A Cut and Paste job of a message I sent to some mutual friends yesterday. Ignore the parts that don't make sense, the names you don't know.. I played hoop every single day in June, and I could whip ass. But Carroll could whip mine.


He was a nice man. How one could wrap a ‘chaotic life filled with poetry, sports and drugs’ seems rather unrealistic, though. Who on Earth could make a burrito out of that mess? Heroin and poetry and balls? Insane. _I_ certainly can't imagine such a thing.

But guys like Carroll were never alone. They always found one another. Whitey Ford and Mickey Mantle had contests to see who could play the most hungover. My good pal Howard Nunn could top ‘em both. The only person I ever met in my life I’d tip my hat to for sheer self-destruction was Townes Van Zandt. But I don’t think he wanted to die. He wasn’t much interested in living, though, he just wanted to do his job. And he was aware that he didn’t know what that job was.

That’s hard. That's very familiar.

Lots of athletes cripple themselves to find out how good they actually are. This is precisely the opposite of banging steroids.

The dope, the booze, reminds me of a long-ago sport’s column in Esquire about Chris Mullin. Written by somebody – imagine that. It was called'Playing Hurt." Mullin liked smoking pot but he was mainly a boozer. Carroll used to say that shooting dope made his game smooth. He used to hang out on the 10th street stretch in the Village back when I did, too. I weighed about 3o pounds less than I do now and I was pretty fucking arrogant, but he could hand me my head, one on one. Beat me silly. Beat me sideways. When we started teaming up, though, three on three on the smooth courts off Washington Park, I could pulverize him. He had a delicate shooter’s touch. All I had was brute force and the intent to deny him his shot. You turn your back to them and you keep backing up. He was all grace. I was all foul.

But there were interests we shared. Not very healthy ones, I’d say.

How strange that I was thinking of Patti Smith this week, last weekend, when I tried to do the Labor Day ATW Tous show, the one about Fred “Sonic” Smith. She managed to make happen the only real successes Jim ever had. Much as I’ve always disliked her, she was kind and decent with Jim. Ugly, but kind. At a pick-up game once – and she always hated my guts – she berated him and flat-out hollered at him: “How can you let that _fool_ knock you around?”

I was scared he was going to cry.

“Because he knows how to get away with it,” he said.

Requiescat In Pace, catholic boy.

thanks guy, i knew you could help flesh this tribute out!

So many more things I could have added.

He always knew that the big hit would end up being about him as well. He should have kept writing poems and he should have kept playing ball, even if it was in rehab in North Carolina in one hot-ass drought of a summer..

Keep lining the bastards up, and keep knocking the bastards down.

Strange to have a Lyle Lovett line come to mind when writing about Jim, but it speaks my heart right now:

and what makes those little ones grow old
To find eternity
And what takes the wise
And leaves behind
A foolish one like me