SongO’TheDay

[This write-up is for one of the best and most loyal friends a guy could have- my buddy Ariel (aka Boopsie)- a fine, and very alive, cat] 

Do you know who Jim Carroll is?  If you do, I like you more. That sounds snobby, but isn’t that how we become friends?  Now, if I asked you as a follow-up, do you like Jim Carroll, and you said no, well, I’d like you less.  See, it evens out.  Sometimes it is better to not even know who Jim Carroll is.

I didn’t know who Jim Carroll was until I was 14.  I was working at Hillcrest Golf Course, an exclusive Jewish golf course in St. Paul, as a caddy.  We caddies spent a lot of time hanging around waiting to get our number called to go out on the course.  We spent our time playing poker, basketball, talking shit.  One of my favorite people to talk shit with was the substitute caddy master named Mark La Bossier.  I’m guessing at the spelling. 

Anyway, he was a cool early 20-something which seemed like an adult to me as a new teen, and he loved music.  He would talk to me and my buddy Glen for hours about music we should listen to.  Mark had recently gone to Europe and seen Julian Cope in Paris, et al.

He would trade tapes with us.  If you read this site, you’ve heard the set-up.

Anyway, he was talking to me one day and asked if I’d heard of Jim Carroll.  I said no.  He said, “Oh, you might like him.”  He brought me a tape.  He told me that Jim Carroll was this New York legend from the 1960’s who was an amazing basketball player and who got into heroin at a really early age.  He told me that Jim Carroll wrote a great book called “The Basketball Diaries.” 

I took the tape home, listened to it, and loved it.  For some reason, heroin always appealed to me (I remember the caddyshack of this story was part of the Velvet Underground story too- and by the way- I never did heroin.)  I fell in love with the song “People Who Died”.  If you’re one of the readers that only reads the write-ups, but doesn’t listen to the songs- you should probably listen to the song now if you haven’t heard it before so that you can understand the impact it might have on a 14-year-old grisly 37-year-old Chris Earley.

…

I next came across Jim Carroll in one of Robert Downey Jr.’s early films.  The movie was called Tuff Turf and it starred James Spader as a poor kid who moved to L.A. with his family and discovered, to his horror, during the mid-1980’s, that his dad was a cab driver.  Robert Downey Jr. played his buddy, who was the drummer in, yeah, the Jim Carroll band.  Not a lot of cred there, but whatever.

…

In 1987, I finally read “The Basketball Diaries.”  It blew my mind, and probably had a bigger effect on my life than it should have.  I was a basketball fanatic, played it all of the time, and to find an author who not only played ball, but made it street and legitimate while maintaining a few bad habits spoke to me. 

…

A few years later, in Rolling Stone, I read a blurb that a movie was being made of the book and that River Phoenix was being considered as the lead.  It was a perfect casting decision.  I identified with River in “Stand By Me” and then was really moved by his acting in Sidney Lumet’s “Running on Empty.” 

Sadly, nothing ever came of it.

…

A few years after that I moved to San Francisco.  I was 20.  My buddy Glen moved with me.  He had made some films at a young age, and we collaborated on some silly things.  I wanted to be a filmmaker.  I knew that I wanted to make a movie with River Phoenix.

A few years earlier, when I was 17, I was obsessed with The Cure.  Glen liked them a lot too, and then, because of a painting Glen painted of Robert Smith that he wanted to give to him at the door of the concert hall we went to see them at, we got to meet the Cure and hang out.  My obsession with celebrity had ended.  It was a smaller world.  Anything was possible.

…

I’ll talk more about Robert Smith in a Cure write-up, but I mentioned it to bring up River Phoenix and how small the world had gotten.  A friend of mine knew how much I liked him, and she told me that she got word from a friend in Portland that he was a heroin addict.  She was right.  He was up shooting “My Own Private Idaho” and he was messed up.  He ended up ODing on Halloween 1993.  He was my age, 23. 

…

I got a lot of calls from friends the day he died.  And I listened to “People Who Died” a lot.

…

In 1996, I was working at a video store in Mill Valley, just trying to get through college, which I started late.  I was older than most of the clerks at the store.  I liked the videos I could get, but I didn’t really have a peer.  Then Ariel showed up, fresh from UC-Santa Barbara.  We hit it off really well.  We hung out all of the time.  He is from Bolinas, a west Marin town known for it’s hippie past and a penchant for tearing down the road sign directing people so that the rich couldn’t find their way to it and buy it up.

…

Ariel and I knew we were great friends when were talking basketball and we discovered that the best play we had both ever seen was John Starks dunk over Jordan and company during the 1994 playoffs between the Knicks and the Bulls.  It is known, simply, as “the Dunk.”

I also came to find out that his stepdad, Terrell, was the guitar player in the Jim Carroll Band.  Ariel was around as a child, seven years old maybe, when Jim Carroll had moved west to kick heroin and start a band.  He was literally at the studio when they were recording and he was playing a video game, Asteroids I think, with Jim Carroll while some of the other musicians were recording, and he asked Jim Carroll: “Why do you guys keep playing it over and over?  It sounds good.”  Or something like that- you know how memory goes.  The point is that my friend Boopsie- Ariel- was around, literally there, when this song was recorded.

When Ariel told me that fact, I had just read Jim Carroll’s follow-up to “The Basketball Diaries”- an amazing book called “Forced Entries.”  Leonardo Di Caprio’s version of the movie had already come out (and yeah, it kind of sucked- damn River), and the sequel book took place largely in Marin.  Great book.  Ariel gave me an original poster from the Catholic Boy album and I talked to him about a lot of the moments I had read about in Forced Entries and it was cool.  Just ordinary days for a friend of mine, a friend I’d had for awhile, who I discovered lived through some of the episodes that captured my imagination.  The things you learn about your friends.

I don’t want to ruin the end of the book, so if you don’t want to hear my half-baked memory of the ending, don’t read further…

 

Jim Carroll had went west to kick heroin.  A friend of his had turned him onto speed to kick it.  It didn’t work.  He had an abscess on his arm that was a running theme through the book…

He finds himself, at the end of the book, back in New York, in a bathtub alone, with a black and white TV sitting on the toilet seat.  While in the bath, he’s watching one of Stanley Kubrick’s amazing early films, “Paths of Glory.”

I’m now about to ruin, not only the end of the book, but part of a great movie…quit reading or go read and see the references…..

In the movie, three guys are condemned to death for cowardice in WW I.  They are being made examples of, and they have to spend the night before their hangings in a barn.  One of the guys is talking, and he laments that the fly on the post next to him will be alive tomorrow while he, himself, will be dead.

One of the other condemned guys looks at him, then looks at the fly.  He smacks the fly dead and says “Feel better?”

I won’t ruin the last few lines of the Jim Carroll book.

Weird lives we lead.  And the connections are something.

-Christopher Earley

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