herjumper wants to punk me and he said if I didn't punk out, him and his boys would jack me up. So what do I do?" (Thomas, 1991, p. 267).
That question --- "So what do I do?" --- could be the question, asked in all urgency and despair and rage, which would most accurately represent the state of mind or soul of the major character in each of these three works. Piri Thomas lives in a world--in and out of prison --- in which everybody is looking out for themselves. It is a world in which there is little humane inter-relating, simply because so much energy is taken up through the work of merely surviving. When one is every day and night concerned with staying alive it is clear that he or she will be unable to exercise altruistic muscles.
Nevertheless, Thomas finds a measure of salvation in serving his probation dutifully, in God, in sobriety, and in accepting the fact that recovery from the dreadful conditions in which he lived would be a slow and painful process. Some of this recovery and acceptance is found in his attitude toward a God in which he had been previously unable to believe:
There, in the semidarkness, I had found a new sense of awareness. I was a down stud, and despite all my Bible lessons and trips into the world of the Big Man, it would take a lot of time to fully dig God; but at least I knew He was there. And, like the Bible lessons said, first would come faith, and then would come understanding . . . "I'm thinking that God is always with us---it's just us that aren't with him" (Thomas, 1991, p. 317).
It is through making choices for himself which express his resistance to the misery around and inside him that Thomas is able to begin to overcome his despair and hopelessness and crippling rage. He accepts the fact that he will have to continue to make such courageous choices if he is to have any real hope of survival. For example, we hear his thoughts as he flirts with the temptation of fixing heroin...