The Basketball Diaries features excerpts from musician, poet, and author Jim Carroll’s adolescent journals, kept from age thirteen to sixteen; a time where he acquired a nasty junk habit between committing petty crime, attending classes and playing basketball. Written in New York in the mid-1960s, there is the distinct intonation of baby Beat in Carroll’s rhythms and hip slang, but none of the energy or enlightenment. Rather, Carroll’s constant nodding out on heroin becomes repetitious to the point of boredom. The Basketball Diaries lacks the narcotic cadence of other drug-fuelled memoirs or prose, most likely due to the age of the author at the time of writing them.

You just got to see that junk is just another nine to five gig in the end, only the hours are a bit more inclined toward shadows.

Carroll’s descent into heroin begins when he starts shooting up under the mistaken belief that marijuana, not heroin, is the habit forming drug. Young Jim guides us through his journey toward and through (but not out of) his addiction and the risks he takes in order to get his fix. The beginning of the diaries start off innocently enough, his peers are his school and neighbourhood friends, they commit crime and take lighter drugs, engage in sometimes funny pranks, and the usual boyish behaviour you’d expect. It is only through comparison that we can see any evidence of the loss of innocence/childhood/faith (delete as appropriate), because Carroll himself doesn’t seem to want to expand upon this. It seems, through his bleary eyes, that the drug addiction is to be seen as something of a gain, an extension of himself, something that offers a better version of himself through the purer state of existence that he aims for.

Now there’s one set of gimmicks hid up there and it’s the filthiest spike you ever could see, been used by guys I prefer not to think of out of the fact my stomach is a bit upset. But you bet your ass there is not one bit of hesitation in drawing your shot into that harpoon and shoving it into your mainline. If you got dope you will get it inside you no matter how and I will too I can’t deny that. But here’s what I can’t get. Willie asks me for a slug of soda so I pass him the bottle and what the hell does he do but pull that old second grade bullshit of wiping off the top of the bottle before he takes some. Shit, I men anything I can give him from that bottle he’s gonna get a lot easier from using the same spike. None of these lames think twice, or once, in fact.

It’s difficult to feel any sympathy for Carroll, and he wouldn’t want it if we did. Though there are very few moments of inspired prose, Carroll jerking off on the roof under the stars and moon stands out as one instance of vivid imagery, the majority of The Basketball Diaries is tediously boring.