearby drum kits. “The din is on!” the building manager laughs. “It’ll be like this for another three hours!” The four quarter-pipe skate ramps, the second-hand couches, the piano/keyboard area, the homework room, and the lobby with its arcade games are all covered with teenagers. They look like they own the place.
On September 2, 1990, the theater’s motto, “Everybody’s Building,” was severely challenged. Bad trouble came in the form of skinheads wearing military-style jackets, tall boots, and armbands with swastikas. White supremacists had appeared in the region in the late 1980s. At that time, a group of very young people who hung around the Phoenix banded together to resist that racist violence, culminating in an intense but nearly forgotten confrontation on the street in front of the theater.
The effect of a single night is hard to measure, but what happened changed the lives of the teenage punks who refused to leave white supremacists in peace—and the racists knew they had been confronted.
At 924 Gilman Street
After a spate of violent harassment and recruitment attempts by the racist skinheads, teenage Anna Costa Rowan and Ben Saari traveled to Berkeley punk club 924 Gilman Street, where they met with the Bay Area chapter of Anti-Racist Action (ARA), a national group started earlier that year in the Minneapolis punk scene, for similar reason.
Rowan had been identified by the racists—they’d seen her in a car with a Black man, reason enough for the white supremacists to punish her. They’d also heard her speak up against them recruiting at house parties. In August 1990, as Rowan parked on an unassuming Santa Rosa street, four of them spotted her and gave chase. Terrified, she ran to a bookstore, which locked its doors behind her as the Nazis beat on the glass windows. Turning to her car, the men kicked dents into it, broke one of its windows, and left a note. “Be at the D.R.I. show next week. We’ll kill you, you race-trading b***h.”
The show, of course, was at the Phoenix.
“That weekend I went down to Gilman Street, said look, there’s this D.R.I. show, here’s the note they left on my car,” she said. “I feel like I need to go, I feel like there needs to be a presence,” she remembers telling the organizers.
Berkeley’s famous 924 Gilman Street is an all-ages club powered entirely by the collective decisions of can-do teenagers. It remains DIY punk’s philosophy in brick, mortar, and graffiti form. Rowan was a frequent volunteer at Gilman Street, so she already knew where to look for support when she was attacked in Santa Rosa. She didn’t call the police, and she didn’t even tell her parents, not wanting to “freak them out.” Instead, she trusted the scrappy, friendly, slightly older punks she knew from the place with “no racism, no sexism, no homophobia, no fighting” written large on its walls.
“I am terrified of being in this place by myself,” she told Gilman Street organizers. “I am also terrified of bringing folks into it that may get hurt.” Still, her mind was made up. She’d go, even if she was scared. All these years later, her emotions are still with her—the telephone doesn’t mask the pain in her voice.
Yet just as she hoped, she wouldn’t be alone: “The BAARA folks immediately went to their phone tree,” Rowan says, naming an effective pre-Internet organizing tool, “their word of mouth—whatever they did to get folks together.”
Roots of Resistance
Today, Ben Saari works in the Sonoma County building trades. After working a full day, in early September he arrives in Petaluma for an interview. He doesn’t mention it, but he’s clearly bone-tired. Even so, he added another driving hour to his day in order to stand on the corner of Keller and Washington outside the Phoenix, and remember.
Saari’s politics have often been as energetic and loud as his punk bands, which he partly attributes to his parents. Early-1960s Free Speech Movement activists around whose dinner table he learned more organizing history than most small children will sit still for. “I was fascinated by that stuff,” he says. “I was so fucking nerdy!”
Between sixth and eighth grade, he was further politicized by a series of events: “‘The Day After’” miniseries about nuclear war, the Union Carbide battery plant exploding in Bhopal India and killing everybody; the MOVE bombing in Philadelphia, and Bobby Sands’ hunger strike to death. “I know that this isn’t the way it happened chronologically, but in my mind, those things happened back to back to back,” he says. “It was sort of an endless onslaught.”
That Saari has a lot to say isn’t surprising to anyone who knows him, and in a life filled with protests, one night might not have seemed important. But today, he talks about September 2, 1990 for almost an hour without stopping.
“Those folks showed up at a D.R.I. show at the Phoenix, and there was a confrontation on the street,” he begins, choosing words that stop short of dehumanizing the white supremacists. But like Rowan’s, his voice is full of emotion—in his case, anger, and maybe disgust.
Rowan, Saari, their friends Mickey Fitzpatrick and Kevin McCracken, and other punks had endured too much of the white supremacists’ bullying. In late August of 1990, they had started organizing and learning about protest tactics. “We met once or twice a week, traveled down to the East Bay and went to BAARA meetings and got literature from them, some basic press training,” Saari says. They formed the new North Bay chapter of Anti-Racist Action.
In addition to the attack on Rowan in Santa Rosa, other racist threats and violence had become an ongoing thing. In June of that same year, according to a news item in the Argus-Courier, eight boys visited the Halsey Avenue home of a Jewish dentist, where they smashed eggs against the house, vandalized the bushes with toilet paper, and painted a swastika and the word “Jew” on the driveway. They were caught and “cited to the juvenile probation department,” but the author of a subsequent letter to the editor isn’t sure justice was served.
Martha Wolff’s letter read: “I cannot believe that eight teens didn’t know what they were doing or what it meant when they wrote the word ‘Jew’ and put a swastika on the home of a Jewish family.”
The violence had reached outside the subculture, but it also remained in the punk teens’ lives. “Dave Young and his mother were coming out of Carl’s market, finishing up the family shopping, and these Nazis identified Dave as [someone who was] not a Nazi, and went chasing after him and his mother,” Saari says. Young, a much-loved local misfit, would not survive his later addictions, but he showed up to the anti-fascist confrontation on September 2.
In another incident, reported by Dianne Reber and Rob Lopez in an Argus-Courier story on September 4, “Parents of two 18-year-old Petaluma women said skinheads made threats against their daughters and other young adults, telling them ‘they were going to beat people up, burn buildings and just hurt people’ if they didn’t support their racist cause.” And there were others, even though in 1990, Petaluma’s population was not quite 44,000. For the punk kids who hung around the Phoenix, it was time to do something.
Other local businesses might have hosted music, but they didn’t allow kids, or there was alcohol for sale, or management gave young punks stinkeye. Maybe girls got harassed. Maybe anyone who didn’t look normal got harassed. But at the all-ages Phoenix, freak flags were welcome, and cool live music was happening.
Tom Gaffey, the theater’s manager, made sure of it; he’s still a beloved legend as the person who allows the place to thrive, whether that means picking up trash at 3 a.m., appearing at City Council meetings to answer questions, or running very large fundraisers. From a minuscule, semi-trapezoidal “office” behind the snack bar, Gaffey facilitates the zillion projects that occupy the Phoenix, more than directing them. With his business-casual clothes and friendly, outgoing personality, the non-punk looking Gaffey stands out from the teens he works with. Today, Gaffey reluctantly sits for an interview. In the 1990s, he says, there was a lot of anger among local teens, but also plenty of creativity.
“I mean, the punks were just such a beautiful group of people. The bands, the audiences, it was just an incredible time to be in the alternative scene. And I purely lucked out on it because I had the perfect location for it,” he says. “All I had to do was open my doors and throw a show and we had at least 350 people in the building. It didn’t matter what bands were playing, the scene was huge.”
This was the world Saari, Rowan and the other teen organizers refused to cede.
As racist skinheads started to show up around that time, Gaffey says, he and his staff of bouncers were always ready to shut them down. If they started fights inside the theater, “Boom, they were immediately thrown out.”
“I love this stuff. I love the pits. I love the bands. I love punk. I love every bit of it. But I was taking it as a lark,” he says. As things changed, he became more alert to the differences. Gaffey understands that “Skinhead” is a term describing racists, as well as anti-racists, both of whom can look almost exactly alike. Those nuances took him a while to figure out, but when he did, “I had to start really taking inventory of who our skinheads were; who was in, who was out, who were Nazis, who were not,” he says. “It started a whole new level of awareness that I needed to get serious about.”
Kevin McCracken, seventeen years old when he was among the group that night, radiates a perpetual restless energy. He can skew intimidating, and he likes arguing—this is a man who can tell you exactly and at length why you’re wrong. During a recent interview, he negotiates with an especially formidable opponent: his youngest child.
An ice cream float is the bargaining chip; the stakes are high. McCracken can hold this debate while also driving and talking on the phone about the night in question and what it meant.
“I didn’t want to go out and get in fights with people,” he says. “The bands I was in sang about veganism and world peace!” Since that night, the whole group stands accused of simply being brawlers, and the conflict was deemed an internecine grudge match. That isn’t how McCracken sees it.
“There was a collective sense that we need to stand up to these guys, because they’re never going to stop.”
There would be a presence—that much was set.
The Stand
The neo-Nazis prepared as well. Newspaper and other accounts record that several local teenagers “attended a skinhead indoctrination camp in Arizona in August,” and that they were members of the White Aryan Resistance, a national white supremacist group.
A Press Democrat article after the fact reports “Petaluma police Sgt. Johnny Turner, who said he is the department’s gang officer” affirms this trip to the Southwest. According to Turner, “racial incidents began happening in Petaluma after at least two skinheads returned from an Aryan Supremist (sic) training center in Arizona and began walking the streets wearing swastikas.”
Or in Saari’s words, “They went to a training camp in the Southwest, where they got drunk, shot guns, got indoctrinated. And then they came home and were worse to deal with.”
Saari says that as a result, by the early evening of September 2, between 30 and 50 people were ready to make a stand against the Nazis. As he readied the theater for that night’s sold-out show, Gaffey had no idea what was about to happen.
In Saari’s back yard, the young local organizers, their East Bay supporters, and a growing number of friends created a rough plan. “We made a decision to just do a march past the show that said we wouldn’t be intimidated, and wouldn’t cede the territory,” Saari says. “We were going to be there, and they’d have to deal with it.”
As the sun went down, the anti-racist group made its way past the 7-11 where the street turns into Washington at Howard, crossed four lanes at the Keller Street crosswalk, and stopped, fanning out along the side of the theater as if defending a position.
“We walked on down to the Phoenix,” according to fellow organizer Fitzpatrick, “and it wasn’t long before we saw quite a few of [the neo-Nazis] and the cops arrived.”
About a dozen neo-Nazis—three local boys, several Northern California skinheads from elsewhere, and others—drove up in a truck, got out, and marched back and forth on the east side of Keller Street. Adult white supremacists stood with the racist teenagers that night, some of them having come into town from the Southwest. The next day’s Argus-Courier front page headline read “Out-of-town Nazis clash with local kids.”
“It felt like the last stand of the nerds,” McCracken says in complete seriousness. “Most of us were just little, young kids. We didn’t have a bunch of, like, street fighting experience.” He puts vocal scare quotes around the last three words. “It wasn’t like we were going in there like a bunch of tough guys.”
Instead, the group standing on the west side of Keller Street that night were outcasts without a sense they belonged anywhere but the Phoenix.
“Looking back on it, a lot of those skinheads, comparatively, were grown men.” McCracken, with his deep-seated sense of justice, still has a hard time with this. “It wasn’t even-steven. It wasn’t like getting into a high school brawl with somebody your own age and size. Some of those dudes were huge! It was definitely not a fair fight.”
The only adult ally the anti-racist punks had was Gaffey, and he was busy. “I’ve got a rather large hardcore punk show going on here. We’ve got three bands moving off and on the stage. I’ve got an audience in and out of the building, so I’m not spending a lot of time out there.” he says.
“Probably a third of the way through the show, I walked outside, and saw punks screaming angrily in the face of goose-stepping Nazis. I saw Nazis in full regalia, and I saw police that I did not recognize in riot gear with helmets, the whole thing. We’ve had some scenes here, but this was one of the biggest scenes that I’d seen at that time.”
Rowan remembers what it felt like. “While we were in front of the Phoenix on the sidewalk, protesting the marching of those skinheads up and down the street, I was angry,” she says. “I was also scared, I was nervous, I was worried about the people around me.” None of it stopped her, and Rowan says the night affected the course of her life. A word she often uses apparently took root in her psyche that night: “Collective.” The act of making decisions together, as a group, without leaders, stuck with her.
“I felt very fortunate to have had that collective, and Anti-Racist Action, to be able to find people of similar frames of mind,” says Rowan, a worker-owner of Rainbow Grocery in San Francisco for the past 27 years. “I felt somewhat empowered at the number of folks that showed up against the skinheads.” She emphasizes “empowered” rather than “somewhat.” “I mean, I’ve been working for collectives ever since.”
In staff writer Bony Saludes’ Press Democrat article “Neo-Nazis, anti-racists clash in Petaluma,” which ran the following Tuesday, he wrote “The Petaluma youths showed up for the anti-Nazi rally, but apparently, the Berkeley organizers did not.” But in fact, East Bay organizers showed up, strategized with the group, and got pepper sprayed along with everyone else. Among those organizers was Gilman Street stalwart George Hated. A man of few-ish words, Hated’s thoughts are organized, so he doesn’t ramble. His words resonate, and—in contrast to his big-emotion moniker—presents as matter-of-fact verging on cheerful.
On a recent calm East Bay evening, the only Black person as well as the only person of color present on September 2, 1990 reflects back on the anti-racist protest. As to what induced him to voluntarily leave home and stand in front of a small-town music hall to face off with Nazis and a rural police department, Hated’s choice was clear. “I had a ride!” he says, still looking excited to go. “There was no way I was going to miss it. Why not?” Apparently, none of the many, many answers to that question stopped him. Besides, he says, “I was happy they were there! The more the merrier—anybody who’s interested in openly, vocally standing against something like that—we’ve got an affinity.”
He’s also an ex-Marine who has physically confronted white supremacists in other locations. When it comes to the kids from 1990, he says the important thing is that they showed up. He describes the event in crisp, factual phrases, as if ticking off a list to be sure nothing goes missing.
“I can remember us being outside the Phoenix Theater. Some people had signs and some people didn’t. I remember the police telling us to disperse. I remember us continuing to chant. And then I remember wiping pepper spray off my glasses.”
McCracken won’t forget the pepper spray either. “My eyes were watering, I could taste it in my mouth. Your nose burns. And it stays with you, the taste stays with you for days. Somebody had to go get milk to pour in people’s eyes.” He half-laughs in disbelief, retelling the story of agents in riot gear treating teenagers this way.
“It was kind of brutal, given the age group and the kind of people who were there,” he says. “I think it was an excessive use of force situation, given what was going on.”
The punks then pushed through the police line and ran down Keller toward Western Avenue.
“At that point,” Saari says, “the Nazis were on top of the parking garage and had weapons out in full view pointed at us. My recollection is one rifle and one handgun.”
Rowan was nearby, and saw them too. “We were trying to tell the cops, who were yelling at us to get out of the area, that ‘they have guns up there’—and us pointing to the roof of that parking garage across from the Phoenix.” No shots were fired that night, but the anti-racist protestors, without plans for battle duty or adult arms dealers, dispersed and reconvened in Saari’s backyard.
“You just can’t ignore the blatant racism, the blatant fascism, the pure evil of that movement,” Rowan says, and whatever else happened, on September 2, 1990, between 30 and 50 punks barely out of high school said no to it.
“No Nazis, No KKK, No fascist USA!” Hated remembers the punks chanting. “Over and over again.”
Ultimately, McCracken says, “I think we made it very clear that they weren’t welcome at the Phoenix Theater.”
The Argus-Courier published “an editorial comment” on September 5. At first, it seemed to support the North Bay chapter of Anti-Racist Action: “The young anti-racists who confronted the supremacists on Sunday made the community’s feelings clear.”
But something changes, and the short article’s conclusion turns finger-waggy. “However, it would behoove the anti-racists to remember that extremism is fueled by extreme reactions. If everyone ignored the parade, the parade would be canceled.”
On the clipped-out and carefully saved version Saari has provided, that difficult final sentence is underlined in ball-point pen, and the annotator has added a single word: “BULLSHIT.”
“The establishment definitely does not want to think that 15- to 25-year-old kids can articulate and act on a worldview,” he says. “So anytime that that happens, they’re going to say it came from a Manchurian candidate, an outside agitator.”
Saari thinks young people are predisposed to empathy, justice, and energetic action. “Giving a shit is just the factory setting on humans,” he says, and as proof he points out the teenagers in this decade who have organized at large scale for gun control, against racist police violence, and demanding climate action.
Was it a victory? “The ultimate resolution was, the next day, all the Nazi organizers from the Southwest dried up. Gone. Never saw them again,” he says.
Rowan’s analysis is practical and clear-eyed.
“It doesn’t mean that there’s no racists in that area anymore. It just means that they don’t feel as free to march down the street and target people based solely on color of their skin or gender, sexual orientation, whatever. And that moment was dozens of us just not ignoring it, taking it seriously and just really putting our foot down and saying, ‘You cannot do this.’”
Hated agrees, and takes a longer, more zoomed-out view.
“I think it’s important to make a vocal and visible stand—I’d do it again,” he says. “If one person alters their thinking even slightly, that’s how you change the world.”
For McCracken, it’s complicated; the night was painful, terrifying, and chaotic. He’s glad they did what they did, but he thinks they got a bad deal. “The story to me is: the kids finally fought back, and the cops squashed it,” he says angrily.
It’s a fair point. What might have happened if the police had taken a different approach? For that matter, what if any of the obstacles the young punks faced had been different? What if their group had included all of their parents, the mayor, and the high school football team? What then?
If the event had stayed forgotten, McCracken might have been right about the squashing. But more than thirty years since the event took place, the group’s members know they taught themselves what it meant to confront, instead of remaining comfortable or staying silent. Those present remember their unity far more than their disagreements. Profound friendships took root that night, careers began, and lifelong political beliefs began to form.
Plus, one tenuous artifact has kept the event on people’s minds, even through all these years.
The Photo
A single photograph exists, and has become something of a cult object. Often shared on social media in small form, it’s blurry and indistinct. It shows a group of punk teenagers sitting in a rough circle on unkempt ground, “a really large chaotic meeting” behind Saari’s rented duplex.
Zooming in reveals little, as the low-resolution digital file quickly devolves into visual mush. Even so, the kids’ studded leather jackets and spiked hair frame something eye-catching: resolve.
The kids in the picture are visibly doing something difficult, together. Bleached heads bow in concentration, strain and fear shows on pixelated faces, and although people look toward a young man speaking, the energetic focal point is firmly in the center of the circle.
Standing in the afternoon shade of the Phoenix Theater, Saari points up Washington toward the intersection with Howard Street. After the confrontation, he says, the punks went back to his house to regroup. This is the moment of the photo, the image people have been looking at all these years. Online discussions show thought processes evolving over decades, and those in the photo chime in to say how formative the night was.
In the upper right quadrant of the photo, shoulder to shoulder with others, a boy with dark, close-cropped hair and a hooded sweatshirt crosses his arms over his chest. He stares not at the speaker, but into the middle distance—as most people do when they’re weighing a choice only they themselves can make. He was 17 years old.
“When I look at that picture…it felt powerful to be a part of something larger, taking a stance against the fascist elements in our scene.” Fitzpatrick says. “A bunch of us met in the backyard, quite a bit of the local goths, punks, and anti-racist skinheads, and then a bunch of people came down from Oakland and Berkeley to support us. And at the meeting, really what we did is kind of strategize how we were going to confront them.”
Today, Mickey Fitzpatrick is a psychologist and psychotherapist in Concord. He speaks quickly, often providing quotations from people he admires.
“One of my greatest political inspirations is Bobby Sands,” he says, naming the hero of the Provisional Irish Republican Army, a man so intense he died in 1981 on hunger strike while in prison. Fitzpatrick rattles off Sands’ call to action from memory, word for word.
“Everyone, Republican or otherwise, has their own particular part to play. No part is too great or too small; no one is too old or too young to do something.’”
The motto reflects what the Petaluma teens knew in their bones: they were different from their community and from one another, but they could still find plenty to agree on. Deciding to make a stand wasn’t easy or fun, but it was something a couple dozen stressed-out juveniles could do in a weedy backyard.
Rowan is in the photo, of course. “I was at the corner of the house, that one little head that’s kind of floating in the background,” she says, explaining she intentionally hung back, outside the center. She didn’t want to be asked to speak, because although she had a major hand in organizing the event, she was also shy.
The girl in the picture looks wistful and patient; she’s been in meetings before. She seems to be listening intently, but was also realizing she was exactly where she needed to be. In 2018, she commented: “What was happening in this photo and my time spent with Bay Area Anti-Racist Action are what led me to almost 30 years of collective and cooperative work.”
The person who stands out most in the photo is Hated. The only Black person in frame, he wears stylish glasses, a mod bomber jacket, and appears to be leaning on a cane. Head tilted to one side, he’s listening to the speaker, likely one of his fellow Bay Area Anti-Racist Action members. In 2023, the existence of this photo comes as news to him, since he doesn’t use social media. “I didn’t know there were any photographs!” he says, underlining the reality that these punks never expected to have any photos or proof of their work. In fact, they confronted racist skinheads in the full expectation that the whole event would be completely and quickly forgotten.
Instead, the visual document endures; it’s inspiring, in an off-beat way. It’s proof, and memory, and art; the image is brilliantly composed, for one thing. Its photographer has yet to be identified, but people have a lot of appreciation for the hands that were holding that camera.
Epilogue
The art of punk, its places and people, hosted antiracist confrontations in many places, notably in the East Bay and Philadelphia in the late 1980s, and the United Kingdom in the late 1970s—while other music and art scenes didn’t.
No such activity exists among jam bands, indie-folk, or Hawaiian-shirt blues musicians, to name a few genres just as full of white men as punk. Art Deco enthusiasts, central-coast surfing enclaves, and rockabilly music scenes harbor white supremacists, but they don’t have documented resistance activity. Punk and ska music, though, have often had both Nazis and plenty of resistance.
In 1981, Alternative Tentacles released the Dead Kennedys’ In God We Trust, Inc. EP, including the one minute and three second long instant classic “Nazi Punks Fuck Off.” In 1990, the song would have seemed ancient to teenagers, canonical, obvious. More vivid in local kids’ memory would have been the Operation Ivy show in a Healdsburg barn on November 14, 1987; the legendary Berkeley ska-punk band almost certainly played their anti-racist anthem “Unity,” right here in Sonoma County. For those who traveled to the corner of Keller and Washington that night, punk rock may have just seemed like a sensible response to the cowboy-inspired nuclear warmongering and plasticky greed of mainstream U.S. culture of that time.
Closer to home—Gaffey points out several times—in the 1980s, it was acceptable to kick angry teenagers out of the family house, and the community tolerated a certain number of children living alone under porches or in the Keller Street parking garage.
Angry, disenfranchised adolescents looking for answers, or even just beer, can be a willing audience for bad ideas, especially if they don’t have wiser voices to balance things out.
“We had several kids growing up in downtown Petaluma living in the parking garage or in some squat under someone’s porch somewhere,” he says. “There were a lot of thrown-away kids in those days. And they were living all over this town, all over Santa Rosa. There were a ton of kids, running free, and angry at their parents.” He credits some of them with banding together to raise each other. “And here they all are as adults raising kids in a much stricter environment than they were raised in. A much more intuitive environment than they were raised in.”
A funny thing about Tom Gaffey is that he’ll openly admit to liking some kids better than others. In the early 1990s, he says, “One or two of my favorite kids were moving in and out of that organization, the Nazi organization.” He tells the story of one such favorite: “They beat the hell out of him to get him out.” Gaffey naturally has a lot of questions about the situation. “Where were they coming from?” His voice lowers to a growl. He yells a lot in his work managing a large theater full of loud teens, and damages his voice as a matter of routine, but right now he’s growling on purpose. “What was going on in their household that put them out on the streets in such great numbers? Who were their friends, who were their friends’ parents?” It isn’t an abstract connection to him, either. “Because those same kids, those youngsters that turned into Nazis…they were finding their family somewhere else.”
More than thirty years have passed since these events, and people’s memories don’t always match. Fitzpatrick is sure the band playing September 2 was MDC, not DRI. Rowan thinks Hated got the brunt of the pepper spray, but he says he hardly got hit. Not everyone remembers guns. Petaluma, generally, doesn’t remember any of this happening at all. Most of the discrepancies aren’t important, but one is.
“The way it was told to me is that the anti-Nazi kids decided that they’ve got security at the Phoenix—let’s have our anti-Nazi rally out in front of the Phoenix Theater.”
It isn’t clear where Gaffey got this intel on the choice of the Phoenix as the venue for a frightening and necessary face-off. But whoever told him it was the punks got their story backward or never knew about the note on Rowan’s car; it was the Nazis who wanted to make trouble at the Phoenix. The anti-racist teenage activists, in Saari’s recollection, wanted to keep it away from the theater, specifically away from Gaffey.
“Us being organized, and caring about outcomes for the theater, we didn’t want to have a battle royale in front of the street at the Phoenix Theater, right?” he says, walking through the theater’s mezzanine. He stops at some graffiti reading “Lost Boys Survival Club.”
“’Cause that would come back on the place, it would come back on Tom.”
He looks at the graffiti.
“This is our home.”
Thanks to Anandi Wonder and Laure Reichek, who contributed their time and insight to this story, and to the kids at the Phoenix, who keep the place open and safe for everybody.