Our Towns - Just Beyond Yale, a Million Miles Away - NYTimes.com

Our Towns - Just Beyond Yale, a Million Miles Away - NYTimes.com: "neighborhoods are strongholds for the Crips, some for the Bloods, some for subsets like the Tre Bloods or the local R2 gang.
The car stops in front of a chicken shack. Bloods territory. Two young men are on the corner. One in a gray hoodie says he is 31, served 13 years in prison and has a job that pays $9 an hour but can barely pay his bills. The other, thin and sweet-faced under his Celtics cap, says he is 20. He could pass for 16.
Asked about gangs, the younger one scoffs. “It’s more like personal stuff, person to person,” he says. “Say someone kills somebody. Well, of course, someone wants to go back and do it to them, like in retaliation. But it’s for your homeboy, it’s not for the gang. It’s like, people who love each other, you look out for the next person.”
The older one says he is trying to look out for younger guys. “What jobs are there? McDonald’s? Burger King? Dunkin’ Donuts? If your father is a bricklayer, he teaches you how to lay bricks, you might be a bricklayer. My father died from heroin and AIDS, sharing needles. My mom was a crackhead. She had me in jail. How did you think I was supposed to turn out?”
His tone is even, conversational, not self-pitying. Just a guy on the corner.
“You wake up,” he says. “You’ve got your job. You wake up thinking, ‘I really ain’t got no problems.’ I wake up wondering if I’m going to die today. And that’s the way things are right now.”"