Looking Back: Jim Carroll on "Basketball Diaries" and His Phase as a Rocker

Jim Carroll

By Steven Rosen

(This originally appeared in The Denver Post in 2002 and is posted here on the sad occasion of Mr. Carroll's passing at age 60 of a heart attack.)

When Jim Carroll, author of the autobiographical and
best-selling "The Basketball Diaries," comes for Saturday night
readings at the Lion's Lair in Denver, he hopes the visit is more relaxed
than his last metro-area visit. In 1999, he had received a death threat, which prompted his sponsor, Boulder's Naropa Institute, to take precautions.

"There were some kind of problems going on at that time, the
whole Columbine thing," Carroll says, in a thick New York accent
that turns "Naropa" into "Naroper," in a telephone interview.

"They couldn't allow the public in, only their students and
the rest of the faculty. And they had to have it at some secret
location. It was very scary."

That reading came just a few months after the murderous
rampage at Columbine High School. There had been speculation that
the killers, Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, were partly inspired
by a fantasy sequence in the 1995 movie adaptation of "The
Basketball Diaries." In slow motion, a trenchcoat-wearing Leonardo DiCaprio,
playing Carroll, shoots his teacher and fellow students with a
shotgun.

Both Carroll and Anne Waldman, who runs Naropa's poetry
program, said the threat against him had come from Colorado and
was Columbine-related. (A dismissed lawsuit by the wife of slain Columbine teacher
Dave Sanders had named the film as one violent inspiration for the
killers. Another dismissed lawsuit had named the film as one cause
of a 1997 fatal school-shooting in West Paducah, Ky.)

Carroll believes it's ludicrous, and unconstitutional, to
blame art for such actions. And he favors tighter gun-control
laws.

But as a film lover whose first book of poetry was called
"Living at the Movies," he is critical of that specific scene,
himself.

"I always thought when I first saw that scene it was kind of
corny, over-the-top," Carroll says. "I don't like slow-motion in
films. But it is a legitimate means of portraying a fantasy or
dream sequence without tipping off that it's a dream sequence
right away," he says. "But when I saw that scene, I never thought
anything like that could happen."

Carroll grew up in New York City as a tough street kid in the
late 1950s and 1960s. As a teenager, he got addicted to heroin,
hustled gay men for money, had plenty of underage sex and
witnessed violence.

But he also was a talented athlete and a gifted student
interested in contemporary poetry. He won a scholarship to a top
Manhattan private school, where he became a star high-school
basketball player. And he started keeping a diary.

The movie, which takes liberties with Carroll's book, changes
his high-school-shooting scene in a crucial way. "Actually, the book says I don't want to shoot anybody," Carroll says. In two passages, which he wrote at about age 15, he expressed his fantasies about firing a machine gun in school, but
not at anybody.

"I wanted to shoot the great expanse of boredom - the ceiling
and the blackboard," he says. "I think a lot of kids have had that
fantasy of wanting to riddle up the blackboard and stuff. But I didn't want to shoot anybody and stuff. That's why I thought it was a little bit over the top when I saw that (film)."

As a teen, Carroll also started to read his poetry at the
Poetry Project in St. Mark's Church, and to publish in its
magazine, "The World." Both were run by poets Waldman, now at
Naropa, and the late Ted Berrigan.

"He's one of my favorite writers," Waldman says of Carroll.
"I've known him since he was a teen in New York City. I was close
to him when he was composing 'The Basketball Diaries,' a landmark
book for our culture."

She and Berrigan gave Carroll crucial support. And Carroll
still has great fondness for them, and poetry. "Ted was the oldest
and best-known of the second generation of New York School poets,
of the generation right beneath Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, James
Schuyler and Kenneth Koch," he says.

"Since we were both these Irish Catholic guys, Ted took me
under his wing. I became like this token prodigy."

When Waldman asked him to contribute to a prose issue of her
magazine, he offered excerpts from the diaries he had been keeping
as a teen.

Influenced by Beat-era writers like Hubert Selby Jr., William
Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, the writings created a sensation,
especially given his youthfulness. "Paris Review" subsequently
published more, and Carroll's "Basketball Diaries" became an
underground literary sensation until it was officially published
in 1978.

When it came out, punk rock was sweeping New York. "It was
much closer to a punk audience than a hippie audience." At about the same time, while living in California, Carroll joined a band that opened for an old poet-turned-rocker friend of his, Patti Smith. He signed a recording contract and his first
album, "Catholic Boy," contained a song loosely based on
"Basketball Diaries," "People Who Died." It became a hit.

"I knew a lot of kids from "Basketball Diaries' who went to
Vietnam and, when they came back, they didn't just have drug
problems, they were oblivion seekers," he says. "(These) guys ... couldn't get stoned enough. To me, I knew these guys just wanted to die. They wanted to kill themselves. But they all wound up dead. I never put myself in that category. And
fortunately, I was able to just get clean."

In his spoken-word performances now, which mix poetry,
nonfiction and fiction, Carroll rarely reads from "Basketball
Diaries." "They're very old to me now. I don't know why people
would want to hear from them," he says. But, he says, he might
make an exception in Denver.

And basically, Carroll says, his rock 'n' roll career is over
after three full albums and miscellaneous collaborations, like a
cover of Del Shannon's "Runaway" with Seattle musicians. It's too hard to work on being a musician and a writer, he says.

"Rock 'n' roll was a period where I put everything aside. I thought I couldn't be a poet and pursue this in a dilettantish way. Even if I had a whole album full of songs, I would not pursue it at this point.

Still, he adds, you never know. "And I look good for my age, man. And I'm still relatively young."
(Steven Rosen's e-mail address is srosenone@aol.com)