by James Salant. Simon Spotlight Entertainment. 2007. 341p.
If the cover of an arm with the tattoo “Dirty Jersey” in Old English font splayed across what looks like a filthy bathroom floor is any indication, this memoir is not for the faint of heart. James relates the story of his life, most specifically a year he spent in southern California getting high and try to convince everyone he met how tough he was. Jimmy, as he calls himself in his memoir, came from a normal upper middle class household in Princeton, New Jersey. His parents were well educated, affirming and supportive. His older brother Joe was jealous of his intelligence and from an early age begain cruelly teasing Jimmy and getting into drugs. Jimmy soon followed, was picked up for running from the cops, and sent to a rehab facility called GSL.
After meeting a few good friends in rehab, Jimmy gets out and stays in California rather than moving back to New Jersey or going on to a more extensive treatment facility. He and his friend Wendy are soon back to using and meeting the junkie network of Riverside, CA. Wendy gets sent to prison and Jimmy “takes care of her” while she’s there which impresses some of his ex-con connections, but consists mostly of him trying to send her packages, but either spending the money on drugs or getting distracted and forgetting. He crashes at the houses of junkies and ex-cons, and finds a good drug connection in a lady named Patti, who lives in a trailer crammed with junk she hordes. He soon starts selling and trying to establish his reputation by making up stories about his ‘hood in Jersey. He has a variety of transient associates, including former GSL clients who are using again, a large Mexican named Manny who is his bodyguard/partner for a time and a string of girls who trade sex for drugs.
Jimmy’s parents continue to call him and he lies about his activities always convincing them to give him money for rent and food which they oblige though they beg him to get clean and go back to GSL. By this point, he’s doing an overwhelming amount of meth and heroin, shooting up and wandering for days without sleep. He reaches a low point where he’s been up for an entire week straight and can’t find sixty dollars to pay back a low-life he owes. He ”sketches” imagining voices, people conspiring against him, and thinking that every rock on the ground could be a quarter of heroin. After seeing a man named “Junkie Jack” get arrested, and sheer exhaustion having set in, Jimmy lays low, calls his parents and goes back to GSL.
He still admits that even at this point, he wasn’t committed to recovery and staying clean. He expresses gratitude for having been at GSL at the same time as a group of men who made it clear that his posing and tough guy talk didn’t impress them. After having spent so much time and effort trying to pretend to be hard, he was around individuals that didn’t value it at all. He soon returned to New Jersey for a September court date that had been looming over him where he was sentenced to more rehab and probation. He eventually gets a job counseling at his own high school about staying away from the drug scene and credits his parents and and a supportive network of friends and editors who believed in him enough to write this book.
Salant’s writing is descriptive, gritty and real. His voice makes the reader feel as if they are struggling through a tangled web to understand the lies and paranoia of Jimmy’s year in California. He is able to describe in horrifying detail what it means to be unable to stop doing something that is ruining your life and how a drug addict loose hours, even days of his life obsessing about finding something he believes is lost. Most of what he describes, understandably is violent, illicit and sexual, which is why this book would appeal to teen readers. It cleverly shows how ridiculous Jimmy’s desire to seem cool by using drugs is through showing the reader how disgusting and pathetic that life really is. I would rate this a 4Q and 4P because of the brutal honesty of the writing and the appeal to teens. I would probably recommend this to Senior High teens, due to the overwhelmingly graphic nature of the book, but both sexes would definitely benefit from reading Jimmy’s story. The shocking scenes of shooting up in bathrooms and wandering the streets for days, dirty and disoriented make Salant’s memoir terrifyingly unforgettable.
