Leaving Dirty Jersey - Softcover

Salant, James

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0091920337 ISBN 13: 9780091920333

Publisher: Ebury Press, 2007

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.

About this title

Review:

"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"

From the Publisher:

The extraordinary true story of a young man's descent into crystal meth addiction and his struggle to get clean

About this edition

• Publisher: Ebury Press
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0091920337
• ISBN 13: 9780091920333
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 352