The Art of Making Money - Jason Kersten [73]
“I think we were what humans were meant to be,” Art says, “completely free, almost like it was in the Garden of Eden. God wants us to play. I do not believe that people were meant to live the way they do. Slavery still exists; now we’re just slaves to the dollar.”
Time to philosophize about their lifestyle was just another one of its benefits. Whether or not freedom can be obtained through counterfeit means has been pondered for eons. Diogenes of Sinope believed that true freedom could be achieved only by rejecting both material goods and societal constructs. The path he ultimately took—hermitage—was one that Art and Natalie had no interest in. The goods and time they bought with counterfeit were real, and their perceived freedom didn’t feel any less so. Great moments and memories, however purchased, always feel stolen.
Freedom from the past was a more complicated matter. Art wasn’t even conscious of it at first, but the route they were taking—more or less due west from Chicago—shadowed the exact course his father had driven twenty years earlier when he had kidnapped Art and his siblings. Like a migrating animal, he had been navigating along the magnetic lines of his childhood. He didn’t become aware of it until they were in southern Oregon, where he saw to the south the allusive and shimmering peak of Mount Shasta.
“That’s where we’re going,” he told Natalie. “I used to live there.”
Memories of the last days he had spent with his father flowed from the landscape. He told her about how he had never wanted to leave Mount Shasta, about riding horses with his first girlfriend, his first kiss, and the horrible trip back to Chicago in the well of the Bronco. He wanted to go back to the last good place of his childhood and plant a flag there.
They rented a cabin in the pines outside the town of Mount Shasta. During the days they hiked the Cascades and swam in the nearby rivers, and at night they ate out and drank microbrews on the cabin’s porch. After a week, Art declared that they should live there, so they began driving around and looking at property. He talked about putting a few big deals together in Chicago, then building a house. “I liked the idea,” says Natalie. “It was a beautiful little town and what he was talking about sounded normal. That was something I always tried to encourage in him, not that I was ever very successful.” But normal wasn’t free. Because they were now all but living in Mount Shasta, they couldn’t drop counterfeit there without popping up on the Secret Service’s radar. They had to spend real money, and as the weeks in the town drew out into a month, Art grew restless. Plans and dreams meant commitment, surrendering the unpredictability that now defined the way he operated. For a counterfeiter who spends his own product, staying free means movement. One morning, just as quickly as he’d decided to stay, he told Natalie they were leaving.
“We’ll come back later,” he said, and she wasn’t exactly surprised. She wanted to see southern California anyway, and that’s where they headed next. They broke for the coast, cruised down Highway 1, and wound up in Huntington Beach. There, it was long days on the beach and L.A. nightclubs in the evenings. They were also in the mall capital of America, but after hitting a couple of the larger centers they ceased spending; Art noticed that southern Cali fornians paid attention to cash. The pen was omnipresent