| The East Hampton Star - June 2, 2007 | BACK | |
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Review by Michael Z. Jody
I didn't even know I was going to run until I'd started, and then, once the boots were thudding and the cops were shouting, it just naturally popped into my head, as if I’Äôd undergone some junkie training program, that I should eat the acid - destroy the evidence. It is impossible, though, to open a sealed baggy while running from the cops on a head full of acid. It also didn't help that my boots, which were fashionably untied, began to come off. When I tried to kick them off altogether so I could run in my socks, my fashionably baggy jeans fell to my knees. Stumbling, then running like a demented penguin, I shoved the closed baggy into my mouth and started to chew. This was neither his first time in trouble with drugs nor his last. As to why he became an addict, the usual expectable reasons (poverty, lack of education, troubled home life) are lacking. Mr. Salant did not come from anything like an underprivileged background and did not attend any school of hard knocks. His parents, with whom he got on well, are both psychotherapists. He grew up in Manhattan, East Hampton, and then Princeton. Until the age of 15, he was still "a good boy who cared about his mommy. But soon after my first joint something happened to me ’Äî some sea change washed over me ’Äî and from that point onward all I cared about was getting fucked up." He had already done a couple of different juvenile drug programs, a wilderness rehab in Montana, and a six-month stint in West Virginia. This time Mr. Salant's lawyer said the best way for him to avoid jail time was to enter New Standard Young Adult Haven, a long-term rehab program in California. As a result he spent a year in Riverside. ". . . the day I returned to New Jersey I was clean, and I have been since, for two and a half years now. But I didn't clean up in New Standard. I spent only a couple of weeks there before moving to Riverside, where I shot crystal meth and lived as a petty criminal among other criminals, some not so petty. For one year I traded my comfortable home in upper-middle-class Prince ton, New Jersey, for motels and convict squatter pads in Riverside. . . . This story is about that year." He starts to kick the day he arrives in California. "I felt as if I had the flu. One big difference, though, was that I was also overwhelmingly depressed. In becoming addicted to heroin, I’Äôd essentially traded all my little problems for one big problem (scoring) and all my little pleasures for one big pleasure (being high)." After detoxing in a program called Get Straight for Life, Mr. Salant is supposed to go to another program called New Standard. He hates it. Yet again lying to his parents about intending to get a job and take classes at the local community college, he moves into a sober-living home. It doesn't take long to be offered some crystal meth by his girlfriend who wants to get high. He does not resist, ". . . announcing that you're going to stay clean is like announcing that you're on a diet. You say it with conviction, you understand just how important it is, but then you’Äôre confronted with a single damn cupcake and you simply can't imagine stopping after just one." Thus begins his education, and vicariously ours, in methamphetamine addiction. After his first shot: "There was a tickle in my throat, and for a second I couldn't breathe. Grabbing at the counter, I doubled over and made a sort of noiseless, hollow cough. It felt even better than I'd expected, but at the same time the intensity of it caught me by surprise - like swimming in a rough ocean, enjoying it, and then all of a sudden you get taken under, crushed and tumbled, and you realize that you can't surface until it lets you." Like a junkie anthropologist practicing participant observation, Mr. Salant elegantly describes the various sequelae and side effects of regular meth abuse. There are the compulsive behaviors of sketching, "meth-induced hallucinatory paranoia"; tweaking, "compulsively enthralled in an activity that can be as simple as tying a shoe, cleaning a glass, or finding a vein," and rooting, similar to tweaking save that "the enthralling activity is looking for something. Often the thing doesn't exist." The vocabulary tutorial immediately proves useful. As Mr. Salant begins to associate with an assortment of shabby, skanky meth and heroin users and dealers, we see each behavior illustrated. This can be chilling, as when some jailhouse-muscled, tattooed, meth-crazed ex-con is sketching and getting dangerously paranoid and violent, and sometimes it is more comedic, as when, alone and sketching in a motel room, he thinks someone across the street is spying on him. "I burn a hole in the drapes. Pretty clever, but my stalker must have seen the flaming cherry of the cigarette, because even though I'm peeking through a tiny hole in a curtain on the second floor of a building about two hundred yards away, he anticipates me and jumps behind the bush as quickly as before. . . . I realize that I'm burning cigarette holes in my motel room, trying to catch a glimpse of what every tweaker in Riverside laughs about when they're not sketching: the bushmen." The book is simply and crisply written. Mr. Salant has a real knack for true-sounding dialogue, and despite the grimy and sordid quality of what he describes, manages to inject no small amount of self-effacing humor into the narrative. However, the arc of his year of drug abuse in California becomes increasingly harrowing, horrendous, and miserable for reader and author. It illustrates the classic need to smack into one's foundation before being willing to address an addiction problem. Mr. Salant devolves from user to dealer to dreadfully heavy user, shooting mixes of meth and heroin into his neck, staying up for days at a time, getting assaulted, robbed, beaten, ripped off for drugs, and suffering through episodes of tweaking, rooting, sketching, overdosing, and kicking. It ain't pretty. By the time he calls his parents collect and says he wants to go back to rehab, I could barely breathe. There is a maxim among psychotherapists that goes: How can you tell when an addict is lying? His lips are moving. During the book - as is almost universally the case with junkies of all flavors ’Äî Mr. Salant lies to everyone: landlords, "friends," drug associates, and (a shocking number of times) to his parents. There were times when I blushed at the bald-faced nature of his lies and fabrications to his parents. In his author's note Mr. Salant writes, "nothing has been more crucial to turning my life around than revisiting my past with ruthless honesty." I believe him. This is a mercilessly honest book. Obviously, in light of James Frey's recent debacle, the veracity of such works may be suspect, but I must say that this book doesn’Äôt feel like much of anything but the truth. - James Salant is a regular summer visitor to Springs, where he has family. |
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