Forgery of the Month Club a memoir

By Keith Alexander

Keith Alexander’s mother was a Jewish woman from the Midwest who taught him early on that getting a job was not necessary. His father, a married African-American lawyer who was born in Mississippi, was cold and unapproachable. As Keith grew up, he and his sister watched their mother prove her point about making a living on the fringes of society. A single parent, Anita Alexander supported her two biracial children by stealing and forging.
The story is set in Chicago – but far from the South Side which had so many black residents that it was commonly known as Bronzeville. Keith was raised a Jew in a white, liberal community and, until he was a teenager, didn’t have relationships with any black people. He assumed that all African Americans were like his father and, understandably, was not eager to meet any others.
Considered intelligent but undisciplined by school officials, Keith nevertheless made good grades. However, by the age of eight years old, he had also become a thief. Over the next dozen years, Keith shirked opportunities in the square world, and instead tried to follow in his mother’s footsteps even as his sister, Lin, moved further away from both of them.
Eventually, Lin is accepted into the University of Chicago which leaves Keith alone with his mom. The two of them work together in schemes that range from eccentric (a castle built in their backyard and a human powered flying machine) to felonious (buying houses by giving the bank forged documents).
Then Keith falls in love and, rather than lose his future wife, he decides to go straight.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Keith Alexander
• Release date: Apr 23, 2013
• ISBN: 9780615743677

Book preview

FORGERY-OF-THE-MONTH CLUB

A MEMOIR

BY

Keith L. T.  Alexander

Published by Seaborn Assets. LLC

3164 Sunnywood Dr.

Ann Arbor, MI 48103

The names and identifying details of some characters in this book have been changed.

Copyright 2012 Seaborn Assets, LLC

Al rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

First edition

Forgery of the Month Club A Memoir/ Keith L T Alexander

ISBN# 978-0-615-74367-7 (eBook)

Cover design by Keith L. T. Alexander

Cover photo courtesy of Keith L.T. Alexander all rights reserved

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CONTENTS

Introduction

1. Food

2. Cycling

3. Mom and Dad

4. Mr. Independent

5. The Old Crowd

6. Bill-Me-Later

7. Matt

8. A Real Bastard

9. Free-Spirit-In-Training

10.  Bar Mitzvah

11. Point Street

12. Mr. West

13. Cali

14. The Rock Lady

15. Navy Man

16. Rooftop Murals

17.  A Tale of Ordinary Chaos

18. Forgery-of-the-Month-Club

19. Mortgage Fraud

20. Love

21. Hannah

Epilogue: Flakes

The rich and the poor create their own laws. The middle class is confined by laws.

— Mom

INTRODUCTION

This book began as a tribute to Mom. For twenty years, I was Mom’s fan club and her collaborator, even though I had also been a vulnerable and angry child. As the writing took shape, my demons awoke and were buckled as my understanding of our choices and of our extended family deepened. I began to see my aunts and grandma, who endured the death of their father and husband at an early age, differently. I also grappled with their estrangement from my mother... who had chosen the life of a hustler.

Whether as a member of a subculture or as an individual, Mom made choices that most mothers would not have made. Rather than hold a regular job, she had the determination to set her own rules and live by them. By choosing to discard the shackles of reasonable behavior, she instead drew on her own inspiration to perpetrate a series of illegal and unusual adventures in order to provide for those she loved.

Mom is alive and living in Chicago where she graciously allowed me to interview her over a period of several years.

CHAPTER ONE

FOOD

When food stamps ran out in our house, Mom dressed in bulky clothing, grabbed a baby blanket and rode her bicycle to the supermarket. She blended in with the other middle-aged, white women who were also pushing shopping carts up and down the aisles. Mom squeezed fruit, checked their prices and kept moving. When no one was looking, she slipped a steak in her pants, jammed a pot roast under her armpit and wrapped a turkey in the blanket. Then she walked out of the store while cooing into the blanket. It was the 1960s, decades before surveillance cameras were the norm in American life.

Although Dad was a lawyer, my parents weren’t married and he didn’t live with us. In fact, he rarely came around. When he did stop by, Mom would sometimes try and coax twenty dollars out of him. That money, along with public assistance, was what we lived on.

 Our poverty humiliated me.

When the free meals program started at my elementary school, pride almost  kept me from signing up.

Ms. Hilton waited until we had taken our seats and quieted down before making her announcement. Nettlehorst School is getting a breakfast and lunch program, which starts next Monday. It costs twenty-five cents for breakfast and thirty-two cents for lunch. If you can’t afford it, there is a form that your parents will have to fill out. Please let me know after class.

I never knew if Mom would provide dinner but she would be willing to fill out a form. That form guaranteed me two meals a day.

While Ms. Hilton taught us fractions, my stomach growled. I had two choices to avoid embarrassment: Ask for the form on my way out with my classmates or wait until everyone else was gone.

I waited.

At 3:15, the bell rang and the other children made their escape. When the last child had sprinted out of the classroom, I approached Ms. Hilton who looked at me curiously.

I need a form, please.

My cheeks felt hot and I kept my head down.

What did you say?"

The free lunch form. I need one.

Wordlessly, she handed me a form.

I mumbled a thank you and fled.

CHAPTER TWO

CYCLING

I can’t even count the number of times when strangers asked if Lin and I were adopted. It wasn’t just the sight of a white woman out walking with two black children that triggered the question. It was when one of us called her Mom that heads turned.

Is that your mother?  

Yeah.

You adopted?

No, I answered. My Dad is black.

 This happened so often that I finally confronted Mom. Are you sure we’re not adopted?

Of course I’m sure.

Then why do people keep asking?

Because you and Lin have darker skin than I have.

I puzzled over that answer for a minute and it made no sense. Why is our skin darker?

Because your Dad’s skin is darker than mine. The two of you got his skin color instead of mine.

I never want to be as dark as Dad.

Me neither, said Lin.

Mom would let the subject drop but lose her temper if she thought we were the victims of racism. When Lin didn’t get chosen to play a sugar plum fairy in Chicago’s production of The Nutcracker, Mom lost it. The role would have meant a union wage for Lin and badly needed cash for us. Mom was convinced that Lin had lost out because her skin was brown. It pissed Mom off so bad that she took the matter to the local office of the NAACP to file charges against choreographer, Ruth Page, who was in charge of the show. Mom was at the NAACP all day making her case but it turned out that she didn’t have enough proof. Still furious as she left the building, Mom paused to catch her breath and noticed an unattended bicycle that was leaning against a lamppost. She jumped on it and rode away. Within the hour, she had sold it to a café owner named Dan for fifteen dollars.

Just like that, Mom went into the bike stealing business.

Encouraged by how easy it was to make fifteen dollars cash, she began to learn about locks by reading books and through trial and error. When Mom went to the hardware store to buy key duplicates, she stole their box of key rejects, and grouped them according to their profiles. Among these groups, she had a selection of the different cuts. In doing so, Mom amassed a collection of 1083 keys. All I could lay my hands on, she says.

Although there were an infinite number of variations of the five tumblers, locksmiths only used a few for making keys. Through her study, Mom concluded that all keys were practically versions of the same key.

Like any good businesswoman, she needed a place to warehouse the stolen bicycles. She also needed customers to buy them. She stored the bikes in a friend’s basement and used Dan’s coffeehouse to pick up and deliver orders. Dan and his wife owned Café Pergolesi and soon the word got out among students and families with children that orders for cheap bikes could be placed there.

So, Mom slept during the day and worked at night.

After Lin did her homework and I came home from scrounging in alleys for food or bike parts, Mom would read to us and then we went to bed.

After Lin and I dozed off, Mom plopped her long screwdriver and ring of keys in the pockets of her hip-long denim jacket which was shiny from years of dirty wear. She ambled quietly down the back stairs from our third floor apartment on Buckingham Place and unlocked her own bike.

The apartment buildings that Mom hit stood five stories high and were known as four-plus-ones. They were a staple of Chicago housing in the 1960’s and cluttered the side streets of Chicago’s north side.

Four-plus-ones did not have basements; instead residents drove their cars into a ground floor parking level, and then entered the building through a door. Once inside the building, Mom knew she had to act quickly to get into the locked storage room.

Frequently, the first key did not work, so it was common for Mom to stand at a door trying each key until one worked.

Inside the storage area, Mom peered in between the wood slats of the lockers, looking for quality merchandise. If someone locked away the expensive stuff, Mom assumed they had forgotten about it. When she found luggage, electronics, or an excess bicycle, Mom brought it to a locker she appropriated in another four-plus-one half a block from our apartment where she stashed her excess swag. In this way, Mom could fill orders within hours.

 One night, she spotted a black Sears men’s 3-speed that was padlocked, and an expensive red Peugeot.

The bikes I stole were in perfect condition, she boasts. Without even a soft tire. After pinching the Peugeot’s tires, she chose the Sears, because she liked their fenders and favored their sturdy construction.

To disable the combination lock that held the Sears, Mom slid a piece of metal tape measure between the shank and lock body and popped it open. Strolling out from the garage ninety minutes later with the bike, Mom rode the mile and a half through side streets to Tim and Sara Jane’s house near Wrigley Field. Despite riding down the dim side streets at night, her biggest worry, she says, was that the bike’s owner would spot her and flag down the cops.

On her arrival at Tim and Sara Jane’s, Mom was in The Zone. After stashing the Sears in their basement, Mom took a cab to the swag locker she kept on Roscoe Street. There, she picked up a woman’s Schwinn, and rode that to Tim and Sara Jane’s as well. Then she returned to Stratford for the Red Peugeot.

Rather than strip or repaint the bikes, Mom disguised them by removing the baskets,  adding bells and switching carriers. When her inventory ran low, Mom would nick as many as six bikes in one evening, ride them over to Tim and Sara Jane’s or to our dining room. Then she’d take a cab to another four-plus-one. Some nights got expensive because of the cab fare, but I never raised my prices, just my volume, Mom says.

A few evenings later at the Cafe, Tim peeled off two twenties and gave them to her. On the slim chance that the previous owner might recognize their recently stolen bike, Mom signed the receipt, Eric Fischl, a person who did not exist.

I loved being a bike thief, Mom says. It only took three to four hours, and only two or three days a week. I couldn’t have made as much on a job, frankly. It was work, but not like a job.

It had to happen sooner or later. Mom got arrested.

The bust came as she helped herself to goodies in the basement storage room of one of the posh, lakefront apartment buildings. Someone told the police there was a burglary in progress. Six cops walked in with pistols drawn. They saw a diminutive, middle-aged frump.

Her cover story was that she was picking up donated paint for a mural she was painting on the wall of Hull House, a neighborhood settlement house.

This, a policeman asked, is a burglar?

Mom might have been able to talk her way out of the situation, but the fact that she carried 42 keys made her highly suspicious.

I spent four years collecting those keys, she says, and they were gone in seconds.

When Lin and I woke up the next morning, Mom was not home. We went to the Monterey restaurant around the corner but her bike was not parked in front. School was going to start and she was nowhere to be found. Mom was sitting in the Cook County Jail waiting for Dan and Lucy to bail her out. Upon her release, she focused on getting our father to defend her.

To pay him, she had to steal even more bikes than before.

CHAPTER THREE

MOM AND DAD

Mom was from Minneapolis. She was born Anita Freedland in 1929 and, by all accounts, she was a nice Jewish girl until her father, Arnie got sick. She was a Daddy’s girl who was not close to her mother.

 In 1942, Arnie was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s disease, which was then untreatable. As her father’s oldest and favorite, Mom had difficulty coping with his illness. I used to visit him in the hospital after school, she says. We talked about the Iris, Peonies, Phlox and Roses we would plant in our yard when he recovered.

When Arnie died in 1944, my grandmother, Teresa, lost control over Mom.

Arnie had been everything to Mom and she was terribly shaken by his passing. Intelligent enough to understand middle class morality yet shattered and aimless, perhaps Mom decided that if her father could perish, than everything in society from social expectations about marriage to employment, to morals, to ones ideas of family were just as malleable.

Two years after his death, my grandmother wrote a letter to her sister-in-law, Becky, which said:

Anita is sixteen years old now. Her personality and problems have kept me on edge. She has no confidence in me and is stubborn. I am hoping it is only adolescence, but I fear it’s deeper than that. Her sense of material values is undeveloped and causes me great despair.

Sometimes I didn’t believe that mother did everything she could for father, Mom later said. Other times I felt like something was wrong with me, and because of that, my father had died. It felt like the world had ended.

Mom became rebellious and was still that way when she entered college. She says, Rather than taking prescribed courses at the University of Minnesota, I took whatever interested me: history and philosophy, mainly. I failed art history one semester because it was so boring. Another semester I got an A in philosophy because I refuted Aristotle. Mother periodically complained that I wasn’t confiding in her but I told her that there was nothing to confide. I wanted to be left alone. It was a black period in my life. I went to recruitment meetings for the Army and Navy, hoping to join the Navy, but they wouldn’t accept me because of my Artresia and Microtia, which means I don’t have an ear canal or a normal external ear on my right side, just a skin flap. Father had encouraged me to have self-esteem because I was different, and inspired me to develop my intelligence. Since I seemed to be a hopeless case, mother concentrated on guiding my sisters Judy and Serene to degree programs at the university, while keeping an eye on me from a distance. I hung out with artists, gays, and intellectuals.

At the end of 1948, the university expelled Mom for low scholarship and she barely took notice. According to one of Mom’s cousins, she continued to act out by sneaking into Hadassah meetings, running off with the member’s fur coats and selling them. By then Mom was addicted to an amphetamine called Dexidrine that she bought by weight at a local drugstore. It got me out of bed in the morning, she says. At the height of her drug addiction, Mom’s resistance became so strong that she took 12-14 pills a day to get high and her reputation for being different gained momentum.

In 1956, Mom decided to make a huge change in her life. I realized I had to leave the expectations of conformity that existed in my Minneapolis community and start a new life. I made a list of places I could settle down in: Los Angeles, Chicago, and Seattle among them. With my eyes closed, my finger landed on Chicago.

Unfortunately, Mom had unfinished business with the University of Minnesota. She owed a lot of money to their library. Instead of paying them before leaving, Mom changed her name from Freedland to Alexander so that future debt collectors would be unable to locate her. She packed her belongings and took the university’s experimental garden of marijuana plants (two shopping bags full) with her to Chicago.

Dad was from Natchez, Mississippi. He was born William Lee Foreman Jr. in 1917. An only child, he moved to Chicago with his grandmother at the age of three. His parents followed. At home, Dad was forced to watch as his father beat and emotionally abused his mother. Naturally, when he was old enough to defend her, he jumped in. His father kicked him out of the house.

When Mom and Dad met, he had graduated the previous year from the University of Chicago Law School (JD ‘56). Aside from the fact that she was white and he was black, they were different in many other ways. Mom stood five feet, while Dad stood six feet tall. Mom was cultured and free-spirited. Dad was controlled, insensitive and, with the exception of dating outside his race, he preferred assimilating rather than rebelling against society.

By the fall of 1957, Mom and Dad had been dating for seven months when Mom became pregnant with Lin. Although she had dated other black men, she was certain that Dad was the father and was thrilled to be pregnant. The combination of their intellects and races would, she believed, imbue their child with what gardeners call Hybrid Vigor. It means the heartiness of offspring of two different types of plants.

My grandmother, Teresa, was not happy to receive the news. She pressed Mom to put the baby up for adoption. The idea that Mom would have a baby without being married and from a Schvartza Shagitz (a pejorative Yiddish phrase that means literally, a Black non-Jew) was more than she could comprehend.

When Lin was born, Dad wanted to name her Rachael, after a childhood girlfriend of his. Mom agreed to do it if he donated a pint of blood to the hospital’s maternity center as payment. He refused.

By this time, Mom had learned that Dad had a lot of other woman and that he was the son of a wife-beater. Despite her love for him, she decided that he would have no claim on her or their baby.

I wanted to insulate you and Lin from his mean streak. Not to do this, she says, pointing a finger to deliver a carefully thought-out one-liner, would have been a disaster. I would have killed him and regretted that he was not around to defend me. She forfeited her right to child support to further insulate the baby by giving the hospital a false name. When the doctor asked Mom for the father’s name, she said Bill Russell. To give his real name would make it easy for Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) to track him down and pester him.

I was born two years later, in 1960.

CHAPTER FOUR

MR. INDEPENDENT

Mom was either asleep or eating breakfast at the Monterrey Restaurant when we left for school, so I was accustomed to trotting down our back stairs and cutting across our alley, through a gangway and across the street to school.

Although Mom was still in the bicycle stealing business, she still had bills to pay and (according to her) we ate constantly and we were always low on cash. The first thing I did in the morning was to check our refrigerator, hoping that overnight Mom would stock it with fruit, cheese, milk, juice, ice cream or cereal. Most mornings,