An excerpt from my novel:
On West Arbutus, Xerxes looks out the gap as the truck rounds the corner and spots Public Enemy No. 1: their shaved heads bobbing to booming beats coming from hydraulics-hopping Impalas sitting on twenty-two-inch rims—I bleed Compton/spit crack/shit chronic—their red bandanas hanging from right rear pockets of sagging jeans belted under their asses, their blinding white wife-beaters waiting to turn red with the next drive-by, their blood diamonds punched through their earlobes and dangling on silver chains swinging from their necks, their tattoos mirroring the graffiti on the derelict, low-lying houses in front of which they work on the Black Wall Street, where it’s Money Over Bitches! and You know what I’m sayin'?, stacking sets with three fingers pointed down to where the Devil lives, hitting that California chronic one more time, because this is what it takes to get through the day, where ghetto birds fly overhead and the Bloods all roam, gang banging and slinging crack cocaine on the street corners, everybody claiming For life! in this superfucked up place from which there is no escape for a young Black soldier who grew up thugging under ghetto Robin Hood rulers, these everyday executioners flashing deserialized pieces that match their shiny new platinum grills in a ‘hood where both the city and murder are incorporated, and the refrain that drifts through the air after the ice cream truck isn’t, as Xerxes had thought at first, One love! but One blood!
