I’ll be straight up. Ben is a friend of mine and he’s a true homeboy (if a non-homeboy can say as much). I don’t know this for sure, but I suspect that BARRIO BUSHIDO is the story of his life. A coming-of-age, darkly comic piece of novelistic street poetry, the novel is the story of three neighborhood friends, Lobo, Toro and Santo (the Wolf, the Bull, and the Saint) who follow their homeboy code of loyalty, violence and machismo into what amounts to a kamikaze mission. You’ll laugh, you’ll be moved, and you’ll realize that some Americans don’t dream at all.