The Art of Making Money (4 page)

To get the older boy’s attention, Art started carrying around a sketch pad too. He had natural talent, and the boy noticed. Soon they were spending long hours drawing together, and the boy taught Art the importance of perspective and drawing from life.

The only constant during this time was that Art was still able to attend the same school, Eisenhower Elementary. That year, the school held a student-art contest. Art drew himself trapped in a long, oppressive hallway that was a thinly veiled scene from the school itself. It depicted the kind of rebellious sentiment that every child feels against teachers and homework and institutional authority—the old school-as-prison lament. But within its execution there was a precision and attention to detail that the judges found startling.

He won.

2

BRIDGEPORT

Th’ fact iv th’ matther is that th’ rale truth is niver simple.
What we call thruth an’ pass around fr’m hand to hand is
on’y a kind iv a currency that we use f’r convenience. There
are a good many countherfeiters an’ a lot iv th’ contherfeits
must be in circulation. I haven’t anny question that I take in
many iv thim over me intellechool bar ivry day, an’ pass out
not a few. Some iv the countherfeits has as much precious
metal in thim as th’ rale goods, on’y they don’t bear the’
govermint stamp.

—
Dissertations by Mr. Dooley
, BY BRIDGEPORT NATIVE FINLEY PETER DUNNE, 1906

 

 

 

 

It was the fall of 1985 when Malinda was finally released from the hospital. Art remembers the year because several months later the Chicago Bears would annihilate the New England Patriots in the Super Bowl, 46 to 10, and from his perspective, other than rejoining his family, that was pretty much the only good thing to happen that winter.

Without any notice, a CPS worker showed up at the boys’ home, told Art to get his things, and drove him to a Salvation Army family unit on Sheridan Avenue. Like reunited refugees snatched from four different camps, suddenly they were together again, and that was all that mattered at first. The Salvation home was clean and safe, and the families staying there were well-mannered. They were from every race, all in the same timid limbo, waiting more or less quietly for social services to find them public housing that would invariably be based upon the color of their skin. Still happily shocked from the reunion with his family, Art didn’t realize that they had become completely destitute.

After three weeks at the Salvation home, one morning they piled into a social-services van and were driven south. The moment they crossed the Chicago River, they entered one of the most storied neighborhoods in Chicago, two square miles of tenements, brick flats, and light industrial warehouses known as Bridgeport.

Chicago’s tough-town reputation rests on neighborhoods like Bridgeport, a place that both forges the flinty myth and keeps it from expiring. From its very beginnings as an American city, Chicago was based on a grand, connective dream: to link Lake Michigan to the Mississippi River. To do that, a canal had to be dug from the South Fork of the Chicago River to the headwaters of the Illinois River, ninety-six miles away. It was a distance twice as long as that of the Panama Canal, and when work began in 1836, there were no steam shovels or bulldozers—just thousands of Irishmen with shovels.

The canal’s starting point was Bridgeport, which was originally named Hardscrabble after a local farm, then later Cabbage Patch because of the crops the Irish planted. The name later changed to Bridgeport after a span was erected across the South Fork of the Chicago River, but that didn’t alter the fact that it was Chicago’s first slum. Once the canal work began the Irish flooded in, and that was where they lived. Many of them had just finished digging the Erie Canal, and they labored for whiskey and a dollar a day. No one knows how many died building the canal, but when it was completed twelve years later, those who remained weren’t so much workers as survivors. Many stayed in Bridgeport, where they built churches, schools, and—as the economic promise of the great conduit came true—the city itself.

But even as the Irish gained a foothold, Bridgeport remained an edgy place, as new waves of Germans, Poles, Lithuanians, and Italians all settled into the neighborhood, most of them drawn by work in the nearby Union Stockyards. The groups eyed each other dis trustfully and segregated themselves to specific blocks. Ethnic strife was an almost daily occurrence, as gangs enforced the georacial boundaries and often battled each other in the streets. Carter Harri son Jr., Chicago’s first native mayor, grew up in Bridgeport, and famously described it as “a place where men were men, and boys were either hellions or early candidates for the last rites of the Church.”

The Bridgeport gangs were the city’s most ruthless racial en forcers, and largely responsible for the 1919 race riots, which erupted when a black boy drowned in Lake Michigan after white youths threw stones at him because he was swimming off a white beach. As blacks began protesting, hordes of white Bridgeporters bent on “protecting” their community began roaming the South Side in a seven-day-long spree of violence that resulted in the deaths of fifteen whites and twenty-three blacks.

Despite all the tensions between its residents, for the first half of the twentieth century the neighborhood flourished. Five Bridgeporters went on to control City Hall—a mayoral legacy unmatched by any other Chicago neighborhood. But once the meatpacking houses started closing down in the 1950s, the fragile economic and social alliances that had held the neighborhood together collapsed. The more prosperous population moved out, low-income housing developments went up, and one of Chicago’s most intransigent criminal cultures took hold. By the time the Williamses moved in, Bridgeport was as tough and as racially charged as it had ever been, with gangs composed of a hodgepodge mix of impoverished whites, Latinos, Italians, and Chinese fighting each other and the blacks for control of blocks, corners, drugs, and honor—a battle for the bottom that hit home with newcomers the moment they or a loved one were attacked by somebody who had been there first. Skin color, address, and income determined where you stood in the battle, and who your allies were, regardless of the fact that nobody liked or even comprehended it. You either played by the rules or, if you were willing to resort to violence, you made your own.

Place was preconditioning, and the particular patch of Bridgeport the Salvation Army set the Williamses down on was known as the Bridgeport Homes, one of the few “white projects” in the city. They comprised a square block of two-story brick row houses, eighteen units in all, with a total of about 250 residents. They were small compared with infamous Chicago projects like Cabrini Green or the Dearborn Homes, but what they lacked in size they compensated for in gloom. When they were built in 1943, they were hailed as stylish, low-income housing of the future, but the one future its residents looked forward to more than any other was the day they moved out. Unfortunately for many of the Homes’ inhabitants, that day often got so obscured by the omnipresent traumas of poverty that it receded beyond the horizon altogether.

It took two days for the power company to turn the heat on. It was the dead clear of Chicago’s winter when even clouds seem to hide for warmth. Malinda and the kids slept bundled up in their Salvation Army clothes, with blankets and some food from the local Pentecostal church. Later on, the church also brought some beds and a sofa and a table, but that just reminded Art that they were entirely dependent and in for the long haul.

Art hated the homes from the beginning and attempted to run away within days. For this twelve-year-old, that meant stealing off to find his father. He recruited Jason in the adventure, and one morning before his mom and Wensdae woke up they snuck out of the apartment and up to Canal Street. Having no idea where to go, they latched on to the one landmark they recognized, the iconic rise of the Sears Tower. They followed it all the way to its base and walked into the lobby. All morning long they rode the escalators and roamed the shops, then finally camped out in front of Alexander Calder’s famous motorized mobile,
Universe
. They were still there when evening fell. Finally a security guard showed up and told them that it was time to leave.

“We can’t leave,” Art said, and in explanation he blurted out that they were waiting to meet their father. When the guard asked for their dad’s name, Art gave it to him, and for the first time that day he realized they had a good plan after all. The guard told him to sit tight. He was going to make some calls and try to find their dad.

A few minutes later, two Chicago police officers approached Art and his brother. They informed him that their mom was terrified and had been looking for them all day. They led Art and Jason out front, put them in the back of a cruiser, and drove them back to the projects. It was the first and only time Art would ever be in the back of a police car without being a suspect.

 

 

 

A FEW MONTHS AFTER THEY MOVED into the Homes, Art ventured into the kitchen one afternoon and found the house totally bereft of food. Malinda explained to him and his siblings that they would have to wait. She left the house—Art suspects she went begging—and returned hours later empty-handed. By the following morning all three children were crying to be fed, and Malinda was crying hysterically herself. “My mother still didn’t know how to adjust to the level of poverty we’d found ourselves in,” Art remembers, “she couldn’t feed her children so she was feeling helpless. She had a breakdown and didn’t know what to do. This was all new to her.”

Art once again grabbed Jason and left the house to see what he could do. He didn’t consider going to the church or social-service agencies an option; he believed that if he did he ran the risk of being taken away from his mother again. With no money and no plan, the first monetary objects Art saw were the parking meters on Halsted Street: old-style, single-headed “Park-O-Meters” that probably dated back to the 1940s. He started hitting them with his palm in the vague hope that one of them would pour out change like a piñata. With each whack he heard the enticing rattle of coins. This caused him to stop and study the meters more closely.

They had a cylinder at the base containing two holes. He correctly assumed they accommodated some kind of twin-pronged key, and searched the sidewalk until he found a pliable piece of metal. He bent it, snakelike, so it could fit both holes at once.

“I stuck it into the holes like a pin and, what do you know, the cylinder began turning,” he remembers. “The cylinder part popped out and inside there was a canister with change. Then we just went down the street, hit about two blocks’ worth. It was really pretty simple. We got about fifty dollars and then we went to the grocery store.”

Art knew in the abstract that he had committed a crime, but when he and Jason walked back through their front door with two bags of groceries each, the relief—and pride—in his mother’s face obliterated any sense of shame. Malinda chastised him when he told her how he got the money, but she didn’t hide her pleasure at his resourcefulness. The family had been starving, he had rescued them, and power had shifted. He kept the homemade key, using its rough design to make an even better one. Over the next six months he used it to buy more food, clothes, toys, and candy. To avoid repetition, he alternated blocks and went to other thoroughfares, but eventually the city caught on and began replacing the meters with a more secure model. He kept the key long after it was obsolete.

 

 

 

LESS THAN TWO WEEKS after the Williamses arrived at the Homes, Art, Wensdae, and Jason were walking down Lituanica Avenue, about a block from their apartment, when they crossed paths with a group of teenagers sitting on a stoop near the corner.

“Project killer!” one of them shouted, then he slugged Art in the stomach and pushed him to the ground. While Wensdae and Jason screamed, the others had at him, shouting, “Project killer! Project killer!” over and over again.

Beaten up and bewildered, Art returned home, and when his mother asked him why he’d been bullied he didn’t even know what to tell her. He got his answer a few days later from a group of boys who also lived in the Homes and hung out in the project’s playground. Noticing his shiner, they plied him for details about the fight, then explained the nuances. “Those kids who got you are Latin Kings,” they told him. “Our gang is the Satan’s Disciples. They figured you were one of us.”

Art had never met anyone in a gang, much less been associated with one. He was surprised to learn that almost every boy in the projects older than fourteen was a member of the SDs, while younger boys like him were regarded as “peewees”—provisional members until they came of age. The gang had started on the South Side in 1964 and rapidly spread. There were more than fifty branches throughout Chicago and Wisconsin. Its supreme leader was said to be a guy named Aggie, its colors were black and canary yellow, and its symbol was the trident. The Latin Kings were their archenemies.

Art found the whole thing utterly weird. Raised a churchgoer and subjected to an exorcism, he had a visceral mistrust of anything with the word
Satan
in it, but, other than the word and the fork sign, the gang was less preoccupied with devil worship than the average church. Race wasn’t a factor either; like the neighborhood, the SDs had originated as mostly white and Irish, then adapted to the changing demographics. Latinos stood alongside carrot-topped Irish kids and Italians, and the operative commonalities were that they were all stuck in the Bridgeport Homes, overwhelmingly lacked fathers, and they all hated the Latin Kings up the street, who differed in no way other than the fact that they were perhaps slightly less poor.

The gang kids teased Art at first. With his gawky glasses, small size, and bookish suburban outlook, he was a natural target. Art avoided them by staying inside, but one day as he was peering out his back door at the project’s basketball court he saw three well-known neighborhood toughs confront and surround an older SD named José Morales. Compared with his assailants, Morales was small, and Art was certain he was about to get severely beaten.