The Basketball Diaries

The Basketball Diaries Summary | Part 1 Summary

The Basketball Diaries is made up of a series of entries in the diary of Jim Carroll, a thirteen year-old boy living in the lower east side of Manhattan. The diary begins in the fall of 1963 and describes the activities that take place in Jim's life.

In the first entry, we learn that Jim is about to play in his first organized basketball league game. The league he is in, the Biddy League, is for players 12 years old and younger, but Jim is able to play on the team because his coach, a man named Lefty, got him a fake birth certificate.

Jim thinks Lefty might be a homosexual because of some of the things the coach has done, including touching Jim inappropriately. Nonetheless, Jim likes Lefty so he chooses to keep his suspicions to himself. Jim describes his coach as a "great guy' who regularly drives his players to games and buys them food.

Jim's team loses their first game. Afterward, as the team is waiting for the subway, two of the boys begin to fight. Jim says that while he doesn't like to fight, he loves to watch others fight. One of the boys tries to involve Jim in the fight, but he refuses. Jim says that he is not about to help a boy who is always getting him into trouble at school.

One unseasonably warm October day, Jim and two of his friends decide to skip basketball practice so that they can take a ferry ride to Staten Island. After stopping for sandwiches, the boys hitch a ride to the ferry on the rear fender of a bus. Once onboard the ferry, Jim's friend Tony takes out a bottle of cleaning fluid and suggests they all sniff it to get high. After a few sniffs, the three boys become nauseous and throw up over the side rail. Unfortunately their vomit lands on the head of a man sitting beneath the rail. Because they are afraid that the man will hurt them, the boys hide in the restroom until the ferry docks. They spend the rest of the afternoon playing basketball in a park and return home near nightfall.

A few days later, Jim comes home from school to find that one of his neighbors; an old woman he refers to as "old Mrs. McNulty," is being taken away in an ambulance. Jim says it was just a matter of time before that happened as nearly every night, Jim saw her pretending to offer Catholic Mass in her kitchen, wearing nothing but her bra and underpants. What Jim finds particularly strange about this ritual is not so much that the woman was pretending to offer Mass, but that she used a litany of obscenities throughout the ritual. Despite the fact that Jim isn't particularly religious, the sight of the old woman behaving in this manner bothers and disgusts him so much that he can not watch.

Jim and his friends often travel uptown where they work in teams to snatch pocketbooks from ladies walking down the street. The easiest technique that they use to steal is the one by which one guy asks for directions and, while the woman points out the correct way, the other guy moves in to snatch her purse from her outstretched arm. Jim and his friends are known as the "Diaper Bandits" and they have gotten quite good at knowing which woman are the most lucrative targets. In this chapter, he describes his latest "hit," a theft that netted him $123 plus some traveler's checks, which he sold to his friend's older brother. In Jim's mind, the biggest prize that he gains is the stack of Polaroid pictures featuring nude women engaged in various sex acts. Jim and Carson, his partner in crime, sell the pictures for three dollars each.

Jim's team travels to the Bronx one afternoon for a basketball game. Although his team has only five players available, and they finish the game with only four after Carson fouls out, they win by more than 40 points. After fouling out, Carson sneaks into the other team's locker room and steals all of their valuables. The team leaves the gym right after the game and they talk Lefty into stopping for hamburgers. Lefty tells the boys that they can only have one hamburger each; however, each boy orders several hamburgers. The bill comes to over nine dollars. Lefty only has five dollars on him so he has to leave his watch with the restaurant's manager until he returns with the rest of the money. Lefty has the last laugh. Before the boys can get into the car, Lefty drives off, leaving them stranded in the Bronx. As they are stranded in the parking lot, the boys from the other team, who are angry that they have been robbed, approach the team, armed with pipes. Luckily, Jim and his friends quickly hail a cab and manage to escape harm.

As the team makes their way to another game, one of the boys, Herbie, points that there are a number of prostitutes on the street. Herbie says that Pedro's mother, Pedro is a boy on the team, is one of them. The other boys think that Herbie is joking but they quickly realize that Pedro's mother is, in fact, on the corner. Embarrassed, Pedro runs from his teammates and doesn't show up for the game. When they pass his house after the game, Pedro runs inside before anyone can talk to him. Tony tells them that Pedro's parents both use Heroin and he suspects that Pedro's mother is prostituting herself to make money to buy more drugs. Jim feels sorry for Pedro and acknowledges that it must be difficult living in a home like that. After school the next day, Pedro's older brother finds Herbie and beats him up. The following day, Herbie's older brother gets revenge by beating up Pedro's brother.

Jim's family is planning to move to the tip of Manhattan in the near future, so Jim decides to take a trip there to visit his cousin. Jim really doesn't like his cousin but he thinks that he better get to know him and his friends since he will be attending school with them. After breakfast, Jim walks to the subway and once onboard, settles in for the long ride. He brings a magazine to help pass the time on the subway and, before long, Jim is absorbed by one of the stories. A drunken man sits down next to Jim and starts talking to him. At first Jim is annoyed because the train is only half full and he doesn't want to share his seat but Jim quickly becomes engaged in a conversation with the man. The two continue to talk until a transit officer enters the car and kicks the man off the train. As the subway pulls away from the station, Jim feels sad seeing the old man standing alone on the subway platform.

The night before Halloween, Jim and his friends use black shoe-polish to disguise themselves and spend the night scaring girls going to a church dance, young children, and old people. They fill socks with flour and use them to beat the girls going to the church dance until they get tired of it. The boys then replace the flour with gravel and use the socks to attack the "creeps" in a nearby housing project. For an added dose of fun, they fill a bag with dog feces and light it on fire outside the door of an old man's apartment. In Jim's estimation, no one is immune from their pranks, especially after they got drunk on some red wine Herbie's brother got for them. Jim finally arrives home at three in the morning and throws up on the new rug, an act he is sure will result in a beating from his father.

When Jim's team travels to Riverdale in the Bronx, they are exposed to a lifestyle that they seldom see. Rather than the apartments and tenements they are accustomed to, the homes in this neighborhood are single family residences with swimming pools. The school is, in Jim's words, "fancy" and the stands are filled with people who look at Jim and his teammates with pity. Lefty instructs the boys to press against the other team from the start and they are soon ahead by 23 points. As the score continues to mount, Lefty instructs them to lay off so that no one becomes suspicious enough to check the players' birth certificates. By halftime, the score is 53-20. At halftime, Lefty finds three players sniffing glue in the toilet stalls but Jim manages to flush his away before being caught. The glue sniffers are benched for the remainder of the game and Jim finishes the game with 42 points. After the game, the boys head back to their neighborhood where they spend the rest of the evening getting drunk and high.

Jim's family moves to the upper tip of Manhattan and he finds himself back in Catholic school. Jim detests the discipline of the school and he threatens to hit the first person who tries to use corporal punishment on him. Jim has secured a scholarship for a private high school and he is doing just enough to get by during his last year of grammar school. Although most of the kids in the neighborhood are described by Jim as, "strictly All-American," his cousin Kevin introduced him to some "weed-heads" that Kevin occasionally meets to play basketball. While Kevin doesn't smoke pot, he does do his share of drinking. Whenever his parents leave town for the weekend, Kevin, Jim, and some of their friends gather in Kevin's apartment to drink. During one such weekend, one of their friends, a guy named Willie, got so drunk that some of the others had to hold him upright while he went to the bathroom. When he finished, he fell and hit his head on the bathtub.

The boys think that cold air will sober Willie up so they take him outside for a walk. As they are walking, they pass a pretty girl on the sidewalk. Willie tries to reach for the girl, but she hits him in the groin. The pain causes Willie to pass out and, while Jim and his friends are trying to revive him, they are seen by a policeman. The officer asks the boys if they have been sniffing glue, a charge they deny vehemently. In an effort to convince the officer that they are not up to no good, Chris tells the officer that Willie was sleigh-riding when he lost control and ran into a light post. Jim is mortified because there is obviously no sled (or hill) in sight and there is only a thin coating of snow on the ground. The police officer sees though this story and tells the boys that they better tell the truth because Willie may be seriously injured. Finally, Jim confesses that they have been drinking. The officer tries briefly to revise Willie, and having no luck, he calls for an ambulance. After Willie is taken to the hospital, the rest of the boys return to Kevin's apartment to watch television.