Diaries of the Damned

The Basketball Diaries

CARROLL'S The Basketball Diaries (Penguin Books, 1987) is not about basketball. The game serves as an entry pass to realms that most red-headed white boys would get chased out of—and a safe reference point for the reader who might not open a book entitled "Sick Shit Done and Observed by a Young Teenager in New York City During a Really Scummy Era." Young Jim Carroll was a sensitive juvenile delinquent who didn't allow his sensitivity to get in the way of adolescent sex, bad drugs and all manner of hustles.

By the second page of The Basketball Diaries, Jim and his buddies are trying to get high by sniffing Carbona cleaning fluid. Two pages later he's purse-snatching on the Upper East Side, and making the reader privy to a picture of "a fat ugly bitch getting screwed on a table by, I swear, a donkey." Carroll continues in this vein throughout the book, and he gets away with it. Words that might bore or disgust if spouted by a dirty old man sitting on your couch instead shock and amaze when uttered by a tender-aged youth in a pre-political-correctness era. His success comes in part from his writing style, which is lucid but simple enough to actually be a lightly-edited diary of a thirteen year-old boy. It's also his tone, his panache, his joie de fuckin' vivre, that wins over the reader.

If most of Jim Carroll's The Basketball Diaries exploits are true, then he has proven himself to be the kind of genius who's simply wired better than the rest of us. Not just mentally but physically—it shows on the basketball court and in the shadows. He's the guy who never has to wuss out on the chance for a thrill, which makes his street-level tales much more exciting than those of some formally educated writer who's just slumming. His stamina allowed him to persevere as a poet and writer without a college education and to wage a successful(?) fight against the addictions that have grabbed him by the final passage of The Basketball Diaries.

New Yorkers who've kept their ears to the ground and to the radio know that Carroll has done all right surfing the sordid scenes of postmodern New York. The Basketball Diaries and its sequel, Forced Entries: The Downtown Diaries, have become cult classics, and Carroll has been on the road giving readings and mini-concerts for the last few years. A movie version of The Basketball Diaries with Leonardo DiCaprio in the starring role will hit the screens shortly after the publication of this journal.

Many people know Jim Carroll more for his music than his writing. "People Who Died," his Velvet-Underground-ish hit about the fate of old friends, continues to sporadically depress the New York City airwaves.

Readers of The Basketball Diaries may wonder what kind of cleanup job the producers performed on the movie version. Hopefully they won't even try to make Jim Carroll palatable to the PG-rated People magazine crowd. He's probably suffered too much self-inflicted damage to become a superstar anyway, but if he does, plenty of funky characters will be able to say, "I knew Jim Carroll way back when..." The people who haven't died, that is.

Dev Duckster lives!—Jim Carroll
(If you haven't read the book, forget it.)

Forced Entries:
The Downtown Diaries, 1971-73

JIM CARROLL is one of the lesser-known chroniclers of culture and life in the United States, circa 1968-73. Like his peers Hunter S. Thompson in Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72 and Tom Wolfe in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Carroll juggles himself in the roles of observer and participant, although his accounts are in loose diary form rather than Thompson and Wolfe's magazine-driven New Journalism.

Forced Entries (Penguin Books, 1987), Carroll's continuation of The Basketball Diaries, which covered 1963-66, extends the themes introduced in the earlier collection: drug use and abuse, casual relationships, and sexual experimentation. Above all, Carroll takes as his inspiration a topic which will probably never be exhausted—New York City and its ever motley crew of characters. New York is to Jim Carroll what Paris was to George Orwell, Dublin to James Joyce, and Ohio to Sherwood Anderson and James Thurber: a sold-out arena of humor, humanity and experience which supplies the raw material of great writing.

Carroll operates out of early 1970s New York, with its luminaries (Bob Dylan, Allen Ginsberg, Andy Warhol, Senator Jacob Javits), transvestites, junkies, hunchbacks, perverts, and artists. He is at all times involved in the scenes he narrates. Forced Entries has a picaresque feel to it—Carroll dancing at Max's Kansas City, attending the New York City Ballet, following a conceptual artist's laser labyrinth around lower Manhattan, buying dope from Puerto Rican drag queens, under gas at the dentist's office, escaping to Bolinas, California to detox, and finally returning to New York to test his newly forged abstinence. Carroll is his own best character, a better leading man than most, and he knows it.

Forced Entries' tone and style are amazingly balanced. Sinewy lyricism counters deadpan sarcasm, self-mocking humor tempers moody introspection. As a collection of life slices, Forced Entries strikes a rhythm and feel compatible with its decadent and endlessly varied backdrop of New York City. Describing a prostitute he once tailed for several Times Square blocks, Carroll's style and gift for metaphor reaches one of its luminescent heights:

The whole effect...was as if someone had placed a Rubens portrait at the bottom of a cesspool, and after centuries of strangeness and decay among the stillness of vile things and vile notions, some chance lightning hit...and out of it she was risen...delivered onto these streets in a pink Cadillac. And she walks and walks, because there is nobody who can make her price.

At first glance, Carroll and his fellow travelers' lifestyle seems as outmoded as the velvet bell-bottom trousers he wears and the heroin he shoots. Then, we remember the glib 70s-style clothes which have recently dominated fashion shows, city streets and, yes, shopping malls; not to mention the reckless hard drug use which seems to be taking its toll on a generation which has already lost River Phoenix and Kurt Cobain.

Midnight

The ambulance passes
we sit up

pinned eyes of nuns that genuflect between stars
ambassadors on marble staircases in steam tropics

and the cracked fingers of sculptured virgins
            reaching out...

I sit cross-legged on dead trees
that float like a saint's ghost I

watch genius natives grow insane by night
juggle fire out from their veins as babies

play astral chords on water stones, breathe
lovely notes lightly, make animals dream, I fade

--Jim Carroll, from Living at the Movies, (Penguin Books, 1981)