The Basketball Diaries - Jim Carroll

THE BASKETBALL DIARIES - JIM CARROLL

Patti Smith always spoke highly of Jim Carroll, saying how great a poet he was and in fact his book The Basketball Diaries whilst dedicated to the memory of folksinger Phil Ochs, singles Patti out for special thanks. Apart from the film of course starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Carroll is probably best known for his song People Who Have Died that is exactly what it says on the can as in a list of Carroll's friends who have died along with the circumstances of their deaths. It's a cracker. When it comes to his poetry, what tends to stand out first and foremost about it is where it's coming from as in New York on the Lower East Side, the kind of impoverished place that in the Sixties was ghetto-like and not somewhere you'd expect to find a lot of poetry. No gleaming spires of Cambridge, moons in June and chasing butterflies there. No, Jim Carroll was a proverbial flower in the dustbin, an original angel with a dirty face.

The Basketball Diaries chronicles tales of his growing up in New York and involves his playing basketball, drinking, smoking reefer and sniffing glue. It's the story of a wise-cracking, street-smart kid growing up with the city as a playground and what better playground than New York in the mid-Sixties? In fact what better playground than New York in any decade? The drawback is that the city is also a jungle wherein dwell monsters be they in the form of over-zealous police, predatory paedophiles and easily if not near freely available heroin.

So, at the age of thirteen Carroll takes his first heroin hit and loses his virgin veins, as he puts it. By the age of fifteen he's a recreational heroin user turning tricks on Third Avenue for middle-aged homosexuals on New York vacations. A veritable mini-Midnight Cowboy. A toilet trader rather than a rose by any other name. He's in control, however, and in spite of his usage becomes a talented if not erratic Junior High School basketball player though over time the more books he reads the more he realises that what he actually needs to do is write. Alas, also over time he proves to be no exception to the rule and ends up like Bowie's Major Tom strung out in heaven's high hitting an all time low, with nothing else to be done apart from spending all day chasing a fix.

Jim Carroll's The Basketball Diaries is a stir of echoes channelling Jean Genet, Arthur Rimbaud, Lou Reed and Christiane F. A majorly interesting aspect of it is in the fact that it's the voice of a genuine working class street kid that at the time was a rare thing though arguably it's even more of a rarity nowadays with culture at all levels becoming increasingly the domain of the University-educated middle class. Jim Carroll, however, is/was the real deal and for that if for nothing else makes The Basketball Diaries a thing of rare if not dark, tainted yet entertaining beauty.

John Serpico