IT’S NOT TOO LATE . . . TO BREATHE

It's too late
To fall in love with Sharon Tate
But it's too soon
To ask me for the words I want carved on my tomb
-- Jim Carroll, “It’s Too Late” (1980)


September 14, 2009: I was stunned this morning to read of the September 11 death of Jim Carroll, poet and erstwhile rock musician. Carroll was perhaps most famous for writing “The Basketball Diaries” about his years as a hustler and heroin addict in New York City, but I first learned of him when my brother gave me the album, Catholic Boy, for my 16th birthday. Steve had been a fan of the anthemic single “People Who Died” – Carroll’s amphetamine-paced litany of deceased friends, and I soon shared his affection for the song, with its furious guitars and detached-but-somehow-not-too-detached closing lines: “I miss ‘em/They died!” This morning when my cell phone rang, and I saw that it was Steve – who almost never calls me – I knew he wanted to talk about Jim Carroll.

There was always a certain cachet to being turned on to Jim Carroll. This was a guy who started a rock band with the support of Patti Smith, got a three-record deal with Atlantic on the recommendation of Keith Richards, and had his first album cover photo taken by Annie Liebovitz. Still, though I have many friends who know a lot about the late 1970s/early 1980s New York punk scene, and of course, know about Carroll, I might be the only one who actually owns a copy of Catholic Boy.

Ironically, at the end of last week, I had been surprised to open the most recent issue of Paste magazine and find a tribute to Carroll and Catholic Boy. I now realize that as I was reading that article on the evening of September 11, Carroll either already had died or was in the process of dying. In the article, Paste editor Andy Whitman praises Catholic Boy, as an album worthy of the “Punk Pulitzer,” an award does not -- and probably should not -- exist (though I appreciate Whitman’s sentiments).

Whitman makes a point of saying that, while he first encountered Carroll through “People Who Died,” the title track resonated even more thoroughly with him. No quarrel there. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve trotted out the line “Redeemed through pain/ Not through joy” to elicit a chuckle about my Catholic upbringing. Even better, for a 16 year-old boy attending a Catholic high school, there was Carroll’s litany of the sacraments. To this day, I can’t think of the Anointing of the Sick without hearing (in my head) Carroll intoning the word “Extreem-unk-shun” as though it were some impossibly filthy sex act.

And that was precisely what made Carroll great: his ability to blur any and all distinctions between the sacred and the profane. Jim Carroll was not the first, though he was one of the most powerful voices, to remind me that most things, unlike the standard nun’s habit, are not black and white. Almost miraculously, he embraced life in all its sordid messiness without it diminishing his longing for or appreciation of small moments of clarity. From Carroll’s viewpoint, the trick was to remain hopeful without being a sucker.

As the day progressed, I began to recall other songs from Catholic Boy, googling the lyrics on my computer: “City Drops Into the Night” with its chorus “When the city drops into the night/ Before the darkness there’s one moment of light/That’s when everything seems clear/ The other side seems so near”; “Wicked Gravity”’s plea for release from earthbound existence: “I want a world without gravity/It could be just what I need/I'd watch the stars move close/I'd watch the earth recede”; and the pop veneer of “Day and Night,” carefully scratched by its subject matter: “But the stars tell lies/ It blinds the only warning/And when darkness dies,/There's nothing left but morning.”

Eventually, I found my way to my favorite track on Catholic Boy, “It’s Too Late.” Ostensibly a rant against poseurs declaimed over a killer bass line, “It’s Too Late” had provided Teenaged Me with some vital words to live by: “I think it's time/That you all start to think about gettin' by/Without that need to go out and find/Somebody to love.” Like I said: too soon to give up, but time to stop being a sucker.

As I walked around my office in the afternoon, with Jim Carroll hooks cascading in my head, a funny thing happened. The Carroll tunes started to merge with another tune that had begun running around in my brain:

Every day I die again, and again I'm reborn
Every day I have to find the courage
To walk out into the street
With arms out
Got a love you can't defeat
Neither down or out
There's nothing you have that I need
I can breathe
Breathe now

I’d been to see U2 in Chicago two days earlier, and now I had the music of those four Catholic Boys, as well as Jim Carroll, on my mind. But I don’t think it was an accident that my subconscious picked “Breathe” to add to the playlist. “Breathe” is U2’s Joycean paean to Everyman (It’s no accident when four Dubliners set a song on June 16th ). In Ulysses, James Joyce artfully scrambled the sacred and the profane in a stream-of-consciousness collage that celebrated the heroic day-long odyssey of ordinary guy Leopold Bloom. “Breathe” takes a similar tack, emphasizing the simple glory of finding enough strength to go outside and take one more self-reliant breath.

And so, at the end of the day on the drive home from work, I cranked up U2’s latest as loud as it would go on my iPod in solitary tribute to Jim Carroll. As I pulled into my driveway, I heard:

We are people borne of sound
The songs are in our eyes
Gonna wear them like a crown

Walk out, into the sunburst street
Sing your heart out, sing my heart out
I've found grace inside a sound
I found grace, it's all that I found
And I can breathe
Breathe now

Jim Carroll wore his songs like a crown. He walked out into the sunburst street and sang his heart out. I got out of my car and took a breath. Jim Carroll helped me to learn how to breathe, I thought, and I was home. So, I realized, was he.