The Art of Making Money - Jason Kersten [10]
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