The Basketball Diaries

Jim Carroll 1978

Introduction

The publication of Jim Carroll's diary, entitled The Basketball Diaries: Age Twelve to Fifteen (1978), had been eagerly awaited. The book, which is generally referred to by its main title alone, had started appearing in excerpt form throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s in various literary publications. Carroll claimed that the diaries were written at the time in which the events related took place. However, some critics wondered how much the diaries were edited before publication, especially since the book includes many outrageous incidents. Regardless of its authenticity, the book made a statement when it was published. Some people at that time were glorifying the image of life in the 1960s urban counterculture. Carroll's gritty diary was explicit; it took readers inside the real world of drug addiction, male prostitution, and crime in 1960s New York.

The book also discussed what life was like for war babies—people who grew up under the constant fear of nuclear annihilation during the Cold War—and the difficulty in remaining neutral in the 1960s antiwar debate. The Basketball Diaries has become Carroll's best-known work, especially after the release of a 1995 film adaptation starring Leonardo DiCaprio. In 1987, Carroll published a sequel, Forced Entries: The Downtown Diaries, 1971-73.

Author Biography

Jim Carroll was born in New York City on August 1, 1951. When he was growing up on the tough streets of Manhattan, Carroll pursued careers as a basketball player and writer. While Carroll's massive drug use as a teenager extinguished any hope of his becoming a basketball star, his poetry about these drug experiences put him on the road to literary stardom. After the publication of his first two poetry collections, Organic Trains (1967) and Four Ups and One Down (1970), Carroll's poetry was relatively unknown outside underground circles. That changed with the publication of his third poetry collection, Living at the Movies (1973). By this time, Carroll was also making a name for himself with his autobiographical prose writing, which had begun appearing in various literary magazines in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

In 1978, these disjointed prose writings were collected in one limited-edition volume, entitled The Basketball Diaries, which was reprinted in larger numbers in 1980. The book established Carroll's literary career and gave him name recognition that he translated to success in other areas. The most notable of these was Carroll's music career. Patti Smith, one of Carroll's former girlfriends, encouraged him to make the transition from poet to rock musician, as she had done. In 1980, the same year that The Basketball Diaries went into wide distribution, the Jim Carroll Band released its first album, Catholic Boy, which featured the hit single, "People Who Died." The song, which lists Carroll's many friends who died from murder, suicide, drug overdose, and other unnatural causes, is generally acknowledged as the high point of Carroll's musical career. In 1995, "People Who Died"—along with several other songs by Carroll or his band—was included on the soundtrack of the film adaptation of The Basketball Diaries.

During the 1980s, Carroll released another poetry collection, The Book of Nods (1986), and his second collection of diaries, Forced Entries: The Downtown Diaries (1987). Neither of these books was as successful as The Basketball Diaries, which continued to be Carroll's best-known work. In 1992, Carroll released a spoken-word musical recording entitled Praying Mantis, and in 1999 he published a nonfiction book entitled Permissive Bargaining and Congressional Intent: A Special Report.

Besides these two works, most of Carroll's publications after the 1980s were poetry collections. These include Fear of Dreaming: The Selected Poems of Jim Carroll (1993) and Void of Course: Poems 1994-1997 (1998). Carroll lives and works in New York City, where, as of 2002, he is working on his first novel.

Plot Summary

Fall 1963

In the first entry of The Basketball Diaries, a thirteen-year-old Carroll uses a fake birth certificate from his coach, Lefty, to get into a twelve-and-under basketball league. Carroll and his friends sniff cleaning fluid to get high, steal purses, and steal from another basketball team. On Halloween, they attack the neighborhood girls with flour-filled socks then get drunk and use rock-filled socks to break windows. Lefty catches some of his players sniffing glue, but Carroll dumps his before getting caught. Carroll and his family move into their new apartment in the tip of Manhattan. Carroll and the gang get drunk, but one of them drinks too much and has to get his stomach pumped.

Winter 1964

Carroll, a non-Catholic, is forced to go to confession at his new Catholic school. He attends a funeral for one of his friends who dies in a glue-sniffing accident. Carroll scores high on a test but is punished for lack of effort. He describes his first experience with heroin, which he believes is nonaddictive. He steals clothes from a department store and smokes marijuana with one of the older guys in his new neighborhood. A priest in Carroll's school spanks a student's naked buttocks behind closed doors and is sent away after the student's brother labels the priest a homosexual. Carroll's mother finds and destroys a bag of Carroll's marijuana.

Spring & Summer 1964

Carroll talks about the caves near his new apartment building, where he goes to smoke marijuana. He describes the rush he gets late at night while masturbating naked on the roof of his building. Carroll and his friends have a huge party in the woods, jump off a cliff into the Harlem River, and steal basketballs from the park house. Carroll loses his job as a seller at Yankee Stadium as a result of his drug use. Carroll and his friends steal liquor from their school that is intended for an American Legion party. He describes a sexual encounter with a girl at his friend's house.

Fall 1964

Carroll has trouble adjusting to the strict etiquette at the new private school that he is attending on a basketball scholarship, but he impresses his classmates with his confidence and athletic ability. During a routine trip with his gym class to Central Park, Carroll almost gets caught smoking marijuana. He notes the futility of the school's symbolic Thanksgiving fast for hunger. He describes a sexual encounter with a communist girl.

Winter 1965

Carroll accidentally exposes himself during a basketball game. He starts hanging around Headquarters, an apartment that hosts all of the local drug users. He drinks codeine cough syrup to get high. He describes his recurring fantasy about shooting a machine gun in class. He goes to a Communist Party meeting but is not impressed. He steals money from the wrestling team. Carroll and some of his team members take drugs that severely affect their game performance.

Spring 1965

Carroll gets picked up by a person who turns out to be a male transvestite. He talks about a kleptomaniac friend, Bobby Blake, who gets high and breaks into a closed ice cream parlor. Carroll's mother receives a notice from his principal about Carroll's bad grades and behavior problem. Blake gets high again, and this time he breaks into a clothes store and starts handing out free clothes to passersby, including the police who take him away. Carroll and a friend skip class to shoot up heroin in a basement, and they nearly get caught by the police. A little girl talks with Carroll about his antiwar views.

Summer 1965

Carroll describes how he hustles homosexuals for money, and he says that his hustles have gotten weird lately. He and several friends find a half-dead, naked woman who has committed suicide by jumping out of a window. Carroll describes the bathroom at Grand Central Terminal, where men from all walks of life go to look at other men and masturbate. He recalls the first time he saw transvestites naked, when he was about nine years old. He talks about his fear of atomic war. Carroll and his friends get high and steal food from a restaurant. He gets high on a train and becomes paranoid that the other passengers are going to throw him off. He gets a case of gonorrhea, a sexually transmitted disease, and goes to an underground doctor in Harlem to get a shot and some pills. He realizes that he is not in control of his growing heroin addiction, but he says that he better get in control if he wants to do well in school and basketball.

Fall 1965

Carroll describes what it is like growing up as a war baby, living in constant fear of nuclear war. He says that getting high at Headquarters is the only way he can avoid getting involved in war politics. He notes that narcotics police steal most of dealers' drugs for themselves. He takes some LSD, a hallucinogenic drug also known as acid. The police raid Headquarters after a noise complaint. Carroll takes more acid and watches a moon eclipse. He describes his experiences during a massive electrical blackout. Carroll gets high and has sex with his latest rich girlfriend. He says heroin is so addictive that addicts will risk using a filthy needle in order to shoot up. Carroll talks about his parents, saying that they try to draw him into arguments and political debates. He gets frustrated with the ineffectiveness of peace marches.

Winter 1966

Carroll has another classroom-shooting fantasy. He says his fear of atomic warfare has lessened but that he is still paranoid. He talks about his experiences during the National High School All Star Basketball Game, when he is groped by Benny Greenbaum, a homosexual college scout. Carroll explains his passion for writing about New York. Carroll describes what it is like shooting up and says that it is getting hard to concentrate on his writing. Carroll's drug habit continues to affect his basketball performance. He talks about an older woman with whom he has been having an affair; the rich divorcée pays for his drug habit and in return she makes him engage in abnormal sexual acts. Carroll talks about a junkie friend who is in prison for two years. Carroll and a friend get swindled by a drug dealer. Carroll buys heroin from a new dealer and begins to like the vomiting that comes as a side effect. He finds out that one of his old friends is in prison for a drug-related murder. Carroll gets sent to Riker's Island Juvenile Reformatory for three months for heroin possession.

Spring & Summer 1966

Carroll's headmaster intervenes and Carroll gets out of Riker's after one month. A friend offers him a shot of heroin, and Carroll is unable to refuse. Carroll has a bad acid trip and decides to stick to heroin. Since most heroin dealers have been arrested, he buys some methadone instead; while he is waiting for it to take effect, he notes that he is not in control of his addiction. Carroll hustles a homosexual. He defines the three types of junkies. Carroll and a group of friends steal a Porsche, but it gets towed before they can return with a buyer. Carroll and a friend steal raffle books from the American Legion then sell them door to door. In the process, they run across an older woman who has sex with them. They use their earnings to buy a spoon of cocaine. Carroll and a friend eat peyote, another hallucinogenic drug.

Carroll tries to give up heroin abruptly and describes his withdrawal symptoms in detail. Carroll steals some heroin from a friend and starts shooting up again. He goes to a drug-therapy session but soon returns to using heroin. Carroll talks to a junkie friend who has also been trying—and failing—to quit. Carroll and a friend go to New York's Chinatown to get heroin. In the last diary entry of the book, Carroll surfaces from a four-day high, realizing that he wants to be pure.

Key Figures

Bobby Blake

Bobby Blake is one of Carroll's junkie friends who gets high and performs ridiculous, illegal acts.

Mr. Bluster

Mr. Bluster is the principal at the Catholic private school Carroll attends on scholarship. Bluster gets Carroll released early from Riker's juvenile prison.

Media Adaptations

• In 1994, The Basketball Diaries was adapted as an abridged audiobook by Audio Literature. The audio diaries are read by the author. The same audiobook is also available as an audio download from audible.com, an on-line audiobook retailer.
• The Basketball Diaries was also adapted as a film in 1995 by Island Pictures and New Line Cinema. Directed by Scott Kalvert, the film featured Leonardo DiCaprio as Carroll. It also featured Lorraine Bracco, Mark Wahlberg, Juliette Lewis, Ernie Hudson, and a small role for Carroll himself. The film, which is set in the 1990s, retains much of the book's 1960s language and slang, giving the film an anachronistic feel. It is available on DVD from Ryko Distribution and contains many special features, including interviews with several cast members and an antidrug trailer.

Brian Browning

Brian Browning is one of Carroll's junkie friends and is one of two men who rent the apartment that serves as Headquarters—the local junkie hangout. When Carroll is strung out and needing a heroin fix, Browning goes to get it for him while Jim waits with his older lover. Browning notes that junkies curl up into fetal positions because they are trying to get back to the womb.

Jim Carroll

Carroll is the author and narrator of The Basketball Diaries, an autobiographical account of Carroll's coming of age on New York's tough streets. In the first entries, Carroll is a thirteen-year-old who has had limited experience with sex, drugs, and crime. Carroll is also a novice basketball player in his first organized league. All of these aspects of his life change rapidly. He becomes a star basketball player, winning a scholarship to a rich private school. He has many heterosexual experiences and starts using increasingly harder drugs. His heroin addiction starts out small, and he lies to himself about being able to control it. However, as his addiction grows, it changes the quality of every other aspect of his life. He starts committing more crimes, including stealing cars, in order to finance his drug habit. In addition, he makes money by selling his body to homosexuals and older women. As his use of heroin and other drugs grows to include cough syrup, various kinds of pills, methadone, cocaine, and LSD, drugs become the central focus of his life, replacing even his love of basketball. In fact, his massive drug use destroys his dream of playing professional basketball and eventually lands him in juvenile prison. At the end of the diaries, Carroll surfaces from a four-day heroin high and laments about how low he has sunk in life. He says that he only wants to be pure.

Over the course of the diaries, Carroll is exposed to several cultural and political issues. He makes scathing attacks on hypocrisy. He condemns the U.S. use of the communist scare as a justification for building more nuclear weapons and engaging in the Vietnam War. He notes that poor junkies like him do not have the same treatment programs or escape options as middle-class or rich junkies have. He exposes the hypocrisy of narcotics police, who keep most confiscated drugs for themselves—to sell it on the streets. Ultimately, he predicts the publication of The Basketball Diaries, in which he intends to expose these views and facts.

Carroll's Father

Carroll's father is largely absent in the diaries. Even when he and his father talk, the conversation generally ends badly. Carroll is against the Vietnam War, while his father is for it. Also, Carroll wears his hair long like other members of the counterculture, something that bothers his father and his father's friends, who goad Carroll's father into picking fights with his son.

Carroll's Mother

Carroll's mother is largely absent in the diaries. She finds a bag of her son's marijuana, but Carroll fools her into thinking that he does not have a drug problem. When he is in Riker's juvenile prison, she does not come to see him.

Carroll's Older Lover

Carroll describes an affair he has with an older woman, a rich divorcée who makes Carroll engage in bizarre sex acts in exchange for paying for his drug habit. However, when she tries to force a strung-out Carroll to have sex with her, he breaks off the affair.

Marc Clutcher

The junkie Marc Clutcher is one of Carroll's basketball teammates. Along with Carroll and Anton Neutron, Clutcher performs poorly on the team because of his drug use. With others, Clutcher witnesses the woman who tries to commit suicide by jumping out of a window. He also smuggles peyote back from Mexico.

Deborah Duckster

Deborah Duckster, one of Carroll's neighborhood friends, is a model. When Willie gets too drunk one night, he lunges for her, and she kicks him in the groin, knocking him out. Duckster witnesses the woman who tries to commit suicide by jumping out of a window.

Benny Greenbaum

Benny Greenbaum is a homosexual college scout who travels with Carroll's high school team to some games. Greenbaum pays one of the team members to perform oral sex and gropes Carroll in his hotel room—under the pretense of fitting Carroll for a college uniform.

Lefty

Lefty is Carroll's basketball coach in the Biddy League; Carroll suspects that Lefty is a homosexual, since Lefty gropes his players.

Jimmy Mancole

Jimmy Mancole is one of Carroll's junkie friends. When the police raid Headquarters after a noise complaint, Mancole retaliates against the woman next door, whom he assumes made the complaint. Mancole and Carroll almost get caught shooting up in the park, and then they are swindled by a Mexican drug dealer. Mancole gives Carroll his first heroin shot when Carroll gets out of Riker's and helps Carroll mug people in the park.

Anton Neutron

The junkie Anton Neutron is one of Carroll's basketball teammates. Along with Carroll and Marc Clutcher, Neutron allows drug use to affect his performance on the team.

Willie

The junkie Willie is one of Carroll's old basketball teammates. Willie is the first person who smokes marijuana with Carroll at school. Willie gets so drunk one night that he is rushed to the hospital to get his stomach pumped. Willie gets revenge on an assailant by spiking the person's soda with a dangerously large amount of crystal amphetamine.

Themes

Escape

From a very early age, Carroll tries to escape his tough existence on the streets of New York by pursuing other activities that bring him enjoyment. At thirteen, he begins playing basketball in the Biddy league, his first organized league. Give that he has natural athletic ability, basketball quickly becomes a lifestyle for him, which leads to minor fame and a basketball scholarship to a rich, private school. However, in the process, he also engages in self-destructive activities, such as stealing, drinking, and doing drugs. On one occasion, Carroll and some of his teammates take pills that they think will improve their performance, but the pills do the opposite. Says Carroll: "My legs began to get the feeling someone slit a nice little hole at the top of my thighs and poured in a few gallons of liquid lead." Carroll and his fellow drug-using teammates get kicked out of the game, an occurrence that happens more frequently as Carroll's addiction worsens.

Ultimately, the physical side effects of massive drug use, coupled with Carroll's arrest for drug possession, destroy his dream of playing professional basketball—one of his few chances of escape from his street existence. Carroll notes that street users like him find it hard to escape a heroin addiction; they do not have the support networks or financial means of rich users, who can "take off to the Riviera" if they feel their addictions are getting too strong. Carroll has a conversation with a friend and notes that a junkie on a high often curls up like a fetus. Carroll's friend thinks this is an indication of heroin's power to give junkies a sense that they can escape to the ultimate comfortable, secure place. "That's what it's all about, man, back to the womb."

Addiction

Carroll's heroin habit starts out small, what he calls a "'Pepsi-Cola"' habit, but his addiction eventually gets out of control—a fact that he recognizes when he tries to stop using heroin and finds that he cannot. He is physically ill from his addiction, but the hardest part is trying to avoid the little voice in his head that keeps telling him to have just one more hit of heroin. "I got to do something to off that little voice, I can gladly take sore muscles but my mind can't handle the monkey back there." Unfortunately, the monkey, the voice of Carroll's addiction, is so strong that he continues his habit. This is so even when he has to use dirty needles to shoot up. He notes a certain needle, stashed in a park, that many local junkies share. Says Carroll, "it's the filthiest spike you ever could see." However, despite this fact, "there is not one bit of hesitation in drawing your shot into that harpoon and shoving it into your mainline." Even unpleasant side effects like vomiting—a side effect of a certain brand of heroin he gets—become part of the experience, and he grows to like it. "I puke four times a day and I love it now. Puking's the newest thing on the junk scene."

Sexuality

Carroll's diaries offer several examples of his potent and varied sexual experiences. When he is around nine years old, he has his first transvestite experience. At thirteen, he gets into the habit of masturbating while watching the stars from the roof of his apartment building. He is excited by "the possibility of being caught in a situation where there is no possibility of explaining yourself." At thirteen, he notes how his coach tends to fondle him and his teammates. "I'm too young to understand about homosexuals but I think Lefty is one." This ignorance does not last long. Carroll initially pursues heterosexual encounters for pleasure and avoids homosexuals. However, once Carroll becomes hooked on heroin, his addiction is so strong that he starts selling his body to homosexuals for drug money. With the exception of one case in the diaries, in which he gets a "strange pleasure [from] … this naughty act of perversion for profit," Carroll is disgusted by these encounters.

Also, in the beginning of the diaries, Carroll does not mind getting rid of a drug high to have sex. For example, before he goes to one party, he drinks some codeine cough syrup. However, when he meets a girl there, he perceives "sexual overtones creeping about, so I figured I better go into the bathroom and throw up the medicine to bring me down a bit, in order to get it up a lot." However, as Carroll's heroin addiction gets worse, getting heroin becomes more important than anything else, including sex. On one occasion, Carroll breaks up with his older lover when she tries to initiate sex with him while he is strung out from a heroin withdrawal and waiting for a friend to bring him his fix. "I told her she had no idea how I felt and to just let me lie down and sweat out the wait. Her slightest touch set little stinging grenades off in my head."

Style

Diary

A diary details the events in one's life as a series of periodic entries. The Basketball Diaries is composed of ten sections, one for each season—in some cases two seasons—from Fall 1963 to Summer 1966. Each section is composed of five to twenty-six separate entries. Most diaries are kept for personal reasons and are not intended for publication. As a result, the diarist may jump around and discuss many topics, instead of developing one major plot, as other kinds of storytellers do. At first glance, The Basketball Diaries appears to follow this episodic format, since each short entry describes a separate event. However, collectively, these entries describe Carroll's coming-of-age transformation—from a healthy, relatively naïve juvenile delinquent into a strung-out, culturally aware, heroin-addicted criminal.

Topics for Further Study

• On an enlarged map of Manhattan, plot the approximate dates and locations for the major events in the book. Research the history of these areas and try to find other, highly publicized events that took place in these areas. Plot these dates and descriptions as well.
• Watch the film adaptation of The Basketball Diaries and compare it to the book.
• Find another region in the 1960s that experienced as much drug use, prostitution, and crime as New York. Write a two-page portrait of what life was like for individuals who grew up in this area during this time.
• Research the current drug problem in the United States, and compare it to the drug problem in the 1960s. What methods of enforcement have been used in each time period to slow or stop the sale and use of drugs? What has been the economic impact of the drug problem in each era?
• Choose a professional athlete, from any point in history, who has been caught using drugs. Write a biography about this person, including whether the athlete used drugs as a teenager and what happened to this person when he or she was caught.

Setting

The events take place in the 1960s in New York City, primarily Manhattan, a small island that contains within its small area some of the world's richest and poorest people. Carroll, a boy from the poor section of New York, is able to use his basketball talent to get into a local, rich private school. He also dates rich young girls, something that he says his friends from the poor part of the city would not believe. "I'm gonna bring all the dirt heads from old Madison Square Boy's Club up here some night: they'll freak out in one second." If he were living in some other U.S. cities, where the physical distance between rich and poor is often greater, it would be harder for him to do this. In addition, New York is notorious for its high crime rate and its drug abusers. In fact, as Carroll notes, his diaries "have the greatest hero a writer needs, this crazy … New York." Finally, as the largest American city and one which contained a significant number of landmarks and economic centers, New York—especially Manhattan—was thought to be a prime target for a nuclear warhead during the Cold War, a fear that Carroll expresses on several occasions.

Language

The Basketball Diaries is conspicuous for its graphic profanity. Many entries include at least one profane word, and in some cases, Carroll uses several. These profane words are used to describe sexual acts—in which case he uses many—and are often used for emphasis, even when describing relatively normal events. Carroll also includes a lot of slang—a type of language used in everyday life by common men and women, typically those in the lower or working classes. Slang words are often established words that have been given different meanings. For example, in the English language, a "spade" is a gardening tool. However, in street slang, a spade is an African American. This term is derogatory, which is another common characteristic of slang words. Sex, drugs, and alcohol are three areas in which slang is often used. For example, Carroll refers to sexual intercourse as "nooky," calls condoms "scumbags," and refers to breasts as "knocks." Marijuana is "weed" or "grass," while heroin is "scag." A "spiller" is someone who acts like he has drunk more than he has, and someone who is drunk is "smashed." These are just some of the countless examples of slang in the book.

Imagery

The imagery in the diaries is also graphic. For example, Carroll and his friends come across a woman who has committed suicide by jumping out of a window. Says Carroll: "I spot a long deep gorge in her ankle and it's oozing blood in slowmotion spurts." Besides violent images, Carroll also uses graphic imagery to describe his sexual experiences. For example, as he is about to say goodbye to his girlfriend before basketball practice one day, he states that she "socks her tongue in my mouth and grinds her sweet bottom up against me." Since Carroll has forgotten to wear a jock strap that day, his resulting erection makes it look "like [he] was shoplifting bananas." Drug imagery is also graphic, particularly the images associated with shooting up heroin. On one occasion, Carroll describes what it looks like when he shoots up: "Just such a pleasure to tie up above that mainline with a woman's silk stocking and hit the mark and watch the blood rise into the dropper like a certain desert lily."

Historical Context

The Cold War

The U.S. use of atomic bombs on Japan ended World War II in 1945, and ushered in the atomic age. After these demonstrations, several countries, including the Soviet Union, rushed to create and test their own atomic bombs. As tensions between the communist Soviet Union and the democratic United States increased, the U.S. government began a policy of backing smaller foreign countries that were in danger of being overthrown by Soviet-backed groups. The resulting tension between the Soviet Union and the United States—and between communism and democracy in general—was labeled the Cold War, and for good reason. Although much of the period was technically spent in peace, the pervasive feeling of suspicion and paranoia that was generated by this clash of superpowers made many feel that they were fighting a war. In the United States, the public was well aware that one mistake on either side could inadvertently trigger World War III. In the diaries, Carroll describes on many occasions what it was like growing up as a "war baby" in a major city during the Cold War, living in constant fear that he was going to die in a nuclear attack:

It's always been the same, growing up in Manhattan.… the idea of living within a giant archer's target … for use by the bad Russia bowman with the atomic arrows.

Vietnam and the Antiwar Movement

Although the peak years of the Cold War were over by the 1960s, the U.S. fight against communism in foreign countries continued. The United States had been supporting South Vietnam for decades in its conflict against Ho Chi Minh's communist forces in North Vietnam. Most Americans were unaware of this involvement, since U.S. soldiers in Vietnam were disguised as advisors. However, in 1965, the United States escalated its involvement, adding fifty thousand new ground troops to the twenty-three thousand already stationed in Vietnam. At this point, the U.S. public was more informed about what was going on, and a massive antiwar movement began. Many people, like Carroll, were forced to take a side in this conflict.

The Counterculture in the 1960s

Carroll, like many other members of the counterculture—a group of people who rebelled against the U.S. capitalist establishment—was against the war. The counterculture grew as many people, especially American youth, became hippies or junkies. Hippies wore their hair long, dressed in deliberately shabby clothes, and believed in nonviolent forms of antiwar protest such as sit-ins and peace marches. Hippies tended to use recreational drugs, particularly marijuana and LSD; they believed these drugs freed their minds and gave them better understanding about the human condition. Junkies shared many characteristics with hippies, however, junkies like Carroll were mainly interested in getting high, and were not opposed to violence and crime. In fact, as Martin Gilbert notes in his book, A History of the Twentieth Century, Volume Three: 1952-1999: "The need to supply and finance the drug habit, if necessary by theft and violence, undermined the moral outlook of many individuals."

Compare & Contrast

• 1960s: Young American men are sent, often through the draft and against their will, to fight in the Vietnam War. Some seek to escape the horrors of guerilla war by using illicit drugs like marijuana and heroin—the latter of which is cheap and readily available in Southeast Asia.

  Today: Following terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, D.C., the United States engages in a war against terrorism, including military engagements in the Middle East. The terrorist attacks spark a patriotic response, and many young men and women choose to enlist in the armed forces.

• 1960s: The use of illicit drugs spreads into the mainstream United States. The counterculture movement of the 1960s and 1970s helps to promote this increased use of drugs, especially marijuana and LSD. Heroin, which is used by junkies (drug addicts), is often avoided by hippies.

  Today: The heroin-related deaths of River Phoenix, Kurt Cobain, and other prominent celebrities spark a national awareness of heroin abuse. Although the use of illicit drugs is still a problem in the United States, drug use has dropped by nearly 45 percent since its peak in the late 1970s.

• 1960s: Sexual freedom becomes a hallmark of the decade. Pregnancy is less a concern with the increased use of birth-control pills. Likewise, some sexually transmitted diseases, like gonorrhea, can often be treated by easily obtained prescription antibiotics.

  Today: Although U.S. youth still engage widely in sexual activity, the risks today are much greater as a result of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS), a disease that is generally transmitted through unprotected sex, the sharing of drug needles, and blood transfusions.

Critical Overview

By the time The Basketball Diaries was published in a limited-edition book in 1978, and again in wider distribution in 1980, it was already a hit with underground readers. Literary critics soon followed suit. Many of them, such as Jamie James in his 1980 review of the book for American Book Review, discuss the gritty nature of the book. As James notes, it is "a blow-by-blow account of a season in Hell." James, like many other critics, was impressed by the literary skill of the young Carroll. Says James of the book, it "is a literary miracle; a description of the formation of an artistic sensibility written by the artist, not in retrospect, but in the process." Several other critics also note Carroll's talent. Says Barbara Graustark of Carroll in her 1980 review of the book for Newsweek: "His terse wit, with its archly contrived naïveté, transformed a tale of teen-age rebellion into a contemporary classic."

The Basketball Diaries received additional notice when the Jim Carroll Band released its first album, Catholic Boy, in 1980. The album's lyrics were rough and dark, like his diaries, and several music critics commented on the book in the course of reviewing the album. In his 1981 review of the album for Stereo Review Magazine, Steven Simels calls the book "a scary, mordantly funny odyssey along the dark underbelly of the Sixties, a virtuoso performance that ought to be must reading for those who still tend to romanticize the counterculture."

The Basketball Diaries also received favorable critical attention in 1987, when it was reprinted to coincide with the publication of its sequel, Forced Entries. The same was true in 1995, when the book was reprinted to coincide with the film adaptation of the book. This time around, with the help of a tie-in cover featuring actor Leonardo DiCaprio, the book landed on the bestseller list. Some critics, like Lewis MacAdams in his 1995 profile of Carroll for Entertainment Weekly, praised the book again. MacAdams notes "the miracle of Jim Carroll," a boy who "wrote like an angel, creating a transcendent autobiography." Others, like Wayne Jebian, in his review of the book for the Columbia Journal of American Studies, note how the book's graphic language did not turn off many readers, as one suspected it might. Says Jebian: "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." For Cassie Carter, the graphic quality of Carroll's life is what leads to his genius and his literary success. In her 1996 article for Dionysos: Literature and Addiction Quarterly, Carter notes that The Basketball Diaries "performs an amazing feat of alchemy, transforming the waste of Carroll's adolescence into a victory."

Still, despite its legendary status with both reviewers and popular readers, the book is not without its critics. Most of the negative criticism has centered on the book's graphic depictions of sex, violence, and drug use, and the book has been banned in certain areas as a result. In addition, in 1997, following Michael Carneal's killing spree in West Paducah, Kentucky, the film version of The Basketball Diaries came under fire. Carneal claimed that a scene depicting one of Carroll's classroom-shooting fantasies from the book had encouraged him to kill his classmates.

Criticism

Ryan D. Poquette

Poquette has a bachelor's degree in English and specializes in writing about literature. In the following essay, Poquette discusses Carroll's use of extremes in The Basketball Diaries.

Jim Carroll fills his autobiographical diaries with graphic language and imagery and includes situations that take the reader from one extreme emotion to another. Says Jamie James, in his 1980 review of the book for American Book Review, "When it is funny it is hilarious, reminiscent of Lenny Bruce at his best. When it hits a blue note, it is harrowing."

An example of a hilarious incident is Carroll's observation of the melodrama during a going-away party for Gums, a local military recruit. Gums's family makes a big fuss about his potentially dangerous involvement in the Vietnam War, but Carroll finds out that the boy is really only going to serve six months in a local reserve unit. As Carroll notes, "from the scene here you'd think old Gums had to assassinate Chairman Mao with a water pistol." On another occasion, Carroll talks about a kleptomaniac friend, Bobby Blake, who gets high, breaks into a closed ice cream parlor to steal the cash register, and ends up making himself an ice cream soda instead. He is still drinking it when two police arrive, "not believing for sure anything they see, Bobby not budging but biting away, cash register wrecked on the floor and the grilled cheese sandwich which Bobby forgot about burning to a crisp."

Carroll also describes some extremely gut-wrenching episodes, such as the various sex acts he has to engage in to support his drug habit, which lately have involved "handcuffs, masks, snakes (yeah, that's right, real ones), chains, whips, last week a guy had a pet parrot that he had eat grapes out of my pubic hair." One of his heterosexual encounters leads to getting a case of gonorrhea, which he describes in excruciating detail: "it's quite a bringdown waking up with your underwear a mass of red-brown blotches, all stiff as cardboard except where the gooey fresh blobs are." Some of the most harrowing descriptions in the diaries are associated with Carroll's heroin use. When he resurfaces after a four-day high, he notices two sets of needles next to him "in the slightly bloody water in the plastic cup on the crusty linoleum, probably used by every case of hepatitis in upper Manhattan by now." When Carroll goes through heroin withdrawal, his descriptions get even more disturbing. On one occasion when he is strung out, he waits the hour that it will take for a dose of methadone—a slower-acting drug—to take effect. "You bet that's a long hour too, with them cold flashes shooting up from your crotch right out your skull and your muscles feeling like wood and your energy to a sad eyed drip."

Besides the funny or disturbing descriptions, the situations themselves are often extreme. Even ordinary situations, like the many basketball games that Carroll plays, fall into one of two extremes—he either plays well or he takes drugs and plays horribly. In the beginning of the diaries, Carroll is a basketball star. The diaries are filled with several accounts of Carroll and his team dominating lesser teams. For example, at one point, Carroll's team is shorthanded while playing another team, but "it was the lamest bunch of saps ever put on a court, this other team, and we wiped them out by at least forty points." On another occasion, Carroll's team is "ahead by 23 points" by the end of the first four minutes of the game. As for Carroll himself, he easily impresses girls at his games. For example, he describes one game, during which the girls in the stands open their legs wider and wider as they let out "oohs" and "ahhs" to show their amazement at Carroll's athletic ability. This phenomenon increases "in direct proportion to each 'ooh' that by the time I dunked one backwards I could almost distinguish what color panties each chick sitting there was wearing."

At the other extreme, Carroll plays badly in games in which he takes drugs, such as when he takes some pills that he mistakenly thinks will make him faster. In reality, they drag him down. "The other team's dude who I normally leave looking at my shoelaces sailed over me and easily laid it in." Later in the diaries, Carroll notes that the massive drug habits of his and two of his teammates are affecting the team's performance. "It is common knowledge around the entire school that Marc Clutcher, Anton Neutron and myself are f—ing up our basketball team by taking every drug we can get our hands on before games."

Carroll's experiences with drugs are also extreme. At thirteen, Carroll is sniffing cleaning fluid. On another occasion, he is able to drink an enormous amount—two bottles—of codeine cough syrup before a party. When he first starts using heroin, he mainlines it, meaning that he injects it directly into a vein as opposed to injecting it into his skin or sniffing the dry powder. Novice heroin users usually avoid mainlining, since the high is so strong and it is easier to overdose. Says Carroll, "Tony said I might as well skin pop it. I said OK. Then Pudgy says, 'Well, if you're gonna put a needle in, you might as well mainline it."' On another occasion, Carroll's friend, Willie, was beaten up by mistake; the attackers try to make up with Willie by letting him wash his bloody mouth out with soda. "Willie took one sip of the soda, slipped in (and this is true) 200 mgs. of pure crystal amphetamine, and gave it back to the prick, who drank the rest."

What Do I Read Next?

• Although many today only know Carroll's prose writings, he made his start in the literary world as a poet. Fear of Dreaming: The Selected Poems of Jim Carroll (1993) includes poems from Living at the Movies (1973) and The Book of Nods (1986) as well as several more recent poems. This collection gives a portrait of Carroll as an artist in various stages of his writing career.
• Carroll's Forced Entries (1987) continues the autobiographical story of the author's drug addiction, starting five years after the last entry in The Basketball Diaries. However, in his first diary collection, Carroll detailed how he became a heroin addict. In this one, he describes his fight to overcome his addiction.
• In 1954, Aldous Huxley, a well-known author, published The Doors of Perception, a small, journalistic book detailing his experiences while under the influence of mescaline, a hallucinogenic drug. First-person accounts of drug use from later journalists like Hunter S. Thompson and Tom Wolfe have since overshadowed Huxley's book, which was very controversial in its time.
• Hunter S. Thompson is infamous for the massive amounts of drugs that he uses in the course of writing his provocative journalistic pieces. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream (1972), his best-known work, documents the journey of Thompson and a friend through Las Vegas. Over the course of the journey, the two men consume large amounts of alcohol, marijuana, mescaline, acid, cocaine, and various other drugs, while seeking the elusive American Dream.
• Irvine Welsh's first novel, Trainspotting (1993), offers a gritty portrait of heroin addiction among teenagers in modern Edinburgh, Scotland. The main character, Mark Renton, like Carroll in The Basketball Diaries, spends most of his time on the street with a gang of delinquents who do whatever it takes—including committing a variety of crimes—to get their next heroin fix.

Carroll's deliberate statement that this incident is true highlights its extreme nature. In fact, after another extreme episode, Carroll notes: "You probably figure I made this one up, but I swear every word is true." In fact, the many outrageous episodes in the book have caused some critics to question its authenticity. In his 1981 review for Creem, Richard Riegel calls The Basketball Diaries "a disturbingly seamless mixture of fact and fiction." Likewise, in his 1987 New York Times review of The Basketball Diaries and its sequel, Forced Entries, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt notes that The Basketball Diaries was "filled with a kind of vitality, though clearly exaggerated in its boastful accounts of drinking, drugs, sex and every sort of crime from stealing cars to hustling homosexuals in Times Square." As James notes, "It suffers from all the faults of the genre," including the fact that "some of the stories sound made up." However, as Peter Delacorte notes of The Basketball Diaries in his 1987 San Francisco Chronicle review of Forced Entries, ultimately, the speculation over the work's authenticity does not matter. Says Delacorte: "Of course, from the author's point of view the reader's confusion on such a point is absolutely irrelevant, as long as the reader stays interested."

In fact, Carroll himself is aware that normal situations make uninteresting diaries. At the end of one of the rare entries that does not include an outrageous situation, Carroll notes that this particular entry is boring. "I just couldn't think of anything else to write about anyway, no dope, no nooky, no queers following me today, I guess you start writing lame diaries like this." With this statement, Carroll hits on a well-known belief. Most people's lives are not that interesting. Despite the popular demand for biographies of interesting people, on a day-to-day basis most people—even celebrities—lead normal, and even boring, lives. Not Carroll, however. In his life, as depicted by The Basketball Diaries, there little boredom; readers are treated to a continuous, exciting variety of extreme dialogue, imagery, situations, and characters.

However, in the end, the diaries are true, even if Carroll did make some of it up. They offer an accurate reflection of what life was like for kids like Carroll, growing up on the tough streets of New York in the 1960s. At one point in his diaries, Carroll says that most people are unaware of what life is like in the city. He says that he will soon let people "know what's really going down in the blind alley out there in the pretty streets with double garages. I got a tap on all your wires, folks. I'm just really a wise ass kid getting wiser." Carroll's main purpose in writing his diaries is not to provide a completely accurate account of his own life but to represent his life and the lives of all those like him. His is the voice of criminals, junkies, prostitutes, and other urban characters who, like him, have struggled against their disadvantaged surroundings and who have failed to "become pure."

Source:

Ryan D. Poquette, Critical Essay on The Basketball Diaries, in Nonfiction Classics for Students, Gale, 2003.

Erik France

France holds an M.S.L.S. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a Ph.D. in history from Temple University. He is a librarian, college counselor, and teacher at University Liggett School and teaches writing at Macomb Community College near Detroit, Michigan. In the following essay, France discusses both historical context and the tradition of the poet as rebel in The Basketball Diaries.

"However, in the end, the diaries are true, even if Carroll did make some of it up. They offer an accurate reflection of what life was like for kids like Carroll, growing up on the tough streets of New York in the 1960s."

The primary value of Jim Carroll's The Basketball Diaries is its contextual vision of time (from the fall of 1963 to the summer of 1966) and place (New York City and its environs) and its carrying onward of a dramatic cultural strand that presents the (in this case young) artist as incorrigible rebel. The importance of the historical content highlighted in the published text is heightened by comparison with the financially successful movie adaptation, starring actor Leonardo Di Caprio that was released in 1995. In the latter version, all references to the 1960s are excised; the setting in the movie version is still New York City, but it is a very different, much more affluent and much more apolitical version of the city apparently of early-to mid-1990s vintage. Indeed, even though the movie quotes extensively from the printed version, it loses much of the charm and background tension and interest rendered in the book. The original diarist makes much of the atomic jitters caused by the Cold War, the Vietnam War, and ferment caused by class and racial friction, indirectly (and at times directly) using his and societal fears as justifications for his rebellious attitude, drug-use, and generally antisocial, at times violently sociopathic behavior.

In his "Author's Note" to Forced Entries: The Downtown Diaries, 1971-1973, Jim Carroll writes: "This diary is not the literal truth and is not meant to be a historical recounting of the period. The entries were consciously embellished and fictionalized to some extent. My purpose was simply to convey the texture of my experience and feelings for that period." The same probably holds true for The Basketball Diaries. What the reader can gain from the early diaries is a sense of what life was like in New York City during a three-year period for a precocious adolescent and teenager who was a good basketball player, drug addict, and neophyte poet. From his wry observations, often dangerous preoccupation and conflicts, one can also learn much about attitudes that oppose his, the prevailing norms, and generally what was going on culturally. Simply put, Jim Carroll's rebelliousness tapped into a relatively small but growing societal discontent that was building momentum for the entire duration of that historical period.

One of Jim Carroll's heroes throughout the diaries is singer-songwriter Bob Dylan, an important cultural rebel and icon of the period and ever since. A Summer 64 diary entry observes: "I spent most of the time just drinking beer in the corner and listening to Dylan on the jukebox." At a time when bands such as the Rolling Stones and the Beatles were spearheading the famous musical upheaval dubbed the British Invasion, Carroll chose to focus most of his musical attention on Minnesota-born, New York veteran Bob Dylan (he mentions charismatic soul singer James Brown in one incident). This makes perfect sense in that Dylan defined himself as rebel-poet, the very thing Jim Carroll wanted to become in full. Bob Dylan could fuse the power and possibilities of poetry with music, passionately rail against the things in society he didn't like, and become rich and famous all at the same time. Technically, he couldn't even sing very well, an evident fact that inspired all sorts of aspiring poets and singers. Indeed, Jim Carroll himself eventually (in the late 1970s) formed a rock band and sang his own poems and lyrics just like his hero, including "People Who Died," a very memorable song on the album Catholic Boy that chronicles the deaths of friends and acquaintances, many of whom appear and whose deaths are mentioned or similarly described in entries of The Basketball Diaries. This song also appears in the movie version, tying four art forms (written diary, poetry, music, and cinema) together. Carroll's interest in Bob Dylan persists throughout The Basketball Diaries. It is worth noting that Carroll's voice has an imprint that is almost equally affected and unique as Dylan's. For Carroll as a boy, as with heroin, once hooked, it would have been difficult to avoid his interest in Dylan, for during the approximate period covered by the diaries, Dylan released no fewer than six very influential albums; indeed, halfway through the period he caused a ruckus among folk music "purists" by changing from acoustic to electric guitar. Carroll, in a Winter 1966 entry, describing an incident shooting up heroin, notes: "Bob Dylan, he's in the radio. He glows in the dark and my fingers are just light feathers falling and fading down…" Carroll was sensitive enough to discover that Dylan did not and does not carry his appeal to everyone, in one case to an African-American friend. In the spring of 1966, after the electric album Highway 61 Revisited had climbed the predominantly white popular music charts, Carroll noted in his diary: "I tell my friend play Dylan … 'Who he?"'

"One of Jim Carroll's heroes throughout the diaries is singer- songwriter Bob Dylan, an important cultural rebel and icon of the period and ever since."

The Basketball Diaries also taps into one of Bob Dylan's major literary influences, the Beat Generation. This loosely defined group of poets and writers included novelist Jack Kerouac, author of On the Road (1957), poet Allen Ginsberg, author of "Howl" (1956), and writer William S. Burroughs. Carroll does not inform the reader whether these are important influences on him at the time as well, but their impact and his meetings with some of the Beat figures is definitively mentioned in Forced Entries: The Downtown Diaries, 1971-1973. As with his fondness for Dylan, this again make sense, for Carroll shares many of the same values and interests as the Beats. In fact, Carroll's preoccupation with drug addictions, especially with heroin, parallels Burroughs' recounting of his own addictions in the memoir, Junky. All three of these key Beat Generation figures spent formative college years in New York City during the World War II barely twenty years before the events and musings of The BasketballDiaries, so he shared the same geographical space, the same sense of rebelliousness, a common exposure to drugs, numerous (including sometimes bizarre) sexual encounters, and at times criminal behavior. With Ginsberg he shared a love of poetry and a sense that prevailing society must be questioned and challenged because of its at best apathetic and at worst reactionary politics. They all enjoyed bucking the status quo, a hallmark of and now a stereotyped way of viewing the 1960s.

In The Basketball Diaries, Jim Carroll frequently argues with his father over societal and political issues that raged during the period. In the movie version, it is worth noting, Carroll's father is edited out along with the 1960s. Carroll's father, in the book version, sides with the status quo along with most of white Americans at the time: to show one's patriotism, one should trust and not criticize the government or religious institutions. But Jim Carroll distrusted, and he criticized vociferously. Like Dylan and Ginsberg, he had specific reasons to feel distrust and anxiety and to show opposition. One was fear of incineration by nuclear weapons as a by-product of the Cold War between the Americans and the Soviet bloc. Just prior to the period covered by The Basketball Diaries, a third world war had nearly broken out during the Cuban Missile Crisis (1962); not mentioned but clearly felt by Carroll and most New Yorkers at the time, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963; and in 1964 United States began escalating its involvement in the Vietnam War (1964-1972). Intermittently throughout The Basketball Diaries Carroll addresses his pervasive fear of nuclear holocaust. He describes feelings of being stuck at "ground zero in one fireball Island" in a Summer 65 diary entry devoted to atomic jitters and the psychic trauma it inflicts. "After all these years of worry and nightmares over it," the entry continues, "(I remember my brother enticing me on to panic during the Cuban crisis saying they were coming any minute) I think by now I'd feel very left out if they dropped the bomb and it didn't get me." When a power outage shut down much of New York City and the east coast in the fall of 1965, Carroll was caught in a subway train and thought the end had come, later noting to his diary, "the fact there were no tunnel lights on either made for more A-bomb paranoia." Carroll's diaries also intermittently mention his dread of Vietnam, for after high school he might be drafted into military service there, mixed with the recurrent fear of nuclear war. In a Winter 1966 diary entry, things have gotten so bad that he thinks of his whole life as a reprieve from the inevitable. "It's just gotten bigger now … will I have time to finish the poems breaking loose in my head? Time to find out if I'm the writer I know I can be? How about these diaries? Or will Vietnam beat me to the button? Because it's poetry now … and the button is still there, waiting …"

The movie version of The Basketball Diaries was made and released in a rare bubble of time. The Cold War had ended, and so had some of the decades-old fears of nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union. The American economy boomed at the time, so there probably seemed no reason to set the film back during the tumultuous 1960s. At the time, who would have cared? The relevance and acuteness of Jim Carroll's awareness and fears of New York City as a target of sudden attack feels far more visceral and immediate since the events of September 11, 2001, a sad and tragic fact that nonetheless helps the text version of The Basketball Diaries to resonate again in time and place, both as a recapturing of the past and prophesying for the future. Artists and poets may seem paranoid at times, but this does not mean that something like what they fear does not sometimes really come to pass.

Source:

Erik France, Critical Essay on The Basketball Diaries, in Nonfiction Classics for Students, Gale, 2003.

Douglas Dupler

Dupler has published numerous essays and has taught college English. In this essay, Dupler analyzes the destructive rift between an adolescent young man and the adult society around him.

A picaresque novel differs from a conventional novel in that the picaresque form usually revolves around a main character who travels loosely from scene to scene, encountering other characters and situations in a random fashion, gathering whatever seeds of wisdom that present themselves. The conventional novel, on the other hand, typically involves characters whose actions and conflicts form a plot, which leads to some sort of resolution in the end. Miguel de Cervantes's (1547-1616) Don Quixote was the original picaresque novel, from which a long tradition of storytelling has evolved. Don Quixote was a knight whose travels have been viewed by critics as a spiritual quest, a journey undertaken for self-knowledge. The main character in The Basketball Diaries might be considered, in a stretch, a modern-day teenage knight, whose battles are on the basketball courts and on the streets, and who also is on a quest, when he states that he just wants "to be pure." But this is the only similarity between these distant stories that somewhat share a form. Knights in Don Quixote's day had very strict societal codes of conduct (chivalry), while the main character in this book is an unformed young man who is either lacking in reliable codes of conduct, or whose main mission seems to be to challenge and test codes and ethics.

Carroll portrays his main character and his street-wise life with a palette of decadence. The protagonist's reality is a downward spiral of drug abuse, theft, violence, altercations with police and other authority figures, sexual abuse, and prostitution, often described with crude and profane language. Indeed, the repetition of these sordid scenes and the protagonist's capacity for self-destruction and wayward behavior would be tiresome if not for the Tom Sawyer-ish charm the protagonist manages to maintain throughout the story. The reader can be attracted to this character despite his trouble-making and his tough-guy posturing because the story plays upon sympathy; the reader knows that this young man has been dealt a harsh reality by fate, lacking in teachers, mentors, and caring parents. The young man, as evidenced by his striving on the basketball courts, also wants to rise above it all and occasionally does, and records these efforts poetically and intelligently at times. The reader feels for him when the protagonist becomes mired in addiction and the troubles of street life.

The protagonist of The Basketball Diaries is curiously without any deep relationships throughout the story. His friends of his own age are partners in petty crime, but none of these adolescents are described with any conviction and remain vague for the reader. No characters in the protagonist's life are memorable and these characters only briefly appear and disappear in the narrative. The protagonist does not even give his own name; perhaps the author wants the reader to believe that it actually is a diary. A policeman refers to the main character as "Jim," keeping with the diary form. However, this omission of a proper name also has the effect of making the protagonist seem young, unformed, and very isolated; the story is told from a vague first-person perspective. The protagonist comments on his isolation when he describes a feeling he has while standing on a rooftop, looking down at the city: "It's just me and my own naked self and the stars breathing down. And it's beautiful." This is a revealing scene; the young man wants to soar above the troubles of the street, but he can only do so by himself, as other people seem so dangerous and distant to him. At the same time, he discloses later in his narrative that it is not really beautiful to be isolated; he has a dream in which he longs for "an incredible love somewhere in my world," and near the end of the story, he has a horrifying drug experience in which he realizes, with emphasis, that "I AM ALONE." His isolation ends in increasing self-destruction and addiction without anyone to help him.

Of all the brief relationships described in the narrative, the protagonist's relationship with authority might go the deepest in giving insights into his character and his troubles. Like Tom Sawyer, he finds the adult world alien and to be avoided. Adults in these diary entries have few redeeming features and give reasons for profound distrust. On the first page of the book, the basketball coach (a classic mentor figure for young people) is revealed with undertones of potential sexual abuse, and later in the book priests, teachers, and a basketball scout are all portrayed as sexual predators. Adults are also shown as helpless addicts, such as the alcoholics that single out the protagonist on trains, or as desperate prostitutes. The protagonist sees a woman commit suicide as though it is a common occurrence in the adult world, and he can only turn to heroin to dull his shock. The protagonist and his friends are in a constant struggle with police, the symbol of society's authority. However, these authorities are also untrustworthy; a policeman, for instance, unjustly strikes the protagonist. When the protagonist's basketball talents gain him a scholarship to a prestigious school, he recoils against the school and remarks, "I feel like … blowing up the 257 years of fine tradition of this place."

Tradition is not the only thing the protagonist wants to blow up. He is alarmed by the violent thoughts that fill his mind; he sits in class and fantasizes about taking "a machine gun and … firing like mad" to "release some tension." It seems that there are areas in this young man's psyche that haunt him and that he is unable to confront, and he has no trustworthy adults who can guide him to deeper self-knowledge, or with whom he can even share his troubles.

The protagonist's parents are no help to him. His father accosts him with anger, and the young man describes that relationship as "an unending rift." At one point the young man swears on his "mom's grave," then quickly notes that his mother is not really dead, although she only pops up in his narrative when she finds drugs and lectures him on the matter, or when she unreasonably attacks his beliefs. He describes his home as "a screaming maniac nut house," and hints that his parents are angry racists, although at the same time he clearly needs his parents' love. He tries to escape his family strife through heroin, writing how his "veins are sore," yet he still loves his parents "somehow more" through the pain and addiction. Near the end of the diaries, when he is in a juvenile reformatory and his mother refuses to visit him, he wishes he has godparents.

The narrator does give hints that he may recognize that he has a problem with authority, and perhaps justifiably so. This is a young man who lives in a period and culture haunted by war; in his fantasies of violence, he dreams of fighting the Germans of World War II. He describes his boss at Yankee Stadium as a man who could be a "commander in any of Hitler's war camps." Furthermore, the Cold War atmosphere in which he exists haunts him deeply. Several times he notes his fear of a nuclear bombing, remarking on his "A-bomb paranoia" and the specter of the "Russians" with their "atomic arrows." He describes his state of mind as "hideous fear" brought on by "constant drills in schools and TV flashes." His fear and fatalism concerning nuclear annihilation have been with him for so long that he says, "I'd feel very left out if they dropped the bomb and it didn't get me."

The political atmosphere in which the protagonist lives gives him a sense of hopelessness and powerlessness. For instance, when his school arranges a traditional Thanksgiving fast to support the poor and hungry, the protagonist can not believe that such a gesture could be beneficial and calls it a "farce." At a peace march, he comments, "Who needs leaders?" He concludes that violence is a better means to solve problems than peaceful demonstration, and there are no wise people or leaders present who can guide him and share ideas. At the same time, the protagonist is sensitive enough to ask a little girl if "Christ would fight in the war?" Rather than finding a meaningful way to express and sort out his beliefs, the protagonist turns again to drugs and denial, so that he will not feel "guilty about not fighting a war" and as a means to escape the "scheming governments of death."

"In the end, the protagonist of The Basketball Diaries uses drug addiction to fill the void created by a lack of positive authority and genuine mentors."

Finally, as meaningful relationships with other people and with authority figures are lacking in these diaries, the protagonist develops his addictive relationship with drugs. In the beginning of the story, the reader is told about the young man's first heroin experience, as well as his experiences with marijuana and psychedelic substances. At first, the protagonist seems to approach drugs with a sense of adventure, recalling the French poet Rimbaud's (1854-1891) famous quote that a poet must use any means available to cause a 'derangement of the senses,' in order to enhance poetic and visionary experience. However, when the reader becomes familiar with the young man's pains and troubles, it becomes clear that his drug experiences are far from positive and visionary. A flirtation with drugs leads to destructive addiction. Although the narrator describes an experience with the Native-American ritual plant peyote as "incredible," the reader still grasps the escapist motive when the young man writes that his mind went "somewhere" the "bald headed generals and wheelchair senators could never imagine." Unlike the Native-American vision-seekers, who have had organized rituals and elder guides for excursions into their experimental realms, the protagonist only has a casual friend to accompany him. His experience becomes one of escape from the world and from his own society's elders, with no life-changing wisdom or visions following it.

In the end, the protagonist of The Basketball Diaries uses drug addiction to fill the void created by a lack of positive authority and genuine mentors. The young man, although once a star on the basketball court, cannot shine by himself in the world. In his final diary entries, he goes through cycles of addiction and withdrawal, and seems to hope that the police catch him, a desperate plea for attention from authority. He blames impersonal "big business" men and "white haired old men in smoking jacket armchairs" for the troubles in the world. In his last diary entry, he describes "four days of temporary death." Lacking any true adult guides in life, and too young and inexperienced to guide himself, he remains an unformed "foetus" longing to go "back to the womb," rather than a young man with great potential springing forward into the adult world.

Source:

Douglas Dupler, Critical Essay on The Basketball Diaries, in Nonfiction Classics for Students, Gale, 2003.

Alex Williams

In the following interview-essay, Williams offers background on Carroll's life and career with comments from Carroll on the occasion of the film release of The Basketball Diaries.

"I could get my shooting eye back," says Jim Carroll in a voice from the Borough of Lost Souls. "But that first step, man, that's the first thing to go." Carroll, at 44, still has the wounded-fawn cheekbones and red hair of the immortal adolescent. Thirty years ago, he was already a god in his small New York universe, a basketball star, literary prodigy, and fledgling heroin addict. That boy has been mummified in celluloid in the film version of his memoir, The Basketball Diaries, with Leonardo Di Caprio playing the stoned angel in a blazer and rep tie.

The actual Jim sits today in a Madison Avenue coffee shop, over rice pudding and apple-cinnamontea, and looks back on his glory days with toneless eyes of battleship gray, eyes that look like they have seen three lifetimes.

"I was always such a f—n' gunner," he says. "Y'know, if they had a three-point line back then, I woulda scored, like, seven more points a game. But see, I wasn't a natural one-step leaper. I didn't have spring. But I worked really hard with, like, weighted spats and stuff. So by my sophomore year, I could dunk a ball, like, backwards, take off from the foul line. After a while, they'd have a guy just sitting there for me. Y'know?

That was in 1966. Carroll was an all-city guard for Trinity, sparring with legends like Vaughan Harper—the Felipe Lopez of his day—and "the Goat," Earl Manigault, on the playgrounds of Harlem. By night, he was traversing the city in a hormonal search for significance, pulling off wild stunts and minor crimes with pals like Pedro and Herbie, and using his basketball-star status to score with girls from Park Avenue to the Grand Concourse. And, amazingly, he was getting it all down on paper. Jack Kerouac said that at 13, he wrote better prose than 89 percent of the novelists in America ("I'm so sick of that f—n' quote, man," says Carroll). It was a world without gravity.

"The actual Jim sits today in a Madison Avenue coffee shop, over rice pudding and apple- cinnamon tea, and looks back on his glory days with toneless eyes of battleship gray, eyes that look like they have seen three lifetimes."

Carroll is on his second coffee shop and it's only 10 A.M. He's just met with a few friends from Drugs Anonymous and is stopping off before continuing an epic walk to the Fifth Avenue office of his lawyer, ex-wife, and friend Rosemary Carroll. A few minutes ago, he was walking down Lexington Avenue when a guy in Chuck Taylors, maybe 25, stalked him for a block before interrupting, reverentially: "You're Jim Carroll! I just heard this voice.…"

"It's, like, I call up stores, and the person on the other end of the line says, ' Is this Jim Carroll?"' Carroll says in his characteristic pinched whine, equal parts Edith Bunker and William Burroughs.

He wears a denim work shirt, blue watch cap, and black sunglasses. Flecks of gray have pushed into his thin, incongruous beard. Tiny folds of skin gather under the eyes, though no one can see past his black-framed sunglasses. And he's talking incessantly, allowing each story the freedom to ramble.

Carroll is talking ball again, wagging his wrist in a dribble motion. "So it was the day we were auditioning Patrick [McGaw], who plays Neutron in the film, and they were short a guy for three-on-three. It was freezing, y'know, down on Thompson Street, with ice all over the side of the court, like where your hands get all cracked, like, when you're a kid, playin' outdoors in winter? It was me and Marky [Wahlberg] and James Madio versus Patrick, Leo [Di Caprio], and Bryan [Goluboff], the screenwriter. And I was pa-thet-ic. I go up for this little jump shot, with Leo guarding me, and he's got no leaps at all, and he comes in and blocks my shot!" He shakes his head. "I hate them for making me do that."

"That's the thing about this project, the biggest downer," Carroll says. "I had that moment. I'm not going back to try to recapture it. I had that one chance.…"

A world without gravity. Twenty-five years ago, The Paris Review published his teenage diaries over his strong reservations; he saw himself as a poet. But the diaries themselves are poetry of a sort: He's down dealing on the hottest corner in the city, like a furnace that street, can feel narco heat waves through your sneakers.

"I think they saw the diaries in The World magazine, published by the Poetry Project. They told me Plimpton wanted to see them," Carroll says. He says that Truman Capote's editor at Random House, Joe Fox, wanted to publish the diaries as a book, but Carroll was adamant about doing a poetry collection. He finally sold the rights to Bantam in 1979, insisting on paperbacks only. "It was the perfect book for the time, the punk scene, but I thought it would be out-to-lunch to publish it as this $19.95 hardcover." Carroll estimates the book has sold around 500,000 copies, and Bantam did a study that showed six people read it for every one who bought it.

The Basketball Diaries, which Carroll wrote between the ages of 13 and 15, is a panorama of winos, preppies, hustlers, and fools. It's New York picaresque—Oliver Twist with a habit. Carroll published poems in Poetry when he was still shooting jumpers against Riverdale High. In the seventies and early eighties, he played rock and roll and almost made it big.

Now, with the arrival of the long-awaited film, comes Carroll's unsolicited midlife retrospective. Carroll sighs, a little weary: "With the records and everything, I've had my time above-ground. Y'know?"

Jim Carroll was an idea fifteen years in the making for his parents, Tom and Agnes Carroll. They had tried to have kids well before Tom's wartime tours of Iwo Jima and Saipan. They'd given up when Thomas Joseph Jr. was born in 1949; James Dennis ("from Dionysius") followed a year later.

Carroll spent his early years in the East Twenties, a tough neighborhood at the time; at 13, his family moved to the more middle-class Irish enclave of Inwood in upper Manhattan. That was the first year he shot up. "I think the main reason I started using heroin was that everyone else was always going out drinking, and I hated drinking," he says innocently. He hated Catholic school, though, and as a freshman used basketball and good grades as a ticket to the affluent Trinity School on the Upper West Side.

His father was a hard-assed war vet whose own father had run a Harlem speakeasy for Dutch Schultz. "My old man would listen to the music I was playing, Phil Ochs, and say, 'What the f— is this Phil Ouches guy? What is this goddamned Communist s—t I'm hearing?"' Carroll says. "Y'know, his bar was this real cops-and-construction-workers redneck bar, and he'd have to listen to them go, 'What the hell is with your son with his long hair? You know, I used to read about him in the sports pages, scored 40 points; now he's got hair down to here.' And then Smitty, the postman from our building, the loudmouthed bastard, starts saying, y'know, 'Your son gets all this poetry stuff in the mail; I mean, what in the hell is that?' Because that's the take in any neighborhood, in the Jimmy Breslin sense. Poetry is sissy stuff. Anybody who writes poetry is a fag." Carroll laughs. "Which I found out is absolutely true when I got out on the scene."

By the time he was a junior in high school, Carroll was traveling down to open poetry readings at St. Mark's Church, swallowing his fear, and turning heads. He impressed poet Ted Berrigun as well as influential literary editors.

He tried college, attending Wagner in Staten Island "for a year, as far as the draft was concerned." He adds, with disbelief, "My dorm roommates, like, they thought the biggest thrill was to go down and see the Johnny Carson show." He was gone within weeks, and spent even less time at his next school, Columbia.

In 1973, Carroll published his first poetry collection, Living at the Movies, and moved to San Francisco with a girlfriend and his methadone. From there it was up the coast to the art colony of Bolinas, where he met Rosemary. "I learned to like being by myself. Maybe too much. But that was the first time I discovered a writing routine."

He might have stayed on that path had it not been for a night in San Diego in 1978. Jim was hanging out with Patti Smith, an old girlfriend, before a gig. There was a scuffle involving roadies, and Smith booted the opening act from the bill. In a pinch, she suggested Jim open the show, just get up and speak-sing some poems, as he had done for her before. Her band would back him, just riff. "I was like, 'Uhhh …"' says Carroll, eyes wide with mock terror. "I didn't even like rock and roll that much." The gig lasted seven minutes. But the Jim Carroll Band was born.

"When I came back to New York, it was such a joke, because I was always referred to as the pure young poet who wasn't in it for what he could get out of it; and all of a sudden, the pure young poet comes back, and I've got this deal for the paperback of The Basketball Diaries, and I'm hanging out with the Rolling Stones."

The single "People Who Died" was his rock-and-roll master work, a Ramones-style guitar grind molded around a terse catalogue of the victims he knew in his New York adolescence. "There was that line, G-berg and Georgie let the gimmicks, go rotten/died of hepatitis in upper Manhattan. It was actually five of us that shared that needle, and three of us died from it. I just say 'G-berg and Georgie' because of the scan," he says. "G-berg, yeah, like Goldberg. The guy's name wasn't Goldberg; he was a Puerto Rican guy, but everyone said he looked Jewish."

Carroll's album Catholic Boy, which came out in 1980, put him on the commercial radar. Within two years, Carroll's group was opening for the J. Geils Band in hockey arenas. "There were always these girls pushing to the front to sock their tongues into your mouth," he recalls.

The fact that the next two records didn't move was no great tragedy. "These guys were always saying, 'The minute you get onstage, it's great, no matter how much you're hurting.' But that didn't work for me. There were some nights I did not want to get out there," he says.

He moved back to New York in 1986, and split amicably with Rosemary (two years later, she married Danny Goldberg, who is now chairman of Warner Bros. Records). He published a collection of poems, The Book of Nods, which even Carroll admits wasn't totally successful. "Rock and roll kind of screwed up my voice, poetically. I found myself having this 'Beat' voice in my poems. It was like this self-fulfilled prophecy, because everybody was calling me this rock poet, this Beat poet."

Carroll moved back to Inwood, two blocks from his old building. His mother had died, and he had made peace with his father, who was reduced to visiting her grave every day. He also wrote a sequel to The Basketball Diaries, which he called Forced Entries. The book was a journal of tawdry, Warholian downtown New York in the early seventies.

Carroll arrives at Rosemary's office. He's there to view a short film by a worshipful NYU student based on the final, cathartic passage of Forced Entries. Carroll's got a headache, so he asks a secretary for some Tylenol. He takes four, then wanders into a nearby conference room.

Cyril Connolly once said, "Whom the gods wish to destroy, they first call promising." Carroll sums it up a little differently: "I was always the young guy. And when you're successful when you're young, it leads to an arrested adolescence or something, y'know. And there's that ecstasy period in your life as an artist. Every artist goes through this. I tried to get it back at first with music, and got, y'know, that adrenaline. But," he says cautiously, "there's a time when you switch into a more sober period."

Carroll knows that after the film hype fades, he'll finally have time to work on two novels that he says "just came to me three or four years ago. Like a gift." One is about a miracle, two priests, and an investigation by the Vatican. (He's been brushing up on the Gnostics.) The other is about a young star painter who walks away from art in a spiritual crisis. There are no drugs, and the painter is a virgin. "These are straight, linear novels in the third person. My editor was shocked. He was like, 'Jim! These are money books.' But if I don't get to work on these things, boy, I am betraying a gift; I mean, that's what I would define as a sin."

It helps that Carroll has finally achieved a quiet writer's ritual. "It's like I've been so jubilant, I just eliminated that need." Carroll rises every morning around 4:30 A.M., when he does his best writing. And he's shaken a nasty TV habit: "After that afternoon nap, it was always Oprah time.… So I got rid of cable and my VCR, but I found I was watching, like, infomercials instead of movies. But these days—" He pauses, indignant. "To me, late-night movies are old black-and-white movies with Cagney and Bogart, but today, old movies are like The Sting II with Jackie Gleason."

During the summer, he often teaches at Allen Ginsberg's Naropa Institute. He lectures and reads at colleges, maintaining little contact with the downtown New York he helped define, although he recently went to a viewing of Diaries at Rosemary's place with Lou Reed and Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon. "It moves well," he says. "It's hard for me to really register on it because of the personal attachment."

Carroll has been clean of heroin since the early seventies. He still has an occasional margarita, although he has never liked drinking. "I can't go for that complete-abstinence thing. I mean, I obviously have an addictive personality, especially for heroin. But I haven't smoked grass in like eight or nine years. I mean, I wish I could still smoke grass. But New York is just so speedy, it's so fast-paced. I mean, the phone's going to ring any minute and someone's going to lay a big trip on me, and I'll spend the first hour paranoid."

Source:

Alex Williams, "Lord Jim," in New York, Vol. 28, No. 17, April 24, 1995, pp. 64-66.

Sources

Carroll, Jim, The Basketball Diaries, Tombouctou Books, 1978, reprint, Penguin Books, 1995.

———, Catholic Boy, Atco, 1980.

———, Forced Entries: The Downtown Diaries, 1971-1973, Penguin Books, 1987, p. vi.

Carter, Cassie, "'A Sickness That Takes Years to Perfect': Jim Carroll's Alchemical Vision," in Dionysos: Literature and Addiction Quarterly, Vol. 6, No. 1, Winter 1996, pp. 6-19.

Delacorte, Peter, "A Follow-Through beyond the Hoop," in the San Francisco Chronicle, July 12, 1987, p. 3.

Gilbert, Martin, A History of the Twentieth Century, Vol. 3, 1952-1999, Perennial, 2000, p. 307.

Graustark, Barbara, "Mean Streets," in Newsweek, Vol. 96, No. 10, September 8, 1980, pp. 80-81.

James, Jamie, Review of The Basketball Diaries, in American Book Review, Vol. 2, No. 2, February 1980, p. 9.

Jebian, Wayne, "Diaries of the Damned," in the Columbia Journal of American Studies, Vol. 1, No. 1, 1995.

Lehmann-Haupt, Christopher, Review of The Basketball Diaries and Forced Entries, in the New York Times, July 9, 1987, p. C23.

MacAdams, Lewis, "Jim Carroll," in Entertainment Weekly, No. 281-282, June 30, 1995, pp. 50-51.

Riegel, Richard, Review of Catholic Boy, in Creem, Vol. 12, No. 9, February 1981, p. 44.

Simels, Steven, "Jim Carroll," in Stereo Review Magazine, Vol. 46, No. 2, February 1981, p. 40.

Further Reading

Baum, Dan, Smoke and Mirrors: The War on Drugs and the Politics of Failure, Little, Brown, 1997.

This retrospective look at the United States' war on drugs deviates from other books in this genre that tend to use anecdotes to depict the government as deliberate participants in the spread of drugs. Instead, Baum, a journalist, provides balanced criticism about why the war on drugs has failed, using facts to back up his assertions.

Braunstein, Peter, and Michael William Doyle, eds., Imagine Nation: The American Counterculture of the 1960s and '70s, Routledge, 2001.

This collection of essays offers a thorough examination of the major cultural issues in the 1960s and 1970s. Topics include Drugs in the Sixties Counter-culture, Insurgent Youth and the Sixties Culture of Rejuvenation, Film and the Counterculture, and Media and Pop Culture.

Holmes, Ann, The Mental Effects of Heroin, The Encyclopedia of Psychological Disorders, Little, Brown, 1997.

Holmes reviews the history of heroin use, discusses the physical and psychological effects of using heroin, and talks about the causes of and various treatments for heroin addiction. The book also includes several appendices, including contact information for substance-abuse agencies, heroin-related statistical tables, a bibliography, and a glossary of drug-related terms.

Unger, Irwin, and Debi Unger, eds., The Times Were a Changin': The Sixties Reader, Three Rivers Press, 1998.

In this book, the Ungers present an extensive anthology of speeches, articles, court decisions, and other documents that defined the 1960s. Organized in twelve categories, the book's sections feature an introduction from the editors as well as specific commentary on the documents.