Jim Carroll, best known for his junkie memoir The Basketball Diaries, died Friday at 60. (Funny, he looks so healthy in the picture.) A poet, musician and author, Carroll shot to worldwide fame after Leo DiCaprio played him in the Basketball Diaries film in 1995.  

The book came out in 1978. In this passage, Carroll boards a Metro-North train to Rye to escape the summer heat in Manhattan. He enjoys the trip with some help from heroin, cough syrup, beer and pot.

Summer ‘65

I’m sick of the city heat and all its bullshit so I throw my sneakers and a bathing suit into my little airlines bag and take the train down to Grand Central to catch the rush hour express for Rye, N.Y. to visit old friend Willie Goodbody who moved up there a year ago and has a nice scene going for himself. I can’t resist hitting the drug store in the station for a bottle of Codeine cough syrup to make the train ride more peaceful and I get a bottle and a can of beer at the deli with my fake draft card and go downstairs to the men’s room to slug it down.

As usual, at this time (5 p.m.), the place is packed with all the executive fairies peeking at each other’s thing and pulling off all along the long row of those piss machines; I pass that by and put a dime in the turnstile and pick out a toilet stall where I can drink up in private. So I’m sitting on the seat in one slugging down the horrible tasting stuff and god damn it, this fairy’s head is looking up from under the barrier of the next stall and he’s there reaching his hand out at my c***! I let fly a clean kick right into the queen’s mug and I think he got the message. Shit, if a cop came along, I’d be in a lot more trouble than him if he saw I was doing medicine. I finished up quick, can’t get away from them fags anywhere these days.

So I get on the Rye train just in time and get a seat. It’s a fairly quick ride; this is the express so we don’t gotta stop at all of them cracker towns on the way, just about three stops and, as the song goes, “I’ll be there,” clean air and cool water. By the first stop the Codeine is hititng and, good lord, I feel loose. Of course since I’ve been fucking with junk too much lately the head ain’t that heavy, but it’s better than I expected.

Then we pull into Mt. Vernon and I figure it would be nice to do up one of the reefers I brought along, so I sneak calmly into the john and do one up real quick. The shit is smoking. I get paranoid about walking back to my seat without cracking up looking at all them executive creeps in uniform with their little fedoras and them dumb little cases they carry that usually got nothing but a pencil in them every time I see a dude open one.

Finally I figure I gotta make my move and the minute I open the door I could swear that everyone in the car turns right around and simultaneously focused their eyes right on me like they all had x-ray vision and could see what I was doing the whole time I was in the john. The paranoia was so heavy I thought they were all gonna heave me off under the tracks or shit. It seemed an hour walking down that aisle back to my seat and then I just huddled there, pretending I was reading but secretly scared shit and goofing on all them at the same time. I ain’t doing that again unless there’s some fellow freaks on board.

[Editor’s Note: The above passage appears as a lone paragraph in the book. Unless you’re hopped up on cough syrup, pot, booze and smack, I felt it’s easier to read broken into a few paragraphs.]