Leaving Dirty Jersey: A Crystal Meth Memoir
Leaving Dirty Jersey: A Crystal Meth Memoir
by James Salant
You can tell an addict is lying if his lips are moving -- but Salant comes clean, January 20, 2008
Leaving Dirty Jersey is author James Salant's account of his years as Jimmy -- an eighteen-year-old preppie Jersey kid turned heroin and meth addict. Jimmy got into a major scuffle with his hometown police during a drug raid, so his well-meaning parents took their lawyer's advice to tuck him away in an out-of-state rehab program to wait out his trial date. He left New Jersey for the Riverside, CA Get Straight For Life program, in which he was introduced to a broad network of local connections before moving with his new crowd into a sober-living facility.
Within weeks, Jimmy is using drugs again. For a year, he drifts between boarding houses, motels, and meth couches of Riverside, wheedling money out of his desperate parents, selling drugs, and desperately working on his street cred. He runs with a crowd of flaky, unreliable druggies, each of whom look out only for him or herself. Their scores and hustles are strangely enrapturing, and Salant's dialog is gritty and sharp. Days consist of nothing more than theft, lies, scrams, and scores, and Salant admits to it all. When he finally embraces sobriety, after a year drifting in Riverside, Salant credits his peers in recovery with breaking him of his need to posture as a tough guy. It takes years, but Salant learns that there's a lot more to life than looking cool for your "friends."
Leaving Dirty Jersey is a quick read with a straightforward message and little to no recovery-speak. At the end of the book, within one page, Jimmy goes from near-death to a new life as James, the author with recovery under his belt and a great girl. However, Salant is nothing if not brutally honest about the downfalls of addiction - he takes credit for both his screw-ups and successes in this gritty but pleasantly brief memoir.
cross-posted to lagizma and booksalon