The Art of Making Money - Jason Kersten [13]
“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.
“In the blink of an eye, José jumped in the air and did a spinning back kick,” Art remembers. “It was like some shit out of a kung fu movie. The other two guys were so shocked they didn’t have a chance, José went at them hard and fast. It was amazing. Here was this little Puerto Rican that just kicked the shit out of three bullies. After that day, there was no question. I wanted to be like him.”
Art later approached José admiringly and asked the older boy to teach him how to fight. Morales took him under his wing, and there in the project playground he began teaching Art the South Side martial arts, which are pretty much the spiritual opposite of Asian martial arts. Bridgeport favors the offense, because attempting to talk your way out of a fight is often interpreted as a formal request to be victimized. With his natural athleticism and background as a wrestler in grammar school—not to mention his desire to avoid future beatings—Art was a star pupil.
Art’s confidence in his ability to defend himself grew like a new skin that rejoiced in its adaptive freedoms. “I noticed then when José started teaching me how to fight, all the anger and frustration I’d been feeling for years, I started taking it out on people.” His first strike at the world came when he was walking with two friends on Thirty-first Street. He stepped into an alley to urinate, and as he was conducting his business a fattish white man came out of a back door and asked him, “What the fuck are you doing?”