The Basketball Diaries by Jim Carroll – Sex and Drugs and … Basketball

The Basketball Diaries (1978) by Jim Carroll is one of those interesting little oddities that you stumble on occasionally.
Jim Carroll was a basketball player, a poet, an author, a musician… just an all around talented guy. He was also a heroin addict supporting his habit through theft and prostitution and any other available means. And the thing is, in this diary of his he describes the way he was living his life as a young tough deeply involved in the drug culture of New York. This is not exactly a bildungsroman because it doesn’t focus on the psychological and moral growth of the young protagonist.
At one point Carroll makes an offhand remark about getting things backwards. He was already smoking pot and started using heroin because he thought that was less addictive. That is certainly not something you should get mixed up, but it just goes to show that when it comes to information you should always consider the source.
What strikes me about the whole diary is the unapologetic narrative voice, the complete and total lack of apologetic excuses. Whatever the influences, whatever the choices, there seems to have been no point at which Carroll felt the need to blame society, his mother, his friends. I have to say I like that. As far as accountability goes, Carroll takes his share and seem to be smart enough to know that he has really very little to gain from telling a woeful tale. There’s a lack of sentimentality to all this that makes it interesting. He talks about the other basketball players that have gone astray in similar ways and wound up dead or in prison, but these are just tales of people he knows, people who made their own choices for whatever reasons.
The other thing about this diary that makes it interesting is the literary quality of it. For someone who scans through a lot of text it is obvious that there is real talent here, displayed at a very young age. I’ve read diaries before, some written by authors as a kind of autobiographical reconstruction of their private history and there is always pretense, a sense that much has been revised and edited, or at least cleaned up for consumption. The diary becomes a device that way, a vehicle for the author, something to perpetuate the image they want to project, constructing a persona. Of course there is no such as objective truth in a diary, either, though it is a popular conceit.
The second an author decides to let others into what should theoretically be private musings and starts thinking of a potential audience the basic premise for the text written alters. It may be self-censorship, it may be fear, but it is still a subtle tweaking of the text that can go either way. Carroll manages to sound sincere and doesn’t try to make himself look better than he is. He tells stories of theft and drug dealing, prostitution and deception as ways and means. He talks about how he and other players rob the locker rooms of the basketball teams they play and – amazingly – he writes about playing, and winning, while high on every drug known to man. That part really confounds me. We’re not talking performance enhancing drugs here, but all sorts. And they still manage to win.
It is actually even more interesting to read something like this in this day of blogging. There’s a an awful lot of private musings spread publicly these days and not a lot of it considers that you should try to entertain, if nothing else.
Carroll is interesting, entertaining and deceptively charming in all his callous revelry. That does not mean you would have wanted to live next to the guy, or that he is in any way a model citizen. The Basketball Diaries is also a document of sorts, of a specific time and a specific place, and as such it is well worth reading.

Mule

And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks by Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs

And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks (2008) written by Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs was actually written in 1945 before the authors even became famous as Beat Generation writers.
The novel is a dramatization of the events in 1944 when Lucien Carr stabbed David Kammerer twice in the heart with his boy scout knife. The murder is fictionalized and all the characters are given aliases, but at its core that’s what this somewhat peculiarly named novel is about.
The narrative voices alternate chapter by chapter between Will Dennison (Burroughs) and Mike Ryko (Kerouac). The style is mostly descriptive, and it keeps a certain distance to the persons and events in a classic hard-boiled tradition. It is interesting to see that the oddities in both authors individual styles are not all the way developed yet, but the embryos are there.
The two voices dovetail nicely, which means they also describe each other and give variations on the same events from two distinctly different perspectives. Other than that there’s plenty of the Beat Generation staples, drugs and alcohol and promiscuity (sometimes with a twist) and literature, talk of literature, art and philosophy. There’s also the distinct feeling that these young bucks were travelling in packs, moving in a little society their own. Money is always tight and nobody seems to have any kind of stable income.
The complicated relationship between Phillip Tourian and Ramsay Allen is given a lot of play. Tourian (Carr’s alter ego) is described by Dennison like this:
“This Phillip is the kind of boy literary fags write sonnets to, which start out, ‘O raven-haired Grecian lad…’“(p. 3) whereas Allen “is an impressive-looking gray-haired man of forty or so, tall and a little flabby. He looks like a down-at-the-heels actor, or someone who used to be somebody.” (p.3).
The thing is that Tourian is still a young man in his later teens when this takes place, and Allen was his teacher at some point. There’s a weird echo of Rimbaud and Verlaine about them, literary pursuits aside. Tourian is aware of Allen’s attraction and in this narrative he doesn’t return any of Allen’s affections, though in real life they probably had a slightly less PG 13 interaction. Tourian plans on leaving the city and Allen’s increasingly stifling attentions by taking hire on a ship headed for France along with Mike Ryko, who has worked on a ship before.
If you know a little about the Beat Generation you will have come across this story before. It influenced everyone connected to it. Burroughs is rumoured to have drifted into morphine addiction because of it, and Lucien Carr himself did his time (two years for first-degree manslaughter) and then went on to have a successful career as an editor for UPI. Carr was also instrumental in introducing Allen Ginsberg to Burroughs and Kammerer, so he was a force at the nexus of the Beats.
This novel, apart from being an interesting read with a lot of sex, drugs and rock’n'roll, or poetry as the case might be, is also one of those hard-boiled murder stories that get undermined by the fact that there is some kind of reality at the base of it. The bohemian lifestyle of the protagonists in World War II New York is depicted with a surprising lack of sentimentality.
It took sixty years between the writing and the publishing of this novel and that means that in the meanwhile the Beats became famous, infamous and some even posthumous. The modern reader comes to this story knowing them and knowing about their literary production. That adds another layer to this, creating a kind of liquid modernity drop-off point where you can’t help asking what is real in any of this. At the end of the day we have Carr’s description of what happened, the way it was presented at court and then the literary variations of the same event. It’s fascinating for more reasons than just the sensationalism of the murder itself or as a curio involving two writers who were on the verge of becoming seminal voices of their generation.

Every Last Drop – Charlie Huston and Joe Pitt

Every Last Drop (2008) by Charlie Huston is the fourth book  in the Joe Pitt series.

I’ve reviewed a few of Huston’s books before and I stand by what I’ve said before. This is Marlowe-Noir with vampires and ghouls set in an extremely territorialized New York.

At the start of the novel Joe Pitt is living, uh, un-living… eh, residing in the outskirts having been ostracised for basically pissing off the leaders of all the different clans in the city. So, he’s on the fringe of the outskirts here and that’s generally not a good place to find yourself.

This is one of the things I like about this series. Actions have consequences. Joe Pitt meddled with some very important and powerful people and now he is paying the prize. This goes for his physical state as well.

You have to think about the plot devices for this kind of narrative differently than you would a regular detective story. What does someone who has seen more than a hundred years want? What matters? How do you react to things you’ve seen a thousand times? Where do you expend your energy? A lot of vampire stories fail at that because you are either coming in to the story in the beginning or near the very end.

Huston’s stories take place in the middle of a longer narrative scope. This guy, this Joe Pitt, he’s been around for a while. His aim is to stick around for a while longer. So – again – what do you want when you’ve been hanging around for a longer than average lifetime? Well, it turns out it’s the same old story, in some ways at least. There’s a girl.

Now, that’s pretty formulaic and trite, you might say to yourself. Of course there’s a girl. There’s always a girl. But … it’s not like that. Not at all. And that’s what I like.

The main players are the same as in the previous stories, there’s Terry Bird of The Society in his John Lennon glasses, there’s Dexter Predo of The Coalition with his sharp suits and lack of a moral compass. There’s also Skag Baron Menace, a new acquaintance from Queens. In the previous novels there’s been interaction between all the main players, all of which is remembered and referenced here, like real live relationships.

Past hurts are not forgotten, and neither are the favours that have been done and the weight of some of the conversations seems to come from all this history. I like that. I like the idea that there’s a point where all history just becomes more weighted for all the years amassed there and that’s hard to get across, considering how little that experience can really be understood.

Huston deals with it by cutting back Joe’s inner monologue and outer dialogue to the bare bones, as you would assume someone could do with all that experience. It’s actually really tricky. It makes his books a blisteringly sharp read in some ways and you have to pay attention. I like Joe’s voice, the terseness of it. Here’s an example:

“There comes a time when you think there are no new territories of pain. After a certain number of stabbings, shootings, clubbings, whippings, beatings, thrashings, cuttings, slashings and eviscerations, you begin to assume that you’ve had the worst of it and nothing of that nature can really surprise you very much.
And then someone comes along to show you that you were wrong.” (Huston, p. 44).

That is what Joe says about having someone take his eye out – with their teeth.

Also, the horror in this one stems from vampires being basically human, in all the worst ways. It’s a cynics view of the world, someone in it for the even longer haul. It’s dark and gritty and funny and sharp. And it’s a lot less cheesy than most of it’s brethren in the genre. If you like that sort of thing, this is the vampire story for you.

Mule.

The Joe Pitt Series by Charlie Huston – Vampires in New York

Charlie Huston – The Joe Pitt series

Already Dead (2005)

No Dominion (2006)

Half the Blood of Brooklyn (2007)

Charlie Huston has come up with a brilliant concept. You take the modern day vampire myth as we have come to know it through writers like Anne Rice and mix it with a good old fashioned hard boiled detective noir reminiscent of Raymond Chandler and set it in a gritty New York filled with vampires, zombies and regular folks and you get a very good ride.

The protagonist Joe Pitt is a vampire. He’s got the blood lust and the superhuman strength and the usual foibles and weaknesses and he’s about as cynical as you could expect from a guy who has been around a little too long and seen a little too much. The vampires of New York are organised in clans, like mobsters and they are about as territorial and dangerous. Each clan has its own philosophy, and there are all manner of politics as you could expect, and Joe gets caught right in the middle of it, despite being a rogue, which is more or less the equivalent of a Ronin – tolerated, as long as he is useful.

I’ve read three of the books in this series so far, Already Dead (2005), No Dominion (2006) and Half the Blood of Brooklyn (2007).

The first novel gives a good indication of where we are going right from the get go. The opening paragraph on page one reads:

“I smell them before I see them. All the powders, perfumes and oils the half-smart ones smear on themselves. The stupid ones just stumble around reeking. The really smart ones take a Goddamn shower. The water doesn’t help them in the long run, but the truth is, nothing is gonna help them in the long run. In the long run they’re gonna die. Hell, in the long run they’re already dead.” (Already Dead)

And that sets the scene. We get the dry commentary voice-over that conjures up a black-and-white old Marlowe detective story with all that that entails, like ladies with dangerous curves and chunky glasses of whiskey and rough villains and a mastermind in a silk suit with a silver cigarette case. This isn’t ever going to be anything other than what it advertises itself as, but – that being said – there are still quite a few ways in which it could be a whole lot less.

Huston, however, doesn’t disappoint. He actually pulls it off and then some.

You get language like this: “Color me pensive. Color me lost in thought and avoiding getting on the train, lighting a cigarette without even thinking about it, because that’s my story. That’s my excuse for why I don’t smell Tom until the fucker jams the barrel of his gun in my back”. (No Dominion).

For all of Pitt’s tough talk, though, he’s not just muscle for hire, even if it seems to be a role he finds it convenient to play. He’s fallen in love with a woman who is dying from HIV, and that’s another clever twist of the overall vampire myth seeing as how vampirism has always been compared to other diseases of the blood like syphilis and malaria.

If it seems like I know a little too much about the vampire myth, believe me, I do. I have read a lot of vampire stories, enough that they have their own section in my library. This is pulp, by it’s own admission. You’ll find Charlie Huston’s stories over at pulpnoir.com. Still, there is pulp and there is trash and the twain should not be confused.

This is smart, savvy, intuitive and intelligent pulp. It takes a lot of cues from a format you will recognize and affords the reader the pleasure of recognition at the same time as giving it a unique voice. There’s nothing wrong with clichés as long as you do something creative with them and Charlie Huston does.

The Enclave, for instance, are the mystics of the bunch. They believe that if they starve themselves long enough and thoroughly enough they will be able to walk in the sun. It just fits that there would be one group that went this way, became monks and tried to reach the next level, because somehow there has to be more to life than just this.

I’ve argued, and believe me it’s not always been a popular view, that vampires are trying to teach us how to die. Practically every vampire legend, story, or franchise always snags on the ennui and pointlessness of living forever. The toll it takes, the cost of giving up human society and all that we grade as natural always ends with a yearning towards death. In most vampire stories you come in either at the beginning, or at the very end, when the stake hits the chest cavity. It’s good to drop down somewhere in the middle and see what that might mean.

This is light, easy, bloody and enjoyable all the way through, provided that you have a taste for the basic genre itself. It’s also violent, dark and cynically funny. Above all it has a voice of its own, and that’s hard to find.

Mule