The Art of Making Money - Jason Kersten [17]
Art wasn’t much interested in his sister’s friend either at first, but by the time she was thirteen Karen had blossomed into a stunning Irish blonde with faintly caramel skin. Whether it was more her emerging sexual transformation or his that sparked Art’s attention, he was taken completely off-guard. “I remember one day just looking at her, and thinking, ‘Wow. How could I have not noticed this really beautiful, sweet girl?’ ”
Soon the Assembly of God church had a new member—a Satan’s Disciple no less—as Art made a point of attending Sunday services. He’d plop into the pew next to his sister and Karen, and during the sermons his eyes would lock on the flaxen cascade of Karen’s hair and the lustrous sweep of her thighs. “I wasn’t going in there for spiritual enlightenment,” he says.
Magers had sized up Art long before that, of course. She’d been impressed by his intelligence, but he, too, had a new body. At fifteen, his skinny arms and knobby shoulders now showed bowling-pin curves, while his jawline had come in square and firm. All of his prior delicacy was vanishing, as if the inner armor he’d adopted after moving to Bridgeport was expanding skinward and sounding out as a swarthy, hard handsomeness.
“He was really cute, and when you’re young you go for looks,” Magers says. “He always thrived on his looks; he was always a charmer. It also might have been an opposites-attract thing. I was always the good girl, and he was the bad boy. I didn’t like the fact that he was in a gang, but in those projects boys basically had to join the gang. It was either that or get the shit beat out of you on your way to school.”
When Art finally worked up the nerve to ask Karen out on a date, she accepted, and they quickly became a regular item. During the winter they’d go to movies, and in summer they’d laze around at a beach off Lakeshore Drive, then grab a meal at one of the tourist spots on Navy Pier. Parental loss was their unspoken bond, but like most teenagers, they rarely spoke about the past and even less so the future. On the occasions when they did talk about their dreams, Art would throw any number of pies into the sky; one day he’d want to be an inventor, the next a real estate developer. Karen, however, was magnificently consistent. She intended to follow a Bridgeport path almost as well-worn as the one that Art would take, and he was so smitten by her that he never considered that it made any future with her problematic at best. “I only ever had one dream. Maybe it’s because when my mom died, the man who broke the news and comforted me was a cop, but I knew since I was five that one day I would become a Chicago police officer.”
Karen’s dream would have to wait. Six months after they began dating, she learned she was pregnant. At fourteen, she was about to become a teenage mother, while Art—with no high school diploma, no job, and few connections outside of the street—had at best dim prospects of supporting a child. “I didn’t know what I was gonna do,” he says. “I was a kid myself. I knew I didn’t want to be like my father and just avoid responsibility—that wasn’t going to be a possibility. Somehow I had to find a way to make it out of there.”
3
THE APPRENTICE
We are all bastards;
And that most venerable man which I
Did call my father, was I know not where
When I was stamp’d; some coiner with his tools
Made me a counterfeit. . . .
—WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Cymbeline, Act II, Scene V
Ed’s Snack Shop had been around for twenty-one years when Malinda took a waitressing job to help prepare for the baby. Owned by a local named Ed Thompson, it was a Bridgeport fixture, an old twenties-style diner with a bar counter and a long line of windows overlooking Halsted Street. It was a familiar world to Malinda, easily navigable, and Ed was sympathetic to her condition.