I’ve been on a minor Jim Carroll kick lately. Jim died in 2009, at the age of 60. His book, The Basketball Diaries, is the best
memoir about growing up in New York that I’ve ever read. The follow-up, Forced Entries, one of the
worst, in which it felt like he got too far into the hip “downtown” Manhattan
scene circa early 70’s and wasn’t doing much but name-dropping and heroin. The heroin experiences in TBD are actually
sort of boring and detract from the book.
He captured the rough-and-tumble essence of growing up working class
(and white) in Manhattan, a place that’s dead and gone as he is.
He put out a few albums at the turn of the 80’s, but the song
that will live on is “People Who Died” in which he outlines, in gruff punk
tone, all his friends dying far too young due to misadventure, drugs, murder, bad
circumstances, etc. It’s a tough song
from a tough kid …
… that sounds like complete bullshit once you’ve grown up
and experienced routine death swirling all around you. We’ve all had that experience, when we were
young, of glorifying the deaths of similarly young friends, in car crashes,
drug episodes, suicides, etc. The
experience at that age makes us feel tough by extension. Some of us see ourselves in that sort of
toughness and don’t picture ourselves “living to see 30.” Well, most of us do. Most of us live way past 30, two or three
times that, and shabbily when our attitude was “won’t live to see 30” once upon
a time. Life is longer than you think, before
it ends in a moment.
I’m sure there were many points in Jim Carroll’s life where
he didn’t expect to see 30. Or 40. Or 50.
He barely saw 60, after years of failing health due to drug-related
illnesses. It’s heartening to hear that
he moved back to Inwood (the northern tip of Manhattan) where he spent most of
his formative years, although he had to be running into the same hipster and
high-rent onslaught most of us have in the past decade. Far from the touch-and-go, working-class Irish hood he grew up in back in the 60’s. The place he moved back to
was a distant memory of the place he grew up in.
This time last year, I was pondering life from the vantage
point of someone with a hole in his belly and a huge question mark as to how
his life was going to move forward. That
was a strange few weeks, where nothing seemed certain and every day was a bit
of a struggle to move forward.
As it turns out, that hernia and the under-active thyroid the
family doctor found were two of the best things to happen to me in years. Spurred me to drop 60 lbs. Have managed to keep most of it off. At the time I laughed at internet accounts of
gym rats who came back “stronger than ever” from their hernia operations. Well, I’m not stronger than ever, but I’m in
better physical condition now than I have been since my 20’s, mostly due to
carrying so much less weight. Life gets
easier when you’re in good health, which is a given in our youth, but something
that takes work thereafter.
That’s the good part.
Bad part has been Mom dying. An
old college friend going through the death of his father. One of my aunts dying, leaving only three of
that older, World War II generation (out of 10) that raised us. A few friends going through similarly rough
rides with aged parents nearing their time.
“People Who Died”?
The reality of the situation is not a punk song. You lose that energy when it starts to happen
often enough that rarely more than a few weeks pass without the news of someone
you know dealing with death. I can scoff
at “People Who Died” now that I have so much more experience with this. Losing your parents goes a long way towards
demystifying all the darkness we associate with people dying. Bury your parents, and real fear becomes
going through the world on your own. Not
some boogie man chasing you with an axe.
Even if you’ve equipped yourself to go through the world on your own and
have been doing so for years – just the knowledge that the two people who
looked after and thought about you all the time are gone is a real blow to the
senses.
I remember when we were kids, and a situation with a bully
or other tough guy presented itself. The
worst and most common thing that kid would say to intimidate you: “I’m going to
kill you” … usually at some appointed time to help build the sense of
dread. Yeah, well, they never killed
anyone. But that very real sense that
this horrible thug might end your life came down on your head like a ton of
bricks. That fear of death, at the hands
of a monster. We weren’t old enough to
discriminate between murderous rage and idle threats. At worst, we might get our asses kicked
which, in itself, carried some type of “cool” cartel for surviving such a
harrowing episode.
Passing time and the nature of the world make any bully look
farcical. Keep on living and you’ll see
what the world can do to you and everyone else.
Take pot shots at your physical and mental health. Wear you down with disease. Suspend you for months or years in treatments
that are just as brutal and terrifying as death itself. It seems like burning hell when you or a
loved one goes through it, but you look around and realize, it’s been going on
forever. Your parents grasped the same
knowledge when they got older; it’s not unusual or in any way unnatural.
But it doesn’t make it any easier when it happens to
you. All it does is signify your
movement into a different phase of life.
Look at it as coming down the other side of the hill that you spent the first
half of your life going up. You can’t
see these things as clearly when you’re on the ascendant side of the hill, but
they become all too familiar on the other side.
What changes come from this?
I can’t really say for sure, but I have noticed in the few months after
Mom’s passing, I am so less patient with people. I don’t know what it is, but things that
rarely got under my skin surely do now.
Something as minor as noticing that there are douchebags in the gym I go
to spitting chewing gum into urinals.
Just knowing there are people like this in the world, and I have to be
around them. We’re not talking Nazis; we’re
talking people with no empathy or manners.
Who are legion in this world. The
smartphone jackasses dotting the public stairs and sidewalks during rush
hour. The people at work getting into
intra-cubical conversations more appropriate for dockworkers than sane adults.
It goes on. The good
thing about Mom was she was a very hopeful, sweet-natured person, even to the
end. And it seemed like she had a better
grasp of this stuff than I do, or at least if it bothered her, she didn’t dwell
on it as much. She had the ability to switch
her mind off when it veered into darker territory. I still do, too, but I can’t help but
noticing in the wake of her passing that these little things that have
nothing to do with me have been cropping up on daily “pain in the ass”
lists I keep mentally. Which signals to
me that I’ve been dealt a severe blow and am still feeling the effects… which is
normal. You meet someone who’s recently
gone through the death of a parent and that person is all optimism and bursting
rays of sunshine … you’re probably dealing with a sociopath or someone on a very
high dosage of medication.
My patience has grown pretty thin, too, with people in my
life. I have no time for people who have
no time for me. The same closing of the
ranks happened when Dad passed on, that sense of finding out who in your life
really cares about you and who doesn’t.
And I gather some of this is dealing with people who don’t have this
kind of experience, who think the death of a parent is something
you feel bad about for a few weeks, and then everything is fine. Not quite sensing the full gravity of the
situation, and that it isn’t all-day weeping and chest beating, but more of a lifestyle
change that takes months and even years to fully assimilate. I can guarantee that some of the people I’ve
had issues with recently don’t grasp this simply because they haven’t
experienced it for themselves. There’s
no point in vindictively predicting, “One day they’ll understand.” Of course they will. I didn’t understand any of this before I
experienced it either. My sense of
support was just as hollow and ill equipped.
I don’t want any of this to sound as if the world must stop
because my Mom passed on. If anything, I
want it to sound as if I’m grasping that the world stops for everyone who goes
through the death of a parent, and now I get it. And I guess that lack of patience I now feel
is directed more towards people who seem so self absorbed and unable to grasp
even the most basic tenet of death – that the world will go on without us. There is no empathy in people who think it’s
funny or “someone else’s job” to pick their chewing gum out of a urinal, or
weave around them on a crowded staircase because they just have to type this
text right now at 5:05 pm in a midtown Manhattan subway station. It gets tiresome and mildly abrasive to be around people this
clueless about life.
Death makes you aware of other people, that they’ve gone
through or are going through this, and you’re now part of the same tribe. I was going to write “unfortunate” tribe, but
that’s not true, again, it’s just the way of the world. I gather some people are born empathetic, but
I suspect most of us need to have life beat it into us. If anything, I can see down the road and
grasp that sooner or later, I’m going to find myself less irritated by the
assholes of the world. Simply because I
won’t have time to waste on them, and that’s something you become much more
aware of on the other side of the hill.
But it’s something to work through when your senses are frayed and
tested as they are by the death of a parent.
I guess empathy is the one thing I’m aware of now that’s completely
missing from a cool song like “People Who Died.” It captures the anger and blind rage around death, if nothing else, but those feelings tend to come and go pretty quickly. I don’t know if Jim Carroll beat his parents
to the grave or not, but these days I’d be more interested to see or hear what he
created with that knowledge.
