Obituary
I was saddened to wake up this morning to the news of Jim Carroll’s death. A poet of the highest order who also found success as a punk rocker in the early 1980s, Carroll is best known for The Basketball Diaries, a raw, harrowing, and exhilarating account of his high school years addled with heroin and hustling. What’s most remarkable is that Carroll managed to keep his shit together enough through the smack haze to recount a relatively standard high school existence.
I was first introduced to Carroll at the ripe age of 12 years-old when a camp counselor hipped our bunk to the glorious sounds of “People Who Died,” a punk rager that bluntly reeled off the unfortunate fates of the poet’s friends. “Teddy sniffing glue, he was 12 years old/Fell from the roof on East Two-nine/Cathy was 11 when she pulled the plug/On 26 reds and a bottle of wine.” We didn’t know what it meant, but it sounded dangerous and we loved it. Our bunk house nestled in the hills of central Texas was a long way from the grimy streets of the Lower East Side, but we connected to this stuff, and we showed it by gloriously screaming the rapid fire lyrics as we stomped with abandon on the creaking wooden floorboards.
A few years later I would finally read Carroll’s written work, taking in The Basketball Diaries like it was my lifeblood or an antidote to my comparatively mundane suburban existence. The closing line of the tome, “I just want to be pure…” was chill-inducing. After reading these words I longed for more and quickly devoured his next set of diaries, Forced Entries, before setting out to discover his influences – Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Frank O’Hara, and William Burroughs.
Although I lived a world away from the streets that Jim Carroll roamed, his work as both a writer and a musician had a profound influence on me, opening the door to a flood of mind-blowing works of art, literature and music. I guess you can say that Carroll was my gateway drug. And for this, I will always hold a special place in my heart for Jim Carroll.
