“That’s what you want to be?” they asked. “It’s what I’m going to be.” He came from a nice middle-class family; that he had the capacity to do any evil was unthinkable to anyone that knew him. Nevertheless, his smoking habit often left him buzzed as he plotted some new scheme that would inevitably find him right back in the claws of the judicial system. He was a mere 16 yet convicted as a felon; sold out by his accomplices, all substantially older, he still refused to rat them out for a lighter sentence. Once, someone had told him, “It’s a cold world, stay in school,” and in reply, he said, “It’s a man’s world; play the rules and fade fools, break rules until we major.” The world he viewed was quite different, and he had little time for such platitudes. Instead, he would get high, using his pager to arrange relations with nameless women. He was raised up in a world of hustling, as though from birth he had already commenced and was engaged in such money-making tactics. But things were getting drastic, an influx of automatic weaponry flooded the streets, and the shadow of gun violence that loomed over the streets only grew larger with time; and from this he was not separate. In his prayers, he prayed to the Lord to make room for those that invoked his ire. The life he lead caused great pain to those that knew him. As they sought comfort in one another, they bemoaned his misguided obsession with becoming a thug. And so, he found his way straight from the hall to the pen’. Not even out of adolescence, he stood far higher than six-foot-ten, in a manner of speaking. Deep in the drug trade, he sold and scaled out such large quantities of narcotics that it seemed only a Mack truck could compete with the weight that he carried. With no mother or father, no old-timers for role models, he was alone in the world. A dim future, trying to make profit out of sin; in the dark, getting buzzed, looking for love out with the homies, because shorty wants to be a thug. Said he’s gonna be—one day he’s gonna be—said he wanna be, shorty’s gonna be a thug.