Juvy and Pops hop out of their armored car in front of a store across the street to survey the scene. It's a damn spectacle. Women in curlers watch from a safe distance as eight pale-faced cops powwow near the cluster of dark, unmarked sedans. Homeboys, tranquilized by brew, stare blankly at their imminent futures.

     Juvy moves behind the counter, a Corona in hand, and kicks it with his boy Wassem, the son of the Palestinian immigrants who own the joint. Above the register, there's a ghettotastic wall of fame‹Polaroid flicks and the like‹of local heroes, a strong percentage of whom have left the planet. "I'm a regular in Magnolia," Juvy says, counting his dead presidents like a thorough cashier. "Only the people that ain't from around here that come around be wanting autographs and shit."

     Five minutes of exposure to the stench that engulfs the dung-brown­bricked projects is enough to let you know that the folks there have been through it. Here, it's often difficult to determine whether a building is abandoned because most windows are either boarded up or punched out. Think neglected army barracks in the thick of a never-ending black-on-black Vietnam. Which may explain why the residents, crack dealers, school children, and God-fearing adults alike, refer to themselves as soldiers. And to many of these welfare card­carrying patriots, striking gold in the rap game is like winning the Congressional Medal of Honor. The MC steps into the twilight with dignity: a decorated, iced-out warrior. A soldier of fortune.

     "Y'all got E-Z Wider?" asks a twentysomething woman with a pierced tongue and a red bandanna blanketing her forehead. She then notices Juvy and exclaims to a friend, "Girl, I wish I had what he has around his neck." With this firm, respectful finality, the entertainer cat who remembers a time when he walked around with holes in his shoes, says to the young hopeful, "I works for mine."

     Work is something that Terius Gray has never been afraid of. "I went to school for safety training," Juvy says. We're back in the monster truck, heading toward his daughter's mama's. "I learned how to fuck with asbestos, how to fuck with corrosive gases, explosive gases, flammable gases, whatever." It doesn't sound like the safest job in the world, but somebody‹maybe it's you reading this‹has to mess with it. Somebody's gotta take that risk.

     "I was a supervisor working on an asbestos-removal job, and I hired my uncle," Juvenile recalls. "This crazy motherfucker was [near] an asbestos pipe and didn't know it. Asbestos is so dangerous, if it touches your skin, if just a little piece of powder hits your skin, it could automatically give you cancer."

     Although Juvy's uncle didn't touch the pipe, he was "within three feet of it. So I had to make him take off all his clothes and spray him down, in front of women and everything. I had to get the whole plant to shut down. The pipe had busted, and they didn't know it. We had to put a plastic shield over the whole area where they was gonna work because the wind might blow [the asbestos]. It's serious shit."

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