The Art of Making Money - Jason Kersten [28]
If anything, he was far closer to obtaining those dreams. During the print runs, the garbage often included money—hundreds of bills that da Vinci had determined were flawed due to bad color, alignment, or just an odd feeling he had when looking at them.
“How much money have you burned?” Art once asked him.
“Oh, man. There have been runs when I’ve burned as much as I’ve made,” Pete replied.
After it got colder, on several occasions Pete took Art back to his house and they burned money in his fireplace, warming themselves by it while watching football. Pete’s house was the most refined home Art had ever seen, a collector’s home crammed with old books of English poetry, tall, exotic lamps from China, and oil paintings of cities and landscapes, many of them done by da Vinci himself. Away from the shop, they’d slip out of counterfeit talk.
“What’s it’s like to be a father?” Pete inquired one time.
“It’s weird,” Art said. “I can’t believe I actually am one. I want to be a good one, but I don’t feel like I’m qualified. I love my son, but look at what we do, where I am.”
“Have you ever heard of Epictetus?”
“No.”
“He was a slave, a Greek slave brought to Rome to serve a very powerful adviser of the emperor Nero. But he was also a writer, a poet, and a philosopher. He said beautiful things, and even though he was a slave, the people loved him. At parties, people would gather around him. They wanted to hear everything that came out of his mouth because he was wise and funny. They didn’t think of him as a slave. But his master always did.
“Over the years Epictetus’s body betrayed him. He became a cripple, ugly and disfigured. Some said that it was because his master was jealous and beat him when nobody else was around. But the interesting thing was that older and more ugly Epictetus became, the more beautiful were his thoughts and words, and the people loved him even more. ‘How can you have such a positive outlook on life when you’ve suffered so much?’ they asked him. And his reply was that even though it might appear that life had made him ugly, it was only an appearance. Throughout all his suffering, his insides had become only more beautiful—and that was the true reality, what made him a great man.
“It’s not your fault that your pops left you,” da Vinci told Art. “You can still be a good pops yourself. It’s not your fault that you’re in the projects, and you’ll get out of them. Just don’t give up.”
It had occurred to Art earlier that maybe the reason da Vinci was teaching him in the first place was because he didn’t have any kids of his own. Did da Vinci think of him as a son? He wasn’t an emotionally demonstrative man. The one time Art had seen him blush had been in the print shop when, feeling frolicky, he had snatched Pete’s beanie off his head and run around the shop, refusing to return it. “Now I know why you never take it off!” Art had shouted. “You’re bald!” Pete had grumbled, demanding his beanie back, then halfheartedly chased him around the shop until they both tired of the game.
“I kind of think of you as my pops,” Art blurted out that day by the fire of burning bills. He will never forget his mentor’s response. Pete’s “eyes bugged out” and he didn’t say anything for a long time. Art threw the rest of the bills into the fire and they joked and talked more as a cold night fell down on Bridgeport. It was one of the last times he ever saw Pete da Vinci.
A FEW DAYS AFTER THEIR THIRD PRINT RUN, Art noticed that it had been a while since Pete had dropped by the apartment to visit his mother. When he asked her about it, she began to cry.
“I don’t know where he is,” Malinda said. “He hasn’t called or come by the snack shop. Nobody there has seen him. I’ve called his home and office and nobody picks up. I’m worried.