Just Kids

I have to admit that when I started Patti Smith's National Book Award-winning memoir, I wasn't quite sure what all the fuss was about; her recollections of her childhood in a working-to-middle class neighborhood outside of Philly straightforwardly conveys her camaraderie with her siblings, the specter of childhood diseases that confined her to bed for weeks on end, the horror of the social stigma of getting pregnant at 19 while working her way through Glassboro State College for a teaching certificate, falling from grace in her neighbors' eyes from the smart eldest daughter who was going to make something of herself to something lower than everyday trash. 

Knowing something of the kind of life-changing effect her work has had on friends just a half-generation older than my own, I was thinking that this was clearly a situation in which the good folks who were on the award committee were themselves so smitten with Ms. Smith that whatever she made of her coming of age as an artist alongside Robert Mapplethorpe was going to be taken as holy writ from on high.  As someone who probably heard her first as that other singer on Bruce Springsteen's "Because the night" and who first listened to Horses in its entirety within the last year (the kind of admission of pop cultural ignorance that, in my household, leads to someone standing at the dinner table, pointing to the kitchen door, and saying with 90% humorous intent "Out!  Get OUT!") I could completely understand that I'm basically so behind the curve on her entire career that all that she has done that has been revolutionary, I've gotten via other artists in their various takes on and homages to her work, so when I finally get to the source I can't fully appreciate what she was doing in bridging beat poetry and rock n' roll. 

So while my Bronx-born and Ardmore-reared kin cut their wisdom teeth on Smith's music, I was steeping in the music of Lynryd Skynyrd  and Molly Hatchet, thanks to the programming selections of radio stations in Southwestern Pennsylvania in the era that Patti Smith was galvanizing audiences in New York City and in other places where folks were willing to lend an ear to the heresy that "Jesus died for somebody's sins but not mine" -- which Smith breaks down as an assertion of her decision as an artist to take responsibility for her actions, in a radical Christ-like way. 

The point  at which the memoir really began to draw me in is as Smith narrates her early days with Mapplethorpe, whom she first encounters while trying to crash with friends from home who have enrolled at Pratt, next as a customer at Brentano's who purchases -- at the astronomical price of $18.00, a Persian necklace that functions as a talisman for Smith, and then in Washington Square Park where Smith is trying to duck out of a date that is taking a turn she doesn't want to follow.  As they scrape together a household - trashpicking a mattress and religious icons for their $80/month apartment, debating over whether to spend the extra dime for the chocolate milk Robert craves from the automat -- they spend free days riding the F train out to Coney Island or taking in the scene in Washington Square Park.  Smith writes that one day "We were walking toward the fountain, the epicenter of activity, when an older couple stopped and openly observed us...'Oh take their picture,' said the woman to her bemused husband, 'I think they're artists.' 'Oh go on,' he shrugged.  'They're just kids.'"

Of course, the joke that we're all in on is that they are just kids - doing things like shoplifting copies of Rimbaud from second hand bookstores because they don't have the 99 cents to buy the copy, only being able to buy one hot dog on their trips out to Coney Island, with Robert eating the lion's share of the sausage while Patti eats most of the saurkraut - but they are also going to become Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe. From Smith's point of view, what we see as inevitable is shown to be a sort of miracle -- the only way she is able to cover the bus fare to New York is because she finds a pocketbook with $18.00;  when she returns from a trip to Paris she finds Robert in the grip of a potentially life-threatening illness, in an apartment where a murder takes place on the front steps her first night back - only the advice of a transvestite junkie at the fleabag motel to which they have fled convinces Patti to take Robert to the Chelsea Hotel, where she talks their way into a room by brandishing their portfolios (which, of course, would in fact now be worth far more than their weight in gold) and spinning tales of getting an advance from her job (which she is in fact able to do); in pursuing an interview with a drummer who has introduced himself to her as Slim, she ends up in a relationship with Sam Shepard in which she begins to make a name for herself as a poet, and starts to find her home in rock 'n roll.

There are also moment at which her straightforward prose gives way to the kind of lyricism that animates her songs:  in writing of her friendship with the musician Matthew Reich, she notes that "I never knew whether his speedy speech patterns reflected amphetamine use or an amphetamine mind.  He would often lead me up blind alleys or through an endless labyrinth of incomprehensible logic.  I felt like Alice with the Mad Hatter, negotiating jokes without punch lines, and having to retrace my steps on the chessboard floor back to the logic of my own peculiar universe."  When I read lines like that, I begin to get her shamanistic way with words and understand how she's worked her magic on so many lives.