Jim Carroll was not the kind of memoirist who constantly worried about how certain passages of his diaries might someday translate to film. He definitely did not think, ‘Hmm, how would this entry look in the movie version?’ when he doggedly wrote what would eventually be known as The Basketball Diaries. He probably knew it was going to get published but that’s it. He must have had zero thoughts about how his diaries will one day become a movie starring, of all people, Leonardo DiCaprio. He was maybe half aware that he’s going to make it big in the literary scene but he was not giving a shit, at the time of writing the now hard to find diaries, about anything when he made the most compelling 200-page memoir ever put to print. The Basketball Diaries is one of the best fucking books ever. This book is pure.
If Holden Caulfield lived in the sixties, played basketball, wrote diaries, mastered the art of injecting heroin, was cool with girls, was a notch crazier, and were an actual person, he’d probably get along with Jim. Not that any of these characteristics would automatically translate to them being friends. Jim is a little offensive, bit of a jerk, and quite hospitable with the ‘flits’ whom Holden quietly despise. But as it is, if both of them lived in the same neighborhood, Jim would probably beat up Holden because let’s face it, Holden’s a bit of a wuss. Holden is yellow. Jim, on the other hand, is the class jock. He is the prep school bully who incurs the ire of prep school kids who turn their noses on stink cases like Jim. Not that kids like Jim care. His life is more exciting and he gets the best drugs on the block. Holden can’t even manage to get a hard on with a prostitute. But Holden can smoke. But if it came to, I’ll place my bets on the basketball star. The basketball star who gets high before and during major tournaments. The basketball hotshot who screws New York matronas and periodically, subway station homosexuals. With the probable exception of teenage dorks and gays, what boy at age 13 didn’t fantasize about living that kind of life?
Typically, I’d bore you and me with how gorgeous this book is. But some books, you just have to read them to know how great they are. So here are some bits:
Symbolic gestures are certainly self-satisfying but they are not too nourishing for anyone anywhere… I suggest that tomorrow, somebody symbolically stick a stale drum stick of today’s lunch up the ass of whoever was humane enough to organize this farce.
If you never do anything to make yourself seen… like really seen, the type that makes people point, then you don’t deserve to be seen at all.
And the clincher,
I just want to be pure…
Me too, Jim!
Jim Carroll is probably still alive today but if he has injected that much heroin and smoked that much smokes, he should be dead right about now. And if he Is still alive, it’s possible that he’ll blog. As a blogger, he probably would turn the comments function off and write profanity like Satan himself and not expect greatness from all the effort. I would probably stalk that blog and comment like a dork and annoy old man Jim. Then he’d turn the comment function on and tell me to get a life. And that would be awesome.
