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his back door at the project’s basketball court he saw three well-known neighborhood toughs confront and surround an older SD named José Morales. Compared with his assailants, Morales was small, and Art was certain he was about to get severely beaten.
    “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