Dancing Barefoot: The Patti Smith Story

by Dave Thompson

  Whatever and wherever it was, her summer job was poorly paid and shoddily maintained, and filled with women for whom life could and would offer nothing better—or, at least, nothing that they could be bothered to aspire toward.

  Patti hated it and was hated in return. Working too fast for her co-workers’ liking, she was first tormented, then bullied, and finally threatened. One day, she was cornered in the restroom and challenged to shatter her goody-goody demeanor by letting out a few swear words. When she refused, they threatened to push her head into an unflushed toilet bowl. Patti gave in and unleashed a torrent of the foulest language she could think of, until her tormenters backed away. But, she said, she was devastated, because she had desperately wanted to become a part of their world, and now she had blown it.

  Not long after that incident, Patti was nestled somewhere in the building, reading her treasured bilingual copy of Rimbaud’s Illuminations, when her shift supervisor came up behind her and spotted the French text that ran down every alternate page. The woman demanded to know why Patti was reading a foreign language.

  “It’s not a foreign language,” she replied, pointing to the English text on the facing page that she had been devouring. But her supervisor was not fooled. She knew what she’d seen. And what was that? Communist literature, of course, because in her view (which she shared with an awful lot of people in those days, thanks to the Cuban Missile Crisis and Khrushchev banging his shoes on the table), “if it’s foreign, it’s Communist, because anything foreign is Communist.”

  She probably said a lot more than that, but her other words were drowned by the hue and cry that her first remark made, as the rest of the women crowded around to see the real-life commie that was wriggling in their midst.

  Patti stormed home, and her final paycheck followed her. She’d been fired for reading a book. It was, she sighed later to Mick Gold of the UK magazine Street Life, “a real drag,” having to go home to South Jersey and tell her parents she’d been fired, because it wasn’t easy to find work in the area at that time. There were a few opportunities. The Columbia Records pressing plant in Pitman had her on their waiting list, and there was the Campbell Soup factory in Camden. She would take whichever came up first and then count down the days until she returned to Glassboro. But she already knew that whatever job she found was unlikely to offer any kind of improvement on life at the Piss Factory. She was notsimply unemployed. She suddenly realized that in the eyes of her New Jersey peers, she was also unemployable.

  That was the first shock. The second, just months later, was the discovery that she was pregnant.

  She was existing on a staple diet of the Rolling Stones’ album Aftermath and the Beatles’ Revolver when she got the news of her pregnancy, torn between the twin axes of Lennon’s “Doctor Robert” and Jagger and Richards’s “Mother’s Little Helper,” a stupid girl who understood that tomorrow never knows. Somewhere between those philosophical poles, she knew what she had to do.

  She made up her mind to carry the child to term and then give it up for adoption.

  The father was just a boy, almost three years younger than she was, a high schooler while she was at teacher training college. Not that she would remain there for long, not after the authorities discovered her condition. Nor could she stay at home with her parents, where she had lived for the last nineteen years. “Judgmental neighbors made it impossible for my family,” she wrote in Just Kids, “treating them as if they were harboring a criminal.” Finally, some far-off friends took her in, a painter and a potter who lived by the south Jersey shore and were happy to see the girl through her confinement.

  She hated, she wrote in the poem “Female,” being bloated, feeling like a lame dog, wanting nothing more than to pull my fat baby belly to the sea.

  But she was also aware that the first phase of her life had come to an end, and she realized with a start that she was not too sorry to see it go. Without the pregnancy, she might have drifted on forever, rootlessly dreaming and stargazing from afar, imagining the magic that was off on some horizon, and standing stock still waiting for it to come down and embrace her.

  She was never cut out to be a teacher, and the school authorities knew it. By the time Patti fell pregnant, she had been a student at Glassboro College for two years, during which time she succeeded only in being repeatedly instructed to stick with the curriculum, and not to bring her own, distinctly individualistic teaching methods into the classroom. So many dreams, so many ideas, so many fanciful notions. Herpregnancy stripped them all away. But it did not simply transform the dreaming girl into a thinking adult. It forced her, too, to make a very important decision.

  If life was beginning, she was going to get started ahead of it. At Easter 1967, Patti’s parents came to the house where she was staying and drove her to the hospital in nearby Camden. There, Patti Smith’s daughter was born on April 26, 1967—the thirtieth anniversary of the bombing of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War, she later observed. She never saw her again. “I gave [the child] up … because I wanted to be an artist—simple as that,” Victor Bockris and Roberta Bayley’s biography quoted Patti as saying. “I wanted to create and re-create in my own way.”

  Nine weeks later, on July 3, Patti spent her savings on art supplies—a box of colored pencils and a wooden slate to draw on—and, with whatever was left over from the $16 she’d put together, set off for New York City. She caught the bus to Philadelphia, which was just about as far as she could go, because she’d completely underestimated the cost of a ticket to New York. But, just as she was about to call home in despair, she noticed that the last person to use the call box had left a wallet on the shelf. Inside that wallet was $32. She had her ticket.

  3

  BALLAD OF A BAD BOY

  JULY 3, 1967, was a Monday, but the next day was Independence Day. Anybody who had been given the chance was still out of town, enjoying the luxury of an extra-long weekend. The city wasn’t deserted, but it wasn’t crazed either, and the bus made good time as it wove through to Port Authority.

  Patti already knew her way around. On her previous, deliberately rare visits to the city, she’d made sure to memorize every place she needed, and she knew precisely where to go. Plus, she had a subway map: take the A train to Hoyt-Schermerhorn, then across to DeKalb Avenue. A Jersey friend, Howard “Howie” Michaels, had a brownstone in Brooklyn, while he studied at the nearby Pratt Institute of Art. She would crash with him for a few days while she found her feet, and then her life could begin. Except it didn’t quite work out that way.

  Her friend had moved on, said the guy who opened the door to her, and the only person who seemed to know where he might have gone was asleep at the back of the apartment. Patti insisted on waking him. The young man whose rest she disturbed later described her as looking like “a creature from another planet,” a skinny little thing in dungarees and a black turtleneck, with a funny way of looking at you, like she didn’t want you to know she was there. This day, however, he barely spoke a word to her. He simply dressed, walked her a few blocks across the neighborhood, deposited her on her friend’s doorstep, then headed back to bed.

  The apartment was in darkness, and when the sun set, it remained closed up and black. Night had fallen on her first day in the city, and she didn’t know where else to go. So she bundled up in her raincoat, with her little plaid suitcase for a pillow, and went to sleep on the stoop. In the morning, she realized the flaw in her mighty master plan: her friend was in school here, but school was out for the summer. It would be another two months before the streets of Brooklyn were alive with students again. She spent the next day, the next week, a large part of the next month, restlessly searching for a friendly face, a place to stay, a place to work.

  She headed back to Manhattan, painfully conscious that every subway token took another bite out of her nest egg, but equally aware that the Village never slept, and it wouldn’t let a sister starve either.

  The Summer of Love was at its fulsome height. Over o
n the West Coast, as the radio sang, the kids all danced with flowers in their hair, but the East Coast was no slouch in the cultural stakes either, and New York City was the center of everything. Every park was packed with kids—hippies in the common vernacular, dropouts and dope fiends in the adult opinion—draft dodgers, junkies, and freaks. Free drugs, free love, tune in, turn on … peace, man.

  If you walked the streets of Greenwich Village from West Houston to Washington Square, past every patch of open space, every corner and every courtyard, you could have been passing through the Twelve Days of Hipmas: eleven leafletters leafletting, ten drummers drumming, nine protest singers protesting, eight radicals radicalizing, and all of them living large on the promise of the teenage dream.

  Radio blared the FM of the day. The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper was barely a month old and still spinning on every record player. The Doors’ “Light My Fire” was on its way to #1; the Association’s “Windy” would make way for its ascent. Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit” was in the wind, and you saw a lot of copies of Alice in Wonderland being studied by the readers on the grass, and a lot of chess matches being fought as well, the players waiting for the chessmen to tell them where to go. Hey, kid—try this, sniff that, feel this, cop that. Patti had never seen anything like it.

  Unfortunately, nobody saw her. She spent a night in Central Park, in the shadow of the statue of Alice’s Mad Hatter, and the next day sheresumed her wanderings. Up and down Fifth Avenue to ask if the stores had any openings. She filled in applications when they did, although she hadn’t yet figured out how they’d contact her after that. Maybe she’d just drop in every few days to see if anyone needed her.

  Down to Forty-Second Street and Times Square, the neon-lit heart of America’s sleaziest soul, where every artery pumped sex and souvenirs. There were X-rated peepshow holes where a pocket full of quarters could buy you twenty minutes in a sticky, lust-filled booth and ragged hookers lurked outside to relieve you of your bills. The occasional door might lead you elsewhere: it was only the storefronts that glowed with seedy grandeur; upstairs there might be a movie house, a library, even a recording studio. In two years’ time, John Cale, the man destined to produce Patti’s first LP, would oversee the recording of the Stooges’ first LP at the Hit Factory, one floor above a Times Square peepshow.

  The best Patti could muster was to find herself a job, waitressing at an Italian restaurant called Joe’s. But she lost it within three hours after spilling a meal into a customer’s lap.

  Patti kept walking. She’d left her suitcase in a lockup in Brooklyn, which flushed more cash down the drain, and carried everything she needed in a bundle beneath her arm. She’d more or less given up eating by now; she just pinned her hopes on finding a friend, who’d help her find a home, which would help her find a job. At last, she found a place to sleep: riding the subway from one end to the other, nodding off between stops and her fellow passengers’ noises. Or she’d go back out to Brooklyn, where she occasionally bumped into someone she recognized as a friend of a friend, who’d let her use the shower or crash on the couch.

  She gravitated to St. Mark’s Place, sensing that this East Village street was the epicenter of something, and so it was, ever since Andy Warhol touched down there earlier in the year. Warhol had since moved on; the Dom, the nightclub where his plastic inevitable had exploded through the spring, was under new management, as the Electric Circus. But the boutiques and bars that blossomed in his shadow were still alive and well, and there was always something going on: seven mime-artists miming, six fire-eaters eating, five old queens.

  Patti found another job, but this was one she could pull off, at Brentano’s bookstore across from the Rockefeller Center on Fifth Avenue. While she waited for her first week’s pay—which, of course, was withheld for a week, to keep staff from walking out without notice—she spent her nights in the store itself, stashing herself away in a bathroom, then creeping out when the last door was locked.

  But it wasn’t just a job or a place to sleep at night. For Patti, Brentano’s was also paradise. “Booksellers to the World: All Books, All Languages,” boasted Brentano’s logo, and it was true. Before the company was subsumed into the Waldenbooks/Borders empire during the 1980s and ‘90s, it was both a publisher whose Éditions Brentano’s imprint was home to the French writers exiled from their homeland during the Vichy period, and a storehouse whose shelves creaked beneath the weight of valued and valuable tomes. There, in that century-old forest of bound paper and carved wood, dominated by the curving staircase and the little wooden benches where browsers could relax, Patti could absorb literary history firsthand.

  Other people moved to the city and found themselves devoured by its friendless emptiness. Patti found herself enfolded within its magnanimity. But only one of the people she met during those first weeks in the city would be allowed to see inside of her: an absurdly photogenic young art student named Robert Mapplethorpe.

  He was precisely fifty-six days older than she, born on November 4, 1946, at Irwin Sanitarium in Hollis, Queens, and raised in another neighborhood in the borough, Floral Park. His half-German father, Harry, and Irish Catholic mother, Joan, already had two children (there would be three more after Robert was born), but Robert was always the odd one out.

  “A mischievous little boy whose carefree youth was delicately tinged with a fascination with beauty” is how Patti recalled him in her memoir Just Kids. He was a budding artist before he could even color inside the lines, a skilled one after he abandoned his crayons, and now an art student with so much potential that even his beloved LSD only scratched the surface of his imagination. The first time Patti saw his paintings, she said, they reminded her of Henri Michaux and Richard Pousette-Dart.

  They met by chance, one day during Patti’s first week at Brentano’s, where they discovered that they’d already run into one another once before, on her first day in the city, while she was looking for somebody else. Mapplethorpe was the silent young man who had escorted her to her absent friend’s door.

  This time, he came into the bookstore with a credit slip from another Brentano’s branch, where he worked, and bought a Persian necklace that she’d fallen in love with. They swapped smiles and words but didn’t exchange names. That happened a few days later in Greenwich Village, while Patti was enduring the attentions of an unwanted dinner date, a customer from the bookstore whom, in her mind, she was beginning to equate with a potential serial killer. Then she spotted Mapplethorpe walking toward her through crowded Tompkins Square. She rushed over, greeted him as though they were longtime lovers, and waved away her original date.

  They began to talk, and at first it may have seemed that they had little in common. They were both artists, Patti later explained to Ed Vulliamy of the Guardian, but she was into abstract impression, while Mapplethorpe was working in tantric art. One of the few things they found they shared was their love of poet William Blake (1757–1827).

  As a child, Patti had devoured Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience, and for a long time she viewed him as a children’s writer. Which “in a way he was—making me aware of the life of a chimney sweep,” she told the Guardian. “But then I grew with Blake, with his sense of spirituality, of social activism, his visionary experience, his compassion for the flaws in human nature and his own nature.” Now, it was Blake who first bound her to Mapplethorpe. “We would spend whatever money we had on books, even if we had nothing to eat, and spent a lot of time together with our Blake books. Both of us had what I’d call a Blakean palette.”

  And soon she was telling Robert her life story. He enjoyed listening to her tell him stories, so she did. Every night—or almost every night, because on some evenings they were too tired to even try to stay awake, and on others they didn’t close their eyes at all—Patti would talk Mapplethorpe to sleep. Sometimes he would request particular tales; othertimes he would simply tell her to begin and then drift to the cadence of her rhythm and tone. Other times he would ask her
to draw what she saw when she looked back into her past, and the sound of her pencil would lull him away. And slowly, over time, she recalled in Just Kids, her most precious childhood memories became his.

  But Patti’s stories could be infuriating as well as comforting. Even attempting to have a simple conversation could wrap you up in her word games; you never knew what she was talking about. “She was on the edge of being psychotic in a schizophrenic way,” Mapplethorpe admitted to his future biographer Patricia Morrisroe. “She told me stories, and I didn’t know whether they were fiction or nonfiction. If she hadn’t discovered art, she would have wound up in a mental institution.”

  Instead, she wound up crashing with Mapplethorpe at an apartment on Waverley Avenue in Brooklyn that he was already sharing with a college friend, Patrick Kennedy, and Margaret, his wife-to-be. It was not the happiest of domestic arrangements. Apparently, Margaret found Patti to be judgmental, manipulative, angry, and thoughtless; Patti thought nothing of marching naked through the apartment, no matter who else might be visiting—Pat Kennedy’s midwestern parents on one memorable occasion.

  Patti and Robert spent what little money they had cautiously. Food or a book? A book or a record? Whenever they could, they would bypass such decisions by visiting their parents for a free meal. The elder Map-plethorpes were never taken with Patti, even after Robert told them that they were secretly married; Patti’s mother and father liked Mapplethorpe, but they didn’t see him much. It was so much cheaper for Patti to make the long hike into Jersey on her own, especially since she could bring the loot back in her bag. And the money they saved, on the fare and the food and anything else she returned with, could be put toward more important things.