The Art of Making Money Read Online Free PDF Page A

informed that Malinda was in a coma.
    The coma would last one month.
     
     
     
    THE NEXT DAY, the neighbor turned the kids over to Child Protection Services. Unable to find a family willing to care for three children, CPS had no choice but to separate them. Wensdae went to a girls’ home, while Jason and Art were sent to live with foster families. For the next three months, none of them would have any idea what was happening with the others, or the condition of their mother.
    Art’s foster family already had a real son, and the two boys didn’t get along. He’d later theorize that the other boy was jealous of his arrival, but, in any case, after a month the family sent him back to CPS. He was then sent to a boys’ home, which he ended up liking much better. At the home Art befriended an older boy whose name he no longer remembers, but he became the first in a long line of older males that Art would follow like a duckling chasing bread crumbs. He was ruddy, blond, and tall, and he spent all his free time bent over a sketch pad, drawing pictures of himself behind the wheels of muscle cars, usually accompanied by curvy and admiring women in bikinis. The boy was immensely popular because he’d do similar sketches for other boys he liked, thus keeping the rooms of the home perpetually blossoming with sexually empowering motor fantasies.
    To get the older boy’s attention, Art started carrying around a sketch pad too. He had natural talent, and the boy noticed. Soon they were spending long hours drawing together, and the boy taught Art the importance of perspective and drawing from life.
    The only constant during this time was that Art was still able to attend the same school, Eisenhower Elementary. That year, the school held a student-art contest. Art drew himself trapped in a long, oppressive hallway that was a thinly veiled scene from the school itself. It depicted the kind of rebellious sentiment that every child feels against teachers and homework and institutional authority—the old school-as-prison lament. But within its execution there was a precision and attention to detail that the judges found startling.
    He won.

2
    BRIDGEPORT
    Th’ fact iv th’ matther is that th’ rale truth is niver simple.
What we call thruth an’ pass around fr’m hand to hand is
on’y a kind iv a currency that we use f’r convenience. There
are a good many countherfeiters an’ a lot iv th’ contherfeits
must be in circulation. I haven’t anny question that I take in
many iv thim over me intellechool bar ivry day, an’ pass out
not a few. Some iv the countherfeits has as much precious
metal in thim as th’ rale goods, on’y they don’t bear the’
govermint stamp.
     
— Dissertations by Mr. Dooley , BY BRIDGEPORT NATIVE FINLEY PETER DUNNE, 1906
     
     
     
     
    It was the fall of 1985 when Malinda was finally released from the hospital. Art remembers the year because several months later the Chicago Bears would annihilate the New England Patriots in the Super Bowl, 46 to 10, and from his perspective, other than rejoining his family, that was pretty much the only good thing to happen that winter.
    Without any notice, a CPS worker showed up at the boys’ home, told Art to get his things, and drove him to a Salvation Army family unit on Sheridan Avenue. Like reunited refugees snatched from four different camps, suddenly they were together again, and that was all that mattered at first. The Salvation home was clean and safe, and the families staying there were well-mannered. They were from every race, all in the same timid limbo, waiting more or less quietly for social services to find them public housing that would invariably be based upon the color of their skin. Still happily shocked from the reunion with his family, Art didn’t realize that they had become completely destitute.
    After three weeks at the Salvation home, one morning they piled into a social-services van and were driven south. The moment they crossed the