by Patti Smith
ALSO BY PATTI SMITH
The New Jerusalem
Devotion
M Train
Just Kids
Auguries of Innocence
Collected Lyrics 1970–2015
The Coral Sea
Early Work
Woolgathering
Babel
Wītt
Seventh Heaven
Kodak
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
AND ALFRED A. KNOPF CANADA
Copyright © 2019 by Patti Smith
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Alfred A. Knopf Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Ltd., Toronto.
www.aaknopf.com
www.penguinrandomhouse.ca
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC. Knopf Canada and colophon are trademarks of Penguin Random House Canada Ltd.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Smith, Patti, author.
Title: Year of the monkey / by Patti Smith.
Description: First edition. | New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2019.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019009856 (print) | LCCN 2019018498 (ebook) | ISBN 9780525657699 (ebook) | ISBN 9780525657682 (hardcover)
Subjects: LCSH: Smith, Patti. | Poets, American—20th century—Biography. | Women rock musicians—United States—Biography.
Classification: LCC PS3569.M53787 (ebook) | LCC PS3569.M53787 Z46 2019 (print) | DDC 818/.5403 [B]—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019009856
Ebook ISBN 9780525657699
Cover photograph by Barre (skills) Duryea
Cover design by Kelly Blair
v5.4
ep
A mortal folly comes over the world.
—ANTONIN ARTAUD
Contents
Cover
Frontispiece
Also by Patti Smith
Title Page
Copyright
Epigraph
Way Out West
ICU
YOM 2016
What Marcus Said
Big Red
Intermission
Home Is the Sailor
Imitation of a Dream
Black Butterflies
Amulets
In Search of Imaginos
Why Belinda Carlisle Matters
The Holy See
The Mystic Lamb
The Golden Cockerel
A Night on the Moon
A Kind of Epilogue
Illustrations
About the Author
WAY OUT WEST
It was well past midnight when we pulled up in front of the Dream Motel. I paid the driver, made sure I left nothing behind, and rang the bell to wake up the proprietor. It’s almost 3 a.m., she said, but gave me my key and a bottle of mineral water. My room was on the lowest floor, facing the long pier. I opened the sliding glass door and could hear the sound of the waves accompanied by the faint barking of sea lions sprawled out on the planks beneath the wharf. Happy New Year! I called out. Happy New Year to the waxing moon, the telepathic sea.
The drive from San Francisco was just over an hour. I had been wide awake but suddenly felt beat. I took off my coat and left the sliding door slightly open to listen to the waves but immediately fell into a facsimile of sleep. I awoke abruptly, went to the john, brushed my teeth, removed my boots and went to bed. Maybe I dreamed.
New Year’s morning in Santa Cruz, pretty dead. I had a sudden desire for a particular breakfast: black coffee, grits with green onions. Not much chance for such fare here but a plate of ham and eggs would do. I grabbed my camera and walked down the hill toward the pier. A sign partially obscured by tall, slim palms loomed, and I realized this was not a motel after all. The sign said Dream Inn, punctuated by a starburst reminiscent of the Sputnik era. I stopped to admire it and took a Polaroid, unpeeled the image and slipped it in my pocket.
—Thank you, Dream Motel, I said, half to the air, half to the sign.
—It’s the Dream Inn! the sign exclaimed.
— Oh yeah, sorry, I said, somewhat taken aback. Even so, I didn’t dream a thing.
—Oh really? Nothing!
—Nothing!
I could not help feeling like Alice interrogated by the hookah-smoking caterpillar. I looked down at my feet, avoiding the sign’s scrutinizing energy.
—Well, thanks for the picture, I said, preparing to shove off.
However, my departure was derailed by a sudden popping-up of animated Tenniel: The upright Mock Turtle. The fish and frog servants. The Dodo decked in his one grand jacket sleeve, the horrid Duchess and the Cook, and Alice herself, glumly presiding over an endless tea party, where, pardon us all, no tea was being served. I wondered if the sudden bombardment was self-induced or courtesy of the magnetic charge of the Dream Inn sign.
— And what about now?
—The mind! I cried out, exasperated as the animated sketches multiplied at an alarming rate.
— The waking mind! the sign chortled triumphantly.
I turned away, breaking the transmission. In truth, being somewhat wall-eyed, I often witness such leaping about, most often to the right. Besides, once fully roused, the brain is receptive to all kinds of signals, but I wasn’t about to confess that to a sign.
—I didn’t dream anything! I shouted back stubbornly, heading down the hill flanked by floating salamanders.
At the bottom of the hill was a low-slung joint with the word coffee horizontally spelled out in letters over a foot high across the glass, with a sign beneath that said Open. Having devoted so much window space to the word coffee, I reasoned they might serve a pretty good cup and maybe even donuts dusted in cinnamon. But as I put my hand on the doorknob, I noticed a smaller sign dangling: Closed. No explanation, no back in twenty minutes. I had a bad feeling about prospects for coffee, and zero for donuts. I supposed most people were tucked away with a hangover. One can’t begrudge a café for being closed on New Year’s Day, although it seemed that coffee would be the exact remedy needed after a night of excessive reveling.
Coffee denied, I sat on the outside bench going over the edges of the night before. It was the last of three nights in a row performing at the Fillmore and I was pulling the strings off my Stratocaster when some guy with a greasy ponytail leaned over and puked on my boots. The last gasp of 2015, a spray of vomit ushering in the New Year. A good or bad sign? Well, considering the state of the world, who could tell the difference? Reminded of this, I rummaged through my pockets for a witch-hazel wipe, usually reserved for cleaning my camera lens, knelt down and cleaned up my boots. Happy New Year, I told them.
Softly treading past the sign, a curious chain of phrases came zipping in and I dug into my pockets for a pencil, thinking to get them down. Ashen birds circling the city dusted with night / Vagrant meadows adorned with mist / A mythic palace that was yet a forest / Leaves that are but leaves. It’s the dried-up-poet syndrome, necessitating plucking inspiration from the erratic air, like Jean Marais in Cocteau’s Orpheus, shutting himself up in a baroque garage on the outskirts of Paris in a battered Renault, tuning in to the radio’s frequencies and scribbling fragments on slips of paper—a drop of water contains the world, etc.
Back in my room I located
some tubes of Nescafé and a small electric pot. I made my own coffee, wrapped myself in a blanket, opened the sliding doors and sat on the little patio facing the sea. There was a low wall partially obstructing the view, but I had my coffee, could hear the waves and was reasonably content.
Then I thought of Sandy. He was supposed to be here, in a room down the hall. We were going to meet in San Francisco before the band’s run at the Fillmore and do our usual things: have coffee at Caffè Trieste, peruse the shelves of the City Lights Bookstore and drive back and forth across the Golden Gate listening to the Doors and Wagner and the Grateful Dead. Sandy Pearlman, the fellow I had known for over four decades, with his speedy cadence breaking down the Ring cycle or a Benjamin Britten riff, was always there when we played the Fillmore, in his slouchy leather jacket and baseball cap, hunched over a glass of ginger ale at his usual table behind a curtain near the dressing room. We had intended to break rank after the New Year’s Eve concert and drive late that night through the seething mist to Santa Cruz. The plan was to have New Year’s Day lunch at his secret taco place not far from the Dream Motel.
But that never happened, for Sandy had been found alone, on the eve of our first concert, unconscious in a parking lot in San Rafael. He was taken to a hospital in Marin County, having suffered a cerebral hemorrhage.
The morning of our first concert Lenny Kaye and I went to the ICU in Marin County. Sandy in a coma with tubes everywhere, enveloped in eerie silence. We stood on either side of him, promising to mentally hold on to him, keep an open channel, ready to intercept and accept any signal. Not just shards of love, as Sandy would say, but the whole goblet.
We drove back to our hotel in Japantown, hardly able to speak. Lenny picked up his guitar and we headed to a place called On the Bridge located on the walkway connecting the east and west mall. We sat in the back at a green wooden table, both of us in quiet shock. The walls were yellow, hung with posters from Japanese manga, Hell Girl and Wolf’s Rain and rows of comics that were more like paperback novels. Lenny had katsu curry with Asahi Super Dry beer and I had flying-fish-roe spaghetti and oolong tea. We ate, solemnly shared a sake, then walked over to the Fillmore for our sound check. There was nothing we could do but pray and play without Sandy’s enthusing presence. We plunged into the first of three nights of feedback, poetry, improvisational rants, politics, and rock ’n’ roll, with a relentlessness that left me breathless, as if we could sonically reach him.
On the morning of my sixty-ninth birthday, Lenny and I went back to the hospital. We stood by Sandy’s bed and, despite the impossibility, vowed not to leave him. Lenny and I found each other’s eyes, knowing we couldn’t really stay. There was work to be done, concerts to perform, lives to live, however carelessly. We were condemned to celebrate my sixty-ninth birthday at the Fillmore without him. That night, momentarily turning my back on the crowd during the breakdown of If 6 Was 9, I held back tears as streams of words superimposed over other streams, overlapping with images of Sandy, still unconscious, just a Golden Gate away.
When we finished our work in San Francisco, I left Sandy behind and headed to Santa Cruz on my own. I couldn’t bring myself to cancel his room, and I sat in the back of the car with his voice swirling. Matrix Monolith Medusa Macbeth Metallica Machiavelli. Sandy’s own M game, straight to the velvet tassel, with instructions taking him all the way to the Library of Imaginos.
I sat on my patio, wrapped in a blanket like a convalescent in The Magic Mountain, then felt the genesis of a strange headache, most likely a sudden change in the barometer. I headed to the front desk in pursuit of an aspirin when I noticed that my room was not on the ground floor but on the subfloor beneath, making it closer to the edge where the beach began. I had forgotten this and became confused while walking the length of the dimly lit hall. Unable to locate the stairwell leading to the reception desk, I gave up on the aspirin and decided to go back. Going for my key, I found a tight roll of gauze about as thick as a Gauloises. I unwound a third of it, half expecting to find a message, but there was nothing. I had no idea how it came to be in my pocket, but rewound it, slipped it back and reentered my room. I turned on the radio and Nina Simone was singing I Put a Spell on You. The seals were silent, and I could hear the waves in the distance, winter on the West Coast. I sank into bed and slept heavily.
In the Dream Motel, I was certain I did not dream, yet the more I thought about it, I realized I did dream. More precisely, I skated along the fringe of dream. Dusk masqueraded as night, unmasking as dawn and illuming a path I willingly followed, from the desert to the sea. Gulls were wailing and cawing as the seals slept, save their king, more like a walrus, who lifted his head and bellowed at the sun. There was a sense of everyone gone, a J. G. Ballard kind of gone.
The beach was littered with candy wrappers, hundreds of them, maybe thousands, scattering the beach like feathers after a molt. I crouched down to investigate, pocketing a handful. Butterfingers, Peanut Chews, 3 Musketeers, Milky Ways and Baby Ruths. All opened yet not a trace of chocolate. There was no one around, no footprints on the shore, only a boom box partially obscured by a mound of sand. I had forgotten my key, but the sliding door was unlocked. When I reentered my room, I could see that I was still sleeping, so I waited, with the window open, till I awoke.
My dual-self continued to dream, even under my own watchful eye. I came upon a fading billboard announcing that the candy-wrapper phenomenon had spread all the way to San Diego, covering a small stretch of beach I knew well, adjacent to the OB fishing pier. I followed a footpath through unending marshes dotted with abandoned high-rises with shifting angles. Long, slender weed trees grew from cracks in the cement, branches like pale arms protruding from dead structures. By the time I got to the beach the moon had risen, silhouetting the old pier. I was too late, all evidence of the wrappers had been raked into mounds and set aflame, creating a long line of toxic bonfires that nonetheless looked quite beautiful, the ignited wrappers curling like artificial autumn leaves.
The fringe of dream, an evolving fringe at that! Maybe more of a visitation, a prescience of things to come, like a tremendous swarm of gnats, black clouds obscuring the paths of children reeling on bicycles. The borders of reality had reconfigured in such a way that it seemed necessary to map out the patchwork topography. What was needed was a bit of geometric thinking to lay it all out. In the back of the desk drawer were a couple of Band-Aids, a faded postcard, a stick of carbon, and a folded sheet of tracing paper, which seemed like unbelievable luck. I taped the tracing paper to the wall, attempting to make sense of an impossible scape, but composed nothing more than a fractured diagram containing all the improbable logic of a child’s treasure map.
—Use your head, chided the mirror.
—Use your mind, counseled the sign.
A J. G. Ballard kind of gone
My pocket was stuffed with candy wrappers. I spread them out on the desk next to the postcard, the San Diego Panama Exposition of 1915, which set me to thinking that maybe I should go to San Diego and check out Ocean Beach myself.
In the course of my fruitless analytics I had worked up quite an appetite. I found a retro diner nearby called Lucy’s and settled on a grilled cheese on rye, blueberry pie and black coffee. In the booth behind me were some kids, maybe in their early teens. I hadn’t paid attention to what they were saying, more lulled by the sound of their voices, as if drifting from the jukebox, a coin-operated song selector, mounted to the table. The jukebox kids were talking low, a hum that gradually manifested as words.
—No, it’s two words, an adjective-noun combination.
—No way, they are two different words, it’s not a combination, it’s just two different things. One’s an adjective and one’s a noun.
—That’s the same thing.
—No, you said combo. It’s not a combo. They’re separate.
—You’re all boneheads, said a new voice. Sudden
silence. He must have had clout, because they all shut up and listened.
—It’s a thing. A description. It’s a thing, I'm telling you. Candy wrapper is a noun.
That got my attention. Happenstance or what? The hum rose like vapors from a block of dry ice. I picked up my check and casually stopped at their booth. Four aggressively cool nerds.
—Hey know anything about this? I said, smoothing out a wrapper.
—They spelled Chews wrong. With a Z.
—You know where it might have come from?
—Maybe some Chinese knockoff.
—Well, if you hear anything let me know.
As they eyed me with mounting amusement I picked up the phony Peanut Chews wrapper. Somehow, I hadn’t spotted the errant Z. The woman at the register was opening a roll of quarters. I realized I had forgotten to leave a tip and returned to my booth.
—By the way, I said, stopping in front of them, candy wrapper is definitely a noun.
They got up and brushed past me leaving no tip. I noticed they each had a blue backpack with a vertical yellow stripe. The last one to leave glared at me. He had dark wavy hair, his right eye slightly wandering, somewhat like my own.
My phone was vibrating. It was Lenny calling with a report on Sandy, which was no report at all. Stable silence requiring patience and prayer. I wandered into a thrift store, impulsively buying an old Grateful Dead tie-dye T-shirt with Jerry Garcia’s face on it. There were two small bookcases in the back with stacks of National Geographic, Stephen King books, video games and random CDs. I found a couple of back issues of Biblical Archaeology Review and a worn paperback of Gérard de Nerval’s Aurélia. Everything was cheap except the Jerry t-shirt, but it was worth the price, his smiling face reeking of chemical love.