Leaving Dirty Jersey

Leaving Dirty Jersey

by JamesSalant (Author)

Synopsis

'When I was eighteen years old and a drug addict, I left my home and upper-middle-class, educated family in Princeton, NJ, having been sent to Riverside, California, ostensibly for rehabilitation. Instead, I ended up spending almost exactly one year shooting crystal meth and living as a petty criminal...' Leaving Dirty Jersey is the compellingly crafted tale of James Salant's descent into crystal meth addiction. Written at the age of only twenty-two, this memoir chronicles his year-long addiction with complete honesty and heartbreaking candour. Brought up in a stable, middle-class family, the second son of two therapists, he was introduced to heroin at seventeen by his brother Joe. A spell in rehab introduced him to a bunch of ex-convicts, and he soon fell into the thuggish, drifting lifestyle of meth addiction. He details the specific behaviour induced by using crystal meth - 'sketching' is meth-induced paranoia, 'tweaking' is becoming compulsively enthralled in an activity that can be as simple as tying a shoe or finding a vein, and 'rooting' is a form of tweaking that involves looking for something that doesn't exist - and skilfully weaves the scams and the psychoses into the narrative in a voice that is so open and authentic it's hard to believe he is still so young. With graphic descriptions of life on crystal meth - the insatiable sex drive, the paranoia, the desperate need for more drugs to sustain the high - James' writing mimics the emotional detachment of the drug and the wired yet aimless life it induces. It was to take a near-psychotic event to finally get him to clean up. Given the nickname Dirty Jersey , while living as a tough guy-junkie in California, James had it tattooed on the inside of his left arm. There, it remains as a graphic and permanent reminder of his past life as a junkie.

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More Information

Format: Paperback
Pages: 352
Publisher: Ebury Press
Published: 05 Apr 2007

ISBN 10: 0091920337
ISBN 13: 9780091920333
Book Overview: The extraordinary true story of a young man's descent into crystal meth addiction and his struggle to get clean

Media Reviews
If prose were a mind-altering substance, James Salant would be your neighbourhood pusher. Lord knows, the man will make an addict of you. -- Koren Zailckas, New York Times bestselling author of Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood
Author Bio
James Salant has been clean for over two-and-a-half years. Since his release from a court-mandated stay at a rehabilitation program in Secaucus, New Jersey, he has lived in East Windsor, New Jersey, and worked as the Office Manager of Comprehensive Educational Resources, an educational consulting firm which manages the Thomas J. Rubino Academy. He is also a Floor Trainer at Momentum Fitness, a health club in Princeton.