by Just Kids
Robert and I stood together alone in my section of the loft. I had left some things behind—the lamb pull toy, an old white jacket made of parachute silk, PATTI SMITH 1946—stenciled on the back wall—in homage to the room like one leaves a portion of wine to the gods. I know we were thinking the same thing, how much we had been through, good and bad, but also a sense of relief. Robert squeezed my hand. “Do you feel sad?” he asked.
“I feel ready,” I answered.
We were leaving the swirl of our post-Brooklyn existence, which had been dominated by the vibrating arena of the Chelsea Hotel.
The merry-go-round was slowing down. As I packed even the most insignificant of things accumulated in the past few years, they were accompanied by a slide show of faces, some of which I would never see again.
There was the copy of Hamlet from Gerome Ragni, who imagined me playing the sad and arrogant Danish prince. Ragni, who co-wrote and starred in Hair, and I were not to cross paths again, but his belief in me bolstered my sense of self. Energetic and muscular with a wide grin and masses of curly hair, he could be so excited about some crazy prospect he would leap onto a chair and raise his arms as if he had to share his vision with the ceiling or, better yet, the universe.
My blue satin sack with gold stars that Janet Hamill had made to hold my tarot cards, and the cards themselves, which divined the fortunes of Annie, Sandy Daley, Harry, and Peggy.
A rag doll with hair of Spanish lace given to me by Elsa Peretti. Matthew’s harmonica holder. Notes from Rene Ricard scolding me to keep drawing. David’s black leather Mexican belt studded with rhinestones. John McKendry’s boatneck shirt. Jackie Curtis’s angora sweater.
As I folded the sweater, I could picture her under the filmy red light of Max’s back room. The scene there was changing with the same speed as the Chelsea, and those who had attempted to imbue it with a Photoplay glamour would find the new guard was leaving them behind.
Many would not make it. Candy Darling died of cancer. Tinkerbelle and Andrea Whips took their lives. Others sacrificed themselves to drugs and misadventure. Taken down, the stardom they so desired just out of reach, tarnished stars falling from the sky.
I feel no sense of vindication as one of the handfuls of survivors. I would rather have seen them all succeed, catch the brass ring. As it turned out, it was I who got one of the best horses.
Separate Ways Together
WE WENT OUR SEPARATE WAYS, BUT WITHIN WALKING distance of one another. The loft that Sam bought Robert was a raw space at 24 Bond. It was a cobblestone side street with garages, post–Civil War architecture, and small warehouses that was now coming to life, as these industrial streets will, when pioneer artists scrub, clear out, and scrape the years from wide windows and let in the light.
John Lennon and Yoko Ono had a place across the way; Brice Marden worked next door, his studio mystically clean with shimmering vats of pigment and small silent photographs he later distilled into panels of smoke and light. Robert’s loft needed a lot of work. Steam erupted from the pipes as the plumbing was erratic. Much of the original brick was concealed with moldy drywall, which he removed. Robert cleaned and covered the brick with several layers of white paint and set it up, part studio, part installation, all his.
It seemed like Allen was always on the road with Blue Öyster Cult, leaving me on my own. Our apartment on East Tenth Street was just a block away from St. Mark’s Church. It was small and pretty, with French doors opening onto a view of a garden. And from our new digs, Robert and I resumed our lives as before, eating together, searching for assemblage components, taking photographs, and monitoring the progress of each other’s work.
Although Robert now had his own space, he still seemed tense and worried about money. He didn’t want to be entirely dependent on Sam and was more determined than ever to make it on his own. I was in limbo when I left Twenty-third Street. My sister Linda got me a part-time job at the Strand Book Store. I bought stacks of books, but I didn’t read them. I taped sheets of paper to the wall, but I didn’t draw. I slid my guitar under the bed. At night, alone, I just sat and waited. Once again I found myself contemplating what I should be doing to do something of worth. Everything I came up with seemed irreverent or irrelevant.
On New Year’s Day, I lit a candle for Roberto Clemente, my brother’s favorite ballplayer. He had perished while on a humanitarian mission to aid Nicaragua in the aftermath of a terrible earthquake. I chided myself for inactivity and self-indulgence, and resolved to rededicate myself to my work.
Later that evening I sat on the floor of St. Mark’s for the annual marathon reading. It benefited the church and went on from early afternoon to well into the night, with everyone contributing to the perpetuation of the Poetry Project. I sat through much of it sizing up the poets. I wanted to be a poet but I knew I would never fit into their incestuous community. The last thing I wanted was to negotiate the social politics of another scene. I thought of my mother’s saying, that what you do on New Year’s Day will foretell what you’ll be doing the rest of the year. I felt the spirit of my own Saint Gregory, and resolved that 1973 would be my year of poetry.
Providence is sometimes kind, for Andy Brown soon offered to publish a book of my poems. The prospect of being published by Gotham Book Mart inspired me. Andy Brown had long tolerated me hanging around Diamond Row’s historic bookstore, allowing me to place my broadsides and flyers on the counter. Now, with the prospect of being a Gotham author, I harbored a secret pride when I saw the shop’s motto, Wise men fish here.
I dragged my Hermes 2000 from under the bed. (My Remington had bit the dust.) Sandy Pearlman pointed out that Hermes was the winged messenger, the patron of shepherds and thieves, so I was hoping the gods would channel me some lingo. I had a lot of time to kill. It was the first time I hadn’t had a steady job in almost seven years. Allen paid our rent and I made pocket money at the Strand. Sam and Robert took me to eat every afternoon, and in the evening I made couscous in my pretty little kitchen, so I wanted for nothing.
Robert had been preparing for his first solo show of Polaroids. The invitation arrived in a cream Tiffany envelope: a self-portrait, his naked midsection in the mirror, his Land 360 above his crotch. There was no mistaking the raised veins above his wrist. He had applied a large white paper dot to the front to conceal his cock and hand-stamped his name on the lower right corner. Robert believed the show began with the invitation and each one was meant to be a seductive gift.
The opening at the Light Gallery fell on January 6, Joan of Arc’s birthday. Robert gave me a silver medal with her likeness crowned with the French fleur-de-lis. There was a good crowd, a perfect New York City mix of leather boys, drag queens, socialites, rock and roll kids, and art collectors. It was an optimistic gathering, with perhaps an undercurrent of envy. His bold, elegant show mixed classic motifs with sex, flowers, and portraits, all equivalent in their presentation: unapologetic images of cock rings beside an arrangement of flowers. To him one was the other.
Marvin Gaye’s Trouble Man played over and over while I tried to write about Arthur Rimbaud. I taped a picture of him with his defiant Dylan face above the writing desk that I seldom used. Instead, I sprawled on the floor writing nothing but fragments, poems, and the beginning of a play, an imagined dialogue between the poet Paul Verlaine and myself, sparring for Arthur’s unattainable love.
One afternoon I fell asleep on the floor amid my piles of books and papers, reentering the familiar terrain of a recurring apocalyptic dream. Tanks were draped in spangled cloth and hung with camel bells. Muslim and Christian angels were at one another’s throats, their feathers littering the surface of the shifting dunes. I plowed through revolution and despair and found, rooted in the treachery of the withered trees, a rolled leather case. And in that deteriorating case, in his own hand, the great lost work of Arthur Rimbaud.
One could imagine him strolling the banana gardens, ruminating in the language of science. In the hellhole of Harar, he manned the coffee fi
elds and scaled the high Abyssinian plateau on horseback. In the deep night he lay beneath a moon perfectly ringed, like a majestic eye that saw him and presided over his sleep.
I awoke with a sudden revelation. I would go to Ethiopia and find this valise that seemed more like a sign than a dream. I would return with the contents preserved in Abyssinian dust, and give them to the world. I presented my dream to publishers, to travel magazines and literary foundations. But I found the imagined secret papers of Rimbaud were not a fashionable cause in 1973. Far from letting it go, I felt the idea had grown to the extent that I truly believed I was destined to find them. When I dreamed of a frankincense tree on a hill throwing no shadow, I believed the valise to be buried there.
I decided to ask Sam to sponsor my trip to Ethiopia. He was adventurous and sympathetic and was intrigued by my proposition. Robert was appalled at the idea. He succeeded in convincing Sam that I would get lost, kidnapped, or be eaten alive by wild hyenas. We sat in a café on Christopher Street and, as our laughter mingled with the steam of many espressos, I bade farewell to the coffee fields of Harar, resigned that the treasure’s resting place would not be disturbed in this century.
I really wanted to leave the Strand. I hated being stuck in the basement unpacking overstock. Tony Ingrassia, who had directed me in Island, asked me to be in a one-act play called Identity. I read the script and I just didn’t get it. It was a dialogue between me and another girl. After a few lackluster rehearsals he asked me to show more tenderness toward the girl. “You’re too stiff, too distant,” he said, exasperated. I was openly affectionate with my sister Linda and applied that in my interpretation of tender. “These girls are lovers. You have to get that across.” He threw his arms up. I was taken aback. There was nothing in the script that intimated this. “Just pretend she’s one of your girlfriends.” Tony and I had a heated exchange that ended with him incredulous with laughter. “You don’t shoot up and you’re not a lesbian. What do you actually do?”
I did my best to feel up the other girl, but I decided this would be my last play. I didn’t have the stuff to be an actor.
Robert had Sam bail me out of the Strand, hiring me to catalog his vast collection of books and kachina dolls that he was donating to a university. Without realizing it, I had said goodbye to traditional employment. I never punched a clock again. I made my own time and my own money.
After failing as a believable lesbian in Identity, I decided that if I took the stage again, it would be as myself. I joined forces with Jane Friedman, who found me an occasional job reading poetry in bars. Jane had a successful publicity firm and enjoyed a reputation for supporting the efforts of fringe artists. Although I was not enthusiastically received, it sharpened my abilities to spar with a hostile audience with some amount of humor. She arranged for me to have a series of slots opening for bands like the New York Dolls at the Mercer Arts Center, located in the decaying Broadway Central Hotel, a once-opulent nineteenth-century edifice where Diamond Jim Brady and Lillian Russell dined, where Jubilee Jim Fisk was shot on the marble staircase. If there were few remnants of its former grandeur, it now housed a culturally rich community, including theater, poetry, and rock and roll.
Performing poetry night after night to an unreceptive and unruly crowd who were primed to see the New York Dolls proved a challenging education. I had no musicians or crew, but the soul of my sibling army, Linda, acted as roadie, foil, and guardian angel. She had an unaffected simplicity, yet could be fearless. It was she who took on the unenviable task of passing the hat when our troupe had sung and performed on the streets of Paris. At the Mercer, Linda manned my bag of tricks, which included a small tape recorder, a megaphone, and a toy piano. I read my poems, fielded insults, and sometimes sang songs accompanied by bits of music on my cassette player.
At the end of each performance, Jane would take a five-dollar bill out of her back pocket, saying that was our cut of the take. It took me a while to understand that I had gotten no pay at all, and that Jane was paying me, literally, out of her own pocket. It was a tough and spirited run, and by summer I was starting to hit my stride, with people calling out for poems and genuinely seeming to be in my corner. I took to ending each performance with “Piss Factory,” a prose poem I had improvised, framing my escape from a nonunion assembly line to the freedom of New York City. It seemed to bring the audience and me together.
On Friday, the thirteenth of July, I gave a reading in memory of Jim Morrison on the roof of underground filmmaker Jack Smith’s loft at Greene Street and Canal. It was my own bill, and anyone who was there had come to celebrate Jim Morrison with me. Among them was Lenny Kaye, and although we would not perform together that night, it would soon come to pass that I would not perform without him.
The strong attendance for a self-produced poetry reading fired up Jane. She felt that, together with Lenny, we could find a way to bring my poetry to a wider audience. We even spoke of adding a real piano, which Linda jokingly said would put her out of business. In this she was not wrong. Jane was undaunted. She came from old Broadway stock; her father, Sam Friedman, was a legendary press agent, working with Gypsy Rose Lee, Lotte Lenya, and Josephine Baker, among others. He had seen all the openings and closings Broadway had to offer. Jane had his vision and stubborn determination; she would find another way for us to break on through.
I went back to the typewriter.
“Patti, no!” Robert gasped. “You’re smoking pot.” I looked up sheepishly. Busted.
I had seen The Harder They Come, and was stirred by the music. When I began listening to the soundtrack, following its trail to Big Youth and the Roys, U and I, it led me back to Ethiopia. I found irresistible the Rastafarian connection to Solomon and Sheba, and the Abyssinia of Rimbaud, and somewhere along the line I decided to try their sacred herb.
That was my secret pleasure until Robert caught me sitting alone, trying to stuff some pot in an empty Kool cigarette wrapper. I had no idea how to roll a joint. I was a little embarrassed, but he sat down on the floor, picked the seeds out of my small stash of Mexican pot, and rolled me a couple of skinny joints. He just grinned at me and we had a smoke, our first together.
With Robert, I was not transported into the Abyssinian plain, but into the valley of uncontrollable laughter. I told him that pot was supposed to be for writing poetry, not fooling around. But all we did was laugh. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s go to the B&H.” It was my first entrance into the outside world stoned on pot. It took an extralong time for me to lace my boots, find my gloves, my cap. Robert stood grinning, watching me moving in circles. I now saw why it took so much time for Harry and Robert to get ready to go to Horn and Hardart.
After that, as fun as it was, I kept my pot smoking to myself, listening to Screaming Target, writing impossible prose. I never thought of pot as a social drug. I liked to use it to work, to think, and eventually for improvising with Lenny Kaye and Richard Sohl as the three of us would gather under a frankincense tree dreaming of Haile Selassie.
Sam Wagstaff lived on the fifth floor of a classic imposing white structure on the corner of Bowery and Bond. As I climbed the stairs, I always knew that there would be something new and wonderful for me to look at, to touch, to catalog: glass negatives, salt prints of forgotten poets, gravures of the tepees of Hopi Indians. Sam, with Robert’s urging, had begun collecting photographs, first slowly, with an amused curiosity, and then obsessively, like a lepidopterist in a tropical forest. Sam bought what he wanted and sometimes it seemed he wanted everything.
The first photograph Sam bought was an exquisite daguerreotype in a red velvet case with a soft gold clasp. It was in impeccable condition, and Robert’s own daguerreotypes, found in secondhand stores buried among piles of old family photographs, paled in comparison. This at times bothered Robert, who was the first to begin collecting photographs. “I can’t compete with him,” he said somewhat ruefully. “I’ve created a monster.”
The three of us would scour Book Row, the dusty sec
ondhand bookstores that once lined Fourth Avenue. Robert would go through boxes of old postcards, stereo cards, and tintypes carefully to find a gem. Sam, impatient, and not impeded by cost, would simply buy the whole box. I would stand aside listening to them argue. It sounded very familiar.
Scouting bookstores was one of my specialties. In rare instances, I would root out a desirable Victorian cabinet card, or an important portfolio of turn-of-the-century cathedrals, and on one lucky excursion, an overlooked Cameron. It was on the cusp of collecting photography, the last period where one could find a bargain. It was still possible to come upon gravure prints of large-format field photographs by Edward Curtis. Sam was taken with the beauty and the historical value of these photographs of the North American Indian, and acquired several volumes. Later, as we sat on the floor looking at them, in his large empty apartment flooded with natural light, we were impressed not only by the images but by the process. Sam would feel the edge of the photograph between his thumb and forefingers. “There’s something about the paper,” he would say.
Consumed by his new passion, Sam haunted auction houses, often traveling across the sea to acquire a specific photograph. Robert accompanied him on these expeditions, and was sometimes able to influence Sam’s choice of images. In this way, Robert could personally examine the photographs of artists he admired, from Nadar to Irving Penn.
Robert urged Sam just as he had John McKendry to use his position to elevate photography’s place in the art world. In turn, both men encouraged Robert to commit to photography as his primary form of expression. Sam, at first curious, if not skeptical, had now fully embraced the concept and was spending a small fortune building what would become one of the most important photography collections in America.