Five Days Of Bleeding - Excerpt

Purple Haze

I sucked my joint, blue-faced, dragging like Jimi Hendrix with a guitar pick hanging over a bottomed-out lip. In the moist night air, we smoked all the grass we could find. Nigger heaven became a smoked-up black skillet holding the earth together, my girl Zu-Zu toiling in the soil though she really wasn't my girl. The clouds around our faces were pasta-red. Like mobsters, we sucked on reefers as if they were puffy spaghetti and macaroni.

As we looked beyond the haze, everything seemed blue. The earth was shapeless, chaotic mass with the spirit of God brooding over the dark vapors, niggas strutting around on The Chronic and dressed like starving artists. Some super thin brother even claimed he did J.J.'s paintings in Good Times; he swore that the lighted bomb in his mouth was dynomite.

I watched the brother stagger away, then turned and looked at Zu-Zu. Like the rest, she was dope and stir-crazy.