The Art of Making Money - Jason Kersten [54]
Throughout it all, the one bright spot in his life was the quiet girl he’d barely gotten to know before he went to prison: Natalie Silva. Prior to his arrest, he’d had a couple romantic encounters with her, but after he went to jail she’d had a brief fling with another man that resulted in a son, Alex. Art naturally assumed she’d fade away, but she’d surprised him by visiting him early on, then followed up by writing him letters. She was the only one of the four girls who stayed in contact with him once he was sentenced, and over the years the letters never stopped, nor did her visits. She trailed him throughout the system, filing her name on visitor-request forms and driving hundreds of miles to whenever he was transferred. “I was in love with Art the first moment I saw him,” she’d later confess, “but I would have been stupid to tell him that. I was young, he was dating my friend, and he definitely wasn’t husband material. But he was unlike anyone I’ve ever met. I have very little tolerance for stupid people, and the thing about Art—other than the fact that he is very, very good-looking—is that he has brains. Yeah, he was a criminal, but to me that always came second.”
For both of them, Lopez—576 miles from Denton—was the ultimate test. Art would have understood if she’d visited him once a year, but once a month Natalie would hop in her Toyota on a Friday and set off on a ten-hour drive. She’d pop Metabolife diet pills to stay awake and sleep at rest stops when they wore off. After washing her hair and doing her makeup in a gas station restroom, she’d show up in Lopez’s visiting room on Saturday afternoon looking like she’d just stepped off a private jet. The permissible visiting time was four hours, and when it expired she’d turn right back around to be at her ticketing-agent job at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport by Monday morning.
Natalie was right outside the gate when Art was released. She drove him back to her place, made love to him, and over the next few weeks offered him encouragement as he looked for a legitimate job. “Initially he had a positive attitude about going straight. He got up early every day and found a job framing houses, like he did before. And he went to work. But after a couple weeks he became quiet, depressed. And then he started complaining about the jobs not paying enough.”
Art was earning seven dollars an hour for backbreaking labor. Since the work itself was intermittent, and he was wrestling to help support his nine year old son up in Chicago, he began to slip into the old victim’s mind-set. “I know every criminal says this,” he says, “but it’s almost like the system wants you to commit another crime. Since you’re a felon, nobody wants to hire you, and those who do are paying you shit because they know they can get away with it. At the same time, most prisons don’t do shit to give you skills. They get the more educated inmates to teach classes. Needless to say, they aren’t the best teachers. I know it sounds lame, but if you’ve never stood in those shoes, you don’t know. You start thinking about how much money you used to make as a crook. And once you start thinking like that it’s hard to stop. Then that opportunity comes along, and suddenly you’re back in it.”
A few weeks after Art was released, he and Natalie visited a local Barnes & Noble. Feeling depressed about his work situation, he wanted to pick up a copy of the Tao of Jeet Kune Do by Bruce Lee, who he’d found inspiring ever since he was a kid. Art hadn’t been paid yet from his construction job, and as they stood in line Natalie gave him a brand new C-note to pay for the book. He had barely gotten a look at the bill before handing it to the cashier, but in those brief seconds his curiosity ignited with the shattering alacrity of buried ordnance.
The hundred-dollar bill, he was astonished to see, had changed.
AMERICA’S CURRENCY had already begun to change as early as 1990, the year the Bureau of Engraving and Printing instituted the security strip and microprinting. Hold any bill except a dollar note