Ten Year Roulette: Life By The Fingernails

In Ten Year Roulette: Life By The Fingernails, Tory Bleaker delivers a brutally honest memoir about survival on the edge of youth rebellion, drug culture, and personal chaos.

Growing up in a struggling American Midwest town, Bleaker drifts into a world where experimentation quickly becomes routine. What begins with curiosity about marijuana and psychedelics soon expands into a decade-long gamble with alcohol, heroin, and the dangerous lifestyle surrounding them.

Through vivid episodes of reckless parties, unpredictable friendships, and life-threatening situations set in Phoenix Arizona as the decades cross from the 1970’s to the 80’s, Bleaker chronicles the strange mix of humor, fear, and excitement that defined those years. Friends come and go, some escaping the lifestyle while others do not. Each experience becomes part of a long, uncertain balancing act between survival and destruction, all while balancing the crazy on-off activities and goals of a blues-rock band guitarist. As the years pass, the fight between specter of impending physical addiction, willpower, and ever-present family love become impossible to ignore. Faced with the continuing path of spiritual and physical oblivion or changing direction entirely, Bleaker confronts the moment that forces him to make a decisive turn away from the roulette of self-destruction.

Honest, reflective, and often darkly humorous, Ten Year Roulette: Life By The Fingernails offers readers a powerful tragicomic story about risk, survival, and the difficult path toward reclaiming one’s life. The view of the economic times of the era vs. the current 21st century pressures is an added flavor of the story. If you enjoy raw memoirs about addiction, counterculture, and personal resilience, this book invites you to witness a decade lived dangerously—and the turning point that changed everything.