Marv is a little drunk this morning, a bit unsteady as he circles through the courtyard of the Olive Branch shelter in search of a cigarette.
“Yo blood, I’m tellin’ you. I hit the muthafuckin’ ground when they came around the corner.” As he listens, Small Head picks at a sore on his left foot; his basketball shoe and sock are on the ground beneath the bench. “All of them had Uzis ‘n’ shit,” Junior continues. “Boom, boom, boom. We was in the park over by the projects.” Junior acts out the scene with an imaginary machine gun. Marv places his unlit Camel between his dry lips. He has already heard about this incident–an altercation between the Black Disciples and Junior’s posse, the Vice Lords. Junior notices the unlit cigarette. “Lemme smoke wit’chu, Marv.”
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Felix moves to a nearby bench and drops heavily on the wooden seat. He removes a plastic cigarette holder from his breast pocket and places the empty device in his mouth. “You smoke?” he asks the next guy over, who does not. “Bad habit, I know,” Felix says in a voice filled with disgust and regret. “But I’m gonna keep doing it until I get out of this situation. I never used to smoke but now it relaxes me. At this point I don’t even want to stop.”
“Muthafuckin’ nearly 90 degrees out here!” yells a brother named Jackson from across the courtyard. He is wearing an unbuttoned white dress shirt that’s wet under the armpits. His comment, directed partly to the man in the snowsuit, draws laughter and banter from the rest of the group, but the butt of their joke ignores them, intently folding the rolling paper over into a boat shape, then extracting a pinch of tobacco from the pouch and placing it carefully in the center of the paper. Immediately the wind blows half of the pile onto the pavement. The man curses and asks his partner in the kente hat to cover the loose tobacco with a cupped palm. Soon they produce a rolled cigarette. It looks like a joint, but the smell that follows is definitely tobacco.
