The Art of Making Money - Jason Kersten [33]
“You know I love you guys, but I’m not about this anymore,” he told them. “I have to look after my family now.”
“You gotta show up, Arty,” one of them replied. “Even if you’re not out there anymore, you gotta pay your respects.”
“Hey, I respect you, but I don’t know what else to tell you, man. I’m steppin’, I gotta move on,” he said, and told them he had somewhere he needed to be.
After Art failed to attend the next meeting, he started missing the camaraderie of the Disciples, and decided to drop by the playground the following Friday for a visit. Marty was there, along with his three biggest attack dogs: Danny, Porky, and Redhead Jerry. When Art greeted them with his normal enthusiasm, he realized right away that he had made a mistake. “They kind of rolled up on me, gave me the silent treatment,” Art says, “and I knew something was going down.”
“You have a violation coming for not attending the last two meetings,” Marty flatly told Art. In Disciple-speak, that meant that he was now expected to submit to three gang members as they beat him for thirty-two seconds—because they were from Thirty-second Street. If he resisted, more seconds would be added according to Marty’s whim.
“I’m not taking it,” Art told him. “If you start swinging, we’re fighting.”
“That’s the way it is, then,” Marty said, and before Art knew it Marty and his lieutenants were charging him.
Art was standing with his back to a brick wall, and the first to reach him was Danny, who opened up with a wide, wild right. Seeing it coming, Art sidestepped left and ducked. An instant later, he heard a crack followed by a scream, and was amazed to see one of Danny’s wrist bones sticking out from the skin of his right hand; he had struck the brick wall instead of Art. That turned out to be the only heroic moment for Art, because after that the other three boys moved in and beat him senseless. As he lay on the ground, knotted up and bleeding, they reminded him to be at the next week’s meeting.
The indignation of the beating only solidified Art’s determination to get out of the gang, and sure enough, he refused to turn up the following Friday. He didn’t hear anything from the Disciples for three weeks, and then one evening he heard a knock on his front door. Thinking it was probably one of Karen’s friends, he opened it, and the next thing he knew Marty and two Disciples bum-rushed their way into his apartment and began beating him in his own hallway.
Art covered his face and scrambled to get a footing, but in moments they had him on the floor. He heard his wife and son yelling hysterically in the next room, then suddenly all three Disciples were running for the front door. When he looked up, he saw Karen pointing his 9mm at the gangsters, screaming at them to get the fuck out, and looking very much on the edge of justifiable homicide.
“I never really talked to any of them after that for a long time,” says Art. “They left me alone. I think they were more afraid of Karen than they were of me.”
That was the final straw for Art. With scenes of pissed-off drug dealers and gangbangers invading his home and killing his family boiling through his dreams, he resolved to get out of the robbery business as well. In the relativity of his world, he had matured, and with it came an epiphany.
“I remembered what Pete had told me about having a nice life,” he says. “He had showed me that stuff for a reason, because he wanted me to have another avenue out. I had no idea how I would do it because frankly I had forgotten just about everything, but I knew that I was going to become a counterfeiter, like him. And, well, you know me. Once I set my mind to something, I’m obsessed. I took what he taught me and amplified it a hundred times over.”
5
THE DUNGEON
So I fixed up the basement with
What I was a-workin’ with
Stocked it full of