The Art of Making Money - Jason Kersten [14]
Art zipped up his pants and went right at him. He began beating him, kicking him, trying to destroy him. The man was bigger but Art was fast, chopping him down until cars on the street began beeping at him to stop. On another day in another alley, he encountered two drunks who began talking shit at him. Discarded nearby were some old golf clubs; he picked one up and answered their taunts by battering them until they were both bleeding, broken, and moaning.
“I’d gone from a kid from the suburbs who was really hoping life would get better to a kid who said, ‘It’s not gonna get better.’ And I started losing it.”
ONE OF THE ONLY BRIGHT SPOTS IN Art’s new life was that, as usual, he was exceeding at his new school, Philip D. Armour Elementary—named after Chicago’s most famous meatpacking magnate. This was despite the fact that he usually didn’t have enough money for supplies. But he noticed early on that right around the corner from the projects was the printing house for the Bridgeport News, his local paper, and so he began showing up at the loading dock and begging for paper. The laborers on the printing-house floor invariably brought him inside, showed him around, and gave him whatever he wanted. That was how Art first came to think of printing as a friendly and fascinating endeavor. “The guys on the floor were really nice, and I remember the smell of the ink; I just loved it. There was a beautiful Heidelberg press in there, about thirty feet long, worth probably a hundred thousand dollars. I guess you could say that visiting that place planted a kind of seed.”
At the end of his first semester at Armour, Art’s teachers were so impressed with his performance and test scores that they recommended he be double-promoted, from sixth grade straight to high school. The downside of this was that his new school would be Thomas Kelly High, regarded as one of the worst schools in Chicago.
Originally opened in 1928 as a junior high, Kelly had all the architectural trappings that harkened back to a spirit of solemnity about education: arched double doors, a colonnaded peristyle, Celtic lettering above the gym. But in the ensuing decades its ornamentation had become icing on a rotten cake. By the time Art attended classes, the roof leaked, the bathrooms barely functioned, and the school had one of the highest truancy rates in Chicago, with more than five hundred out of about sixteen hundred students cutting classes on any given day. Sixty-six percent of its students were failing two or more classes, while less than half went on to graduate. Assaults on teachers and students were routine.
“You had people getting killed there,” Art remembers. “Going from Armour to this shit school where teachers didn’t care was such a shocker. It felt hopeless to the extent that I didn’t want to be there. Studying no longer felt like a way out for me.”
By the end of his freshman year Art had lost all interest in aca demics. In terms of survival skills and fulfilling his immediate needs, the Satan’s Disciples were more pragmatic mentors. The SDs taught him to stop messing with the parking meters and instead break into the cars sitting next to them. He learned how to hotwire vehicles, where to sell the stereos and rims, and the locations of the chop shops, which were particularly abundant in Bridgeport. During thin times, the gang members would even chip in to help buy food for his family. “Once I saw that the gang could provide, moving up in it became the main goal,” he says. “Food and money for the bills were immediate concerns, and the gang helped with those things. It was all bullshit, of course, but I was thirteen, and those good grades I’d gotten before got me nowhere. I was in the worst fucking school in the city.”
Kelly High and the gang finally collided during the end of Art’s sophomore year, when a rival gang known as La Raza began making inroads at the school. Tensions ratcheted up and erupted in a widespread brawl in the school’s cafeteria; one student was knifed and the assistant principal had his head shoved through a glass food-display