“Just Kids” by Patti Smith
Photo of Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe, taken on Coney Island.
(This is a guest review by Christie C.)
I think my favorite thing about Patti Smith is that she’s a believer. I don’t just mean that she prays to Jesus even though old-school, earnest religious belief has long been unfashionable in the punk and art circles she’s spent time in ever since dropping out of teachers’ college and moving to New York City to become a poet. And I don’t just mean that after giving up her first child for adoption as a too-young mother, she swore on Joan of Arc’s birthday – to both the baby and to Joan – that she would make something of her life.
She believes in the magic of destiny. “Just Kids,” a memoir of her friendship with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, is filled with enough breathtaking coincidences to make you believe in it, too. Self-described “country mouse” Patricia Lee Smith first met “Bob” Mapplethorpe ( she would later tell him,“Somehow you don’t seem like a Bob to me. Is it okay if I call you Robert?”) when she arrived from South Jersey, hungry and penniless and looking for work, at what she thought was the apartment of friends from high school now attending art school in the city. Instead, asleep in a back room and haloed in sun, she found Robert. Their meeting was poetic and auspicious, and although on that day he led her to the correct address and said good-bye, they would have two more chance meetings before becoming inseparable and psychic as twins. It’s easy to see why the two of them would feel that their union was meant to be.
The second meeting occurred at the bookstore where Patti had gotten work. In the long dull hours, she dreamed up backstories about a mysterious necklace the store had for sale at her counter – a silver plate etched with Persian script, on a violet cord. One slow day, Robert entered the store. They recognized each other from their previous encounter, and the aesthetically discerning Robert took his time examining the jewelry. Of all the pieces, he selected the necklace that had secretly been Patti’s favorite – to her delight but also her dismay, because she could no longer gaze at it and fantasize during lulls. After ringing up his purchase, Patti said, “Don’t give it to any girl but me,” a moment of uncharacteristic boldness that she immediately felt embarrassed about. Robert promised he wouldn’t – a promise he kept when he later gave the necklace to Patti as a gift, immaculately wrapped in matching tissue paper.
Keeping promises is a theme that beats strong throughout the book, and in the lives of the two main characters who meet as (literally) starving artists, whose paths intersect and part and intersect again, until Robert’s death of AIDs in 1989. In fact, the book itself is a kept promise. All through their friendship, as they hunger and move into the Chelsea Hotel where running into William S. Burroughs and Janis Joplin were everyday occurrences, as they draw together on the apartment floor for hours of sustained concentration late into the night and Patti charms Robert with her regret-soaked childhood story of stealing an ice-skater charm from a sick girl who died the following day, as Robert discovers and struggles with his homosexuality and lovers come and go in both of their lives – Robert begs Patti to someday tell their story, and Patti promises that she will.
Robert would later become infamous for his aggressively graphic, S&M-tinged photographs. Patti writes that she sometimes had trouble reconciling this brash work with the artist she thought of as a sweet – albeit mischievous – and sensitive boy: “I admired him for it, but I could not comprehend the brutality.” Yet there’s a yin-yang, symbiotic quality to the relationship between the romantic Patti and the experimental Robert who was always pushing his art further and further away from what was socially accepted. You get the feeling that their differences drew them together just as much as their similarities.
To share an example of just one emblem of Patti’s endearing and unwavering belief in fate is to tell the story of how she selected her first guitar, a gift from Sam Shepard, who was her lover at the time and had found success with his off-Broadway plays (meanwhile, Patti and Robert had remained roommates, vowing never to be apart, and Robert had begun to date men). Sam took Patti guitar-shopping: “We looked at a lot of Martins, but what caught my eye was a battered black Gibson, a 1931 Depression model. The back had been cracked and repaired, and the gears of the tuning pegs were rusted. But something about it captured my heart. I thought by the looks of it that nobody would want it but me.
‘Are you sure this is the one, Patti Lee?’ Sam asked me.
‘It’s the only one,’ I said.” (page 184)
It’s as if she saw something of herself in the scruffy, dogged guitar. She imbues chance meetings and objects and the birthdays of saints with meaning, and it makes for a meaningful life that takes the shape of a myth, complete with symbols.
I think readers will find Patti’s lack of cynicism refreshing. In her 1960s and ’70s milieu, as many around her grew weary and wryly embraced the falling plaster of the simultaneously liberating and deteriorating society around them, she doesn’t give up hope in the power of art to make people and culture better. When writing about Robert’s starstruck worship of Andy Warhol – at one point, at Robert’s behest, the two hang out at legendary nightspot Max’s Kansas City night after night so they can penetrate Andy’s inner circle and sit at his cool-kids table in the back room – she says, “I didn’t feel for Warhol the way Robert did. His work reflected a culture I wanted to avoid. I hated the soup and felt little for the can. I preferred an artist who transformed his time, not mirrored it.” (page 69)
Also admirable and a little at odds in Patti’s bohemian world is her suck-it-up, blue-collar work ethic. At many points in their friendship, it was Patti who awoke before dawn to ride the subway to jobs in faraway parts of the city and work long hours to pay for rent and food and art supplies, romanticizing her role as the self-sacrificing lover supporting her artist. It’s also usually up to the sensible Patti to get the duo out of tough spots, whether it’s negotiating an art-in-exchange-for-rent deal with the manager of the Chelsea Hotel, or telling their former landlord he can keep some of their possessions in lieu of paying back rent. “As I was leaving, I noticed one of my drawings hanging on the wall. If [Chelsea Hotel manager] Bard didn’t get it, at least [former landlord] Jimmy Washington did. I said good-bye to my stuff. It suited him and Brooklyn better. There’s always new stuff, that’s for sure.” (page 98)
It’s fun to read the book for the glimpses of stars who pass through it, often leaving lasting impressions on the unassuming young wannabe poet once teased for her Joan Baez-like, folk-singer hair (before taking scissors to it to give herself an androgynous Keith Richards ‘do, a daring move that finally earned her some cool cred). She soothingly sings a song she wrote for a drunk Janis Joplin, after which Janis says, “That’s me, man. That’s my song.” She takes bits of wisdom from the talented artists around her and keeps them like stones in her pocket, such as this life-saving advice from Sam Shepard: “I was both scattered and stymied, surrounded by unfinished songs and abandoned poems. I would go as far as I could and hit a wall, my own imagined limitations. And then I met a fellow [Shepard] who gave me his secret, and it was pretty simple. When you hit a wall, just kick it in.” (page 170)
She believes in decency. After a well-received poetry reading accompanied by electric guitar at literati haunt St. Mark’s Place, offers poured in, inviting her to record albums and publish books – but she turned many of these down, feeling she still needed to pay her dues and mature as an artist. “I thought of something I learned from reading Crazy Horse: The Strange Man of the Oglalas by Mari Sandoz. Crazy Horse believes that he will be victorious in battle, but if he stops to take spoils from the battlefield, he will be defeated. He tattoos lightning bolts on the ears of his horses so the sight of them will remind him of this as he rides. I tried to apply this lesson to the things at hand, careful not to take spoils that were not rightfully mine.” (page 183)
Speaking of the lightning-bolt tattoo, Patti later gets one on her knee to remind herself to be gracious and not seize what isn’t hers. The way the tattoo comes to be part of her is just one example of the beautiful coincidences she recognizes in her life: “I decided I wanted a similar tattoo. I was sitting in the lobby drawing versions of lightning bolts in my notebook when a singular woman entered. She had wild red hair, a live fox on her shoulder, and her face was covered with delicate tattoos. I realized that if one erased the tattoos, they would reveal the face of Vali, the girl on the cover of Love on the Left Bank [a book of photographs of 1950s Paris]. Her picture had long ago found a place on my wall.” And so, of course, Patti asks Vali to do the honor of tattooing a lightning bolt on her knee, and Vali wordlessly nods yes.
Fans of Patti’s music will enjoy reading the story behind the iconic cover image (photographed, of course, by Robert) of her seminal “Horses” album, which musicians including Morrissey, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Courtney Love, and R.E.M.’s Michael Stipe have cited as a major influence, not just on their own music but as guiding their decisions to make music in the first place. (Stipe told The Guardian that he bought the album in high school and it “tore off my limbs and put them back on in a whole different order.”) Toward the end of the book – which resolutely focuses on her friendship with Robert and is not meant to contain Patti’s life story – readers will find enchanting trivia that adds depth to the album and each of its songs. But my favorite bit of background about “Horses” describes how un-premeditated the look for the cover was: “The only thing I promised Robert was that I would wear a clean shirt with no stains on it.” (page 249) Astonishingly, Robert took only 12 photos that day, and the now-famous cover image was one of them. But then, it was like him to take very few photos, she writes, because he always knew the shot he was going for and went about getting it very deliberately. Still, that they got the shot right away fits right into their view – one that Patti and Robert shared, and part of what made them soul mates – that life is guided by magical destiny. Some things are just meant to be.
It’s interesting for readers who know Patti as a rock legend to read so many pages in which she struggles to succeed as a poet, with no real musical ambitions until much later in the book. There are tantalizing glimpses of the path she’ll take one day – for example, at a Doors concert she has the strange experience of objectively analyzing Jim Morrison’s performance and thinking it’s something she could do; the audacity of this reaction surprises her, as she has no experience performing or even writing music. Her heroes include Rimbaud and Bob Dylan, and later in the book Dylan attends a show that Patti puts on with her band. The moment is moving because Patti feels her idol and unwitting mentor has come to her musical and artistic graduation – the point at which she is no longer trying to emulate her heroes, but to go her own way.
is set 500 years after the Twilight of the Gods, and the Norse pantheon is scattered or dead. Or both.
is the order of the authors- Lewis Carroll is first, and Nickolas Cook is (a distant) second. That is because everything that is interesting, witty, and original is the work of Lewis Carroll, and Cook’s additions add nothing, and only detract from the work.
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… these are all superior choices to Alice in Zombieland. They attempt (with varying degrees of success) to transplant themes from one genre to another, using supernatural or science fictional elements as metaphors for class consciousness or representations that will resonate with the modern reader. Alice in Zombieland exhibits no such effort.
again instead of this.