JIM CARROLL, R.I.P.

[Note: Both poet Tom Clark and poet Ron Silliman have much more intimate knowledge and understanding of Jim Carroll and his work. If you want to know more about Jim Carroll, please visit their blogs and do a search for Jim Carroll. I promise you--it's worth the journey. My thing here, for what it's worth, is a dreamy meditation on a man and a poet I did not know. bb]

Jim Carroll (and here) died a few weeks ago. “The Basketball Diaries” Jim Carroll--the playground b-baller who became a poet rock star celebrity. Pure New Yorker type of guy. 16 years old and he was running with the New York City poets I loved. The St. Mark’s poets. 2nd generation. Tom Clark was publishing him in the Paris Review. Jim was going to be the next Rimbaud. That's what "they" all said. Then he was a rock star and Keith Richards of the Stones was playing behind him. Jesus. It must have been a rush. I never knew Jim Carroll. I don't think I wanted to. And I really didn’t pay much attention to the Diaries or his poetry. Maybe I avoided them. I didn't want to step inside. Yet there he was in my psyche living the life. The rep and the rumors and the talk. Yeah, I guess I can say all that scared me. I always figured if I went off to NYC to be a poet that I would get lost in the jingle jangle. I could have walked into Jim Carroll’s song “People Who Died” and live right there in the ether. I loved that song. I didn’t want to die but I could die. I could go that way. The first time I heard it a local hero rocker here in El Paso was covering it. I wanted to scream and shout and weep and laugh.

"People Who Died" by Jim Carroll
(lyrics lifted from St Lyrics website here)

Teddy sniffing glue, he was 12 years old
Fell from the roof on East Two-nine
Cathy was 11 when she pulled the plug
On 26 reds and a bottle of wine
Bobby got leukemia, 14 years old
He looked like 65 when he died
He was a friend of mine

Those are people who died, died
They were all my friends, and they died

G-berg and Georgie let their gimmicks go rotten
So they died of hepatitis in upper Manhattan
Sly in Vietnam took a bullet in the head
Bobby OD'd on Drano on the night that he was wed
They were two more friends of mine
Two more friends that died

Those are people who died, died
They were all my friends, and they died

Mary took a dry dive from a hotel room
Bobby hung himself from a cell in the tombs
Judy jumped in front of a subway train
Eddie got slit in the jugular vein
And Eddie, I miss you more than all the others
And I salute you brother

Those are people who died, died
They were all my friends, and they died

Herbie pushed Tony from the Boys' Club roof
Tony thought that his rage was just some goof
But Herbie sure gave Tony some bitchen proof
"Hey," Herbie said, "Tony, can you fly?"
But Tony couldn't fly, Tony died

Those are people who died, died
They were all my friends, and they died

Brian got busted on a narco rap
He beat the rap by rattin' on some bikers
He said, "Hey, I know it's dangerous, but it sure beats Riker's"
But the next day he got offed by the very same bikers

Those are people who died, died
They were all my friends, and they died

Teddy sniffing glue, he was 12 years old
Fell from the roof on East Two-nine
Cathy was 11 when she pulled the plug
On 26 reds and a bottle of wine
Bobby got leukemia, 14 years old
He looked like 65 when he died
He was a friend of mine

Those are people who died, died
They were all my friends, and they died

G-berg and Georgie let their gimmicks go rotten
So they died of hepatitis in upper Manhattan
Sly in Vietnam took a bullet in the head
Bobby OD'd on Drano on the night that he was wed
They were two more friends of mine
Two more friends that died

Those are people who died, died
They were all my friends, and they died

Mary took a dry dive from a hotel room
Bobby hung himself from a cell in the tombs
Judy jumped in front of a subway train
Eddie got slit in the jugular vein
And Eddie, I miss you more than all the others
And I salute you brother

Those are people who died, died
They were all my friends, and they died

Jim Carroll was like my friend Jimmy Walker. Carroll (b1949) started doing cocaine on the streets in NYC at the age of 13. Me (b1942) and my friend Jimmy Walker (b1941) started drinking together when we were 13. Different places, different times. Another difference, it seems, was that Jim Carroll had a father, a bartender in a conservative Irish neighborhood. Both of Walker and I were fatherless, me literally, Jimmy figuratively. Harvey Goldner, another founding member of our drinking club (aka "gang" or "pandilla"), had a figuratively dead father who was happy enough to come home from work and get drunk. And a little bit later Jimmy Douglas, who like me had a father they had put into the ground. All of us fatherless one way or another. We drank hard and often all the way through high school. I’m not proud of that. It’s what happened. We were lost and shy and foolish. Booze was our shield. We battled against the world with our booze. It could have been cocaine very easily but cocaine wasn’t an option in 1954 East Memphis. After high school Jimmy Walker--who like Jim Carroll was easiest the craziest of us all--quit school and went off with the carnival. Then he joined the Army and before long he had jumped off some tower in Germany (the Army said he fell, Jimmy Walker would never fall / he loved climbing the tall trees in his Friday night drunkeness) and he came home packaged in his uniform lying inside a box. But Michael Clemmons was first into that void. I know because Jimmy was with him. Another of the fatherless. They were floating on a log in the Mississippi--Mike and Jimmy, my little sister Patsy and Harvey and somebody else. (I was elsewhere, saying goodbye to a girlfriend). The river swallowed Mike whole. We were 18 then. Mike was a sweet-faced boy who wanted to be a poet. Surely he was gay but it was before that time when he could say, "Sure, I’m gay. What of it?" I hope we would have understood. They found his water bloated body the next day snagged into some eddy on the banks of the river. The undertaker fixed him up fine for his mother. Next in line was Bert Ringold. He put his father’s shotgun in his mouth and pushed the trigger with his toe. And there were others--Horace and Kemp and red-headed Bobby. In the 70s tall David Telder bought himself a gun at an El Paso pawnshop and went into the desert. He was a good friend. I never guessed at his sorrow. It’s happening more often now. Dead people. Jimmy Gardner from AIDS. My little sister Patsy from viral pneumonia and obesity and struggles with depression and addiction. My big brother Bill from alcoholism and a heart attack and depression. Steve Sprague from meningitis. Harvey Goldner from cancer.

I sometimes wonder what would have happened to me if I had gone to New York. The thing is, I didn't. But I did leave Memphis and all the baggage of my growing up. I wanted to be a poet. I needed to be away from my family. From some daydream I wanted to be in the desert. I went west and not east. Arizona and Colorado and New Mexico and now El Paso. I think the work of Snyder and Kerouac pushed me in that direction. I was interested in Zen, whatever that was. I didn't know anything about myself. Whatever would happened, happened. I’m glad I found El Paso. Like they say now, it is what it is. A cliche that makes sense. It wasn’t planned. Jim Carroll’s life was probably like that. Not planned, I mean. Just one day after the next, following our noses. Now Jim Carroll is dead. Why his death leaves a hole in my psyche, I don't know. I plan to buy his books and find out. Meanwhile here Lee and I are on Louisville Avenue in the old Five Points neighborhood of El Paso. We've been in this house 30 years.



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I miss Jim Carroll. I miss not knowing him.

May he rest in peace.