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