Jim Carroll died of a heart attack at his Manhattan home on Friday, reports The New York Times. Carroll’s unforgiving prose chronicling his young life in New York City continues to attract young audiences. He drew pictures of himself as both talented athlete and desperate heroin addict, passionate writer and knife-wielding criminal. He also is a popular poet and musician; Carroll Web site catholicboy.com reported on Aug. 25 that no Jim Carroll Band tour dates were set because Carroll was “completing a novel and [had] cut back his touring schedule.” The site also reports that Carroll was “at his desk working when he passed away.”

 Carroll’s The Basketball Diaries - the autobiographical work for which he was mortalized on screen in 1995 by Leonardo DiCaprio – concludes with these lines:

Jimmy Dantone comes running in and grabs me, “Those guys that we sold the phony acid to the other day are after our asses if they don’t get back the bread.” “Go tell them I hate them,” I tell him. He splits. A wasted peak into the mirror, I’m all thin as a wafer of concentrated rye. I wish I had some now with a little Cheez-Whiz on it. I can feel the window light hurting my eyes: it’s like shooting pickle juice. What does that mean? Nice June day out today, lots of people probably graduating. I can see the Cloisters with its million in medieval art out the bedroom window. I got to go in and puke. I just want to be pure. . .

Here is an image of the Cloisters taken this morning (Sept. 14, 2009) from my roof in northern Manhattan.

You can find Carroll’s poem “8 Fragments for Kurt Cobain” here. Carroll’s first collection, the 17-page Organic Trains, was published in 1967, one year after the death of fellow New York poet Frank O’Hara. The book began with an epigraph from O’Hara’s poem “To the Harbormaster.”: “To / you I offer my hull and the tattered cordage / of my will”.

–JD

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