Born a Crime

In the hood, gangsters were
your friends and neighbors. You
knew them. You talked to them on
the corner, saw them at parties.
They were a part of your world. You
knew them from before they
became gangsters. It wasn’t, “Hey,
that’s a crack dealer.” It was, “Oh,
little Jimmy’s selling crack now.”
The weird thing about these
gangsters was that they were all, at
a glance, identical. They drove the
same red sports car. They dated the
same beautiful eighteen-year-old
girls. It was strange. It was like they
didn’t have personalities; they
shared a personality. One could be