Calm Under Fire

Part I: Cold Cuts

Unreachable

As I remember, it was the afternoon of the first day of ninth grade – we were supposed to call it “form III” – and we were all getting on the bus to go three blocks to Central Park. There were no freshman teams that season, so even the guys like Ace and me who’d been on the football team last year were signed up for intramural touch football. Then this new kid climbed on, one of the oddest-looking kids I’d ever seen, because not just his hair but all the freckled skin showing was a bright orangey-red. A pair of my clownish buddies promptly named him “The Red Kid”, but Eager, another new boy, had been in an orientation meeting with him, I guess, and greeted him with, “Irish to the back of the bus, Carroll!” That note of harsh Hibernian humor must have made him feel more at home at his new school, among the WASP’s and the Jews. He shambled along the aisle on heavy legs, eyes fixed to the floor.

When we got to the field we chose up sides: Ace and I were the captains, and he picked the new kid first. Evidently he was onto something. I was tallest and fastest on my team, and I figured I could cover anybody. I’d been playing football in the summer with Mickey Riley and Jimmy Behr, the last another redheaded Irishman despite his German name, and they were four years older. This Jimmy Carroll was several inches taller than we were, though, and bigger all around; he had the body of a true teen, while the rest of us were still boys.

Ace played quarterback. Jimmy went out, faked, cut right diagonally and got a step on me. The ball arrived in front of him; he caught it on the tips of the fingers of his left hand, froze it there, and brought it in softly to his palm. He wasn’t running hard. He cruised in for a touchdown, all ruddy blond, head tilted downwards, swimming tantalizingly beyond any touch, face expressionless, not a word said, just ahead of my hands, unreachable. That scene was repeated several times that afternoon to my mounting frustration, a near-silent fever dream that I was trapped in. After a while I imagined on the air the softest sound, a faint high hooting, the hint of a laugh.

As Mr. Maxim walked us across Central Park West and Columbus back to Trinity, I noticed that the new kid crossed the street exactly as quickly as he needed to, using short, choppy strides to put on a little burst of speed at the start, then abruptly slowing down and chugging along as if he had plunged into thigh-deep water. The traffic nipped at his heels. I tried this out: it felt like a dance, as if you weren’t really serious.

***

Not so long ago, we were walking in Chelsea, and Jimmy was laughing at me, his little falsetto laugh: ” You could never cover me, with that one-handed catch. And you were so competitive, Robert!” He paused, and then he said generously, but not sadly, I think, “I bet you could cover me now.”

Desire

When I’d showed up at Trinity two years earlier, Ace had been the king of the class. He wasn't much of a student, but he was a star in tennis, the top sport at the school, and the best at basketball and football, too, even though he was always the shortest one in any game he played. Besides that, he had an older brother in the school, so he knew everybody who mattered in the higher grades. But most importantly, he was sly; he always knew what was going on. Somehow he had gotten to know Jimmy right off, which wasn’t easy in those days, and he knew what his scene was. Being a nationally ranked tennis player, he understood the world of serious junior athletics, so he knew what it meant that this shy new kid had been on the All-City Freshman team, had been recruited out of Rice. The rest of us didn’t have a clue. I told people I figured Jimmy would play J.V. for a year, but Ace told me I was crazy. Yet even Ace didn’t really get it, not fully.

At lunch break we three headed down to the gym, a huge, drafty, barn-like building, with a court two feet longer than regulation, for some mysterious reason. They must have been talking before I caught up to them, because Ace had already bet Jimmy twenty dollars he couldn’t make five out of ten from midcourt. Midcourt! From there, against our old white wooden backboard, the red line of the rim looked like a tiny nick you would get shaving, if in fact any of us had needed to shave. Jimmy took off his stiff new blazer and set it down. Stock-still on his tree-trunk legs, loose at the shoulders, he flicked his left wrist, shooting from near his chest. He missed one close, then swished five of the next six. He might have been placing coins in a cup. He picked up the twenty.

Ace and I realized that we had just seen something outside of reasonable expectation. “Are you going to go pro?” Ace asked. “No,” said Jimmy, “I don’t have the desire.” He said it that way, using the sports cliché to achieve a near double meaning, as if he were formally distanced from himself, writing a scouting report, wistful, wry, damning.

Comic Props

When basketball season started, the varsity looked to be pretty good. Despite his half-court display, which we two witnesses had underplayed, Jimmy was still an unknown quantity. Our best guess was that he would be about as good as Steve Smith, big and fast with a soft touch: Smith had been an all-sports superstar in eighth grade when we were in seventh, and then had gone to Deerfield.

Still with us were a handful of rough seniors, one good sophomore, and a junior, Naceo Giles, who had been brought in the year before, and who was a pleasure to watch. His game was simple and elegant: it minimized his weaknesses, which were ball handling and improvisation, and built a perfect structure on his strengths: quickness, elevation and flawless form on his jump shot. Nace was a beautiful guy altogether, poised, cheerful, intelligent and extremely handsome. The one black kid in the upper school, he was friendly to everybody, even pipsqueaks, and was universally admired. The previous year he had taken a weak team and made it halfway decent.

The first varsity game of the year took place after our J.V. practice, and my friends and I were planning to shower and come back upstairs to watch. I was the last to dress, and by the time I got there Ace had already been sitting in the stacked bleachers for a while.

“You’ve got to see this,” he said. “Jimmy’s going wild.”

On the court was a different Jimmy from the one I thought I knew, as if he had strapped on his six-guns and been transformed. Our home uniform was white and gold, and he himself was shades of white and gold, a fringe of orange hair blowing off his forehead. He spun off the fulcrum of his man leaning on him, offered ball fakes and head fakes and eye fakes, playing the defenders for laughs, using them as comic props for flashing moves, impossibly long floating set shots, a dizzying array of mid-range jumpers and running hooks, look-away passes flicked behind his back off the dribble, which caught his stiff-fingered teammates by surprise.

Jimmy’s point total was mounting into the twenties, then the thirties, now, as the game was near ending, the forties. Ace, in the know as ever, told me that the school record was forty-eight, by Rivera, the smaller member of the great Kosmeyer and Rivera tandem from ten years previous: we passed their team photo every day as we went to and from chapel on the grand white marble staircase. Dudley Maxim, who had been coaching for the past thirty years, sat Jimmy down near the end, when he had forty-five points and the outcome of the game was not in doubt.

Ace and the others were giddy with excitement, from a kind of fancied partnership in the glory. We didn’t imagine that Jimmy would never again focus that hard for a whole thirty-two minutes, never care quite that much again. He had made his point. He only needed to show us once.

That Undying Pulse

If Jimmy never quite fit in at Trinity, it certainly wasn’t for lack of trying. Our school uniforms were tightly prescribed, except for a few precious degrees of play in the choice of footwear. Oxfords were standard. A boy might venture a timid rebellion by wearing Hush Puppies. Jimmy had come to us in shoes that were too pointy ("fence-climbers"), but soon enough switched to oxblood penny loafers like Ace’s, as mainstream prep as you could get.

His first year, he hung out as much with the sophomore class, where he really belonged, as with us silly freshmen. That class had a different feel from ours, too: we were always making fun of people, but they were truly hard and mean. The Norwood brothers had been left back a few times in their international odyssey, and were long, lean and nasty: they’d been practicing on each other all their lives. Their best friend Quiroga was the grinning half-pint son of a prominent minister, so you know he was bad news. Then there were the guys in Norwood’s band. Ted Waddell, the blond bass player, was actually a good guy, a friend of mine from J.V. basketball, and, later on, varsity baseball. This was the cool crowd, the group who took Jimmy in.

One night they were all over at Waddell’s, and they told Jimmy they’d heard he was a great drummer. They already had a drummer, of course; but bands are like chicks in that way, always hoping to trade up. Jimmy tried to beg off, but he was mistaken for modest until he flailed around for a few seconds.

Then from out of one distant room stormed a man dragging a woman by the hair. They were both yelling; then they disappeared into a different room. Old news to the others no doubt, but Jimmy turned to Ted: “is that your mother and father?” Ted admitted that it was. “Why don’t you do something?” Ted didn’t believe that there was anything he could do. “If that was my mother I’d beat the living shit out of the guy!”

* * *

Before the Christian holidays, the Episcopal pastor, Mr. Sox, served communion at morning chapel. Obviously, the Jewish kids didn’t go for it, but the various other Protestant denominations joined in if they wanted, and even some Catholic boys. My older neighbor Richard Domini, whom I’d followed down from 116th Street to Hunter and then to Trinity, often “received”, an ecumenical gesture that led my parents to arch their brows and twist their mouths. For our politically aware student (see below: “Brent”), an early morning dip in holy water might be a shock to the system. But for most of us chapel was just another period of daily drudgery to snore through, as bland as bio lab or the wafer itself.

Jimmy alone was thrown into a spiritual quandary: could he, as a Catholic, even attend? Some timely resolution, or absolution, was provided by his homeroom teacher, Frank Smith, a man who meant a lot to Jimmy, not least because as a fellow Catholic he granted the question its proper weight and led the boys to chapel nonetheless.

Frank Smith was both uniquely odd and altogether typical of Trinity’s masters. A small, rat-faced Englishman, white as whey, he kept house in a brownstone right next to the school, together with our even smaller French master, Paul Bolduc. Their academic credentials were impeccable: Oxford and the École Normale Superieure, respectively; and they both were invested body and soul in the life of the school. Monsieur Bolduc primped merrily down the halls in tight trousers and checkered waistcoat, his enormous bald head floating over a minuscule body. Mr. Smith, by contrast, garbed in black, moved with sure and stealthy tread. He could glide up behind a boy chattering all unawares. Then, with astonishing swiftness, he would pounce and drum hard upon the back of the stunned boy’s head, alternating fingertips and heel of the hand in an ambidextrous blur, barking out, “Hey, Jemerin, hey, hey!” for example, all the while.

Erhard, another of the brighter, chattier boys, ultimately became a marvelous Brazilian percussionist. At a party many long years later, he sat in with my jazz band: his hands, still bubbling with boyish life, caught up that undying pulse he bore deep within his spinal cord, and drove it down onto the head of the conga drum.

Jimmy wasn’t chatty in those days, and had remarkable peripheral vision, so he never learned to drum. In any case, he was Frank Smith’s particular protégé, as he was for a handful of other masters in the school, despite his anemic grades: his ineradicable respect for them was so different from the chip on the shoulder of the usual arrogant boy. Jimmy was a faithful believer, in his elders, in learning, in tradition, in Latin. And Frank Smith, who was a great Latin teacher, some years later returned the favor and redeemed that faith in him by appreciating and believing in Jim’s literary art.

Lust for Pollution

The summer before sophomore year, like every summer, was spent at the bungalow in Far Rockaway. In earlier years, it had been softball and swimming all day, every day. Now I nailed up over our backyard shed a plywood square with a bent hoop tilted off of it. Sometimes the usual crew of Jimmy Behr, Mickey Riley and Robert DiPrima would come over, and sometimes other, older, tougher kids from up the block, many of them a few months shy of shipping out to Vietnam, here at the very end of childhood packed pushing, grunting, sweating onto the small space of concrete. There was barely room for a foul-line jump shot, for a lefty hook from the side.

But it really didn’t matter what the court was like; none of us could play worth a damn, anyway. It wasn’t that kind of a neighborhood. The other Robert and I, by far the two youngest and only just starting to get gangly, turned out to be the best players, rising contrary to natural law up through the ranks. The eighteen-year-olds, man-muscled, were already too old to inject the new forms smooth and deep into their nervous systems, to shake loose their tight upper bodies, to become liquid.

Whenever I was alone, I would practice my Jimmy Carroll moves over and over, gazing off obliquely into nowhere, left wrist cocked and loaded. An old great-aunt from Sicily was staying with us that summer, mutely knitting bathing suits of heavy wool for my father, my uncle and me, and the non-stop echoing of the bouncing ball made her life miserable.

* * *

The school year began two weeks early because of football camp. Jimmy hadn’t played on the team the previous year, instead humbling me in touch football. A little while before arriving at our school, in summer league he had suffered a hairline fracture of his wrist tipping in a shot as it rattled around the rim. His finger had caught in the net cords, and for a long moment he hung there in a quarter-crucifixion.

In fact, a bit of trouble had come about over that injury. Brennan, the football coach, was the sort of drill sergeant who, playing to a captive audience of teenage boys, would wisecrack at some innocent, “If I want any shit out of you, I’ll squeeze your head!” This wit went over just fine with chesty Mike Byrne, who got off on stuffing a skinny kid into a laundry sack while he was asleep, or dangling him out over the subway tracks and then mocking his milquetoast oaths. Brennan with his buzz-cut had been waiting for the promised prodigy to show up and play quarterback, and insisted that he man up and join the team hurt or not, or else forfeit his scholarship.

But Trinity didn’t work that way. The new headmaster Richard Garten stepped in and told both Jimmy and the tight-lipped coach that boys were not given athletic scholarships, but scholarships based on need; this student had been admitted for his “personal qualities,” and could play any sport or not, as he chose.

One year later Brennan had got his quarterback at last, and his punter and place-kicker, too. And the flesh was willing and able: punts sailed high and deep, rocketing off with a gratifying boom; field goals traveled straight and true.

A football is a kind of missile-cum-gyroscope: if the spin is strong, the odd-shaped object stabilizes and cuts through the skies as far as you please. If not, feeling its inner balloon, it gets hammered at the line by billions of air molecules, then wobbles and flops. That was how the ball proceeded when thrown by Jedidiah Wormhoudt, the back-up quarterback, or by Naceo Giles or Mike Byrne, the hard-as-nails running backs, or by Wallach or me, the more or less adequate (respectively) receivers.

Jimmy let it go with a languid sinewy motion. Locked in by its spin, his ball rode heavy, in a tight spiral fifty yards or more, steady as a bullet train. You could hear it hissing as it came on.

And yet there was a puzzle to his play, a tentativeness and a hesitancy that let you know Jimmy enjoyed contact as little as anyone on the field, except maybe me. Not from fear of pain, as I saw it, but as if to say, ”Who are these people anyway, grabbing at me, granting themselves such familiarities? Noli me tangere." It was a dread of pollution, in a sport that requires lust for pollution in all its tactile forms from merger to murder, requires you to bathe in it. Jimmy dwelled at all times within a virtual space of zero contact, which could almost be excused as the protective privilege of the lone quarterback, if it hadn’t extended to other forms as well, to eye contact, verbal contact, emotional contact, everything needed in a leader. Brennan couldn't complain, but he wasn’t pleased.

The Equalizer

Evenings, after the drills and the scrimmages and the punishing runs in the late summer heat, we would hang out all together, minus the coaches, around the ping-pong table and the soda machine. The endless round-robin ping-pong tournament brought us together as equals for a change and free of tension. We were all at about the same level, fair to middling. Any second stringer, who could barely move his spindly limbs in the clumsy cleats and pads, and who slogged through pass routes like a sleep-walking gooney bird, could pop the light white ball, the equalizer, back at Naceo, the god.

At the green table each boy had his personal style. Mine was colorless, but correct. Nace picked the ball up early off the bounce, flipping over his wrist. One silent, burly tackle returned everything from an unchanging, immobile backhand, like a wall. He in particular spurred Jimmy to exaggerated robotic imitation and hoots of laughter; he found the reduction of man to machine to be at the root of all humor.

Jimmy’s own style was the polar opposite of this. Improvising on every shot, he appeared to be playing a game of court tennis in which the elements had gone psychedelically out of scale, everything tiny except the player, who swooped from left to right along the baseline like Rocket Rod Laver, hitting deep topspin-heavy forehands and looping backhands, until he could rush the minuscule net for a slam.

Towards the end of week one, the coaches told us that we would be practicing only a half-day on Saturday, and on Sunday not at all. Nonetheless, we were confined to quarters out there on Long Island: no catching the train into the city! Jimmy had been saying privately that he would get permission to leave, but that he was going back in no matter what. He told us that he wanted to see his girlfriend, but he told Brennan that he had a doctor’s appointment to get his hamstring checked, the one that had shut down his freshman basketball season soon after that brilliant debut. Many years later he told me that it was really the doctor after all, but even now I’m not sure. He always did have more ideas in his head than there were facts in the world to match up with them.

However it was, in this instance he had no doctor’s note or parent’s note, so Brennan said no, and, missing no chance at an ultimatum, added, “you go and you’re gone for good.” For a day or two each of them reiterated separately to the team his non-negotiable position: to Jimmy, Brennan remained at least civil, while to the coach, Jimmy was his usual respectful self. But at noon on Saturday he showed no hesitancy, catching the first thing smoking back to Manhattan. Deferential, calm disobedience, come what may.

When the prodigal returned on Sunday evening, sure enough, Brennan threw him off the team, zero tolerance, even though now Jimmy did have a covering note. Coach could finally breathe easy after bringing a threat to fulfillment. The payback to Brennan was his being stuck for the year with Jed Wormhoudt’s knuckleballs and assorted shanking punters,

I asked off the squad soon afterwards, to Brennan’s relief and mine, but was prevailed upon to help out as team manager. Despite my loathing for the passive role and a sport with so little play in it, I played along out of shame. Side by side for a season, coach and manager sat and watched the boys at their grim labors. Since they couldn’t take to the air, they were forced to grind it out on the ground. That pedestrian approach proved serviceable on occasion, but unfailingly plug-ugly.

Chains of Logic

The culture of Trinity in those days was still hard-core British boarding school: all boys, queer masters, uniforms, forms instead of grades, Anglican hymns, corporal punishment, unremitting competition for marks. Eight times a year, the better students had their grades posted in the school paper, and at the end of the year the top three in each form received large cash prizes. By a few years afterwards all that had been washed away, of course; and I liked to imagine that our class had played some part in taking the starch out of the old place.

In his one year at Rice High School, Jimmy had been a very good student, and, before that, in grammar school had been skipped a grade. But even though he had been made to repeat freshman year when he came to Trinity, he found hinself now in an altogether different league, one much softer in sports, much harder in academics. Except for geometry, there were faster and slower tracks in all the courses; geometry we all had to take equally, and the classes were assigned at random. It was the only class that Jimmy and I had together in four years. He sat on my right, and my best friend Nicky sat on my left.

Nicky Jemerin had been, without serious competition, the most mocked and bullied boy in the school for the previous three years. The youngest in the class by six months (I was number two), he had wide hips and narrow shoulders, his hair, glasses, clothes, tie and book-bag were in perpetual dismal disarray, and he was freakishly smart. Glad troops of tormentors lay in wait for him, and chased him down the underground corridors, calling out “We like Nicky! Nicky’s our friend!” They would jump up and down on his book-bag until it burst, and gleefully scatter his books and papers. He was not impressed with the sincerity of their chant.

Nicky and I were math-crazy for a few years, with the tense enthusiasm of early adolescent rivals, playing math games, reading math books, multiplying large numbers in our heads, memorizing logarithmic tables and perfect squares. These borderline autistic antics were certainly not Jimmy’s preferred pass-times, nor did the natural bent of his intellect incline in that direction.

Jimmy did try a bit, for a while. Our teacher, Sorrel Paskin, a thin, burning young man masked behind heavy black-framed glasses and a goatee, took his work greatly to heart. He openly wooed me as his favorite (as later on, to his increasing frustration, in Physics and Philosophy). He granted a sour, grudging regard to Nicky, and set himself to hector and humiliate Jimmy to the limit of his power.

Those good grades before Trinity testified to Jimmy’s intelligence, not to his attention, nor to his habits. In fact, he used to space out so consistently in grammar school that his parents had been told to take him to a neurologist, to find out if he had those brief seizures that are called “absences” (rhymes with “La France”). All tests negative. Jimmy’s daydreams were, in plain English, absences, and rhymed with nothing. Given his basic predisposition, keeping up with a tightly sequenced course like geometry, in which every proof depends on what came just before, is very nearly a doomed enterprise. Like a conveyor belt, once it gets away from you, it’s gone. It didn’t help that Jimmy never did his homework.

An autocratic master can hold a class at his mercy, but the converse is also true. Paskin was playing to a tough room. Maybe he was betting that some of the more studious boys would join in the disdain and the disparagement: many of the masters were control freaks and bullies, and some needy students could usually be cowed or jollied into playing along, especially if the target was an unpopular boy. Nothing of the sort happened here. Instead, the class as a whole felt empathic distress, which we were powerless to act upon, as Jimmy was belabored with chains of logic, sarcastic questions that he obviously couldn’t answer.

By the middle of the year, Nicky and I had finished the course, and were sent wtih enormous textbooks to an empty lab to do advanced work on our own. No work was done. Not long afterwards Erhard was sent to join us. So we never got to see the specifics of how Jimmy’s ordeal played out. But I figure the result must have been the same, over and over: there were no variables in the equation.

In his body, and in some parts of his mind, Jimmy was already a man. Yet in the classroom he had to submit to a fool, which was visibly hard for him, despite the ingrained deferential attitude of a trained Catholic boy. His voice might strain, but it wouldn’t break. He was years too old to cry. But his hopeful attitude towards school, and even his sense of himself, began to change from that time forward. And, in somewhat similar ways, I think the same was true for many of us.

The Heyday of the Biplane

A fair and rosy dawn broke over the basketball season of our sophomore year. Naceo Giles, then a senior, brought a flawless game: even if he really had only one move, a quick jump shot off the dribble, it was unerring and unstoppable from around the hoop out nearly to the corners. Explosive and strong, he anchored the middle on defense, cleared the boards and led the fast break. Norwood, the lanky junior forward with a sweet shot and a sour disposition, could also score inside and out. Along with them came a decidedly mixed bag of flawed juniors and sophomores up from the last year’s junior varsity, with some height, some speed, some shooting. Maybe Mr. Maxim could concoct something.

All summer Jimmy had been racing up and down the broiling asphalt courts of Inwood and Harlem. Our Ivy League was a joke, and he needed to keep sharp by getting up and running with some serious competition. When he wasn’t playing, he was working out with ankle weights, determined to take his game literally to the next level. Two years before in the halls of Rice he had tried to leave them strapped on all day, until one puzzled Brother had asked him what those funny lumps were just above his feet, and instructed him to remove them. This year at age sixteen his body was ready to turn those thick legs to good account.

“About every great athlete there is something freakish.” So says Cousy. With Jimmy, it was his eyes and his legs. When he had the ball, each eye, watery blue, seemed to be gazing off in its own direction, seeing …what? …a cutting teammate, an inner vision? He had trained himself to attend to the periphery of his visual field, so in fact he was staring at nothing, lulling the defender in a shell game of false focus and intent, until suddenly the vague eyes riveted upon the goal.

Jimmy’s legs were remarkably massive, almost one and the same circumference from hip to ankle. When he stood next to Naceo, the contrast was extreme: the long-limbed Apollo, perfectly proportioned, black skin shiny with sweat, and the strawberry blond, with his slim top and thick bottom, as if some mad doctor had bolted him together at the waist.

Their games, too, were a study in contrasts. Nace’s was smooth, minimalist, no motion wasted, nothing given away. Even so, in his handle, in how he finished around the rim, you could read the limits of his coordination. His patented move was the “stop and pop”, an ebony cobra striking clock-steady to a single stark rhythm: one, two, three; shoot, arc, swish. Two points. Jimmy hooted and called him “Mr. Machine,” imitated his move with exaggerated robot rigidity. Jimmy’s own nickname at Rice had been “Automatic”, bestowed on him by Dean “the Dream” Meminger, and he was mighty proud of it; but the epithet referred to the inevitable result of his shot, not to the jitterbug quantum dance that led up to it.

More than anything, he rejoiced in the moves he could toss off, forms given freely as a gift to the game. The trick was to do it differently each time, what had proved unstoppable before serving as a ruse to misdirect attention, to goof, to play. And now he had a whole new set of moves to try, because now he could fly.

But there was a catch. The city game was changing with the city, becoming blacker, quicker, slicker, taking to the air. And, for a number of reasons - racism perhaps, the dominance of towering Lew Alcindor at Power Memorial, certainly the envy of the old for the young - the old men who made the rules now changed the rules and banned dunking. Their rationale was that the dunk was a kind of offensive goal-tend, already against the spirit of the rules, and that young players should be learning different shots around the basket anyway. This attempt to stopper the surge of youth soon enough proved as futile as dictating to the rising tide. Still, for a few years the swell had to flow around the obstacle until it ultimately swept the rule away.

What happened meanwhile was this: on the playgrounds always, and in the gyms before the game and at halftime, whenever and wherever the men with the whistles weren’t in charge, every proud boy who could, would rise up and put his fresh-grown gifts on display. And during the game, once or twice, both on offense and on defense, a statement would be made, and Wham! Yesss! someone would slam it home or pin one to the board, whistles be damned.

Our lay-up lines before the start of play were the setting for the most spectacular aerial show since the heyday of the biplane. Jimmy had worked up a set of basic moves, and enough variations and improvisations on them to make every day new. He could run in on a slant, explode upwards, and rattle the rim with the thunderous force of his jam, or finger-roll it in delicately, barely stirring the net. He would come straight down the lane and hurl a two-hand tomahawk slam from near the elbows, or rotate in mid-air and flick it down backwards over his head, moving just the tips of eight fingers. Gliding along the baseline, he might toss the ball up high off the board, catch it one-handed a foot above the rim, and ram it home with authority. I never saw him miss one.

On The Field of Arms

The only really remarkable player in the league besides Naceo and Jimmy was Jerry Armfield, the biggest man in the league by far at six-foot-six, built like Superman, and able to pluck quarters from the top of the backboard. His game was all in the paint, based on his unmatchable strength and athleticism; he got his points on power dunks, short lefty jumpers, and an amazing ability to guide teammates’ shots into the basket, which is illegal but was never called. On defense he blocked everything put up inside the foul line. Again, goal-tending, never called: these refs had never seen anything like it before. Our inside players, stork-thin Norwood and even Naceo, could do very little to check Armfield once he had the ball in the post, and were forced to take their own shots a few feet farther out than they wanted.

Jimmy was in shooting range as soon as he left the locker room, but he loved to drive to the hoop and create, to do the sky dance. Also, he loved a challenge. To counter Armfield’s soaring blocks, he had developed a made-to-measure lay-up in which the basketball was put up high and straight on the board with tons of spin on it, like a bowling ball, so that it caromed off into the hoop at an extreme angle. Check and counter-check: your move, fish. Jerry and Nace and Jimmy relished playing each other; there was always a festival atmosphere when we met, and everybody got up for the games.

Our team made it out to Stonybrook about halfway through the season. After Armfield, their number-two man was a middle-sized, mildly talented, light-skinned black guy with the improbable name of Samson. As we filed through the home locker room on the way to the gym, he called out to Jimmy:

“You’ve got fat legs, Carroll.”

Without missing a beat, Jimmy shot back, “these fat legs’ll be jumping over you!”

It was the quickness of the comeback that struck me, the ready rhythm of the word-stresses, which he’d picked up from the black kids. Not long before, in practice, I’d slipped over to trap him from the blind side; turning to find me there, he bounced the ball just a little harder, so I swiped at it and caught air. How had he done it? There was no time.

Now, as the three sure stars were chatting familiarly before the game, Jimmy was telling Jerry to check this out, that Trinity’s lay-up lines would feature three dunkers to their one, since, besides Nace, Norwood could dunk now, too. All nodded at each other appreciatively, and Norwood moved a step closer. Then each team went to its side of the court, and Jimmy put on his spectacular high-flying pre-game show.

His inspiration carried over to the game itself, not always a given. He was a blur, and everything he threw up there was going in: tip-ins as he went sailing out of bounds, ridiculous racing floaters, deep corner jumpers, running hook shots, side-show set-shot bombs from near mid-court. Unconscious! The three other sophomores on our team were sitting together, shaking our heads, watching stunned from the bench. I turned to Ace and David Lynn-Bruce:

“Jimmy’s on fire. He’s playing like he’s already in college.“

“Are you kidding, man?” Lynn-Bruce snorted, “Jimmy’s playing like a pro.”

Towards the end of the game, he had the ball off on the right wing, yo-yoing it, waiting as the side cleared out for him. Suddenly he took that lightning jab-step past his man and drove the middle, right at the giant Armfield protecting the rim. Anything fancy would have been summarily swatted into the seats, but he went up strong, rocketing up off the run, pumping his big round legs and then tucking them up under him. Far above the hoop the two left hands, white and black, nearly met.

“You ain’t getting this one, motherfucker!” (Much later, he told me that was what he was saying in his head.)

Jimmy rose a little higher. Then he threw it down over Armfield’s stretching fingers, threw it straight down with no arc (and yet you could see something delicate in the curve of the arm), hooked it hard into the hoop from two feet away: so it was a dunk, a monster dunk, and yet it wasn’t, because of the distance. So it was good! You had to laugh out loud!

* * *

It did seem that those two were frozen there, stilled at the peak of their jump, bodies posed like painted cherubs on a cloud; but it must have been over in an instant. You can’t really hang in the air. It is only in the eye and brain that we are caught and held, as that moment has been held. Of course even in here time never stops working and wearing away. I set up the frames and run them back. Wherever I notice that the outlines of Armfield and Carroll high over the rim have begun to blur and fade, I go over them again.

A Self-Wounding

Between sophomore and junior years, Maxim had put together a team for the summer league, made up of some Trinity boys and the better players from other Ivy League schools. Even with Naceo, Jimmy and Jerry Armfield getting their share of points, the squad couldn’t match up with the stronger teams. Players like Andy Lowry, whom Maxim was grooming to play point-guard, would just get laughed off the court.

Back in our weak league, he was merely mediocre. We actually had three quick and skilled point-guards in Jimmy, Bobby, and Marc, who could penetrate and pass or shoot, but Maxim’s vision of a half-court offense started with the obligatory pass from the head of the key over to a shooter on the wing, so the ideal point guard in his system was a dullard who took no risks, a punch-card.

Naceo had won the league Most Valuable Player award the year before, beating out Jerry Armfield, and had taken his twenty-five points a game, his strength and his serenity off to Colgate. At college, he developed an outside game, to Jimmy’s appreciative surprise introducing a degree of suppleness into the mechanism, until racist rifle shots at him from across the campus led him to re-order his priorities altogether.

Junior year had a certain sourness to it; it always does. I’d been ill over the summer - almost died, in fact (Fourth of July cold cuts leading to a burst appendix), and I stayed skeletal and drained of life for a year. A couple of new kids had been brought in to beef up our anemic sports teams. Buddies from the mean streets of the Lower East Side, Bobby Antin and Marc Blane struck faculty and students with horrified fascination: this rough, two-headed beast with loosened tie slouching down our halls surely portended the imminent fall of civilization! Meanwhile, their raw energy and uninhibited aggression, along with the tight spirals of Steve Harris, a sophomore quarterback, raised the football team up to respectability and better.

Those two were hard cases. Bobby was always looking for an angle, always had an eye on the goal. Not big or fast, he was sneaky-fast, shifty enough to be an all-star halfback. His looks fooled you: squat body, baby face, tousled blond hair. Girls loved him. There was one trick he used to do at parties, where he’d snatch a quarter out of your palm, then give you a chance to try it on him. He made quite a bit of money that way: guys get frustrated, and they don’t add up the quarters. On the court, he needed zero room to get off his shot.

Marc didn’t sport quite the same sheep’s clothing; the wolf showed in his eyes and grin. He kept coming at you. Block his shot and he’d get the ball right back, put it up in your face again. He and Bobby meshed very tightly together and got the job done. While Jimmy and his side-kick Lynn-Bruce would lift anything that wasn’t nailed down, long fingers coaxing shy casmere sweaters and loose bills out of lockers half-shut, Marc and Bobby were more systematic. If they cleaned out a coat closet at, say, a girls’-school mixer, many an Upper East Side deb would be tottering home that night in heels, unhorsed, in her clutch bag nothing but lipstick.

* * *

There was a scout named Mike who steered good ballplayers to Trinity. This man had a terrible weakness for teenage boys, and a nose for those who were not just hungry, but father hungry. He could speak to the cold-eyed realist as well: besides the school interview, the boy was also presented with a brand new pair of Converse All-Star sneakers! Partly as a consequence of this arrangement, the cream of our prep school team was some pretty rough trade. But cute. Did Maxim know, or suspect something? After one game, when Mike came into the locker room, Marc called out from the shower, “Hey Mike, come on in! The water’s fine!” His hard laughter boomed off the tile. I never saw the always gentlemanly Maxim look so uncomfortable.

What did Mike’s presence mean to the boys? Marc loved to tease Craig Walker, the big golden boy from the class below us, that Mike had a crush on him. This was more than likely true, and Craig didn’t find it funny at all. Ace tittered incredulously when Mike said that Jimmy and another younger boy named Topper looked alike, “if you imagined them in profile in the nude”. Marc was thick-skinned enough to laugh off just about anything. Bobby was more vulnerable, but kept his unease always under tight wraps.

Jimmy had given them both a head’s-up before their deal went down. Mike had brought the two recruits to a game of ours the year before, and they were considerably impressed with Nace and especially with Jimmy: his teammates cleared out the side, and let him take his man one-on-one. Afterwards Jimmy pulled Bobby and Marc aside and laid out for them what the real story was: one blow-job, no big deal, just close your eyes and pretend that it’s Joey Heatherton.

But as he told it to me over the years, the boy in the story became less and less of a cool customer. In situations like this, a sense of control is everything. Jimmy himself at the age of fourteen had been caught off guard. Mike had been giving him the hard sell on the ritzy school, then brought him over to his apartment “to try on the new uniform, white and gold.” Gradually working his way down, adjusting the uniform like a custom tailor, he ran his fingers over the satiny cloth. “It fits perfectly.” Mike’s elderly mother was in the next room; for a moment she poked her head in and shook it slowly, sadly, pursing her lips and furrowing her brow. Then she withdrew, and Mike, down on his knees now, resumed fingering the perfect shorts.

“Oh,” he said, “look! It came out!”

* * *

We had no center, no one to play the post underneath. The one big man Mike had steered to us couldn’t pass the entrance exam (written section). Even though there were no true centers in our league anymore except for a six-foot seven-inch stringbean at Saint Paul’s, still somebody had to get rebounds, score some points inside, and defend the middle. Norwood had turned nineteen before the season started, and was ineligible to play in league games. He was furious at Maxim for ratting him out and essentially ruining his senior year. Screwed him for tennis, too, where he and Ace had expected to duel it out for number one. By now, his main interest was his band, anyway: he had a right bitchin' take on Mick Jagger doing "Heart of Stone", all full lips and hollow hips, minus of course the fag dancing. He brought a lot of attitude to practice, and he and Marc Blane, another hothead, almost came to blows.

In league games, our fifth starter was either Eric Gardner, who had been the star of our junior varsity, or Craig Walker, the precocious sophomore. They were both tall and good shooters, but not fast or aggressive enough.

I had seen a lot of playing time the year before, but now after my surgery I was as weak and thin as a noodle, and slid down the bench. Ace was tiny, and Lynn-Bruce, all elbows and knees, was so uncoordinated you weren’t safe standing next to him on the lay-up line. Marc Blane, in his blunt way, said that until he met him he thought all black guys could play basketball. Marc had been the back-up point-guard on an all-black team in a nearly all-black league, and the coach would put him in if the team was starting to speed out of control. “Get in there,” he would say, “and slow those niggers down.” If Marc were ever foolish enough to take a shot among those long leapers, the ball would be swatted back at him so fast he’d have to duck to escape decapitation.

But at Trinity, Marc and Bobby and Jimmy were expected to score all the points. Our best bet was the fast break: get the rebound somehow, or, better yet, steal the ball, and run. Marc and Bobby, who were smaller, played up front and broke first. Jimmy had to hang back for the rebound and then feed the ball up to them, so they got easy points off of his efforts. And he could be sure that if he passed the ball to Bobby, it wouldn’t be coming back.

The team finished the season just above five hundred on quickness and shooting alone. And we voted for slow-poke Andy Lowry as our Most Valuable Player, which was some sort of symbolic gesture, a joke at our own expense, a self-wounding.

Skip One Space Down

One morning just before chapel Jimmy was there in front of the great wooden doors, handing around to selected teachers and students a slim pamphlet run off on Brent’s radical press, with “Organic Trains” mimeographed on the front.

There are few things in life as disheartening as student poetry. Humbled by experience, adults maintain a discreet silence, except when they fall in love and consider themselves ill-used. If they should chance upon a school magazine from their own student days long past and encounter poems of theirs in it, shuddering they avert the eyes and destroy it as quickly as they can.

But this cascade of language of Jimmy’s wasn’t student poetry. It was poetry, plain and simple: you couldn’t make heads or tails of it. The words and images tumbled across the page in great profusion; it wasn’t obvious why they veered off one way rather than another. A line might break in the middle of a thought, and it wasn’t clear how it knew just then to skip one space down.

The whole contraption seemed like dreams blasted out of a cannon, utterance blown all to confetti.

What was this stuff? Where did it come from? We had all seen Jimmy every day – well, nearly – and these organic trains had pulled in from another time zone.

* * *

Very Astute, Chief

Senior year the players just didn’t care for each other all that much. The way it turned out left a bad taste for over forty years, at least for Marc and Bobby, not only because we failed to win the championship by a single point, but because we failed to come together as a team.

Jimmy had never taken winning and losing deeply to heart. After his freshman team at Rice lost in the finals to a Power Memorial team that they had dominated during the regular season, he simply said “we played a bad game,” and never looked back. Now he had lost interest even in his own performance.

Remarkably for an eighteen-year old, he was in physical decline He would start a drive to the basket and leave the ball behind: Ace, smiling, said, “Jimmy forgot something.” He couldn’t dunk anymore. Jump shots clanked off the front rim. Over Christmas vacation he put on nearly twenty pounds; when the team photos for the yearbook arrived, he looked at himself and saw Wayne Embry, the notoriously beefy and earth-bound center for Cincinnati. Out of vanity he starved off the weight, but he never tried to get in shape.

None of this seemed to bother him; his mind was evidently elsewhere. A sports editorial in our school paper put it suggestively: “Jim Carroll, supposed to be the hot-shot of the league this year, appears to be on Cloud Nine.” The drug reference was annoying; in fact, he wasn’t playing stoned. The heart of the matter was that Jimmy had moved on. In his wise-guy style he might say that the Joe Jockstrap routine was getting old. That one drew more scouts than girls, that’s for sure.

As we moved through our teens, the cultural icons changed from Mickey Mantle, the Oklahoma Strongboy, to Jimi Hendrix, who trumped all epithets, beggared all description. The torch of leadership was passed from hand to hand at a dizzying pace, as leaders were often literally killed off before our eyes. Some kids took to politics, with the prospect of being drafted as a major motivator. Mostly we oriented to what we thought was cool, what chilled out the panic, and what we hoped would impress the girls.

Back in Catholic school days, Jimmy had written for the newspaper, remarking of a runner who won several races at a track meet, “he took home everything but the floorboards.” He remained prouder of that clever turn of phrase, and of the supervising Brother’s approval, than of any acrobatic throw-down. And after all, what flight of the body could compete with the free play of the mind? It wasn’t drugs so much as writing that wooed Jimmy away from basketball.

This devaluing of the game, the season and the team didn’t sit well with Marc and Bobby. Bobby especially was both dependent on Jimmy’s performance to ensure team success, and in personal rivalry against it. Soon after he arrived in school, he had announced that Jimmy had great talent but too many moves that went nowhere. Scully, the assistant coach, nodded, seconding this assessment, since he and Jimmy had detested each other at first sight. All of Bobby’s moves led directly to the basket.

Face to face in the locker room, Bobby and Jimmy would bray at each other like idiots with cleft palates: “nyong nyong nyong nyong nyong!” Jimmy dubbed Bobby “pizza face” for his acne. The two stars sniped at each other in practice.

“At least I pass the ball sometimes.”

“That’s because you’ve got no shot.”

This last said to Jimmy, who a year before would drain jumpers from any distance. Some days he still could. If he invited me to a game of “Around the World”, I’d rattle in a couple of shots and he’d sink them all. Other days he looked bored, or dazed, or gone somewhere out to lunch, and the ball had grown balky and unfamiliar in his hands.

For the odd game he might wake up and play for a while against an opponent he respected, for example Collegiate, with knife-like Perkins and the explosive Dover, whose sneakers often greeted me at eye level as I reached for a rebound. Or on a whim, Jimmy might trail someone on a breakaway, perhaps some rising phenom with an unearned reputation, and pin the unlucky lay-up to the glass. At McBurney, which had a shooter’s gym, warm and tight, he’d still pour in the points. After our last game there, we filed downstairs past the still, shining pool, eyeing it thirstily, until Jimmy stripped and led us in laughing, showing us the way for once, like a white-tailed deer in the woods.

* * *

Dudley Maxim was a very passive coach; easy-going would be a kinder way of putting it. Ace nicknamed him “Lloyd Bridges” for his close resemblance to the star of “Sea Hunt”, and he might as well have been underwater for all the guidance he gave us. He spoke no words of encouragement, taught us no set plays. Nominally, each scorer had a “special”: when his number was called, he’d get the ball, make his pet move, and shoot. Of course, if no play was called, this is what would happen anyway. Once Maxim tried to design a “post special” for our non-existent post player. Jimmy cracked that it sounded like a cereal, and the play died there. Maxim coached me in two sports for six seasons, and never said more to me than “Get in there, Catman.”

He was a responsible and trustworthy man, but quietly devaluing from time to time. On one occasion, when Jimmy scored, twisting up in traffic underneath, and I wondered aloud how he managed to do it, Maxim answered, “they don’t expect him to shoot with his left hand.” You’d think they would have noticed. If Jimmy spun the ball on his finger, later Maxim would show us a much less impressive trick which he claimed was harder. Yet he admitted to Ace that Jimmy was the most talented player he had ever coached. Maybe a stronger, more confident voice would have held Jimmy’s attention, kept him with us.

As a freshman, Jimmy had been the archetypal fiery redhead. If he drove the baseline and was shoved out of bounds, fists would fly. Now at worst he seemed mildly annoyed, usually at Bobby. The scouts had stopped coming. He might make one or two pretty plays a game.

After one home game, two players on the other team were talking in the showers.

“Carroll’s washed up. Antin’s the man now.”

But the other one replied:

“Not at all! Did you see that full-court bounce pass Carroll threw?”

At that point, Jimmy walked in:

“That’s very astute, chief.” He was pleased with that pass through traffic, and with its due recognition, even though Craig had blown the lay-up. As for the rest of the game, he could care less.

Just Us

It seemed as though at Trinity everyone peaked and then burned out. Ace, the best athlete and the class leader in the early grades, and Jono and Woody, the best students, had long ago gone on cruise control. I had peaked sophomore year, about when Jimmy was soaring over Armfield; now teachers were starting to complain. But Marc and Bobby were still fresh, still brought the heat.

Against St. Paul’s, Bobby’s goal was to outscore Koop, the gangly center who was his main rival for the league’s Most Valuable Player. Marc got into it with one of their guards, who was riding him with the old “I-fucked-your-girlfriend-in-Puerto-Rico-over-winter-break” routine. Amazingly, in this case it was true! At the end of the game, Maxim told Marc to go over and shake the guy’s hand. Walking over with big strides, Marc reached out his right hand, put him in a headlock with his left, and, in workman-like fashion, set in to punching him in the face.

* * *

Drugs were about the only thing that brought our stars together. In general they were not stoned on the court. Jimmy wrote about one exception, when he and Marc and Bobby and a ne’er-do-well second-time sophomore named Steve Harris, were stumbling around on barbiturates, having picked the wrong pill. Steve, a funny fat boy who played quarterback on the football team and catcher on the baseball team,

was falling all over himself on the lay-up lines, and drew most of Maxim’s attention.

Now Steve sat on the floor, tears of laughter streaming down his cheeks. Evidently, throwing the ball over the backboard and then executing a belly flop to the deck struck him as hilarious. I tried to cover for him, explaining to Maxim that Steve hadn’t gotten any sleep last night. “Stayed up studying,” I added, which was pretty hilarious in itself. Marc tells me that Maxim cried after that game - teared up, really - but I didn’t see it.

* * *

Remarkably, we went into our final game at Riverdale tied with them for the league lead. Even the Cat had made a contribution. All season as the punch-card point guard I dutifully delivered the ball to our scorers, never missed a shot (never took a shot), and made accurate outlet passes after a rebound. From under the rim, with one step I could dunk a soccer ball. To block a shot, you set up false expectations: back alone defending a two-on-one break, I figured they were in trouble, not me.

That day we had let the greyhounds out, racing up and down the court to a ten-point lead in the second half. Then the pressure got to us, and our game began to unravel. Jimmy was pretty much alone on the boards against a gang of bruisers, taking a pounding from the Riverdale muscle men. He’d get the rebound, but our offense had stalled, and the momentum was swinging against us. I could see the fear in our faces. Twice I ran the ball up the left sideline and banked in jumpers, hoping to kick-start the engine and open up some options for our real scorers. Maxim must have covered his eyes when I let fly, but luck was with me.

Nothing came of it. We couldn’t hold on, and Riverdale slid past us by a point for the game and the title. Marc and Bobby blamed it on Jimmy, or on our lack of a big man. They still do. Really it was just us.

The next day the team got together in the gym at lunchtime. Again, I got lucky twice. Ace had bet me five dollars I wouldn’t be able to dunk by the end of the season: I could only half-sneak it over with my fingertips, but he called it even. And Topper, my self-appointed official statistician, indulgently rounded my points-per-game average up to two, based on my breakout six of the last game. Then we voted for our team M.V.P. Maxim said we had three deserving candidates. I tried to throw it to Marc, the least obvious choice, because he was the most open, and because I didn’t want to choose Bobby over Jimmy. Bobby won, deservedly, and he won the league scoring title and M.V.P. award as well.

Our Better Foot

Chilly spring arrived. At pitchers-and-catchers sessions in the gym, Jimmy and Bobby and Craig and I took turns throwing to Steve Harris. When I affirmed with my usual foolishness that we all threw about equally hard, Steve shot that notion down immediately: “Are you kidding? Jimmy throws much faster.”

We held our preseason practices upstate at Trinity-Pauling, and Jimmy broke out his old mitt, with “Wabbit” stenciled on it, one more time. He claimed that the girls had nicknamed him that for his liveliness and for his Bugs Bunny wit, but it must be admitted that his “r’s” were a bit Elmer Fuddish. He’d been a strikeout king in Little League, and had been recruited by Power Memorial Academy as much for baseball as for basketball. Maxim said he had the strongest arm in the league as a freshman; in practice it had been intimidating to stand in against the hard curve veering down and in, the fastball, half-seen, exploding up and away.

But for various reasons Jimmy had long ago lost interest in baseball. For one thing, he had developed pinpoint control pitching at the shorter Little League distance, practicing against a pitch-back at an upstate summer home. Then he stopped going there, instead staying in the city for the summer basketball leagues, and he never developed that same confidence at the standard distance. For a perfectionist used to getting strikeouts, walks were intolerable. And, besides, by then baseball wasn’t cool anymore: basketball had the right inner music, the right hip talk. Following Ace, he had tried out tennis the last two springs. Now back on the diamond, he quickly grew bored with the erratic hodge-podge of his own pitches, with his unsteady aim. The next day he wasn’t there.

* * *

That year for the first time the school was trying out a Senior Project, in which seniors could work on one large-scale project at home for the last quarter of the year. Eager beavers and deadbeats alike leapt at the chance. I was the only senior who declined, much to the annoyance of the administration: “You, of all boys!” In forlorn, echoing classrooms, I sat alone with the teacher, two convicts on a chain.

In the empty afternoons, Craig and Steve and Topper and I led the perennial cellar-dweller baseball team through a sunless season, with game scores more like football scores: 18-2, 24-0, 26-2. And once a week, for morning chapel, the other seniors reappeared, even Jimmy, sometimes.

Key seniors still kept their pet publications going: the yearbook, The Trinity Times, the literary magazine. By now, when Jimmy’s work appeared there, it might still seem vast and outlandish, but at least it had a history with us. We could see that “Organic Trains” of a year before, however good it was, was homemade. But one day the Headmaster announced in chapel that Jim Carroll’s poems had been published in real magazines (though we’d never heard of The Paris Review), and had won a poetry prize out there in the adult world.

* * *

The final year limped to its conclusion. Boys got into their chosen colleges or didn’t, and friendships ended in anticipation. Brent was taking his verbal gifts and SNCC bona fides off to Chicago. Ace, despite his mediocre grades, was headed to Columbia; the tennis helped, and maybe he gave them a Renoir. For Jimmy too, Columbia beckoned. Basketball schools like Marquette and South Carolina had lost interest, but Jimmy’s new pals on the poetry scene, big guns like Allen Ginsberg, John Ashbery, and Kenneth Koch, floated the word that this high school senior was the best young poet in the country. But by now Jimmy had worn his welcome at Trinity so thin you could read “Fuck You, A Magazine of The Arts” through it. He had bitten the hand that fed him, and the headmaster Garten wasn’t about to go to bat for him one-handed. When he spoke to the admissions director there, he told him that Jim Carroll was the biggest druggie in the school. The application sank like a stone, and Jimmy was left high and dry.

Graduation came, none too soon, on a hot day in June. Inside the gym, parents milled about. Garten began his speech with a quote from Dickens: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” Uncle Hamlet (my namesake) the politician parodied his see-saw cadences. My father drily noted his hypercorrect phrase, “We must all put our better foot forward.” My mother and aunts clucked and shushed under fresh permanents. Half present at best, standing unnaturally straight, I mouthed a speech about the essence of Trinity being friendship, unwilling to acknowledge the place’s existence in any other way. Brent was agitated: he had tried to convince Jimmy to at least pick up his diploma and walk with us, but he blew it off, M.I.A. as usual, fully absent.

Jokeology Whiz

Jimmy did go to college after all, for a couple of months. Wagner was the City University branch out on Staten Island, and a long ferry ride farther downtown than any poet since Whitman wanted to go. It had open admissions, which meant they had to take you. He even wandered over to the gym for basketball tryouts, who knows why? He was put on the second team, with the other walk-ons, and in the scrimmage he got hot and hit a million shots. Even though he didn’t show up for the rest of the week, his name was posted with the others on the board: he’d made the team. Maybe someone remembered who he used to be. A few weeks later, he left school for good.

Not long afterwards, I left college too. Things weren’t working out. The people struck me as “Joe College/Gee Whiz” kind of guys. I wasn’t going to lectures, wasn’t writing the papers, stayed up on the telephone, loitered all night in my bathrobe at the Hayes-Bickford across Mass Ave. Exams didn’t go well. At semester break I came home to an exiguous apartment; my parents had downsized immediately after I left. My long bed was stuffed behind the upright in a corner off the kitchen, like when I was thirteen. Most days were spent at Nicky’s new Park Avenue apartment, the size of a smallish theme park, working out the White Album on the baby grand.

Late one night, after a date, I kept on walking downtown, tossing Moll Flanders up onto an awning: I just couldn’t get into it. I went looking for Jimmy down at Max’s Kansas City, but he wasn’t there, and nobody could tell me how to find him. Somehow, I did find him, though. He was staying on the couch at Bill Berkson’s apartment on 57th Street. Bill was a poet, and a Trinity boy from ten years earlier, very generous; but obviously Jimmy couldn’t ask him to put me up, too.

When Nicky heard I wasn’t going back to school, he decided to stick with me, and pick up on our music again. He’d changed a lot from the plump-bottomed schoolboy who had been hunted by the baying throng; over the summer in L.A., he’d lost weight, got cool, put on boots and bellbottoms. At Cornell, he was doing fine, with a girlfriend, and playing in a band with Huey Lewis and a real blues cat named Ken, so he gave up something.

His parents had held onto their old penthouse apartment on 98th Street, and they let us move in, with two cheap guitars, one amplifier, and one record player. Besides that, there were two beds, a couch, a kitchen table and chairs. My aunts donated a black-and-white portable TV, and my parents passed along a big green armchair that couldn’t fit in their new place. In our old railroad flat in East Harlem, it had been a guest bed, that and an old army cot, for when my mother’s sisters slept over. We used to push it behind a screen in the parlor where my parents slept on the convertible couch. Well, now the green armchair served as the guest bed again, because two weeks after it arrived, Jimmy asked to move in, and lived in that chair for the next three years.

* * *

La Vie Boheme

During those years, Jim had three homes and three lives: uptown, downtown, and the chair. Uptown was Mount Sinai Hospital’s methadone clinic, situated just two blocks north of us. It was also the junkie and criminal scene, which stretched from the blocks around the clinic north to the ragged edges of Harlem. Jimmy knew most of the regulars, so he took it personally when he was robbed at knife or gunpoint, as we all routinely were. I myself, as a point of etiquette, might decline to shake a robber’s hand, even when he assured me the hold-up was nothing personal. But Jimmy, deeply offended, came steaming upstairs, grabbed a steak knife, and set off in hot pursuit of his five dollars, the standard amount we carried to reduce the likelihood of getting offed by a disappointed junkie. I trailed Jim down the streets for a while, until he ran out of rage; the perpetrators had melted back into the darkening city.

Uptown was also Jimmy’s motley crew of salt-and-pepper street people. He showed up one afternoon with a five-by-five smiley black woman, and announced, “This is Precious,” crowing delightedly at the phrase. Or we might find ourselves standing on the corner with a Latino dude, a self-proclaimed “agent,” who was making those clucking, sucking noises at every appetizing female who passed. At the heart of that crew was Eddie, later saluted in Jimmy’s one hit song, ‘People Who Died’ (title from a Ted Berrigan poem, by the way), and who became a 98th Street regular.

"A sudden luminescent memory of Eddie." Smallish, sallow, vulpine, with greaser hair and blanched, acne-scarred cheeks, he was at once streetwise hoodlum and romantic innocent. In style he was 1950’s all the way like most working class New Yorkers, but he allowed Jimmy to lead him into the hip world of the arts. When there was a poetry reading he’d come along for the ride and get something out of it.

He and Jimmy riffed well off each other. If Eddie expressed puzzlement over the shenanigans of some scam-artist, Jimmy would say, “You ought to understand why he did that. You’re a criminal,” in a matter of fact tone, as one to another.

Stepping out through the lobby, gussied up in a skin-tight diaphanous shirt, corduroy bells, and Captain America boots, Jimmy would pause at the mirror to pat his bangs and fluff out his flowing orange hair in back, “trailing clouds of glory like the sun.” Eddie turned around and waited:

“I swear, Jimmy, you’re worse than a chick! I’ve never seen you pass a mirror without checking yourself out in it. You never miss once.”

The day Jimmy proudly brought home the prints of the cover for his first book of poetry, with the little photo of himself from a few months before nested in the midst of the Larry Rivers collage, Eddie noted, “you look good there. You still had that young face.”

As smooth and funny as Eddie was straight, that’s how nasty he could turn on one of his pill-popper binges. He’d show up at the apartment after a few weeks missing, with one black eye, and stitched and patched here and there. Then we knew he’d been on goofballs, marching up and down the streets all night, cursing and challenging everybody he met. Eventually, he got this throat cut from calling out the black man. But for a time, he did give it his best shot to join the peace and love parade: he was cheering as loud as any of us when Dylan showed up unannounced at the Concert for Bangladesh.

A few years later, when that crew had scattered – Jimmy to Bolinas, me to Paris, Eager to Austin, and Eddie to the loathed wastelands of Rego Park – we exchanged desolate letters, and I translated Eddie’s raw poems into bookish French and mailed them back*. But beyond art are demons dwelling too deep within for words to conjure. The night the Fillmore East was closing down, they broadcast the farewell show on the radio. Eddie had come over tripping, and was easily persuaded that the maudlin valedictions were announcing the end of the world. Eager, the one who had first welcomed Jimmy onto the Trinity bus, was in the room listening too, and, as an unkind joke, fostered the notion.

*Yes, I still have them, but this should go in the appendix, where Jimmy asks if I do, then guesses wrong. Too late now!

The Myth Underneath

Farthest uptown lay Inwood and Jimmy’s parents. The donning of the black woolen watch cap, the ritual hiding of the hair, announced a jittery visit to the Carroll’s. One might have thought their son’s wayward locks to be the least of their worries, but no doubt they served as a red flag heralding all the rest. Style is the man as he wishes to be.

One day Jimmy returned from a visit to his parents to pick up his welfare check, hurt that his mother had said he was getting too old to wear jeans. For her generation, blue jeans were "dungarees", the uniform of ragged boys or farmers. With that vision, she saw through the new fashion for denim to the myth underneath: “We are forever as pure and as impure as children.” And Jimmy rightly understood his mother to be declaring his childhood over, which for an artist is death.

Tiny Poets

Heading downtown meant “making the scene”. Actually, there were several overlapping scenes: the poetry scene around St. Mark’s, dirty and brotherly and poor; the arts scene in the West Village and SoHo, where dreams of fame and fortune yet lived on and the memory of movements that mattered was still fresh. There was no music scene, despite Max’s. The Village coffeehouses, The Wha, The Bitter End, Gerdie’s Folk City, The Café Bizarre, were all dying tourist traps, and the jazz clubs were for rich old people. It was too late for Doo-wop and Brill Building Pop, too early for rap: rock and the blues were Southern blooms that never took root in New York City. Andy Warhol’s “Factory” was a scene unto itself: crossing over boundaries, he “presented” the Velvet Underground, and produced some campy and halfway commercial films, impassively asking right at the faked climax “how’s my technique?”

There existed at that time a family often referred to as the New York Poets, a group of men, and a few women, who always had each others' backs. They collaborated spasmodically on poetry projects, they wrote each other’s ridiculously effusive jacket blurbs, they passed around Pepsis, pills and East Village crash pads. Their subject matter and their language was the stuff and breath of everyday life. And they revelled in all sorts of iconoclastic pranks, taking sounds for sense, like mistranslating Reverdy's revered "Corps et Biens" as "Corpse and Beans", or calling ordinary words into "question" by putting them inside quotation marks. One critic dismissed them for this supposed triviality as “the tiny poets”, and Jimmy in particular loved that appellation.

Jimmy found the whole concept of “the small” endlessly funny. When he was a high school freshman ballplayer, he had once been described in a newspaper article, by the most minuscule of misprints, as “Jim Carroll, a 6” guard.” Noticing this, a friend remarked to him, “Oh, so you’re one of those quick little guys, huh?” Jimmy couldn’t stop laughing. Now his poems easily made room for tiny gestures, tiny turkeys, tiny ambulances and tiny circuses.

Light as their touch was on the page, the “tiny poets” were dead serious about their craft: as a community, they constituted an ideal university for each other, frank, endless and free. Each poet was both master and disciple.

The best friend on the poetry scene was Ted Berrigan. Not just Jimmy’s best friend - the best friend, period. Ask anyone. Ted had come to New York as part of the Tulsa gang after a stretch in Korea: he was fifteen years older than Jimmy, and played big brother to every poet born in the forties and fifties. “Tambourine Life” was his early hit poem, the one that got anthologized. His poetry was very good, maybe not great, but it continued to develop lifelong. He had a lot of self-confidence, so he was open, not defensive at all.

Ted was the only poet Jimmy saw fit to invite up to our place. He brought in a presence much bigger than his body, with his intense moon face completely ringed by bushy brown hair and beard, no mustache, a strong walk, a voice high and clear. Talk flowed very easily around him, about poetry, about music, about the state of the world. The song “Galveston” came on the radio:

“Hey, I like that. So that’s the second song by Glen Campbell I like. “Wichita Lineman” is a great song.”

These people, the master/disciple poets, healed Jim, they and the discipline of writing. Plus he got plenty of rest.

Orpheus in the Underworld

Every so often, Jimmy would wake up infused with manic energy. Preening in his trendiest clothes, as if he were going to audition for “Hair, The Rock Musical”, he would borrow ten bucks and catch a cab downtown to make as big a splash on the scene as he could. He might be gone for hours or days. When he reappeared, visibly the worse for wear, he would spin off a number of marginally plausible tales of the rich and famous. After meeting John Lennon at a cocktail party, Jimmy, unimpressed, said he looked like a City College student. He returned from a long weekend sporting the aforementioned Captain America boots, claiming he’d been in London: who knows?

But the weirdest fable was this: Jimmy, a tough guy who was afraid to ride in the elevator, no less the subway, donned his magical watch cap to hide his hair, presented himself as his older brother, who was ill with the flu, and spent the day filling in for him, driving a train down the mazy black tunnels under the city. Such were the stories he told, anyway. Then he would sink back into his chair.

On our way to a poetry reading at St. Mark’s church, we got out of the subway at Astor Place (sensibly, he wouldn’t ride the subway alone, not knowing who might be driving). Ten feet out the door of a bodega where we’d stopped to get sodas, Jimmy started giggling, and pulled out from under his jacket a long plastic pack of assorted cold cuts. This in no way represented food. For as long as we could remember, none of us had eaten anything but Frosted Flakes, though Nicky had set his hair on fire once trying to fry hamburgers. These cold cuts would have administered a fatal shock to the system. Overruled but unashamed, he snuck them back into the bodega, and we made our way down to the reading

* * *

Only once, on Fifth Avenue, did we see the sequined side of the arts scene, when Jimmy, in his lone venture as a promoter, booked us to play at a resplendent private party. Some big names were there: Allen Ginsberg ironically parroted back “Mister Ginsberg!” when Nicky addressed him so formally. He was socially flirtatious, but he wasn’t trying to score. His sexual tastes at that point were heading down towards pure pedophilia, where they settled. As Jimmy said ruefully at age twenty-one, “I think even I’m too old for Allen now.” Sad but true. A few years later, when I caught his act at Sanders Theater, he was sitting on stage in swami position with a blissed out smile smeared all over his face like jelly, playing his squeeze box and chanting about sucking little boy cock.

According to Jimmy, the ne-plus-ultra Velvets had blasted off towards fame eight years before from this very same million-dollar bash. It was not to be our launching pad, however. Our night vision was better adapted to the seedy obscurity of a hitter’s bar in Union City, New Jersey, “the town that time forgot,” than to a fete for glitterati on the Upper East Side. Granted, this was a mellower scene than the Army base on Staten island where the both the P.A. and the guitar amp blew and the drummer didn’t show and I was down among the shaved recruits hollering myself hoarse and stomping out the beat for dear life, just as scenes go. But the soldiers were much better dancers; they really got down into it.

The Memory of Appetite

When he wasn’t headed uptown or hepped up and heading out, Jimmy was on the nod in the big green armchair, the little television set up in front of him, his typewriter and papers strewn on the floor and window sill beside him. In the pre-dawn, when Nicky and I dragged in from Port Authority bus terminal after a gig in Jersey, he would be sweetly sleeping, bathed in snowy light and softly hissing white noise. Soon enough Farmers' Almanac, Sunrise Semester, game shows, soap operas, sitcoms and riveting prime-time dramas would flicker past his heavy-lidded, all-accepting blue eyes. He sometimes speculated that his next book, after “Living at The Movies”, then in press, would be called “Living at The Television.” Nicky and I would stop practicing scales long enough to gather round for the reruns of “Lost in Space”. We all hooted at the mincing, smirking Doctor Smith, then returned to our respective trances.

At odd moments, in the midst of a chorus run through for the fiftieth time, we’d be brought up short by the smell of smoke and rush out into the living room. A cigarette smolders bright orange, burrowing into the blackened arm of the chair.

“Wake up, Jimmy, wake up! You’re on fire!”

Unconscious.

We scramble to smother and drown the infant blaze. Jimmy, taken by surprise, pats at it drowsily, apologetic.

“Oh my God,” he drawls, "I must have fallen asleep. Jesus, I’m sorry. Uh, let me get some water.”

He rouses himself, heads to the kitchen. There, waylaid by the memory of appetite, he forages, takes down the box of Frosted Flakes. Setting his mouth level with the brimming bowl, he clutches the spoon in his fist and sweeps the soggy pap in. He replaces the carton of milk, careful to leave two or three drops for the house. Now he drifts back to his chair, ever-forgiving, willing with its wounded arms to embrace him once more. In an interval of alertness, for the hundredth time Jimmy resumes editing his diaries.

* * *

Except for the Dixie cups of methadone that Jimmy consumed in bulk, there was no drug use in that time and place. I recognize that this claim runs counter to all likelihood and credibility. Nonetheless it’s true. Eager had left Wesleyan, and was working as a jeweler on St. Mark’s Place. He moved in too, so there were four phthisic longhairs polluting the premises, twenty-five feet and five hundred pounds of rag and bone, not counting the cat. Then there were the day students, like Eddie and Billy, a teen-aged musician who lived downstairs. And yet not a joint was rolled, not a pill was popped, not a powder was snorted or shot up there in three years. Without a word spoken, largely without any awareness, those few rooms had been declared an asylum, a safe haven from the world. Meanwhile the bright open face of the decade darkened and turned away.

One day we received a surprise visit from two old classmates who were still at college, Jono at Wesleyan and Woody at Princeton, and as soon as they walked in the door they asked if we had any dope. This was puzzling: “dope” meant heroin, but apparently in college parlance it meant grass. Either way, the embarrassing answer was certainly not what it would have been at college. They didn’t linger long.

The landlord was hoping to throw us out and raise the rent, so he had set Benjy, a massive autistic boy from the building, to sniff around at our door for the smell of smoke, denoting toking heads. Nicky’s father told us that Benjy had raised some suspicions, but he must have been misled by the smell of the burning chair.

Bop Heads

Billy the musician was a force. A better guitarist than any of us even though he was only a junior in high school, he was just making the transition from rock and blues to jazz, which was much harder to hear and to play. He had all the lines and lineages down, who had taught whom all the way back to King Oliver. Many of the giants were still at their peak, like Monk and Mingus and Miles; Trane and Dolphy and Wes Montgomery had just died.

Every afternoon at four there came a series of sharp raps on the door, and Billy would be there bouncing impatiently on the balls of his feet, a fresh album held out in front of him like a sacred tablet. We’d lean forward, gathered around the chintzy hifi, lifting the needle on and off, clicking the turntable down to half-speed, trying to figure out the bop heads and then blow over the changes. Billy had put together a jazz combo with a wispy reedman named Raymond, and they sometimes asked me to sit in on bass.

Always ready on the turntable sat either the Charlie Parker or the Charlie Christian album that Eager had brought over with him: these were our Bible. "You can play any note on any chord," saith the prophet. My old upright, cryptically smiling with its hundred teeth, was hauled over from my parents’. I picked up a few books on theory, and began to pore over the arcane codes. At The Café Bizarre in the Village, and in divers louche dives in Transfer Station, NJ, I was still belting out “The Night Life” and moanin’ to move some alcohol; but at home it was all about breaking down bebop. “Wait, was that a tritone sub on a major seven flat-five?” Now I talked that kind of crazeology, one more cat chasin’ the Bird.

Meanwhile, next door in the spacious and sunny living room, Jimmy remained serenely uninvolved with any of this. He worshipped Dylan, of course, for his gnomic lyrics and messianic charisma, but he actually only listened to two albums, over and over, warbling along at the top of his lungs, gestures and all. One, unsurprisingly, was “The Velvet Underground Live at Max’s Kansas City.” The words “sweet Jane!” run howling through my head to this day. The other one was the original Broadway cast recording of “Hair”. Even back then no one would be caught dead at that show except sixty-year old tourists from Iowa. Corn-fed. So how could slim Jim, who was down with Kerouac and Burroughs, and hip to the tips of his fingers, throw himself whole-heartedly into a song (and dance!) about the dawning of the Age of Aquarius or, tossing his head, celebrate the wonder and the beauty of his hair? Inwood provincialism?

It’s true that Jim hoped to be somehow included in the show. He knew Jerry Ragni, one of the lyricists, and Middle America might even have caught a glimpse of him onstage in his bright birthday suit, waving a flower at the back of the hippie chorus, if he had only been willing, as Jerry suggested, to first get on the bed and, you know, wrestle around a little bit. Try on the uniform. But here Jimmy drew the line, and his roommates were for the time being the only audience for his musical efforts. As he remarked to me with reluctant wisdom, ”It’s hard to be straight in the arts.”

Not that anyone wanted to appear completely straight. On the downtown scene, especially, the style was fem all the way. The Factory Girls were, at the moment of truth, boys. Jimmy did a good job of goofing on the swish repartee: after a few days at Andy’s, he’d catch a cab back uptown with the drag voices and poses polished to a T. And he had managed to melt off most of his muscle. But even under the frou-frou and frippery of the age, he couldn’t hide the big bones and pug face of a brash Irish kid.

Devereux, his arch and leggy girlfriend from The Professional Children’s School, endured the transformations as long as she could, considering that Jimmy’s sole dependable appetites were for fame and narcotics. She almost never showed up at our apartment, and certainly never sat down. And yet we’d just received a visit from Suzy, the Jemerin’s ancient maid, who shuffled over from time to time to trouble our dust and discomfit the vermin!

Then one afternoon, there filtered in from the living room the sounds of sobbing. Jimmy was on the telephone pleading with Devereux not to leave him (an approach which, to my knowledge, has never been known to succeed). After a few moments, I closed the door again, and focused once more on my scales and arpeggios. The sounds in the background rose and fell for quite awhile.

Nothing was ever said. That night Jimmy snoozed as snugly as ever, and soon enough was stepping out with a pair of new girlfriends: Rise, a hamische little woman who did sit down, and Ruth, an older woman who, Jimmy was pleased to report, had been DeKooning’s girlfriend twenty years before, immortalized in the painting “Ruth’s Zowee.” But during all those years, the woman he rejoiced in, and his true friend, was Clarisse Rivers.

Jim used to babysit for Clarisse and her husband Larry, the famous painter. After an odyssey not at all uncommon for his generation (cf., Cage, Rauschenberg, Cheever, Fellini), Larry had determined to his own satisfaction that he was, after all, gay. Clarisse was young, pretty and charming, living in a world of compulsive, obligatory sex. It struck both her and Jimmy as wonderful, in its full sense, that they never slept together. Jimmy once or twice suggested that I get to know her more intimately - "she likes young guys with long hair” - but I altogether lacked the courage. If it had come to pass, it would have been his second turn as my promoter.

The Gift

It was a mystery to me how Jim at age twenty could be tight with cats like Larry Rivers and Allen Ginsberg, on the one hand, and still celebrate cynical and derivative trash like “Hair”. Why not demurely refuse to wrestle with John Cage and Merce Cunningham, instead of with a clown like Jerome Ragni? Or play it coy with Leonard Bernstein, at least! How could Jimmy fail to hear real music of any kind whatsoever, from Bach to Robert Johnson, from Duke to the Beatles to James Brown, and still write poems so supple in rhythm, so rich in resonance, so purely musical? A first line like:

“Her body dances death dances in the prell light” is itself a mesmerizing dance.

Listen to these few first lines, taken almost at random from his early poetry, if you can, simply as sounds:

Blue poles (well) on the beach
The accumulation of reefs
That is the way you are, always given
I was a young pilot in World War I, remember
We’ll stay until ice begins
Today the room is filled with tomorrows
Wet leaves along the threshold of the midday
An odyssey of error humbles the cosmopolitan sense

Read out loud, they settle in the ear as lush and clean as they sit on the page.

The last line of the short poem “How Relaxed” is a single sound, set apart as lone syllable, word, verse, stanza, paragraph and Zen counterweight to the rest of the poem:

green

Of course, vision is called into play as well. “Green” is both less than and more than an image. As rule, you can’t quite picture a color without picturing a colored something. Here, islanded on the white page, the word resists the object, and suggests a color field of indeterminate dimension. At the same time it is a sly witticism: first you are “teeing off”, then lost in space, then you hit the “green.”

Yet, figuratively speaking, the visuals in this case are “musical”, too, in the way that a work by Pollock or Bernini may be called musical, depending for its impact on a virtuoso balancing of forms. Finally, even the joke is in some sense “musical”, in that it is based on shifting levels of conceptualization rather than on the content per se. As Lenny Bruce said, “I tell my jokes to crack up the band.”

Here is the whole poem:

How Relaxed

The way a man sits
all day on a manhole cover
contemplating a rubber stamp,
until a Volkswagen brushes by
on your arm
and you’re left with an idea
of, say, a man washing windows
who would rather be teeing off
somewhere in Rye, N.Y.
green

This poem and those first lines all come from Living at The Movies, a collection of the poetry Jimmy wrote in the green and black chair. The voice is young, in the sense of lyrically yearning, yet not derivative, despite the clear debts to Frank O’Hara and John Ashberry, Jimmy’s main early models. No wonder the older poets gaped, then went giddy with praise: Rimbaud reincarnate walks among us! The lines burst forth fully formed, like the quick buds of a wild rose. Jimmy read a lot of poetry, but he didn’t learn to be a poet by logging the prescribed ten thousand hours towards an arduous mastery of the craft.

A package arrives. You open it. It remains a mystery.

A Cartoon

You can't make money on free verse. Prose is a poet’s day job, and Jimmy set to work with a will. Diary notes from Jimmy’s early teens were fried and refried. When they were crisp and done, he served them up.

“It’s good,” I reported tepidly, “but it’s a cartoon.” I was hoping for shading, for nuance.

He didn’t seem terribly put out by my lack of enthusiasm.

“I want it to be a cartoon.”

That seemed a cold move. What about the reader? What about me? I didn’t want to be that broken boy in the book. Krazy Kat was crazed, after all, by an unfulfilled hunger for connection. Throw me a bone here, not a brick!

Now I see that Jimmy made the harder, purer choice, the modern choice, in keeping the work superficial all the way down, in using the techniques of silkscreen, not of sfumatura. You can turn the damn stories any way you want, stare at any surface, and the surface stares blankly back at you. The narrative “I”, forced upon you, is trapped amid the distorting mirrors of a fun house. We have been condemned to the Hell of the Self, and the stories are funny as Hell. The narrator’s consciousness suggests no way out, offers no relief, only more reflections. The Basketball Diaries are deeply alienating and viscerally depressing, comedy as tragedy minus the hope.

A Sample

Sooner or later somebody had to pull the plug on that slow-motion carousel. One evening, as per my usual M.O., there came a bolt from the blues. Nicky was out with a snaky dancer we’d met on a bus, who had the band back her in her promo skin-flick. Jimmy was on the scene somewhere, and Eager wasn’t. I emptied my drawer of $150, five weeks pay, and caught the first coach to the West Coast, riding man's best friend the Dawg as far as it would go. Outside of Cleveland, I dropped a postcard behind me, along with my long hair and beard: off in the hinterland, a pizzicato of strings on the jaw could be the overture to some serious chin music. Four days later, I was thumbing down through Topanga Canyon on my way to bust up swimming pools in Pasadena.

Late spring was a beautiful time to hitchhike back east, through the grape fields and the desert and the plains. Bikers are fine locally, but truckers are best for the long haul. When I got to New York, my father started talking to me again, after three years. Jimmy passed along some books to get my gears going: Henry Miller and Max Beerbohm. We walked together to the Central Park courts behind the museum, and ran in some pick-up games, a pair of old hands, Stretch and Rusty.

Jimmy’s lip was still limber enough. A bossy teammate, who didn’t view him through the magnifying lens of memory, tried to direct our play. Jimmy instantly saddled him with the moniker of “Coach”, and rode him a while. With me, he was gentler: “You didn’t play bad, Robert, you just didn’t hit your shot.”

Billy had shipped off to school in September. First George and then Nicky decided to go back too, but Nicky dropped acid on his visit to Ithaca, definitively picking the wrong pill. He made a quick detour and ended up relaxing for a spell at Mount Sinai Hospital, where his father was Chief of Surgery (as it happened, he'd just cut out my gallbladder). Jimmy helped advise the frightened old man on how to settle his son with just the right mixes and doses. After he got out, Nicky always seemed to be a little taller, lighter somehow, as if he were floating one invisible millimeter off the ground.

By early winter, the dreaming poet had the whole warm and silent place to himself. Even the little old t.v. set was gone, poor thing: one night I had an Elvis moment - the man could put some serious hurt on the furniture - and blew it clean away. Still, it practically took a crowbar for the Jemerins to get Jimmy out. A return to the crash-pad life-style held no attractions. Poverty doesn’t pay, and the city gets cold.

* * *

For that stretch, and from now on, I was living alone off campus. On breaks and long weekends, I’d drive my father’s old white Chevy down to New York, using downhill momentum to get uphill. Jimmy and I had both woken up from a long sleep, and now we actually saw each other sometimes. You know, almost anything can be beautiful. Bowling, for instance: the soft leather shoes, that polyurethane shine on the pine floorboards, the crack of the Bauxite ball against the pins - have you noticed how it all comes rushing up against your senses?

On a sunny day in the spring, I picked Jim up and we headed out to visit Woody. Not that we were ever that close, but he and I had played soccer as seniors, and, once, a little music together. As I drove along, Jimmy was chuckling, doodling a face with a moustache above the Playmate’s blond bush.

When we pulled in to Princeton, the scene we encountered was typical campus grunge. A few hours later, we wind up in this hazy room. A dealer is passing around a chunk of hash. Who the fuck are all these people? Now we’re walking back to the car … it must be parked somewhere around here … then the hairy little guy comes booking down the path after us all hot for his missing merchandise. Sure enough, my light-fingered friend pocketed it. Guess it’s time for the usual drawling apologies: “Oh yeah, yeah, I have it right here. I thought it was a sample.” Yeah, right. Try that in the bodega, Jimbo. And yet, in all fairness, are we really talking “chunk” here? Wasn’t it more of a chip, really, and little enough hospitality after a two-hour drive?

Junkie!

During the summers, I’d mix it up: some time in Italy or France, some time studying the physics of the cue ball, some time getting blown up by organic chemistry, some time running on the Central Park courts, some time with Marc searching for shapes in the Chinatown markets, some time hitching through the Deep South out to visit Eager in Texas. He was a night watchman at the University, and, as usual, into numberless oddball antics. Just then, we were collaborating on cut-up prose poems - unreadable nonsense, really. I’d stayed over with him many a weekend in his commune at college, with wrestlers, dancers, hyperrealists and their babies, and I still wasn’t sure if he was C.I.A. or I.R.A., agent or counter-agent.

After double-time and then some, college was history at last. Even a blind man wanders out of the woods eventually. One evening, I caught the #5 train from Pelham Parkway near the medical school, down to Astor Place for a reading at St. Mark’s. I was bringing along my wife, new at the time, to meet my old friend, in from California, land of rebirth. Jim was already up and gripping the lectern, still decked out in high hippie regalia, smiling and swaying from inner energy. Then he threw himself into his work.

My wife leaned towards me. “Why didn’t you tell me he was beautiful?” Her voice was even flutier than usual, with a catch in it, like Dolphy. Hmm. Striking, perhaps, but my father was beautiful.

Jim read some of his newer stuff, prose poems mostly. The Book of Nods was about to come out. Back at 98th Street, he’d told me that would be his next book, and some of the pieces were already written there. What he resonated with most personally were writers like Baudelaire, Rimbaud, de Quincy, and Burroughs in his straight prose like Junkie! Check out his “The 103rd Street Boys.” You could see some of it as romanticizing addiction, but Jim never did that. Addiction was a medical fact for him, and not fun at all.

Even when he’d been a tough street kid, and, later, gulping down enough methadone to stun a rutting bull, he still suffered from break-through anxiety. He used to go see a psychiatrist over at Metropolitan Hospital, who dished out the Valium; but nobody, I think, saw the whole person. Grass and especially acid pushed Jimmy way over in the wrong direction. He once said to me, “I’ve been high so long, I don’t know what it is to be straight anymore.” In fact, he was no hippie: he really couldn’t get high. Now, in Bolinas, he was gradually ratcheting down the methadone dose. He was almost straight.

Either way, straight or self-medicated, for better and for worse, he was married to his metabolism. As an artist, he was going to turn his anxiety and his addiction to good account.

Unless you’ve cooked one up, you don’t know how nearly impossible it is to write prose poems based on dreams or visions. You have to exert extreme formal control over the subjective material or it devolves into incoherent episodes, a blurry slideshow of one man’s particularly dull vacation. So don’t use your eyes; use your ears. And it helps to have good models: Rimbaud walks among us! These “nods” are not actually nods, of course, anymore than “the diaries” are actual diaries. They are prose poems. Art is really just more art. Jim toiled and fussed over the “nods” for a decade and a half, like a prisoner in stir building a tiny golden model of St. Peter’s out of his own painfully plucked hairs.

Here are the first and last sentences of the “nod” called “Watching the Schoolyard:”

It is a decade now past my decadence.

Morning has never meant so much as her Christian smile, the perfect weight of her small, wet fingers, as light like crushed glass strains through their crevices.

No Room at All

As it happened, Bobby and Marc were reborn out in California, too. They each had experienced a fair amount of success. Sitting behind brainy Brent at the Regents’ Scholarship Exam, they both earned full scholarships to the State University at Cortland. Once there, Bobby kept honing and polishing his smart, limited game, and by sophomore year he was burying jumpers from the top of the key, from the corners, from everywhere. He then earned a scholarship to Cornell to study hospital management, and ended up in L.A. making a small fortune as C.E.O. of a chain of pet hospitals. The laws are looser for animals.

By the time I went to see him in Marina del Rey, he had just bought himself a great big ungainly house near the water, in a half-built new community of many such houses. He owned the lot next door, too, and on it he’d laid down a basketball court made of woven two-tone purple plastic, easy on the knees. Every Saturday at noon Bobby had his employees over, a bunch of mostly black kids half his age, and ran a full court with them.

This particular morning we looked over a scrapbook of articles celebrating his athletic triumphs of thirty years before, and I helped his son Devon do his homework. I could see that they loved each other, in the American style. Not long before, by request, Bobby had drizzled ten thousand dollars over the bed of the child, who slept that night clutching twenties. Now he had got them tickets to play in a celebrity golf tournment in the desert, among the stars and superstars: "All you have to do, Devon, is please do your homework." And the proud boy, honor-bound as Achilles, reluctantly told his father to go fuck himself.

As Bobby and I shot around before the game, he noted that I still jumped when I shot. I asked him how else can you make some room to get your shot off. He said he didn’t need room to get his shot off. I brought up Jimmy.

“He was dirty,” said Bobby.

I didn’t see what he meant.

“Not physically. As a person.”

Guys started showing up, bouncing through their moves on the springy weave. My presence triggered thoughts of our other old teammates. “I’ve got a friend in New York,” he told one young man, “and all he does every day is get stoned and work out all day.” Marc’s sculpture evidently hadn’t made much of an impression on Bobby. He himself had never nursed artistic pretensions: on the subway back from a game in high school, hearing I played the guitar, he said, “all I can do with my hands is jerk off.” Then as now, this was a base slander: he had recently played in a charity game with other high rollers and celebrities, and had stolen the ball from Magic Johnson, not once, but twice.

Then our game got under way. Bobby could still play. My wife, new at the time, went for a long bike ride along the shore, past Venice and Santa Monica, all the way to Malibu. When she resurfaced, Bobby’s brother Artie said to her, “You just missed your husband blocking a shot.” I lay doggo a moment, blocked another one on the perimeter, and fed the ball up ahead to Bobby. He drove left, stopped short with his man right there on him, and banked in the game-winner. It was true; he’d needed no room at all.

One Part Publicity Stunt

Marc, a more complex person than Bobby, had a more complex relationship with Jimmy lifelong, well beyond rivalry and dislike. In his first game with the basketball team, Marc scored twenty points despite playing in a corset of pads. He’d been racked up hard in the final football game, hammered in the kidneys to where he was pissing blood at halftime. Brennan had played him all through the second half anyway. Now on the hardwood a few weeks later, he threw away an inbounds pass in the last seconds, and we lost to those scumbags at Horace Mann yet again. Jimmy seized that early opportunity to brand him “Clutch” once and for all, an inside joke meaning not the expected “he-who-comes-through-in-the-clutch,” but “he-who-clutches-up,” a choker. Marc could take a joke, but that was a rough welcome.

When Marc went off to Cortland, he discovered that he had a talent and a passion for the visual arts, and he gave up the ambition of becoming a basketball referee. Large abstract paintings won him a transfer to Cooper Union, where he became the star student in the sculpture department. Cooper in those radical years was the place to be. The faculty insisted that concept and construction be realized with equal rigor. Art is historical process. The goal of the artist is to make himself a part of the public discourse, and the objectification of the artist’s inner world is merely a means to this end.

Marc’s first show out of art school had an object-display component and a performance component. Leading a bacchic parade of friends, he danced through the streets of SoHo wearing ring shoes, satin shorts and boxing gloves, in role as The Art Champ, calling out other artists, living and dead, and challenging them to a mano-a-mano. Stenciled on his sequined robe were the names of prior champs: Leo DaVinci, Big Mike Angelo, and so on. The outfit and the act were convincing. Every day, when he wasn’t pounding out the sculpture, Marc was working out. The whole routine, one part confrontational happening, one part publicity stunt, was only loosely related to the particular character of the objects in the show, shiny little Surrealist dramas in ceramic. It was very much in character for Marc.

Jimmy, who was already in with the in-crowd of painters and sculptors, mostly through Larry Rivers, always maintained that this debut was perceived as crude and heavy-handed buffoonery, and had cast Marc in concrete as an outsider. No one ever accused Marc of understatement, it’s true; but his failure to make it big was, as the critics say, “overdetermined”. The shows were invariably favorably reviewed: the individual pieces were provocative, very smart, disturbingly beautiful in design and execution. But for a curator they were hard to categorize: Pop, Minimalism, or Concept Art? And in which room, exactly, would the discerning private collector show off to best effect the oversized steel switchblades, the money-sperm, the artillery shells and the charred urban ruins?

And yet Marc turned out to be very successful as a businessman. His grandfather had run games and numbers in New York and Miami Beach: as a small boy, Marc announced to the indulgent regulars that he wanted to grow up to be a “conniver”. Possessed of, or by, infinite energy, he could build anything from scratch to fine finish, including brownstone apartments and a colossal house in the tropics; he could grow anything in bulk, from herb and spice to coconut palm; and he managed to corner a market shipping fine sand across the country that funded many an art project. Shuttling back and forth between Phoenix and Mexico, he may well have been mistaken for a merchant of other goods. For a few years, he and Eager were partners in mail orders, shipping boxes nested inside boxes. When Marc was farming in Big Sur, he used to jump in his truck and visit Jimmy in Bolinas, ride with him to the methadone clinic, run with the dogs along the beach, listen to him work out songs with the band:

“This one should sound like ‘Brown Sugar’.”

Jimmy slowly fingers an E-chord. All nod uneasily. The musicians thrash and grind.

“Umm, that sounds too much like ‘Brown Sugar’.”

* * *

A couple of years farther along, when Marc was back living on East Broadway, he’d call me up whenever the band rode into town, and we’d catch the show. From a balcony box high above, we watched Jimmy point and posture in a bright white light. During the guitar solos, he kneeled off at the side smoking, his back to the crowd; he appeared to be eerily at ease - that is to say, as nervous as ever. He turned againt to face us.

“I hear the voices,” he called out, “I hear the voices!” He wasn’t quite singing, he wasn’t rock-star screaming, but there was an unnatural urgency in his throat. “I hear the voices!” Afterwards, on the sidewalk outside, I wondered what most of the audience made of this: who was really out there with him? Marc said that they all heard their own kinds of voices.

The next day we paid Jim a visit at his apartment. As always, he was intoxicated with his art: within a few minutes we were in headphones, transported to grind and thrash city, bearing mute witness to the apotheosis of the E-chord. Shortly, as we were walking out the door, Jimmy pointed to a basketball with a hat on, sitting alertly on the bed. He laughed his falsetto laugh.

“I put it there to watch the bed when I thought Rosemary was having an affair.”

I believe that unblinking guardian of the conjugal bed, bless him, was the most conventional thing about their marriage.

Oh, Look. It Came Out!

When Jim’s rock career had wound down, and he was back in New York for good, he braved the subway and came up to the Bronx for a visit, to have dinner with me “en famille” in my home, the one and only occasion when we didn’t get together in Manhattan. I wanted him to see my life in the round, to meet my wife, new at the time, and my small daughters. The girls trooped in to observe Papa’s friend. The friend observed them in turn. “Robert, I knew somehow that you wouldn’t talk baby talk to them.” He was back in the world of the word, and it turned out he was going to give a reading soon.

A few years earlier, Ted Berrigan had died; Jim still couldn’t believe he was gone. He had contributed a poem to a memorial volume from the scattered troops to the fallen campaigner.

Calm under Fire

We die in different directions
At the same pace we die
As the virtue of structure and grace
As a challenge to distance
We die, you and I, with our hands
Outreached, by chance, one night each
Toward the other. In a corner.
In a cellar. With jars and webs,
A continent apart, we die
As submission to an unfinished heart

You can see what the poem is doing formally, using line breaks as the main tool to recast sing-song end rhymes as internal music and to create a resonant web of meaning, since each “we die” hooks onto the phrase on either side. And to say that we die in different directions at the same pace is a counter-intuitive and penetrating way of graphing the life course, which I don’t recall our studying in tenth grade geometry.

But what is most striking is the stoic calm of the voice as it acknowledges our common death, absolutely, without any hedging or verb tense. Not “you died” or “he died”, but “we die”. This serenity in sorrow was at the core of Jim’s character. It was also the fruit of the unshatterable community Ted helped forge.

* * *

A few weeks later I was sitting at a table at The Bitter End Café. Does anybody really enjoy poetry readings? Be honest. The reactions of the audience feel random, or forced and false, or polite or impolite. In any case the human element tends to mess with your concentration. Jim was reading that night along with the novelist Richard Price. You've probably come across some of Price’s books, or at least seen the movies: the language is very strong, street lingo ricocheting white-hot off the page. His works tonight weren't noirs, though: mostly childhood memories, very evocative, not contrived at all. Leave it to the unconscious to knock you out cold. Then Jimmy came on and read some “nods” I didn’t know well and some recent poems.

I hadn’t registered “Just Visiting” before. I didn’t know Jim’s work exhaustively, though there was little enough of it. Man, did that piece blow me away! It still does, every time (It's on YouTube, if you want to check it out, but he swallows the key line). It’s the monologue of a bank robber to his hostage, and yet what comes out is Jim’s most intimate thought. If I have to liken it to something, the performance was like Brando’s monologue in “Last Tango in Paris”, the one about the high school dance and the shit on his shoes. How can a person get to that place? And then how does he get back? Where did he stash his armor? How will he survive?

Backstage after the show, Rich and Jim and I rapped for quite a while. We got off remembering the pro wrestlers of our childhood, household names like Gorgeous George, Bruno Sammartino, Fritz von Eric, Haystacks Calhoun, Nature Boy Buddy Rodgers, and The Fabulous Kangaroos. Now there were guys who packed a punch, who could really put a story across!

No Ups at All

Finally the movie of The Basketball Diaries came out. Jimmy had been holding out for a big budget Hollywood flick, basically for the bread. As the blues song goes,

“If I can’t sell it, I’m gonna sit on it.

I ain’t gonna give it away!”

The indies probably would have served the material better. Or Bunuel - the Bunuel of "Los Olvidados" - in my dreams.

I asked my father if he wanted to see it with me. He remembered Jimmy from the one game he came to: “He’s like a general directing his troops.” Now he wondered how Jimmy was doing with the addiction and all, and if he was still writing “that beat talk”.

“Is that what it is?” I asked.

He nodded, then did a passable imitation of hipster slang. Yeah, man! He preferred Hemingway and DosPassos to Kerouac. When I was in Paris, he had written me a pretty sly pastiche of Henry Miller, too: “I was hungry! Hungry as a wolf! I could have eaten a horse!” As if Henry had simultaneously discovered the simile and the sandwich. I must still have it somewhere, filed under "Lord Chesterfield, letters to his son."

We made it through the movie, and I tried to like it. I turned to my father. His enthusiasm knew bounds: "run-of-the mill fall-and-redemption plot, good guys and bad guys, the usual. " (The man could cast a cold eye: in this world, only winter follows the fall. Even some years after he died, he said to me, in a night visitation, "nothing you say or do is funny in the least.")

I couldn’t disagree.

When I brought the movie up to Jim, I said I thought the director missed the point. The book was funny. He agreed. “The movie was so dark!” For the scene in the “shooting gallery” that Jim acted in, the director kept having them put more and more make-up dirt on their faces. Jim told him, “We were junkies. We weren’t miners!” Then he told me ruefully that Leo DiCaprio had blocked his shot on the set, “and the kid had no ups at all.”

Varieties of Religious Experience

There was a Trinity reunion cruise I went on: we got about twenty feet out of South Street Seaport, but with the open bar it felt like at least double that. I waved to Craig Walker, who looked good, but much too old and bald for Mike now. I went over to Maxim, who seemed untouched by time. He’d coached us against the current students in the alumni game the day before, me and Marc and Bobby. We’d played very well and gotten slaughtered. I reminded Maxim of our years, and brought the talk around to Jimmy.

“You always did worship him, didn’t you,” he said.

Stiffening, I grew precise: “Well, I worshipped his game…,” drawing the word out to make my point. We’re all men here.

Maxim said that Jimmy never surpassed his early games because, by junior year, “he was a marked man” to the league’s defenders. Actually, it takes about three shots made in a row before the defense figures out they better double-team you. Then Maxim said that Jim was “too Irish”. He made a jabbing motion with his hand: “If he was covered by two defenders, he tried to go right through them.” I thought to myself, what a bizarrely reductive explanation! The blinders were still on.

In my next letter to Jim, I told him about these exchanges. As always I employed my best blacksmith’s touch, and managed to hurt his feelings. But he quickly forgave me, as always, and returned intrigued to the “too Irish” idea. Maybe Maxim had seen through to a deeper truth, long denied. Maybe that could explain the way Jim had slammed headfirst into his life time and again.

* * *

Here's a silly old story out of place, and a tale told out of school as well, only flickeringly remembered and with details irrecoverable, like whether it's junior or senior year, or why I'm guarding Jimmy, or what dull point Maxim is trying to drill into us in the half court. But anyway our ruddy gunner gets lazy, looks me off towards the wing and tries to quick-pitch past my head a sneaky little tippy-toe bunny-hop pop shot from the foul line. I fake falling for the phoney "pass"; meanwhile hiding in plain sight I've been keeping my weight back and smack that shot away deadpan, tippy-toe too. (Imagined Trinity Times Headline: "Can-do Classicist Plays 'Possum'.") He says "nice block," appreciatively, and, touched, I nod and say, "thank you." We have each been playing head games, method acting in a con-man caper buddy movie, pretending to be someone else going about something else, elsewhere.

Pants on Fire

On the street one afternoon, Jim had a chance reunion of sorts with his old “lifting” buddy David Lynn-Bruce. David had flunked out of Trinity after junior year: now to all appearances the poor guy was a homeless schizophrenic.

“Hey Jimmy, Jim, Jim Carroll! Yo, it’s me, Dave, David Lynn-Bruce, from Trinity!” Long-limbed gestures of waving, pointing, welcoming.

“You must be mistaking me for someone else, ” said Jim, “I'm not Jim Carroll.”

Now the first thing that struck me when Jimmy told me that story was how insane it had been for him to imagine that his thin red shit could pass for Shineola. Maybe if Lynn-Bruce had gone blind and deaf: schizophrenic just doesn’t hack it.

All his life, the way Jim walked and the pitch of his voice changed dramatically as he changed his defining enthusiasms and his idealized peer groups. But in his maturity he was not a blend-into-the-crowd kind of guy. Quite to the contrary, he was one of Mother Nature’s more whimsical creations. Unmistakable.

In Jimmy’s youth, various opportunistic identities were popped on and off like wigs. As a mid-teen, when he could, he would try to palm himself off as a well-known local ballplayer, Kenny McIntyre, and maybe score free sneakers. A few years later, he would on occasion manage, in a darkened room, to pass as the guitar hero Alvin Lee. Fair enough. And if the Truth exists to serve Man, and not the other way around, why not shave off a couple of years to con coaches, then critics, groupies, and even - who knows? - stay the Reaper from the ripening grain?

The second striking thing is how cold the cut was. I mean, O.K., everybody tries to duck an old buddy when he’s on the skids, but still....

The third thing was that Jim told the story straight. That’s where anyone else would fabricate, when the falsehood might fly. But Jim was willing and able to say, “Here I am, with all my weird broken beauty, my foolish fears and venal heart.”

As a liar, he had his pants on backwards.

A Vile Fiction

And I remembered one time after a game, we were dressed and standing in the hallway, when the opposing coach came by, and said to Jimmy, "That's a nice jumpshot you've got there, son. How old are you?" Sizing him up on the meat rack.

"Thank you. Sixteen, sir," answered the gentle youth, who hadn't put up numbers like that any time lately. He stretched his wrists a bit farther out from his sleeves.

"Want him to think you're still a growing boy, eh Jimmmy?" said Ace softly, as the coach walked off. But why? I had thought those desires were long dead and buried.

Back then, Ace had the brass balls to crack on anybody, like when he said Lynn-Bruce's sister was known all over town as "Robin Redbreast" (a vile fiction! I knew her, she was a nice girl.) and threw himself on his back in contortions on a locker-room bench to demonstrate just how she would spread whenever anyone tossed a nickel down. Lynn-Bruce, who towered over him, could only repeat, "C'mon Ace, man, c'mon," pleading for a little decency and forbearance.

Jimmy had even brought Ace up to Inwood once, showing him off, to prove to his picaresque crew of roughnecks that tennis wasn't a sissy sport after all. And the prized little rich boy duly whipped them, most persuasively. Ace feasted on fallibility; he would roam the baseline, where his lack of height didn't matter, and return everything. (And yet Marc did manage to beat him once at his own game, playing pit-pat, sending back junk for junk.)

* * *

Now here's a sunny Saturday, fine for an outing to the city! My youngest daughter Eva and I first hit the Met and next drop in on Ace at his uptown art gallery. Startled, he straightens, tilts his head back: I appear to have grown gigantic! He gets off the phone right away, announcing me to someone as who I used to be. It seems worth a try to rouse his magisterial attitude of old, feeling around for that boyish cockiness, but he's having none of it, claims it wasn't real, just self-doubt pimped out in a blue blazer, and nothing but the buttons were brass. Word is, he has cut off all connections with Trinity since they rejected his kid, so it wouldn't do to bring up a certain melancholy middle girl, who, bedecked with trophies, is sailing through. His family managed to get themselves squeezed out of the diamond business by DeBeers, and here it's only the Saul Steinberg pieces that keep the place afloat. We've both read "The Basketball Diaries," of course.

"But it's all lies!" I squeak.

Smiling his slow conspiratorial smile, he croons back, "that was Jimmy".

(Ah, so there you are, slyboots.)

Jimmy was his best friend in high school, he grants, and yes, he would be interested if the three of us got together again.

He shepherds us around the gallery, full of clever little things you could hang in your foyer. (Marc is always pushing him to get his works displayed in the back room, but that is all of ten feet further downtown, and any rude-boy sensibility belongs at least a hundred blocks south of here.) Now to remind him - no, best to re-enact for us all Ace's one moment of triumph on the basketball court, even if it does come during garbage time in a scrimmage. It's the glorious fake-out of a pair of high-flying hot-shots. Overhead once again they soar past, hugely windmilling, swatting at nothing ... until at length they touch back down to earth, bent over double with helpless laughter at themselves. All the while, diminutive, crouched, ball in hand I have been waiting. As I fade for the bank shot, backpedaling blind towards a ten-thousand-dollar Steinberg table, Eva and some other, older Ace shout and grab at me, stop me from nailing it just in time!

Author's note: This chapter is embarrassing to me in the extreme. I come off as a total chump, unreliable, disloyal, naive about narrative truth, and so deep into pretending to be Ace in the gym in the distant past that I totally spaz out and lose track of when, where and maybe even who I really am. Worst of all, I am unable to keep the tenses and story line straight: where is "the poet Jim Carroll"? But please note, "I" is not me! "I" is the narrator! I deny and dissolve any implied union. It's because of idiot amateurs like him that I have to write under a pseudonym.

The Hook

I hadn’t seen Jimmy for a while - no particular reason for it, just that we were both recluses when we weren’t channeling Ann Corio and Gypsy Rose Lee. As usual, it was Marc who clued me in to his whereabouts and situation, and he warned me that Jim didn’t look well.

Even so, I got a shock from seeing him. Some of that was just the passage of time: I get a shock from seeing myself. But Jim looked to be teetering at the near edge of non-being: all flesh had been stripped off him. A walking stick.

It was the pneumonia, he said; the last time Rosemary had hugged him, she had pulled back in alarm: "Jim, there's nothing there!" His skin was translucent, as if the disease had flayed him from the inside out.

His balance was off, too - that was the ___. The stress of the city was too much to take with nothing on board. He was going to cut back, though. I said I thought he could get off it completely.

“Do you think, Robert, after so many years, that’s realistic?”

With that last word he beat me to the spot, took the charge. I’d been whistled for trying too hard to be helpful, like a doctor on T.V. I wasn't ready to lose him.

I’d better slow my fool self down, walk around Chelsea with him and visit a few galleries, full of some pretty lame stuff, I’m afraid. Get to know his condition.

We have no gravity, either of us, so I’ll need a hook to keep the connection. What does he need?

* * *

Towards the end, Marc wouldn’t see him. He told him bluntly that he was too self-involved.

“All artists are self-involved. What is it?” Jimmy asked me, “is he jealous of me, or what?”

“Yeah,” Marc said to me later, “tell him that’s what it is, that I’m jealous. You know what it really is, Cat? I can’t stand the darkness.”

Jimmy couldn’t believe that I’d told Marc what he had said. Of course, the jealousy theory wasn’t altogether off; Marc was increasingly frustrated by his lack of public success. But why was it overpowering him just then, long after Jimmy’s moment in the spotlight had passed?

A Generous Intellect

I’d drive down and meet Jimmy in his lobby. He didn’t want me to see his apartment at first. We’d walk around the neighborhood, grab some eats. In the garden of forking paths he told most of the stories, but we passed the punch lines back and forth so it came out even: the burnished blade.

The stories were by and large about his past, and I’d needle him for being an inveterate name-dropper. One time, nettled, he said, “You know, they didn’t get to be famous by being stupid!” Maybe he thought I was pulling class rank on him. It tickled him if he caught me not knowing something he knew, like what “sortes Virgilianae” were. He talked about his daughter, whom he’d found after all these years, and how much they liked each other. He talked about his rock-and-roll days and his days in Bolinas, which I didn’t know well. A few regrets, not too many.

The performer in him celebrated the Winfrey-Frey dust-up as great theater ("No, I made a mistake. You lied!"). The fabulist was given pause: "What, are we all going to have to hire fact-checkers now for our memoirs?" Unnecessarily in his case, since Jim had a photographic memory for what ought to have happened.*

He talked about mysticism, and Catholicism, and the bet of Blaise Pascal: in the long run, it’s cheaper to be a believer.

Together we talked about painters and painting, which we both did know well, about his recent poems, and about the coming novel. He was sobered by a comment from a Times critic, that he always diminished himself in his writings: the remark was a sign of respect, really, an acknowledgement of his intelligence.

He gave me his records: he was pleased that on “Runaway” he’d actually learned to sing a little. I loved Pools of Mercury, especially “Train Surfing” and the poem about the river, you must know the one I mean. After we saw the Dylan documentary, and the interview with Ginsberg where he spoke of Bobby as “a column of breath”, Jimmy said, “Allen was such a generous intellect!” He liked that expression: he'd used it for the critic Edwin Denby in 1972.

We went museum hopping, to the Guggenheim for the David Smith show (riveting), to the Modern for the Serra show (ponderous), to the Met for the Rauschenberg show (dynamite! It had all the best pieces!). Jimmy was reminded of a party he’d been at recently, where incredibly valuable works had been set right out on a table, a piece of cake to steal.

“Then they would have looked down the guest list, seen my name: ‘Ah, Carroll! That’s the guy. You can stop looking right there!’” We cracked up at that one.

He met my wife Audrey over lunch and a museum visit, and they really hit it off, not just as kindred spirits, but also with that Irish Catholic thing.

* * *

*N.B. All subjective experiences narrated here have been thoroughly cross-checked for accuracy against documents of the time and, where possible, with first-hand witnesses: further footnotes to follow.

Nulla Dies

Jim was living alone in an apartment in Chelsea, awaiting eviction. He’d quit cigarettes after the pneumonia, but the smell of stale smoke permeated the carpet. I palpated Jimmy’s legs, big more with water than muscle now, checking for pitting edema: not too bad. He was impressed by my technique. The shades were drawn, and the only light came from the computer. You got online from the Ethernet of the porn queen next door, retired now and tutoring transvestites in how to walk. He was once more living at the glowing screen. Above it on the wall was a hand-lettered sign, “Nulla Dies Sine Linea.” No Day Without A Line. A reminder from Horace, with a tip of the hat to old Frank Smith. On the floor nearby sat a basketball, in dire need of air. We were smiling. Jimmy picked it up and showed me his patented jab step and his lightning spin move: they were still very fast.

Jesus Christ

Jim and I were writing emails to each other fairly often now: I had to keep regular tabs on his medical condition, and he let me know when he needed prescriptions. I am crazy about writing letters, but it’s so hard to find people who can dematerialize and then rematerialize on the page, alive. My daughters prefer the telephone: my eldest said to me, “You write us letters so we can’t answer back!”

I do have to be careful. Sooner or later, I offend and alienate everybody. A close friend of mine, another writer and long-range jump-shooter like Jim, said to me on the phone, during one of my apologies following up a letter, “so you’re telling me you’re not an asshole?” Please be very careful, doctor, and we’ll thank you to keep your anatomy to yourself!

I offended Jimmy. I was trying to link him up with a cardiologist, someone who’d been in our class, a really good guy named Willie Schwartz. When I asked Willie if he could soft-pedal the fee, he stammered, “ It would be almost an honor to treat Jim Carroll.” Trying to make a joke at Willie’s expense, I wrote to Jim, “Almost? Maybe if The Downtown Diaries had sold better.”

You see my problem?

I offended him again when I told him about what I’d replied to Maxim, about worshipping his game…. Then it was something else, I don’t remember what. Oh yeah, in person I told him he was self-destructive. That notion caught big Jim by surprise, and he thought it over and took it to heart, and was determined to do better. Then I wrote: “Give me a fucking break! Your entire career has been based on marketing your martyrdom. You might as well parade around with a hammer, three spikes and a giant crucifix!” Audrey stopped me from emailing it just in time.

Jesus Christ! What the hell is wrong with me!