Tory Bleaker is a lifelong musician, sometime poet, and visual artist. His early romps in the drug world of American society in tandem with his guitar-playing rock band experiences in the Midwest and Arizona are distilled into “Ten Year Roulette: Life By The Fingernails”. Underlying the graphic sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll images however are deeper observations on growing up in a traditional postwar family culturally blindsided by the new counterculture, and lost youngsters finding their own way, and often not finding it, in a society steadily more detached from its earlier values. Bleaker’s desire to opt for the more earthy experiences of blue collar work over a top university education provides for more than a little dark humor and sometimes shocking images of life at the bottom of the economic scale in the 1970 -80’s, bonding with a cast of wild and misfit characters that would keep any set of parents losing sleep. Managing to live on through ten years of often brutal emotional, physical, and economic shocks, accidents, and surprises Bleaker lives on to prosper in later life and even conquer a deadly disease “by the fingernails”. Ten Year Roulette is a not soon forgotten memoir of the tragicomic road of growing up in the rise of big corporate America and deciding whether to live life or abandon it early, with lessons for those who care to take them.