Jim Carroll is now also a person who died
I saw him once, in a theater in San Francisco. And his memoir, The Basketball Diaries, was an inspiration. There was something searching and wrong about him. He was a beautiful talented mess. I loved him, kind of, without knowing him. Indebted. Read most of his books.
His music made me uncomfortable. There was too much in common with my own life, except in his late teens, shooting heroin, he already knew who he was. He already wrote beautifully. He knew why he was turning tricks and the drama inherent in his situation. I knew nothing about these things. When a man asked me to get in his car, said he wanted to smell my feet, I didn’t know the potential. I wouldn’t write about those things for ten more years. And when I was twenty-one, and shooting heroin, and stripping in a gay club, it wasn’t interesting yet.
There was something privileged about Carroll. It’s the kind of awareness I saw in my students at Stanford. Children that referred to their high school teachers by their first names. But that didn’t make it less real. His writing was stunningly accurate. And those were people who died. And that’s where we really cross paths. At an early age I was surrounded by death, and in the past year I have lost three more. Victims, in their late thirties, of social class.
What am I getting at? That art illuminates. That I clung to Jim Carroll’s paper leg to help make sense of the world around me. And I miss him now, though I only met him that one time.
Jim Carroll died. And that’s just very sad.
**
The Jim Carroll website.
Interview with Thomas Gladysz.
September 13th, 2009 at 6:30 pm
and he had a trusted rhythm of his own when he read. He was always pulling back on the beat, not like in his singing. You figured he’d picked up a lot from St Marks, learning how to hold the idea or image in the phrases of the sentence.
And he felt right.
September 14th, 2009 at 5:35 am
Man, this is terrible news. Whatever ‘it’ was, Jim had it. A really great prose writer, and a poet of exceptional talent. And he lived it, it wasn’t just some abstract notion to him. It’s a brave thing to actually physically embody what you write about… like the old Burroughs axiom of dividing writers up into either bullfighters, who risk getting gored, or bullshitters, who make fake passes at imaginary foes… he was definitely the former…
September 14th, 2009 at 5:40 am
There may be some irony in the fact that one of my closet friends, and the best poet I have known, was named Steven Elliott, who was also someone who died far too young, and may have had too much in common with Carroll….
September 14th, 2009 at 8:57 am
If you don’t have “Catholic Boy” in your rec. collection get it. Cuz its not a true rec. collection til you do.
R I P Jim.
September 17th, 2009 at 9:03 am
He was a great writer, but he was great because he was haunted. I’m amazed he even made it to 60. When his book came out in 1978, my friends and I argued about whether he was still alive then.