The Art of Making Money by Jason Kersten Read Free Book Online

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