The Basketball Diaries: The Classic About Growing Up Hip On New York’s Mean Streets

“Good for the big bastard, he never gives credit, and he won’t even let you use the bathroom in the joint. Now the big tough guy is down on his knees in the street.”

Jim’s disdain and lack of empathy for authority figures, as well as his refusal to hold back in his expression, often shine through in his diary entries. He observes occurrences of irony in his daily life and finds amusement in them. In this case, he is laughing at a pizza parlor owner whose business is burning down.

“As usual the transit cop comes along at 181st St. and kicks the guy off and the guy gives me this pathetic sad wave good-bye as the train was pulling out like he was thinking, ‘Who’s gonna listen to me now?’ and I felt black and sad like always after that happens.”

Where Jim lacks empathy for authority figures, he makes up for in empathy for gay people, Black people, and the poor. Unlike those around him, particularly his family, Jim is against the idea of treating people differently based on superficial factors. His empathy is often taken advantage of by people who seem to sense it in him and want to unload their pain. Jim does, in fact, feel for these people and expresses it in his diary.

“The cats in the white suits got there in a snap and off went the poor cat to get the pump job, and back we went to a warm penthouse and turned on the t.v. just in time for ‘Superman.’” 

One of Jim’s friends named Willie drinks too much liquid codeine and overdoses. He goes unconscious on the concrete, and the boys have no choice but to call an ambulance and save his life. Heroin is a dangerous drug, and overdoses are common. Jim is used to this fact and barely reacts to the incident.

“I guess deep down I think they have the right to boss me around. I’ve got to break loose.”

Jim earns a perfect grade at his new school but receives a failing grade for effort. The school assumes he cheated and when he asks about it, he is whipped with a strap. Jim is well aware of the cultural brainwashing taking place, yet even he believes he deserves it. He realizes he needs to escape the oppressive nature of society as a whole.

“Today’s school day should be up for ‘Ripley’s Believe It Or Not.’”

Jim’s life has an uncanny way of presenting strange and extraordinary events to observe and experience. One day in school, a boy goes into an epileptic seizure, and one of the teachers gets their hand bitten trying to move his tongue (an outdated technique). A second boy has a catatonic fit. Jim feels like he must have been transported into a movie.

“I love it this way. My feet bare against the tar which is soft from the summer heat, the slight breeze that runs across your entire body…”

Jim is a nature lover at heart despite being born and raised in New York City. He takes any chance he gets to escape the streets and spend time relaxing either alone or with friends with nothing between him and the earth and sky. Jim also regularly goes up to his roof naked just to appreciate the feeling of a breeze running over his body.

“I didn’t really think, I didn’t even take my sneakers off, I just jumped into this jerky dream that lasted all the way down until I hit bottom.”

One day, Jim and his friends go cliff diving into the Harlem River, with Jim describing his jump as one without inhibition, dreamlike and endless until the bottom. This description closely resembles Jim’s descent into heroin addiction. He dives into it headfirst, lives his life in a dreamlike state for several years, and does not cease until he hits rock bottom long after the completion of his diary.

“She was the most far out antique doll you’d ever want to meet.”

A large portion of Jim’s experiences center on his sexual awakening and later, his developed skill for using sex to his advantage. Jim keeps an emotional distance from sex and sees it as a means for pleasure, not necessarily a way to connect with others. He views his sexual partners more like objects than people.

“If you never do anything to make yourself seen...like really seen, the type that makes people point, then you don’t deserve to be seen at all.” 

Jim addresses the importance of presence in life. He draws a connection between the basketball court and the everyday world, explaining that a person should not necessarily try to be seen, but should be seen just for being themselves. By this token, people who do nothing noteworthy do not deserve to be seen.

“What the fuck am I supposed to say? Stoned from such strong grass we smoked, here in the cosmos holding a suicide case at five a.m.?”

Jim and his friends stumble upon the body of a woman who threw herself out of a fifth story window to end her life. She lies on the sidewalk, dying. Most of the boys cannot handle the scene, but Jim bends down and holds her hand while they wait for the police to arrive. Everyone is high and unable to process what they are witnessing.

“It’s always been the same, growing up in Manhattan...the idea of living within a giant archer’s target...for use by the bad Russia bowman with the atomic arrows.” 

Jim lives in the 1960s under the threat of the Cold War. Talk of possible attacks from Russia regularly permeate the news and people’s conversations. Jim is against the war but spends much of his time in a state of anxiety. Because he lives in the biggest city in the United States, he understands that his risk of being attacked is higher than that of other places.

“I’m gonna be fifteen soon and the summer’s ‘Pepsi-Cola’ heroin habit is tightening more and more around me.”

A “Pepsi-Cola” habit is slang for a creeping heroin addiction. Heroin starts off like most other drugs but before long, a person can become completely enveloped in addiction with no idea how they got there—as is the case with Jim’s own.

“I used to laugh at the corny monkey phrase too, I had it under ‘control’ all the way to sitting and sneezing a lot on this fucking lice sofa wanting to scream my balls off.”

Jim and his fellow junkies often discuss their addiction, the cycle they are in. When they attempt to quit and experience withdrawals, they get what they call a “monkey voice.” This voice encourages heroin use to avoid the pain and suffering of withdrawals. In other words, a heroin habit feels under control until it is not.

“When they dropped them A-bombs on Japsville I wasn’t even an idea, but I paid for it anyhow all through growing up and I’m still paying.”

Despite being born after World War II, Jim still felt (and continues to feel) its effects as they shaped the person he became. Jim had nightmares of bomb attacks as a young child, and in his youth, continues to live with anxiety and hopelessness regarding his future. These effects also contribute to his decision to do drugs.

“It’s just the dreams we remember that make us want to end your nuclear games.”

Jim’s parents regularly accuse him of being a communist and having immoral political affiliations. While Jim occasionally associates with communists, he considers himself apolitical as he believes all governments are corrupt. The fear spread by previous wars affected Jim’s life and worldview, as well as the choices he makes as a teenager. He does not oppose war because of politics, he opposes war because of the trauma it produces in ordinary people who are forced to suffer through it.

“At dawn light came in shafts and led me to some fields nearby to watch the tall reeds wave and then become fingers calling me over.” 

Jim becomes most poetic when describing his psychedelic experiences. In doing so, he feels connected to nature and apart from his ego and problems. When he is high, he enjoys experiencing the little nature he can find in New York City or at least imagining himself being there.

“I had always thought the sky was flat, but now I realized it was a friendly dome, watching secret U.F.O.s zipping over the horizon. And the eclipse was fantastic, I watched it in slow motion and understood it.”

Jim and his friends spend an evening at the house of a fellow drug user. Later in the evening, a lunar eclipse occurs, and everyone ascends to the roof to watch. Jim describes it as a moving experience. Because of the drugs he is on, everything is happening in slow motion and Jim feels like he can fully embrace and connect with the sky.

“Little kids shoot marbles

where the branches break the sun

into graceful shafts of light…

I just want to be pure.” 

This is the shortest diary entry in Jim’s autobiography: An old piece of paper with an LSD-related poem. As per his style when describing trips, Jim writes about nature and compares nature imagery to his inner thoughts and feelings. Because nothing else is written in this entry, it is clear that the desire to be pure is centerfold to Jim’s motivation for almost everything he does.

“This was the way I measured my future time. […] There was no way you could think of one without the other […] anything that was worth looking ahead to, well, that’s when it always seemed the sirens were gonna start the death chant.”

Jim feels like he is living on borrowed time. He was born after a major world war and is living through the Cold War and Vietnam War. He does not expect to live long, figuring he will either be drafted at 18, or Russia will attack. Whenever something positive happens, Jim refuses to look forward to it because he may not live to see it.

“I’m just really a wise ass kid getting wiser and I’m going to get even somehow for your dumb hatreds and all them war baby dreams you left in my scarred bed with dreams of bombs falling above that cliff I’m hanging steady to.”

The 1960s saw everyone in a state of fear. Jim describes some of his childhood dreams and paranoias as resulting from war-related trauma. He feels he is strong enough to hang on—even in the face of a culture that wants to push him over the edge—and swears retribution for the damage done to him and those in similar shoes.

“Shit my man, it’s so all there that no one’s seeing it anymore.” 

Jim reflects on the nature of corruption and how things are getting so out of hand that said corruption is more or less normalized. People no longer react to it and are instead completely blind to it.

“Yes, this is a hard, cold city, but it shows there are good souls out there too.” 

Jim runs into an old female friend who works as a sex worker. She recounts some of her recent experiences with men and notes how many of them treat her kindly. Jim considers this a sign that some good people still exist on the “mean streets” of New York. This is contrary to Jim’s personal experiences as a sex worker and drug user.

“Four days of temporary death gone by, no more bread, with its hundreds of nods and casual theories, soaky nostalgia […] at any rate, a thousand goofs, some still hazy in my noodle.”

As Jim sinks deeper into heroin addiction, he spends less time sober. At one point he is high for four days straight and feels like he died and came back to life. He runs out of money after spending it all on drugs, memories of what happened being a blur at best.