The Art of Making Money - Jason Kersten [72]
HITTING AT LEAST A MALL A WEEK, Art and Natalie ran out of counterfeit fast. At night in the motel rooms, they’d assemble the bills. Art had a five-gallon pail in which he kept his glues, sprays, and finishing tools, along with a portable hydraulic press that could clamp onto tables and counters. Their only requirement was a fan in the bathroom to vent the chemicals. They’d dry the bills on a portable clothesline, hanging the fresh notes festively above the beds like the streamers of a capitalist cult. On one occasion, Art even assembled five thousand dollars in a tent they’d pitched in a northern California campground. “I had the little zip windows open and I’m in there with my kit and my radio going. I’m out in the wilderness putting money together. Natalie was pissed because I fucked the whole tent up. My glue got everywhere.”
It was easy enough to buy a new tent the next day with the finished bills. Except for camping hardware and CDs, possessions became entirely disposable to them. They never did laundry or wore the same clothes more than twice. Once their clothes got dirty, they went into the donation pile with all the other goods.
With all the driving, traffic tickets were an omnipresent danger, especially since Art was a hopeless speeder. A single ticket could attach Art to a locale where counterfeit had popped. But like any conscientious criminal he carried fake IDs, or more precisely real IDs belonging to other people. He obtained them by getting trial passes from gyms in Chicago’s more prosperous neighborhoods and visiting them on a regular basis. Not only did he get free workouts, but if he saw a fellow fitness enthusiast who looked like him, he’d note the time of his arrival. Gym rats often follow a precise schedule, and the next time Art’s doppelgänger showed up he might return from a workout to find his locker ajar and his wallet gone. Art never used the credit cards; he was only interested in the driver’s license and photo IDs. On two occasions that summer, patrolmen pulled Art over for speeding, but there would never be a trace of Art’s presence anywhere near a papered mall. For years to come, guys in neighborhoods like Lincoln Park, Lakeview, and Old Town would receive receipts for tickets from places they had never been. The strangest thing was that all of them had been paid, in cash.
If the crime of creating counterfeit had brought Art and Natalie closer together, then the act of spending it on the road bonded them as surely as the twin sheets of their bills. They went river rafting in Wyoming, took a rock-climbing course in Utah. Hiking was their favorite pastime. One day in the Olympic Range, they stood on a cliff above a glacier lake.
“I want to jump in,” Art told Natalie.
“It’s at least three hundred feet, don’t even think about it. You’ll be dead.”
“I can do it.”
They joshed and argued over the jump for fifteen minutes until she won, then they clambered down to a beach for a safer entry. But Art liked the earlier view, so afterward they hiked back up and made love up above the tree line, cooled by nearby snowmelts with a granite boulder for a bed.
In western Nebraska, they had to stop the car when a herd of wild horses crossed the road in front of them. They left the car and marveled at the dappled crowd, making contact with eyes that held fear and ferocity. Then, it was the Art of romance.
“That’s us, baby,” he told Natalie.
All over America they saw twentysomethings like themselves laboring in restaurants and strip malls, burning away their youth in pursuit of paper.