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

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?’ ”
    Soon the Assembly of God church had a new member—a Satan’s Disciple no less—as Art made a point of attending Sunday services. He’d plop into the pew next to his sister and Karen, and during the sermons his eyes would lock on the flaxen cascade of Karen’s hair and the lustrous sweep of her thighs. “I wasn’t going in there for spiritual enlightenment,” he says.
    Magers had sized up Art long before that, of course. She’d been impressed by his intelligence, but he, too, had a new body. At fifteen, his skinny arms and knobby shoulders now showed bowling-pin curves, while his jawline had come in square and firm. All of his prior delicacy was vanishing, as if the inner armor he’d adopted after moving to Bridgeport was expanding skinward and sounding out as a swarthy, hard handsomeness.
    “He was really cute, and when you’re young you go for looks,” Magers says. “He always thrived on his looks; he was always a charmer. It also might have been an