The Art of Making Money - Jason Kersten [12]
“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,