Leaving Dirty Jersey: A Crystal Meth Memoir

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Editorial Reviews:

Product Description
With his nickname, Dirty Jersey, tattooed on the inside of his left forearm, James Salant wanted everyone to know he was a tough guy.

At the age of eighteen, after one too many run-ins with the cops for drug possession, he left his upper-middle-class home in Princeton, New Jersey, for a stint at a rehab facility in Riverside, California. Instead of getting clean, he spent his year there shooting crystal meth and living as a petty criminal among not-so-petty ones until a near psychotic episode (among other things) convinced him to clean up.

In stark prose infused with heartbreaking insight, wicked humor, and complete veracity, Salant provides graphic descriptions of life on crystal meth -- the incredible sex drive, the paranoia, the cravings. He details the slang, the scams, and the psychoses, and weaves them into a narrative that is breathtakingly honest and authentic. Salant grapples with his attraction to the thuggish life, eschewing easy answers -- his parents, both therapists, were loving and supportive, and his family's subtle dysfunctions typical of almost any American family.

Exploring the allure and effects of the least understood drug of our time, Leaving Dirty Jersey is that rarity among memoirs -- a compulsively readable, superbly told story that is shocking precisely because it could happen to almost anyone.

Customer Reviews: Read 12 more reviews...

4 out of 5 stars

Salant Comes Clean in Gritty Memoir May 26, 2007
8 out of 8 found this review helpful

If you look at James Salant's author photo on the back of this book, you see a baby-faced kid, admittedly very cute, trying to look tough. Leaving Dirty Jersey is 23-year-old Salant's story of his crippling drug addiction, and his author photo is misleading. All his life, he wanted to be tough and now, with this book, all he wants to do is come clean, in more ways than one.

The book is gritty and real, allowing people who have never had more than a few beers a look at the other side. In his writing, Salant is both self-conscious and courageous, as there are things in this book that you'd never want to tell anyone, let alone everyone.

With tales of banging female junkies in dirty hotel rooms, shooting up in trailer park bathrooms, and desperately masturbating to laptop porn, Leaving Dirty Jersey is not for the faint of heart.

5 out of 5 stars

Reality reading at its grittiest. June 4, 2007
7 out of 7 found this review helpful

Leaving Dirty Jersey is a (very) detailed and gritty account of a young man spiraling down through the perils of the drug-world. Salant's writing is both enthralling and droll--you're on the edge of your seat as he hangs with volatile criminals but also reminded of how tedious the dealer life is as he spends a lot of time waiting around on couches for people to stop "sketching" and pay him. Some of the writing is hard to swallow, there are raunchy scenes, uncomfortable threesomes, and a whole lot of aggressive homo-eroticism, but Salant's humorous and good-natured voice will keep you routing for him throughout. This book is seriously addicting, as Salant's mind unravels, you feel yourself going a little crazy too. You may start to "sketch" and read the whole thing in one sitting.

4 out of 5 stars

You can tell an addict is lying if his lips are moving -- but Salant comes clean January 20, 2008
7 out of 7 found this review helpful

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 learned 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.

5 out of 5 stars

The World's Most Depressing Memoir August 12, 2007
5 out of 6 found this review helpful

That's right. This thing is a horrible downer. It's also fabulous writing by, if you can believe it, an early 20-something reformed crystal meth/heroin addict. This kid obviously had talent before he became a druggie, or he wouldn't have been able to write this well. But there are questions. What happened to the cast of characters? Did they read about themselves? And wouldn't more than a few of them want to hunt the author down and exact a little revenge for portraying them so unsparingly in his memoir of a year as a druggie on the streets of Riverside, Ca., my former home? The book does ring true, though. He gets the addresses and the descriptions of Riverside's desert seaminess exactly right. Does this stuff really go on there? I never saw it, but I wasn't a druggie. You'll be unable to put this book down. But you'll wonder what made him do these things, given his privileged background. His poor parents. What chumps! He's evidently made it up to them by writing his story so well. Don't miss this piece of literature, in the tradition of Kerouac's "On The Road."

4 out of 5 stars

Disturbing . . . October 18, 2007
4 out of 4 found this review helpful

Having dealt with meth addicts in my work, I was really interested to read a book from a junkie's perspective. Mr. Salant's story is unusual, in my experience, in that he was shooting heroin before every going to meth. As a result, he almost immediately begins intraveneous meth use, which is a pretty rare -- and serious -- starting point.

However, his descent into the meth world, the life driven by the single-minded quest for the next hit, the deceit, the overwhelming paranoia, and the moral and physical decay are presented vividly. You keep thinking, why would anyone want to even start down this path?

A disturbing part of this story is the parents' enabling role in their son's ongoing addiction, especially in light of their older son's similar descent into the drug world. Their naivete and gullibility jarred me in light of their educated, middle class upbringing. Mr. Salant consistently cons them out of money and sympathy. But I wonder if as a parent I would be able to engage in the "tough love" he appears to have needed.

The primary reason that I gave this book 4 stars, and not 5, is the author's failure to discuss fully the difficulty of getting and remaining sober, when he eventually chooses to do so. In my observations, meth addiction is one of the most difficult to overcome, particularly on a long-term basis due to the permanent damage which it wreaks on one's brain. I would have liked the book to flesh out that ongoing process, so that readers don't come away with an unrealistic understanding of the complexity of getting and staying "straight."

Nevertheless, this is an interesting and vivid work of the lives and thought processes of meth additcts.

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