The Art of Making Money - Jason Kersten [31]
Other than poverty, the common denominator behind many of the deaths was simply guns, which in the late eighties hit Chicago like a medieval plague. “It was just one summer and suddenly guns were everywhere,” Art remembers. “It was scary. Something happened and then everyone had a gun. They were easy to get, almost like somebody planned it and brought them in by the crate. It wasn’t just my neighborhood, but the whole fucking city.”
By the time he was nineteen, Art had lost five friends to gun violence. In terms of American lives lost, Bridgeport had become as much a war zone as Baghdad later would, and similar death traps were sprouting up all over the country—South Central Los Angeles, Detroit, Harlem—anyplace where people were poor, angry, and looking for fast power.
It sounds trite to say that Art’s number was bound to come up—violence is never inevitable until someone decides it is—but it did early one morning in the summer of 1990 as he was walking home from a party. It was about three A.M., and he had just crossed into the basketball courts at the Homes when two young men stepped out of the shadows and accosted him.
Their faces were covered in bandanas and Art never got a good look at them. They were black, and one was in his late teens and the other didn’t look much older than eleven. They started asking Art questions: “Where you from? This is our court. What you doin’ here?” in that tone people use when you know there’s no right answer, because they’re just fishing for a verbal response as excuse to hurt you. Art got out a “What are you talking about?” before they both raised pistols at him and opened fire.
He wheeled around and started to run, dropping his chin down close to his chest. He got about twenty yards away, then felt a sharp push on his left hip and tumbled to the cement. He’d been hit by a .25 caliber round. The shooters screamed with glee and chased after him, but he got up again and kept running. As he did so, another bullet from a 9mm struck him on his right thigh. Flying on adrenaline and knowing that he had no choice but to keep running, he rounded the corner onto Thirty-first Street, where a Chicago Tribune deliveryman was unloading stacks of the early edition. He collapsed next to the van and asked him to call an ambulance.
LUCKILY ART’S GUNSHOT WOUNDS were superficial; paramedics took him to Mercy Hospital, where surgeons removed the bullets and released him in less than twenty-four hours. The shooters were never caught, and in a macabre way, getting shot was a good thing for Art; it crystallized the literal dead end he’d been heading down since arriving at the Bridgeport Homes. Lying incapacitated in his bedroom, he knew that the moment he recovered he would be right back where he had been. He had hated the Homes from day one, then the Homes had become home, and for the better part of a decade they had defined him and then nearly killed him.
“After I got shot, I thought a lot about the things da Vinci had told me about getting out of the projects,” Art says. “I knew that I’d die if I stayed there. I didn’t know how I’d get out, but I decided that I would.”
It turned out the decision would be made for him. About three weeks after he returned from the hospital, he awoke one morning to the sound of his mother in his doorway.
“Arty! Get up! There’s a fire downstairs. We gotta get out of the house. Hurry up!” she shouted until she saw Art’s head pop up from his pillow, then whisked back downstairs.
He groaned plaintively, naturally thinking that his mom was experiencing another delusional episode. But a few seconds later, he smelled smoke. He lifted his head off the pillow, saw a black cloud pouring through the heater vent, and ran to the doorway. When he looked downstairs he saw the living room half engulfed in flames. Malinda and Wensdae were nowhere to be seen.
Art