SECONDS
Issue #23 - 1993

JIM CARROLL

NEW YORK NODS

Rock laureate JIM CARROLL's
search for poetic justice.

by DAVID AARON CLARK

The Basketball Diaries, JIM CARROLL's 1978 book of teenage sex, dope addiction, and team sports participation struck an abused nerve in a generation still suffering front Summer of Love jetlag. Carroll's adolescent journal earned him a reputation as a promising wunderkind among the post-Beat literati who he seemed compelled to dismantle through further addiction and a striking but conspicuously small body of work.

In 1980, following in the wake of old friend Patti Smith, he made the transition from poet to rock 'n roll icon, producing one of American punk's greatest albums, Catholic Boy. The single, "People Who Died," Was a churning anthem d'morte, a roll call of the fallen which even those who had yet to experience the horror and emptiness of losing friends to dope, violence, or the capriciousness of existence were moved to bellow along with.

Spidery and pale, with lank strawberry hair and a New Yawk accent that belied his generous vocabulary and poet's dreamy sense of metaphor, Carroll was the perfect romantic figure for the times. Fronting a hard rock band as tight as Virgin pussy, he looked as if he were too delicate to exist on this plane, yet too perniciously cranky to let go. His cameo appearance in the Rebel Without a Cause update Tuff Turf (Robert Downey, Jr. played the drummer in his band) remains one of the great B-movie moments of the decade.

His second and third albums, Dry Dreams (1982, Atco) and I Write Your Name (1984, Atlantic), were completed shortly before The Book of Nods (1986, Penguin), a collection of Rimbaudian prose-poems, raced up the best-seller lists in every college bookstore from New York to San Francisco. Soon after, Forced Entries: The Downtown Diaries 1971-73 (Penguin, 1987), a sequel of sorts to his first, most successful work, appeared. Though it employed the same wicked humor and clear-eyed observations, Carroll's innocence seemed somehow lost. Those dying for a Carroll fix were reduced to listening to Catholic Boy over and over, and digging up the occasional spoken-word performance on a John Giorno compilation.

Then, in 1991, Giant/Reprise released Praying Mantis, a spoken-word CD that elegantly proved the bratty wunderkind had become an accomplished, moving lyric poet. Now Rhino Records is shoving Carroll's short but brilliant musical career in the face of a new generation that desperately needs this feisty mick's flavor of rage and transcendence with A World Without Gravity, a compilation of the best of the trilogy.

SECONDS: Why were there only three albums? Why did you walk away from performing music?

CARROLL: I don't know. I remarked, at the time of the first one, to a woman from the New Music Express that I was only going to make three albums, and as it turned out, that's what I did. I thought that would be enough and I could get back to writing books. I was sick of being on the road. Playing was great, but all the psychological paraphernalia accompanying it burned me out. Then my literary agent got me this deal with Viking-Penguin for The Book of Nods, and then Forced Entries, and they got the rights to the other books, and they had the movie (The Basketball Diaries, still unmade) set and everything.

SECONDS: Do you ever regret it?

CARROLL: I fell out of touch with the record industry, but mainly through Lenny Kaye, a lot of A&R guys would ask, "What's Jim doing, does he want to make a record?" I thought about it, but I'd say, once every two months, for about half a day, I feel like rock 'n rolling again. But it dissipates - I watch MTV for awhile, and then I say, "no way." You really have to launch yourself completely into that. I'm working instead on these two novels, the ideas for which both came to me at the same time. They're different than anything I've ever written before. They're not autobiographical, like Diaries, and also, I had written short prose, but never pieces that sustained an entire novel. One is a very straight narrative, a linear novel. The other is more fragmented, more surreal. They're both in the third person, and they have nothing to do with me at all. There's no drugs, really, it's character-oriented. I chose to write the more fragmented one first, because it just made it easier to skip around chapters. Since I had to deal for the first time with the architecture of the novel, it made it difficult enough. The funny thing is, the other one is the one my agent and Viking-Penguin really wanted, because there's a real plot twist in that that's very strong. The working title for the one I'm writing now is The Petting Zoo, and the other, more linear one is Stig/mur, that's short for stigmata and murder. It deals with two priests, the younger one's investigating a murder. They're from the Vatican bureau, which actually does exist, to investigate miracles after they've been fully investigated by the parishes and the local bishops. The Bureau of Beatification at The Vatican, they're detective priests who investigate these things. So the one priest goes to investigate the other, who has the stigmata, the wounds of Christ. There's also a murder mystery that runs through the whole thing. The Petting Zoo is about this painter in his early 30s, a hot shot who's the next big thing on the New York scene. He goes to the Velasquez show at The Met and he runs out totally terrified after seeing the first floor of paintings, they're so terrifying in their spiritual arrogance, a spiritual quality that he can't see in his own work or those of his contemporaries. So he goes on this quest, he's not going to paint again until he can find a spiritual quality that he can inject into his own work. It's a Grail-like quest, with all these strange situations. That's the one I'm working on first.

SECONDS: Do you put deadlines on yourself?

CARROLL: Well, I do put deadlines on myself ... I don't meet them all the time. I just think that these novels came to me at all is a real blessing from the muse. You don't rely on inspiration like that very often or you won't get anything done. All the ideas, the text, the subplots, just fell into place. From that, it was just a matter of which one I was going to start the draft on first. The thing is, my editor and agent wanted three chapters and an outline on Stig/mur, they thought it was a serious money book. But then I'd be under their deadline, so that's why I didn't do that. The deadline problem is a real dilemma for me. I was two months over my deadline on Forced Entries. It was very harrowing. I think I could have gotten a lot more in, and diaries aren't as important as in a novel, even the continuity problems in a fragmented novel. I'm to the point where I have enough that I might give them four chapters; I have more than that, but you should never give them too much, 'cause they always think it's going to be better than it really is, and you can always get more of an advance. If James Joyce was around now, and he had the complete work but he submitted four chapters first, he'd do a lot better. I suppose that wouldn't be a best-seller now, anyway. I just don't want that pressure of a deadline, though it does serve a purpose with me. It's a wake-up call. I've gone leaps and bounds from the time I was in my reclusive period in California, which I talked about in Forced Entries. For the first time in my life, I'm on a disciplined schedule, writing every day. When l was doing rock 'n roll, it was kind of put aside. But since the last tour, I've gotten back into a groove, workwise. I have a strong urge to get back to the West Coast in a way, even though I know that the little town I lived in would not he the same at this point in my life, that's an intersection in time and space I look back on when things were very comfortable, and there was a sense of well-being in my life. That cannot be achieved by just returning to the place.

"I don't really feel like I have any wisdom."

SECONDS: What about New York City as an addiction? You're so eloquent on addictions. People from here seem to get nervous when they're away for too long.

CARROLL: Really? I get nervous when I get back! Even a busy city like Chicago, when you get back here, just into the airport, things are speeded up about three times. If you're in the country for years like I was, it's an enormous distance, even though I grew up here and knew it so well. Even if I just go away to do a few readings, I'll come back after the weekend and everything will seem fast again. But I wish all the addictions in my life, now and in the past, were as easy to drop as I feel about New York. I could leave it without thinking too much about it. I think people who weren't born and raised in New York feel more of that sense of addiction.

SECONDS: Now that we're on the subject of addictions, how about commenting on the chic resurgence of dope among the grunge generation?

CARROLL: I don't know, even though I'm in New York, I'm still pretty hermetic at this stage in my life. Even though I'm not on the scene, I hear about these heroin references among the grunge bands. In fact, I just came from CNN, doing a plug for A World Without Gravity, and they also wanted to interview me for a story they're doing talking about exactly what you're talking about. I don't really feel like I have any wisdom. For me, obviously, heroin ... One's not an idiot or stupid, you do take it because there is something to it at first. It does slow down all the bullshit a lot and let you see the landscape for what it is. But then it slows it down to a point where you feel no compulsion to have to work anymore. At first it gives you energy. People have that stereotype of shooting up and nodding out, but unless you got strong shit and didn't realize, it's really more of an upper, then you nod out later. But then it turns so perniciously and imperceptibly from you being in control of it to it being in control of you. It's not just the physical side; the first habit's relatively easy to kick. Psychologically, it puts into your brain a place of comfort which you're always going to want to return to at one time or another in your life. That's the thing that, even if you get clean, will reside inside of you, even as it does in me to this day. In the news, it's like this is the twelve-year cycle. The last one was in 1980, when The Soho News asked me for comment after I had just moved back to New York and the first record had just come out, and there was a cover story on the resurgence of heroin, how good it was, the quality. It hit all these triggers for addicts. All my friends who were clean but who were addicts before wanted to go down to the Lower East Side and cop the stuff, the press made it sound so good.

SECONDS: Some of your lyrics are about the beauty of heroin.

CARROLL: I really don't think that's true. In one song I made a flat statement about wanting "some pure, pure white so I can nod all night," but that was just in the context where I was talking about "a world without gravity," in that sense it was just a metaphor for some different place, ideally.

SECONDS: Isn't that what heroin serves as in reality, a metaphor for a different place?

CARROLL: Yeah, I think so. In most of my songs, say like "City Drops Into The Night," I say it ain't hip to sink that low, unless you're gonna make a resurrection. "When the body hits the bottom, that body's my own reflection." But it's not cool to sink down into that romanticized pit, unless you accomplish the really romantic part, which is climbing out of it. Susan Sontag, of all people, once told me that is an opportunity, one of the few, that people can have of literally being born again in a secular sense, of just starting your life completely over, because you are spiritually dead. At first, it might liven everything up and slow everything down, but after awhile it just gives you a validity not to do anything, to just be walking around.

SECONDS: In a non-secular sense, it sounds like you're still a Catholic boy, after all.

CARROLL: I don't know about "Catholic" boy. There's a lot of things about the church, the politics of the church, that are abhorrent to me.

SECONDS: But the structure of the Church, the ritual aspects...

CARROLL: The ritual aspects of the Church are very interesting to me, I like that.

SECONDS: Is there any secular ritual in your life matching that beauty and transcendence?

CARROLL: You can see it in other things. I mean, doing the stations of the cross, where you're praying from one station to the next, of Christ being crowned by thorns, being whipped and scourged, carrying the cross and falling, it's all that blood and whips and stuff. It's like punk rock or something. It's really quite a bizarre passion, that whole ritual.

SECONDS: A lot of people into sadomasochism see a similarity between their rituals and the Church's.

CARROLL: I suppose so. But what they're doing is out of an excess of sexuality, allowing it to overtake all the other aspects of their life. If you're into S/M, it's just an aspect of pain, you allow sex to become pain, inflicting it or receiving it. That's the problem with sex when it's using you instead of you using it. People say it's a natural thing, like in the '60s with free love, but it's not. It's a natural human function, obviously, but there's an aspect of sex which makes it much different than eating or drinking. You could become a glutton eating, I guess, but when sex just completely consumes you in such an obsessive way, it doesn't really matter whether you're into S/M or those things. By themselves, they're just an aversion like everything else, they can't be really put down.

SECONDS: I've always found that interesting in your work, that despite your predilection for documenting decadence, you're not really a hedonist; in fact you try to stick to a strict moral code.

CARROLL: Moral, or I think my work is ethical in a certain way. I think, too, I work in a Burroughsesque sense of being a recorder, of feeling like, as I have for a long time, that I don't live in my body as much as most people do.

SECONDS: Have you ever had any unexplainable experiences, transmutational occurrences?

CARROLL: You mean in a paranormal way?

SECONDS: Could be paranormal, satori, both, either...

CARROLL: Yeah, I have, good and bad. But I don't want to talk about it. Those things are at a certain core that has to be kept completely within myself. I wouldn't write about it...

SECONDS: You wouldn't write about it, really?

CARROLL: No, it would vitiate it if I wrote it down. It's in a place where it should be kept, inside of me. I wish there was something that doesn't fall into that category, that fell into that depth where I could speak about it. But if anything happens, I'll let you know.

SECONDS: What do you find sacred in everyday life?

CARROLL: Funny you said that. I was walking past the Metropolitan Museum of Art about two weeks ago. I hadn't done this in front of churches since I was a kid, but I made the sign of the cross, as if I were passing a church or a cathedral or something. It was very strange. Not only did I not do it during a flashback to my past, but I did it in front of the Met! Art must be more important to me than I thought. But what I think is sacred in every day life, and this is one of the reasons that drugs inhibit it and alter it completely, is the speed of everyday life. That natural sense of connection within - like Olsen said, "It's a human universe, and I am a correspondent." A connection within the collective human spirit for good. There's a collective human spirit, I suppose, that's on the dark side, in some sense of dualism. Like Schopenhauer, a sense of will to be connected with other people. That's a difficult thing for me, because I tend to isolate myself too often. There's a difference between being reclusive for awhile, as I like to do, but to be isolated is not too good for people.

SECONDS: Do you find it too intense to be so connected with the web of humanity in everyday ways?

CARROLL: No, I just withdraw because it's a source of pleasure to me. It's not too intense for me — well, I suppose it is, and that's why I do tend to withdraw, but most of the time it's for a particular purpose, like for work. I'm at a point in my life where it's not like when I was young and wanted to make the scene in every sense to learn, to hang out in the back room at Max's, or go to this party or that so I could speak to poets I was really interested in. I don't feel that necessity to make the scene now at all, and that's a great relief, actually. That web of contact between people, that being in the flow, is a very good thing, very pleasurable, depending on the people you're around. It can be too intense.

SECONDS: You mentioned the Max's crowd. There you were in the middle of the '70s Berlinesque attitude. Was that uncomfortable?

CARROLL: I was really young then. I felt that I was learning. To me, it was a gathering of knowledge. Some things I might have looked on immediately with some kind of disdain, but that was rather rare. Most of the time I was bewildered or fascinated. There weren't too many things that seemed abhorrent right away. But after that time in California, I filtered out a lot of the knowledge, the learned trivia of the intellect, to transform it into some sense of wisdom. It's not that I make these moral conclusions. I'm just in touch with a certain sense of intuition within myself. Most of the time at least, I'm not putting those people down. Sometimes I'll make a direct statement that'll seem like a judgement on somebody or something...

SECONDS: Are there going to be any more spoken-word records?

CARROLL: I don't know. When these A&R guys ask me to do music, I'll ask them if they want to do a spoken-word record. That's what basically happened with that one. Giant/Reprise wanted a rock 'n roll record, and I told them I wasn't interested, but I'd do spoken word. They said, do that next, like everyone else would say, but then they came to a reading I did at the Bottom Line with Marianne Faithful and he said, okay, we'll do it. It's not a likely label to do spoken word, but I was glad they did it.

SECONDS: Have you ever seen Henry Rollins or Lydia Lunch perform?

CARROLL: I read with them both. I did a little mini-tour on the West Coast with Rollins, and he opened, but read for three fucking hours! I mean, it's hard enough, especially for people who aren't used to poetry, to "spoken word," it really sucks up your attention span. I know I can't listen to anybody for three hours. I find it hard to even stay for a whole Springsteen concert.

SECONDS: You're hardly the only one there.

CARROLL: Yeah, I know. After awhile, the promoters would just start pulling out the mike plug and stuff, but he had such a booming voice he'd just keep going on. I just thought that was rude, in a certain sense. When someone's reading after you, you should be aware of it.

SECONDS: Did he say anything about it?

CARROLL: One night we were in San Jose, and the next day my girlfriend and I were supposed to drive down to L.A., so we wanted to get out early. So I said to him, the only words I spoke to him during the thing, at the soundcheck I said, "Listen, we have to drive down to L.A. tonight, would you mind going on last?" And he says, I couldn't exactly read his tone, but he seemed surly, "No, that's cool, you're the boss." He seemed kind of miffed. At any rate, he seems to be in a different strata now, to the point where he can read last, so it doesn't matter how long he goes on.

SECONDS: What books are you reading that you'd recommend?

CARROLL: I'm reading an old Graham Greene novel, and this book of research on the Dead Sea Scrolls. The whole cover-up of the Dead Sea Scrolls is really interesting. One wonders what's in the ones that haven't been published. But that's another story.