Down These Mean Streets

In Sing Sing, Piri forces his mind to do menial things, like counting the teeth in his mouth, in order to keep his mind “from being eaten up by pressure” (250). He has to stay tough so that he is not taken advantage of by the other inmates: “Motherfuckers, I thought, I got one thing left, and that’s my rep, and nobody’s gonna take that” (251). Piri gets in a confrontation with a prisoner named Rocky. Piri asks another inmate for an improvised knife, called a shank, with which he plans to stab Rocky. Before he can, he is shipped out to another prison: Comstock State Prison. This relieves Piri, because he didn’t want to have to stab Rocky, though he would’ve, had he stayed at Sing Sing.

Piri hates prison, saying that “As prison blocks off your body, so it suffocates your mind” (256).He makes friends, though. Among them are Young Turk, his “closest amigo” and a black Puerto Rican like himself, and Kent, a well-educated white man who encourages Piri to write. Despite his maturation while at Comstock, the pressures of jail life get to Piri from time to time, such as when he and a friend of his, named “Little”, get in a fight. However, their fight doesn’t hurt their friendship. As Piri says: “Sometimes a fight between two men makes them the greatest of friends, because of the respect that is born between the swinging fists” (261).

In jail, there are men who seek homosexual relationships with their fellow inmates. Sometimes they are aggressive, and “If you weren’t careful, if you didn’t stand up for yourself and say, ‘Hands off, motherfucker,’ you became a piece of ass” (262). An inmate named Claude tries to make Piri his “steady” (262), but Piri resists. Piri is worried that if he has sex with another inmate that he’ll turn into something he doesn’t want to turn into: “Just one time and it’s gone time. I’ll be screwing faggots as fast as I can get them. I’m not gonna get institutionalized. I don’t want to lose my hatred of this damn place” (263).

A couple of weeks later, Claude gets “prison married” to another inmate, and they have a wedding “complete with a preacher, best man and attendants” (263). To Piri, this wedding is a “farce” that makes him “sick inside” (264).A few days later, a brother of one of his friends arrives at the prison. His name is Tico and he needs Piri’s help keeping another inmate from making sexual advances on him. Piri advises Tico to attack this inmate with an iron bar, which Tico does. Though he is put in isolation for this act, no one messes with Tico again.

It is three years into Piri’s sentence and one day his whole family visits him in jail. They tell him that Trina has gotten married. This news devastates Piri and he gets some drugs from Young Turk. Piri says that “I wanted to get high, to get stoned, to get blown away. I wanted to wash away the pain” (273). The next day, Piri puts Trina’s marriage out of his mind. The thought of her marriage is “washed away by the reality which was the beginning of one more day that had started a long time ago and would end a long time beyond” (274).

After four years, Piri is eligible for parole. However, the parole board denies his parole and Piri must serve at least two more years. Piri talks to the prison chaplain, who Piri says is “the only preacher I had talked to who didn’t make God stick in my throat” (279). The chaplain tells Piri that he’ll make it through all right. In order to make his next parole, Piri must stay out of trouble, but this is difficult to him because “if you didn’t face up to the trouble, you ran the risk of being branded as having no heart” (280). When Piri has only six more months before his next parole hearing, a riot breaks out in the prison. Piri is torn between joining the rioters or following the rules and returning to his cell. He ends up allowing himself to be herded back to his cell along with some other inmates, but he feels guilty for not rioting with the other prisoners. The rioters end up being beaten badly by the prison guards, and Piri and the others “felt a touch of shame at not having shared in the pain of our gray brothers” (285).

Piri, who has earned his high school diploma while in prison, begins “digging into philosophy and different religions” (288). He befriends Muhammad, who is a member of the Nation of Islam. Piri is curious about his religion and speaks with Muhammad. Muhammad says that “Christianity is the white devil’s religion” (291).Piri is intrigued by Muhammad’s ideas and wonders if “maybe Allah is a black man’s god” (291).Eventually, Piri becomes a Muslim, taking the name Hussein Afmit Ben Hassen. However, Piri does not remain a Muslim after his eventual release from prison. 

Nearing his parole hearing, Piri fears he will go insane before he is released: “Three times I almost flipped, and every time I had to fight desperately to keep my sanity” (300). Two weeks before the hearing, a prison guard “wasted [Piri] with hard words” and Piri “blew up in his face” (301). Although Piri screams at the guard, the guard, much to everyone’s surprise, decides to not punish Piri. Piri nearly gets in a fight with another inmate a few days later, but decides that his “rep” is not worth sacrificing his chance at getting out of jail. The parole board ends up granting his parole this time and Piri is ecstatic. Regarding his time in jail, Piri muses that “I ain’t ever gonna be the same. I’m changed all right” (306).