The Art of Making Money (5 page)

“In the blink of an eye, José jumped in the air and did a spinning back kick,” Art remembers. “It was like some shit out of a kung fu movie. The other two guys were so shocked they didn’t have a chance, José went at them hard and fast. It was amazing. Here was this little Puerto Rican that just kicked the
shit
out of three bullies. After that day, there was no question. I wanted to be like
him
.”

Art later approached José admiringly and asked the older boy to teach him how to fight. Morales took him under his wing, and there in the project playground he began teaching Art the South Side martial arts, which are pretty much the spiritual opposite of Asian martial arts. Bridgeport favors the offense, because attempting to talk your way out of a fight is often interpreted as a formal request to be victimized. With his natural athleticism and background as a wrestler in grammar school—not to mention his desire to avoid future beatings—Art was a star pupil.

Art’s confidence in his ability to defend himself grew like a new skin that rejoiced in its adaptive freedoms. “I noticed then when José started teaching me how to fight, all the anger and frustration I’d been feeling for years, I started taking it out on people.” His first strike at the world came when he was walking with two friends on Thirty-first Street. He stepped into an alley to urinate, and as he was conducting his business a fattish white man came out of a back door and asked him, “What the fuck are you doing?”

Art zipped up his pants and went right at him. He began beating him, kicking him, trying to destroy him. The man was bigger but Art was fast, chopping him down until cars on the street began beeping at him to stop. On another day in another alley, he encountered two drunks who began talking shit at him. Discarded nearby were some old golf clubs; he picked one up and answered their taunts by battering them until they were both bleeding, broken, and moaning.

“I’d gone from a kid from the suburbs who was really hoping life would get better to a kid who said, ‘It’s not gonna get better.’ And I started losing it.”

 

 

 

ONE OF THE ONLY BRIGHT SPOTS IN Art’s new life was that, as usual, he was exceeding at his new school, Philip D. Armour Elementary—named after Chicago’s most famous meatpacking magnate. This was despite the fact that he usually didn’t have enough money for supplies. But he noticed early on that right around the corner from the projects was the printing house for the
Bridgeport News,
his local paper, and so he began showing up at the loading dock and begging for paper. The laborers on the printing-house floor invariably brought him inside, showed him around, and gave him whatever he wanted. That was how Art first came to think of printing as a friendly and fascinating endeavor. “The guys on the floor were really nice, and I remember the smell of the ink; I just loved it. There was a beautiful Heidelberg press in there, about thirty feet long, worth probably a hundred thousand dollars. I guess you could say that visiting that place planted a kind of seed.”

At the end of his first semester at Armour, Art’s teachers were so impressed with his performance and test scores that they recommended he be double-promoted, from sixth grade straight to high school. The downside of this was that his new school would be Thomas Kelly High, regarded as one of the worst schools in Chicago.

Originally opened in 1928 as a junior high, Kelly had all the architectural trappings that harkened back to a spirit of solemnity about education: arched double doors, a colonnaded peristyle, Celtic lettering above the gym. But in the ensuing decades its ornamentation had become icing on a rotten cake. By the time Art attended classes, the roof leaked, the bathrooms barely functioned, and the school had one of the highest truancy rates in Chicago, with more than five hundred out of about sixteen hundred students cutting classes on any given day. Sixty-six percent of its students were failing two or more classes, while less than half went on to graduate. Assaults on teachers and students were routine.

“You had people getting killed there,” Art remembers. “Going from Armour to this shit school where teachers didn’t care was such a shocker. It felt hopeless to the extent that I didn’t want to be there. Studying no longer felt like a way out for me.”

By the end of his freshman year Art had lost all interest in aca demics. In terms of survival skills and fulfilling his immediate needs, the Satan’s Disciples were more pragmatic mentors. The SDs taught him to stop messing with the parking meters and instead break into the cars sitting next to them. He learned how to hotwire vehicles, where to sell the stereos and rims, and the locations of the chop shops, which were particularly abundant in Bridgeport. During thin times, the gang members would even chip in to help buy food for his family. “Once I saw that the gang could provide, moving up in it became the main goal,” he says. “Food and money for the bills were immediate concerns, and the gang helped with those things. It was all bullshit, of course, but I was thirteen, and those good grades I’d gotten before got me nowhere. I was in the worst fucking school in the city.”

Kelly High and the gang finally collided during the end of Art’s sophomore year, when a rival gang known as La Raza began making inroads at the school. Tensions ratcheted up and erupted in a widespread brawl in the school’s cafeteria; one student was knifed and the assistant principal had his head shoved through a glass food-display case. Although Art had no involvement in those particular acts, he was in the fight, and in the ensuing crackdown he was expelled from Kelly altogether. At fourteen, the eradication of a stellar academic future was complete.

That seems like a young age for a kid to wash out, but Art did have two siblings who were even younger. Right about the same time he was bashing his way out of high school, his little brother, Jason, was getting in trouble for acting up in grammar school. Jason enjoyed none of Art’s academic advantages and had experienced even less stability. At ten years old, he was not only expelled from grammar school, but Malinda lost custody of him completely. The State remanded him to Maryville Academy, a boy’s school in Des Plaines, where he would languish until the age of eighteen and emerge with less education than Art.

Wensdae would fail to finish high school as well, but she would get a general-education degree. The only one of the Williams kids who never lashed outward, she would continue her interior battle, with consequences far more violent than any her brothers ever faced.

 

 

 

THE WILLIAMS KIDS were struggling with poverty, but there was another factor they had to contend with, one that haunted them in their own house. Art discovered it one day during his freshman year in high school after he forgot his key. Knocking on the front door, he called for his mom to let him in. He knew she was home because he could hear her inside, talking to someone. Malinda didn’t respond, which he thought was strange. To the side of the front door was a little opaque window to a utility room, and through the glazing he could just make out the form of his mother crouched in the corner. He banged on the window and shouted at her.

“They won’t leave me alone!” Malinda screamed back. She explained that she had gone into the utility room to look for supplies to build a spaceship, so she could escape them.

“Who won’t leave you alone?” Art asked.

“The little people,” she said. “They’re all over me, they’re driving me crazy.”

Art didn’t hear any other voices. He sat down beneath the little window, trying to talk his mom down and get her to open the door. He assumed she was on drugs, and figured they’d wear off, or if he could just calm her down she’d come out, but she didn’t. After an hour, a neighbor came out to see what was the matter.

His neighbor, a Puerto Rican single mother, tried to talk to Malinda, too, but she just kept yelling about “little people” and “leprechauns.” With no other recourse, and fearing for his mom’s life, Art and the neighbor finally called the police. Minutes later, while half the Bridgeport Homes looked on in curiosity, the CPD kicked in the door and an accompanying paramedic unit entered the apartment, sedated Malinda, and carried her out of the projects strapped to a stretcher.

She was diagnosed with bipolar schizophrenia. The bipolar disorder, characterized by massive mood swings, had afflicted her for years. It was almost certainly rearing its head when she was institutionalized following the episode at Uncle Rich’s. But schizophrenia, which typically includes hallucinations, intense paranoia, and the hearing of internal and often violent voices, was something frighteningly new. Although the cause of schizophrenia is most often genetic, recent studies indicate that a severe trauma to the head is also a trigger. Both Art and Wensdae flatly blame their aunt’s assault with the beer bottle for what they refer to as their mother’s “problem.”

After that first “leprechaun” episode, Malinda’s illness became a major destabilizing factor. Doctors prescribed her lithium, which was extremely effective at suppressing the symptoms—so much so that when Malinda was feeling really good she’d stop taking the medication altogether. Then it was only a matter of time before her brain realigned to its natural chemistry. When it did, the caring, affectionate, and fun-loving mother the children knew was replaced by a woman whose behavior ran on a roulette wheel numbered and colored with bad news.

To get an idea of the spectrum, on various occasions Malinda had declared that she was running for mayor of Chicago. She had perched herself in front of a bowl of collected pebbles and proceeded to silently suck on them for hours. She once wandered away from her home and turned up three months later in a field in Kansas, completely naked and showing signs of starvation. During a more recent episode, she told the FBI that she had been abducted by an Al Qaeda cell and held as a sex slave at an Oklahoma barn for a month. According to a friend familiar with the incident, the Feds were so convinced that she was telling the truth that they took her up in a helicopter in the hopes that she could pinpoint the location.

Those are the more exotic episodes. In the early days of her disorder, Malinda was either entirely uncommunicative or violently obsessed with the only other female in the house: Wensdae.

“Art had it easy with my mom,” Wensdae says. “She doted on him and went after me. I got all of it.”

The first incident Wensdae recalls came on the eve of a school dance when she was twelve, not that long after the leprechaun incident. It was her first dance, and like any girl that age she was eager to look her best. She put on lipstick, did her hair up, and wore a skirt. When she came out and asked her mother how she looked, Malinda told her she looked like “a dirty little whore.” She then proceeded to grab Wensdae by her hair, punch her in the face, and tow her back to the bathroom. There, she forced her daughter to sit on the toilet while she took out scissors and cut off all of the girl’s hair. By the time Malinda was finished, Wensdae looked like a concentration-camp inmate.

“You could see it coming with my ma,” says Art. “She’d start chain-smoking and staying to herself. That could last a day or two, and if you couldn’t get her to take the lithium, it was best to get away from the house.”

That’s what Art usually did. He’d go to McGuane Park or hang out with the SDs and hope that by the time he came home Malinda would be asleep. On some occasions he even crushed up lithium pills and spiked his mother’s drinks. But most of the time Wensdae was left alone with Mother Hyde.

By the time she was fourteen, Wensdae had discovered her own escape: “wicky sticks”—marijuana joints laced with PCP and dipped in embalming fluid. Wickies were cheap and popular in the neighborhood, and the intense, brightly hallucinogenic high they provided was an instant, if temporary, vacation from the oppression of Malinda’s rages, and the dread that, somehow, there really was something wrong with her, something that had caused everything to end up the way it was. “The wicky sticks were so
fun
. Everybody in the neighborhood did them. I didn’t think they could hurt me, and if you do them in moderation they don’t. But I didn’t know what moderation meant when I discovered them.”

One night in 1989 Wendz overdosed and went into seizures. She was rushed to the hospital, then later admitted into a rehab unit. Although she completed the program, her battle with addiction, and the conditional underpinnings that supported it, was just beginning.

 

 

 

ONE OF THE WAYS Wensdae coped with Malinda’s episodes was to visit the house of her best friend, Karen Magers, who lived a few blocks away. No stranger to hardship herself, Magers had never known her father, a traveling musician from Mexico. Her mother, who was Bridgeport Irish, had been killed by a drunk driver when she was five, and her uncle had taken her in, doing the best he could to raise her on a nursing home attendant’s salary. Though they had very little themselves, the Magerses fed and even clothed Wensdae, sometimes for days, until Malinda emerged from the storms of her delusions. “I don’t know why, but it was Wensdae who always bore the brunt of her mom’s episodes,” says Magers. “I remember one time she accused Wendz of dressing like a tart, then burned all of her clothes. She came over in tears, and I had to give her some of my clothes.”

The two girls were inseparable, and spent most of their free time at the Assembly of God church at Thirty-first and Poplar. They volunteered for fund-raising activities, youth groups, and appeared in all the plays and pageants. “It was the only place we felt safe, or normal,” says Magers. “We weren’t interested in the gangbangers.”

Art wasn’t much interested in his sister’s friend either at first, but by the time she was thirteen Karen had blossomed into a stunning Irish blonde with faintly caramel skin. Whether it was more her emerging sexual transformation or his that sparked Art’s attention, he was taken completely off-guard. “I remember one day just looking at her, and thinking, ‘Wow. How could I have not noticed this really beautiful, sweet girl?’ ”