No one cares what I had a dream about last night, but I rarely get ones with celebrities in them, and even rarer is when the dead show up. It's new-agey but I always have a serious undertow when famous people, who actually were important, to me show up in dreams.
What I'm saying is the guy who took my writing virginity, whose death I have desperately tried to forget, showed up in a dream where we both were teachers at a weird private school and no one knew that we secretly hung out in a sub-basement, watched almost indescribably horrific movies, and smoked pot.
I didn't actually know Jim Carroll so it always spooks me out a little that he would be in a dream that was so clear. That his personality would be so fully formed. I always wonder about that, because if there isn't anything telepathic or supernatural about dreams then how do three dimensional people, sometimes ones I've never met, live there. Are there like ten thousand people living in the depths of my brain? How do we speak German in dreams? Are we telepathic radio towers when we're in REM? (Not Micheal Stipe)
For the majority of my childhood I wrote all the time but it was mostly fan fiction about the Ninja Turtles and Spiderman or stories about guys who crash landed on other planets. But Carroll tore a hole inside of my brain. I come from a family of movie people where the term "inappropriate for certain ages" was scoffed at. So when the fourteen year old me rented the The Basketball Diaries I was more worried that the blockbuster guy wouldn't give it to me, then if it would change my whole life.
The moment that it was over, I did what I normally did for most of my adolescence: I went into the driveway, and dribbled a basketball while I talked to myself. But it didn't last long. Before I watched that movie I wanted to be an athlete and maybe a fighter pilot, maybe an astronaut. The movie itself was pretty good but it was the direct pieces of Carroll's writing, the snippets of his actual poems that just kept churning over and over in my head.
They were't boring. They weren't pompous, they felt like poetry that existed right now, they weren't voices from dead pasts or from years into the future, Carroll was the guy staring out the window on the bus, he was the voice in your head when you were stealing CD's, he was the words you were looking for.
I went inside and for the first time I wrote because I wanted to rather than because I was bored in class. Yeah I was just ripping him off at first (maybe I still am), I started ripping lots of people off at first until I didn't have to, until I could play the concertos without counting the key strokes.
I haven't stopped. I am now addicted to it, I seriously feel like I haven't smoked a cigarette in a week if I don't write for a couple of hours a day, and maybe that was the attraction, the connection with me and Carroll, we're addicts. Addicts in good things and bad: to soul, to poetry, to beauty, to music, to technology, to drugs, to fun, to girls, to ignoring pain, to everything. This is all getting really heavy, I know, and probably more than a little pretentious, but when he died last September I washed it under the porch.
I couldn't stand to look at it. He looked like a skeleton when he died. You don't see a lot of fat writers go down. I was glad for the dream. I was glad I remembered where all this started, because I don't think it will ever end. I now feel that odd sensation of loss without regret. The lunchbox will mostly be about nonsense but Carroll was hilarious and touching at the same time. I was hoping the lunchbox could be the same.
He will be our patron saint.
It was nice to meet you Jim, thanks for ruining my life.
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