Catholic Boy

If you knew Jim Carroll, and you heard that he had died of a heart attack at age sixty, you might have responded the same way I did: "What took him so long?"
He was a poet, a punk, and a prophet, of sorts. He hung on the edge of all three of those descriptions even when they weren't cool. But he was. He was my Alan Ginsberg. Jim saw the best minds of his generation destroyed by sex, drugs and rock and roll. He lived life in the fast lane, for a time, hanging with contemporaries like Andy Warhol, Patti Smith, Larry Rivers and Robert Mapplethorpe. Patti Smith was the one who told him to put music to the words he wrote.
Those songs never fully captured the tortured child at the heart of "The Basketball Diaries," the story of his life as a sports star at an elite private high school in Manhattan. It was a tale of wasted youth both literally and figuratively. At age thirteen, he's working harder at getting high than on his jump shot. He's pounding cough syrup and sniffing cleaning fluid as he learns the pick and roll and how to snatch a purse.
When I read it, it made me feel a whole lot more safe about the way I had been living my life. It also gave me someone to compare with Hunter S. Thompson. The stories of drugs and danger were similar, but the good doctor was a highly trained professional. Jim Carroll was just a kid. There was some sick fascination in his story, and I could always take solace in the fact that my life never got as twisted as all that.
Now they're both gone. Just like the song.
Those are people who died, died
They were all my friends, and they died