by Patti Smith, 2010
I got this book from a Little Free Library (Smith Street?). I wanted to read it because Wayne has her album, Easter, and she has always intrigued me; her lyrics and the album cover photo of her. I knew nothing about her, except for her hit song, Because the Night, which it turns out, she got from Bruce Springsteen.
This book is mainly about her relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe, whom I had never heard of, and now wish I still never knew. I don’t like him at all, but Patti Smith loved him, through and through.
She is the oldest of 4 children, born December 30, 1946, in Chicago during a blizzard. She grew up in Germantown, Pennsylvania, and then southern New Jersey. Her Mom, standing next to her with a cigarette in her hand, taught her to pray every night before bed, Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep, If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take. She stayed awake not wanting to have her soul taken away. Her Mom sent her to Sunday School so she could learn about God and her soul. She didn’t like the prayer her Mom taught her so she asked her if she could make up her own prayers: “Thus freed, I would lie in my bed by the coal stove vigorously mouthing long letters to God.”
She was a little general and her younger siblings were her army. When she wasn’t sick (she had flu, measles, chicken pox, mumps), they would march around, have battles, retreat. When she was 8, she had a neighbor friend, Stephanie, who was 12 and had leukemia. Patti would sometimes go and sit with her. Stephanie loved Patti’s company. Patti loved Stephanie’s stuff. One day, Stephanie fell asleep and Patti went through her jewelry box and stole one of her pins, a “skater pin.” She felt so guilty and even worse when Stephanie died the next day. And it turns out Patti had scarlet fever. She was quarantined and their door was painted yellow, so she couldn’t go to Stephanie’s funeral. Stephanie’s mom gave Patti all of Stephanie’s stuff- her jewelry box and comic books – everything. “It was then that I experienced the weight of sin, even a sin as small as a stolen skater pin. I reflected on the fact that no matter how good I aspired to be, I was never going to achieve perfection. …”
“Robert was very taken with this story, and sometimes on a cold, languorous Sunday he would beg me to recount it. “Tell me the Stephanie story,” he would say. I would spare no details on our long mornings beneath the covers, reciting tales of my childhood, its sorrow and magic, as we tried to pretend we weren’t hungry. And always, when I got to the part where I opened the jewelry box, he would cry, “Patti, no…”
“We used to laugh at our small selves, saying that I was a bad girl trying to be good and that he was a good boy trying to be bad. Through the years these roles would reverse, then reverse again, until we came to accept our dual natures. We contained opposing principles, light and dark.”
Patti loved books and art and rock and roll.
When Patti is 19, she gets pregnant by a 17-year old. “In 1966, at summer’s end, I slept with a boy even more callow than I and we conceived instantaneously…Our union was so fleeting; so tender that I was not altogether certain we consummated our affection.” She releases this boy from responsibility and prays to God while sitting on a cot in her laundry room. “I sat readying myself to face my parents, praying beneath my breath. For a brief moment I felt as if I might die; and just as quickly I knew everything would be all right.” She decides to have the baby and give it up for adoption. With that decision, she feels such peace. “It is impossible to exaggerate the sudden calm I felt. An overwhelming sense of mission eclipsed my fears. I attributed this to the baby, imagining it empathized with my situation.” Her parents continue to let her live with them until the judgmental neighbors’ cruelty force them to send her away to live with a nice artist couple with a little boy. When it comes time to have the baby, her parents take her to a hospital in Camden, New Jersey. The nurses refuse to care for her, they are so cruel. When the doctor finally comes, he is furious at them because the baby is breech. Her baby is born healthy, though, and I believe taken away while she was still under anesthesia – she goes to see a statue of Joan of Arc in Philadelphia. “Young Joan whom I had known through books and the child whom I would never know. I vowed to both of them that I would make something of myself, then headed back home, stopping in Camden at the Goodwill store to buy a long gray raincoat.”
This book is mainly about Robert Mapplethorpe, though. She meets him on her first day in New York City. She’s 20 years old; it’s the summer of 1967. He’s sleeping in a room in a house she was supposed to be able to find a friend in, but that friend had left. “I walked into the room. On a simple iron bed, a boy was sleeping. He was pale and slim with masses of dark curls, lying bare-chested with strands of beads around his neck. I stood there. He opened his eyes and smiled.
“When I told him of my plight, he rose in one motion, put on his huraches and a white t-shirt, and beconed me to follow him.
“I watched him as he walked ahead, leading the way with a light-footed gait, slightly bowlegged. I noticed his hands as he tapped his fingers against his thigh. I had never seen anyone like him. He delivered me to another brownstone on Clinton Avenue, gave a little farewell salute, smiled, and was on his way.” I think Patti loves him at first sight – his dark brown curls, the way he walks, his hands.
Patti ends up homeless in NYC for a little while – always hungry. She meets other homeless people, one in particular, a friendly black guy, who shows her where to find food, mainly from restaurant chefs – bread and lettuce. She finally gets a job and meets Robert again when he comes in to buy a necklace. He buys the particular Persian necklace that is her favorite. “My favorite object was a modest necklace from Persia. It was made of two enameled metal plaques bound together with heavy black and silver threads, like a very old and exotic scapular. It cost eighteen dollars, which seemed like a lot of money. When things were quiet I would take it out of the case and trace the calligraphy etched upon its violet surface, and dream up tales of its origins.” When Robert buys it, she blurts out, “Don’t give it to any girl but me.” He smiles and says, “I won’t.” The third time she meets him in NYC, she is on a forced blind date with a creepy guy, and they are sitting on a park bench and he’s about to force her to go with him to his place. Robert shows up out of nowhere. She runs up to him and asks him if he’ll pretend to be her boyfriend. He says yes and she brings him over to the guy and tells the creepy guy, “This is my boyfriend! He’s been looking for me. He’s really mad. He wants me to come home now.” They hightail it out of there. She says, “Thank you, you saved my life.” “I never told you my name, it’s Patti.” He says, “My name is Bob.”
“Bob,” I said, really looking at him for the first time. “Somehow you don’t seem like a Bob to me. Is it okay if I call you Robert?” And there and then begins their starving artists love affair, except Robert is weird, weird, weird. He loves to trip on acid. He hates to work in the traditional sense. Patti supports him by working in book stores so he can stay home and do his art all day. He ends up with “trench mouth.” So sick he has to convalesce for weeks or months, a long time. They start out in a horrible hotel, the Hotel Allerton.
“These days marked the lowest point in our life together. I don’t remember how we found our way to the Allerton. It was a terrible place, dark and neglected, with dusty windows that overlooked the noisy street. … The place reeked of piss and exterminator fluid, the wallpaper peeling like dead skin in summer. There was no running water in the corroded sink, only occasional rusted droplets plopping through the night.
“Despite his illness, he wanted to make love, and perhaps our union was some comfort, for it drew out his sweat. In the morning he went out in the hall to go to the bathroom and came back visibly upset. He had exhibited signs of gonorrhea. His immediate sense of guilt and worry that I might have contracted it magnified his anxiety about our situation.
“He thankfully slept through the afternoon as I wandered the halls. The place was filled with derelicts and junkies. I was no stranger to cheap hotels. My sister and I had stayed in Pigalle in a sixth-floor-walk-up, but our room was clean, even cheery, with a romantic view of the rooftops of Paris. There was nothing romantic about this place, seeing half-naked guys trying to find a vein in limbs infested with sores. …”
She meets one of the addicts, a former dancer, who tells her stories of all the neighbors, “room by room, and what they had sacrificed for alcohol and drugs. Never had I seen so much collective misery and lost hopes, forlorn souls who had fouled their lives…” During the night, Robert cried out in pain and she went to this former dancer and asked her for something to give him. He came to their room and told them, “You have to take him to a doctor. You have to leave here. This place isn’t for you.” The next morning, they escape down the fire escape (they didn’t have any money to pay the rent) and get in a cab and Patti tells the driver to take them to the Chelsea Hotel.
The Chelsea Hotel at that time is full of artists of all types. The manager agrees to rent Patti and Robert a room. They have a tiny room so Robert is not really able to work. Patti works at the book store all day. At night they go to a place called Max’s. It sounds like a drag nightclub, famous because of Andy Warhol and his entourage? There is a lot of name-dropping, mostly of people I have never heard of. Robert wants to be famous. They really like their fellow artists staying in the Chelsea Hotel. She becomes good friends with some of them. Robert starts hustling at night for money (men paying him for sex). One night, he comes home with a look in his eyes and he tells Patti he crossed a line – he did it for free. So, he gave her the clap and now he is gay. She still loves him. They remain together but it becomes more a friendship. They made a vow to never leave each other. She is very loyal. His art becomes more and more dark, S&M, evil. He gets into photography. That is what made him famous. She wants to be a poet, an artist. She always wanted to be the wife of an artist and support an artist in his work. He eventually becomes the benefactor of Sam Wagstaff, a rich, gay man, who fell in love with Robert and supported him – bought him an apartment, bank-rolled all his work, arranged for his first showings, made him famous. Robert’s work sounds obscene. She describes some of it; I don’t want to remember it. Thankfully, there aren’t any pictures of it in the book. I Wikipedia’d Robert Mapplethorpe. He may be what started the whole outrage over art being supported by tax-payer dollars. His photos in these showings supported by NEA were full of “BDSM” and even child pornography, it said.
Patti talks about when his art started to take a dark turn: “I would return home to find Robert in brown monk’s cloth, a Jesuit robe he had found in a thrift store, pouring over pamphlets on alchemy and magic. He asked me to bring him books slanted toward the occult. At first he didn’t read these books so much as utilize their pentagrams and satanic images, deconstructing and refiguring them. He was not evil, though as darker elements infused his work, he became more silent.”
She said it was like he wanted to conjure up Satan and ask him to give him fame and fortune. She told him, “You’re looking for a shortcut.” He responded, “Why should I take the long road?”
…”Later he would say that the Church led him to God, and LSD led him to the universe. He also said that art led him to the devil, and sex kept him with the devil.”
There was a bar called the El Quixote connected to the Chelsea Hotel. One day it was full of rock stars: Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Grace Slick. Grace Slick walked by Patti. “Hello,” I said, Noticing I was taller.
“Hello yourself,” she said.
“When I went back upstairs I felt an inexplicable sense of kinship with these people, though I had no way to interpret my feeling of prescience. I could never have predicted that I would one day walk in their path. At that moment I was still a gangly twenty-two-year-old book clerk, struggling simultaneously with several unfinished poems.”
Once, someone slipped her a hallucinogen and she started to trip: “I had never taken any kind of drug before and my limited knowledge came from observing Robert or reading descriptions of the drug-induced visions of Gautier, Michaux, and Thomas de Quincey. I huddled in a corner, not sure what to do. I certainly didn’t want anyone to see me telescoping in size, even if it was all in my head.
“Robert, most likely high himself, searched the hotel until he found me, and sat outside the door talking to me, helping me to find my way back.”
When it is finally obvious that Robert is gay and is in love with another man: “Later, alone with my thoughts, I had a delayed reaction. I felt heavy-hearted, disappointed that he hadn’t confided in me. He had told me I had nothing to worry about but in the end I did. Yet I understood why he couldn’t tell me. I think having to define his impulses and confine his identity in terms of sexuality was foreign to him. His drives toward men were consuming but I never felt loved any less. It wasn’t easy for him to sever our physical ties, I knew that.
“Robert and I still kept our vow. Neither would leave the other. I never saw him through the lens of his sexuality. My picture of him remained intact. He was the artist of my life.”
One night they were at Max’s and she listens to the Velvet Underground for the first time. “I immediately related to the music, which had a throbbing surfer beat. I had never listened closely to Lou Reed’s lyrics, and recognized, especially through the ears of Donald, what strong poetry they contained.”
Here’s what she writes when the director of the play she is in asks her to shoot up: “I almost fainted. I couldn’t even look at the syringe, let alone put it in my art. “I’m not doing that,” I said.
“They were shocked. “You never shot up?”
“Everyone took it for granted that I did drugs because of the way I looked. I refused to shoot up. Finally they slapped hot wax on my arm and Tony showed me what to do.”
She was still always hungry. Her favorite place to eat in NYC was Automat. She would take 55 cents and put her coins in the slot and get a cheese and mustard sandwich on a poppy-seed bun. One night, she was so hungry, she took her 55 cents and put them in the slot and nothing happened. The doors didn’t open. She stood there and looked at them. Behind her she heard a voice. She turned around and it was Allen Ginsberg. He gave her the money she needed. He told her he thought she was a very pretty boy. There is a documentary on Kanopy called Automat that I want to watch, all about this place Patti Smith loved.
In these early years, Patti never smoked cigarettes or pot, she didn’t drink or do any drugs. She looked like an addict but that is because she was basically starving for 10 years. She played an addict in an off-broadway play, and then she played a lesbian in another off-broadway play. She eventually started smoking pot, by herself, to help her write. But she was not a druggy and she was not a lesbian.
The song, Because the Night, she was given to Patti by Bruce Springsteen. She put it on a shelf – she didn’t want it. Her producer, Jimmy Iovine, got it for her from Bruce. Bruce had written the title and the music and didn’t want to go any further with it; it was just another love song. Jimmy wanted a hit for Patti and Bruce said she could have it if she can do something with it. Wayne knew when I told him this that Patti wouldn’t want something from someone else. She is an artist. Finally, one night when she is waiting for a call from her soon-to-be husband, Fred Sonic Smith, she takes the package off the shelf and listens to it, and the lyrics come. She finished it at midnight, when the telephone rang and it was Fred. This song made her famous. When Robert heard it and saw her fame, he said, “You got famous before me.” It’s like all he wanted in life was to be famous.
Here’s what she writes on page 235-236 about Robert’s S&M:
“Robert was not a voyeur. He always said that he had to be authentically involved with the work that came out of his S&M pursuits, that he wasn’t taking pictures for the sake of sensationalism, or making it his mission to help the S&M scene become more socially acceptable. He didn’t think it should be accepted, and he never felt that his underground world was for everybody.
“There is no question that he enjoyed, even needed, its attractions. “It’s intoxicating,” he would say. “The power that you can have. There’s a truck line of guys that all want you, and no matter how repulsive they are, feeling that collective desire for oneself is powerful.”
“Robert’s subsequent excursions into the world of S&M were sometimes bewildering and frightening to me. He couldn’t share things with me, because it was so outside our realm. Perhaps he would have if I’d wanted him to, but I really didn’t want to know. It wasn’t so much denial as it was squeamishness. His pursuits were too hardcore for me and he often did work that shocked me: the invitation with the whip shoved up his ass, a series of photographs of cords binding genitals. He was no longer using magazine images, just models and himself to produce visuals of self-inflicted pain. I admired him for it, but I could not comprehend the brutality. It was hard for me to match it with the boy I had met.”
She never really talked about herself musically. She really wanted to be known as a poet, but gradually, she was drawn into poetry with music and formed a rock band, one member at a time. But she must have sang to Robert. He said, “You should sing more songs.”
Here’s from page 247: “Lenny showed me how to play an E, and as I struck the note, I spoke the line: “Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine.” I had written the line some years before as a declaration of existence, as a vow to take responsibility for my own actions. Christ was a man worthy to rebel against, for he was rebellion itself.
“Lenny started strumming the classic rock chords, E to D to A, and the marriage of the chords with this poem excited me. Three chords merged with the power of the word. “Are those chords to a real song?”
“Only the most glorious,” he answered, going into “Gloria,” and Richard followed.”
These are the members of the Patti Smith Group: Lenny Kaye: stratocaster, bass, vocals; Ivan Kral: Les Paul, bass, vocals; Jay Dee Daugherty: drums, percussion; Patti Smith: vocals, duo-sonic; Bruce Brody: keyboards, synthesizers.
On page 258, here’s all she writes about “Because the Night.”
“One late afternoon, we were walking down Eighth Street when we heard “Because the Night” blasting from one storefront after another. It was my collaboration with Bruce Springsteen, the single from the album Easter. Robert was our first listener after we had recorded the song. I had a reason for that. It was what he always wanted for me. In the summer of 1978, it rose to number 13 on the Top 40 chart, fulfilling Robert’s dream that I would one day have a hit record.
“Robert was smiling and walking in rhythm with the song. He took out a cigarette and lit it. We had been through a lot since he first rescued me from the science-fiction writer and shared an egg cream on a stoop near Tompkins square.
“Robert was unabashedly proud of my success. What he wanted for himself, he wanted for us both. He exhaled a perfect stream of smoke, and spoke in a tone he only used with me–a bemused scolding–admiration without envy, our brother-sister language.
“Patti,” he drawled, “you got famous before me.”
Robert died of aids on March 9, 1989, at the age of 42. He was born on November 4, 1946. The Foreword of the book, Patti writes that she was on the phone with him while he was in the hospital, listening to him breathing, and said goodbye, “knowing I would never hear him again.” She tucked her baby in, kissed her sleeping son, “then lay down beside my husband and said my prayers.” (Her husband and the father of her two children is Fred Sonic Smith.) She whispered, ‘he’s still alive,’ and slept. When she woke up, she got a call from Edward, Robert’s brother, telling her that Robert had died in the night. Edward had given Robert a kiss from her before he died, as she had requested. “I stood motionless, frozen; then slowly, as in a dream, returned to my chair. At that moment, Tosca began the great aria “Vissi d’arte.” I have lived for love, I have lived for Art. I closed my eyes and folded my hands. Providence determined how I would say goodbye.”
She and her family (Fred and their two children) go to the seaside shortly after Robert’s death. She walks up and down the beach. “Finally, by the sea, where God is everywhere, I gradually calmed. I stood looking at the sky. The clouds were the colors of a Raphael. A wounded rose. I had the sensation he had painted it himself. You will see him. You will know him. You will know his hand. These words came to me and I knew I would one day see a sky drawn by Robert’s hand.”
He had asked her before his death to write their story. It took her from 1989 to 2010, to gather the words to write, Just Kids. It won the National Book Award, and it was one of 30 World Book Night books for 2012. She says in the last pages, in A Note to the Reader: “…our story was obliged to wait until I could find the right voice. There are many stories I could yet write about Robert, about us. But this is the story I have told. It is the one he wished me to tell and I have kept my promise. We were as Hansel and Gretel and we ventured out into the black forest of the world. There were temptations and witches and demons we never dreamed of and there was splendor we only partially imagined. No one could speak for these two young people nor tell with any truth of their days and nights together. Only Robert and I could tell it. Our story, as he called it. And, having gone, he left the task to me to tell it to you.” (May 22, 2010)
At the very beginning of the book, she writes this:
“Much has been said about Robert, and more will be added. Young men will adopt his gait. Young girls will wear white dresses and mourn his curls. He will be condemned and adored. His excesses damned or romanticized. In the end, truth will be found in his work, the corporeal body of the artist. It will not fall away. Man cannot judge it. For art sings of God, and ultimately belongs to him.”
Wayne loves Patti Smith’s song, Privilege (Set Me Free). He distills Patti Smith down to this: ‘She was part of the NYC punk art scene of the late 60s/early 70s, of which there was a desire to create art that was different, just to be different. But she had a soul and it shows in her anthem, Privilege.’ That song really speaks to him.
Here’s what Bono writes about Patti Smith as I wrote in my book report on Bono’s book, Surrender: “Here’s what he says about Patti Smith, who sang her song with them, “The People Have the Power” in Paris right after some terrorist attacks, which he was almost hurt by. “Singing with Patti, I’m conscious that she is one of those spirit guides I cherish. Her first album, Horses, gave us a chance to express our faith as doubt. “Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine.” This voice coming to me in my early twenties, showing me that you could have visions that you could sing about them. Radio Ethiopia and that voice pointed me to that place. On Wave, she speaks to the pope in a vision while the fiery prayers of Easter in 1978, this reverent irreverence, were everything I wanted. The way she allowed her religiosity to flow through would shape the way I see music.”