Jim Carroll. Read by the author with musical accompaniment by Lenny Kaye, Audio Literature. Two cassettes, 180 rains., $16.95 ISBN 0-944993-87-7
In the early 1960s Carroll was a scrappy New York City teen, a basketball phenom and an above-average scholar. He was also a fiendishly dedicated heroin addict who lost his “virgin veins” around age 13. These are his diaries from that time, a set of Tom Sawyer-style adventures peopled with drunks, dopers and hustlers. Carroll, now a poet and sometime rock musician living in New York, reads in a voice that trembles and shakes with a hesitant delicacy. He still manages to evoke his wiseass teenage outlook and a tough anger at the world. But the entries also record the voice of a young poet emerging, a beat romantic digging the perverse beauty of the down-and-out. Carroll’s deadpan humor lifts this program above bleak morbidity. Carroll at 13: “It’s a Friday night and all we wanted to do was go down to the East River Park and get drunk, do reefer and sniff glue–and that’s exactly what we did.” Later, he gets a scholarship to an “ultrarich private school” and ends up doing a stint in a Riker’s Island juvenile hall. Providing quite the ride on audio, Carroll’s kiddie William Burroughs tale is slated to be adapted to a movie starring Leonard DiCaprio. Based on the 1969 [sic] Penguin Books edition. (Dec.)
©1994 Reed Publishing USA