by Patti Smith
AMULETS
The writer’s shoes
I sat in the center of my own disorder. The boxes stacked against the wall contained two decades of Polaroid images. Remembering a promised mission, I set about the task of sorting through countless numbers of them, mostly shots of statues and altars and defunct hotels. I spent hours but had no luck locating the photograph I had promised Ernest—the games of Roberto Bolaño. I felt a twinge of regret, but in the end I hadn’t the slightest notion of where to send it if I did. Going in circles. Going in circles. Lyrics to a song, though I couldn’t remember which one. Going in circles, surrounded by images of cities and streets and mountains I could no longer identify, like small evidences of a crime long gone cold.
I separated some of the photographs I had taken in the last year or so. The back wall of On the Bridge covered with Wolf Girl posters. The coffee place whose letters were disproportionate to the actual interior. An unmade bed, a bad angle of Ernest’s truck. A pelican perched atop the WOW Café sign. An action shot of a charm bracelet sliding off the dashboard of a Lexus; the many charms of Cammy. Each one tells a story she had said.
Cammy and Ernest and Jesús and the blonde, all characters in an alternative reality, black-and-white cutouts in a Technicolor world. Even the sign and the security guards on the beach. A world that in itself was nothing, yet seemed to contain an answer for every unutterable question in early winter’s impossible play.
Piling the Polaroids back into a box, I found several glassine envelopes in a manila folder. There were various shots of the Guggenheim in Bilbao and the fifties-style lobby of the beach hotel in Blanes. Images that I had obviously favored and set apart. The writer’s shoes. The tomb of Virgil. Two linden trees in the mist. One after another, each a talisman on a necklace of continuous travels. And behind a picture of a small girl with dark curly hair was Bolaño’s games. Not really much of anything, just a closet interior, but exactly what I had been looking for.
I sat on the floor somewhat satisfied, not a fruitless search at all. I gazed at the photograph of the smiling little girl, the daughter of Roberto Bolaño. She had not played with his games, but had games of her own. I pictured several such girls, turning in circles, singing in different languages that somehow seemed the same. Suddenly I was tired. I remained where I was and leaned against the bed attempting to untangle my excessively knotted hair. A brief memory of untangling two gold chains came to mind. Twin golden circles and faces like dangling charms, some close up, some indistinct.
IN SEARCH OF IMAGINOS
The Unicorn in Captivity, Cloisters
Imaginos approached the sun singing songs
nobody knew and stories left undone
—SANDY PEARLMAN
I walked the length of Atlantic Avenue, where I had once bought henna and reggae records that you couldn’t find anywhere else. I stopped to rummage through some overflowing trunks of discarded costumes in front of an abandoned theater, sequined robes and bangled skirts glinting in the Indian summer sun. I unearthed a fragile silk dress, cut wide yet weightless, as if spun by a factory of militant spiders. I left my jacket atop a box and slipped the dress over my T-shirt and dungarees. I kept digging and found a coat, also lightweight and somewhat frayed. It was my kind of coat, entirely without seams, riddled with small holes at the hem and sleeves. There was a rubber band in the right pocket, caught in some thread. I pulled my hair up in a ponytail and walked up the metal ramp and took my seat on the Jefferson Airplane. The plane, not the band, but when I looked out I realized I was in a van, not a plane, which was thoroughly confusing. The driver turned on the radio, a baseball game interrupted by radio calls in another language, somewhat musical, maybe Albanian. He took a different route than I requested and ignored any questions. He kept grunting and scratching his thick arms and I noticed flakes of skin falling on the black leatherette armrest. We were gridlocked on a bridge, only it was not a usual bridge and seemed to be slightly swaying. I was more than tempted to get out and cross on foot.
And so it continued. No matter which way I stepped or whatever plane I was on, it was still the Year of the Monkey. I was still moving within an atmosphere of artificial brightness with corrosive edges, the hyperreality of a polarizing pre-election mudslide, an avalanche of toxicity infiltrating every outpost. I wiped the shit from my shoes again and again, still going about my business, that of being alive, the best I could. Although an insidious insomnia was slowly claiming my nights, giving way to the replaying of the afflictions of the world at dawn. At some point I tried sleeping with the television on, a small one stationed on the right side of my bed. Avoiding the news, I accessed the on-demand channel, choosing random episodes of Mr. Robot to play at low volume. I found the monotone voice-over of the hoodied hacker Elliot quite soothing and lay in limbo, which was almost like sleeping.
* * *
—
IN EARLY OCTOBER, Lenny and I flew to San Francisco for Sandy’s memorial. I felt a wave of irrational bitterness. It should have been in Ashland, I thought, with the entire Ring cycle performed ground-level, without sets, on a circular stage, where the mourners could keep shifting position every hour, experiencing the Ring from every angle. Sandy left a hole, and with his unexpected departure, his devotion to Wagner, Arthur Lee, Jim Morrison, Benjamin Britten, Coriolanus, The Matrix and a revolutionary vision of a Medea meant to unhinge then reframe the theatrical world. With no family to speak of, one by one friends spoke fondly, if not humorously, of his youth in Stony Brook, his contributions to music technology, his songs and visionary production of the Blue Öyster Cult. He was noted as a revered lecturer at McGill University, specializing in the obscure convergence of classical composition and heavy metal.
Roni Hoffman and her husband, Robert Duncan, Sandy’s lifelong guardian angels, had selflessly negotiated his complicated and ultimately failed convalescence; they both spoke poignantly of decades of friendship. The glowing threads of their reminiscences interlaced with my own and I found myself on a long-ago drive with Sandy to the Cloisters. He still had his sports car then and wanted to show me the majestic tapestries called The Hunt of the Unicorn, canonical works created in the sixteenth century by unknown hands on behalf of unknown royalty. The hangings were massive, at least twelve-foot-high pictorial scenes of intricately interwoven wool warp and silk, metallic threads, silver and gilt wefts.
Sandy and I stood before The Unicorn in Captivity. The mythic animal was encircled by a wooden fence surrounded by a carpet of wildflowers, vibrantly undead. Sandy, an admirable weaver of words, mapped out the terrible events that led to its capture, beguiled then felled by maiden betrayal.
—The unicorn, Sandy said solemnly, is a metaphor for the terrible power of love.
On its knees, the unicorn shimmered in its distress. I had seen and admired it solely in books, not comprehending its magnitude, its innate power to arouse a buried belief in the existence of a mythical creature.
—This unicorn, he continued, is as alive as you and me.
Lenny tapped me gently on the shoulder and led me to the small stage. We performed Pale Blue Eyes, then a slow ritualistic version of Eight Miles High, both meaningful to Sandy. Lenny played electric guitar with his eyes closed. I could not help but feel distraughtly distant, like Nico performing her elegy to Lenny Bruce.
Lastly, Albert Bouchard, the charismatic drummer from Blue Öyster Cult, embarking on Sandy’s masterpiece, Astronomy, armed solely with an acoustic guitar—a feat requiring a high degree of selflessness, considering the august scope of the piece. Years ago, I had watched with Sandy, both transported, as the Blue Öyster Cult performed the same song with Albert at the helm in an arena for eighteen thousand people. Albert, now alone, delivered Astronomy with a pathos that broke all stoic barriers, and all wept.
Lenny and I went back out into the night and walked through Chinatown. We passed the same wise-monkey bench as I had on
my own. We walked forever, it seemed, up and down the streets of San Francisco, stopping for a breath at the corner of Fillmore and Fell. I was wearing the clothes I had found in the overturned trunks on Atlantic Avenue. Lenny was wearing a black jacket that had belonged to my husband with black jeans and a black leather vest. I lifted my hem to tie my bootlace.
—Nice dress, he said.
The band joined us two days later at the Fillmore to honor Sandy. As I got out of the car, two fellows approached me. They looked nothing alike but gave the impression they were the same person. The one with a shaved head gave me a necklace. I put it in my jacket pocket without looking at it and once again climbed the metal steps to the stage door, imagining Jerry Garcia doing the same. Lenny was already there to greet me, opening the heavy iron door. I froze for a moment before reaching him, suddenly conscious of the repetition of our every action.
That night, performing Land of a Thousand Dances, I closed my eyes during the breakdown, improvising all the way to the Baltic, to the land of Medea. I walked that barren stretch, following Medea’s sandaled feet, as she had followed Jason. The golden fleece shimmered, blinding all who dared to glance upon it. I saw the flame in Medea’s transparent heart and felt the blood boiling in her veins. A high priestess yet also a country girl, she was unable to match wits with Jason’s people. Forced to draw from her primal self she dresses as a fox to obscure the hunt. Her small sons sleep. Jason’s sons. She loved him and he betrayed her. I watched as she raised her white arm encircled with heavy bracelets. I saw the fleece lose its luster. I saw the dagger find their small hearts.
The band played loudly, the people were rowdy, spontaneously erupting. Perhaps some followed the thread wound from the fleece of Jason to the fleecing of Medea and the terrible witchcraft of the beyond, but it didn’t matter. I sang for Sandy, and the poetry that spewed was for him. I beheld his flashing smile, those ice-blue eyes, and felt for a moment that joyful arrogance that spread its mantle on the altar of opera, mythology and rock ’n’ roll. I was exactly where he was, and we stood, each sensing the other, on the precipice of irredeemable tragedy.
WHY BELINDA CARLISLE MATTERS
The hotel phone would not stop ringing. It was the front desk, but which front desk, which city, which month? Okay, it was October, Seattle, in a spacious room with a view of a massive air-conditioning unit, and I was slated to deliver a talk on the importance of libraries. It was four in the afternoon and I had fallen asleep in my coat. The dress I wore to the memorial was draped across the couch. I had arrived and dropped my stuff and just passed out. Somewhat groggy, I washed my face and prepared for my talk, mentally collating a succession of libraries I had frequented since a child, when a library card gave entrance to entire series of books: The Bobbsey Twins, Uncle Wiggily and His Friends, Freddy the Detective, all the Oz books and Nancy Drew mysteries. Library memories cross-wired with images of my own books, hundreds of books, lying on the bed, lining the right side of a staircase, stacked on the card table in the kitchen and higher stacks on the floor, against the wall.
Once in the lobby, I was pounced upon and spirited away, much like Holly Martins in The Third Man, when he was herded from his hotel in Vienna to deliver a talk about the role of the existential cowboy in American literature. Like Holly I felt excessively unprepared. Standing before a full house, I figured better to take the personal route and spoke of the importance of a library to a nine-year-old bookworm living in a rural community in southern New Jersey, a place devoid of culture, not a single bookstore, though thankfully a small library, roughly two miles from our home.
I spoke of how much books have always meant to me and how every Saturday I would go to the library and choose my books for the week. One late-autumn morning, despite menacing clouds, I bundled up and walked as always, past the peach orchards, the pig farm and the skating rink to the fork in the road that led to our sole library. The sight of so many books never failed to excite me, rows and rows of books with multicolored spines. I’d spent an inordinate amount of time choosing my stack of books that day, with the sky growing more ominous. At first, I wasn’t worried as I had long legs and was a pretty fast walker, but then it became apparent that there was no way I was going to beat the impending storm. It grew colder, the winds picked up, followed by heavy rains, then pelting hail. I slid the books under my coat to protect them, I had a long way to go; I stepped in puddles and could feel the icy water permeate my ankle socks. When I finally reached home my mother shook her head with sympathetic exasperation, prepared a hot bath and made me go to bed. I came down with bronchitis and missed several days of school. But it had been worth it, for I had my books, among them The Tik-Tok Man of Oz, Half Magic and A Dog of Flanders. Wonderful books that I read over and over, only accessible to me through our library. As I recounted this little tale I noticed a few people in the audience with handkerchiefs, recognizing something of that book-struck young girl in themselves.
Early the next morning, I got up and had coffee at a place called Ruby’s. I remembered eating here with Lenny and Sandy a few years ago after a concert at the Moore Theatre, the oldest in Seattle, notorious for its Egyptian décor. The great Nijinsky and Anna Pavlova had danced on its stage, and the likes of Sarah Bernhardt, the Marx Brothers, Ethel Barrymore and Harry Houdini played their best hands here as well. It was once segregated, and people of color were relegated to the high balcony seats. This stain upon the theater was not without irony, as those same seats were rewarded with the best acoustics. That was the year Sandy and I drove to Ashland to see Coriolanus at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Or as Sandy put it, to witness the fall of a condition of hubris that Shakespeare had raised to the realm of the mystical. I finished my breakfast and walked over to deliver a donation to the Bread of Life Mission. A homeless fellow in a long, gray overcoat and purple watch cap was scrawling a message on a brick wall with a thick piece of pink chalk. I slipped a five in his cup next to a makeshift bed of flattened cardboard, then watched his fingers as the words slowly emerged: Belinda Carlisle Matters.
—Why? I asked. Why does Belinda Carlisle matter?
He stared at me for a fairly long time that extended into an even longer time, all the way back to when cities were merely hills. He shifted his gaze from me to over his shoulder, then down to his shoes, then finally looked up and answered in a low voice.
—She’s got the beat.
This was a true Sandy moment. Had he been here he would have surely declared this a momentous truth. I merely smiled and shrugged. I didn’t doubt him but I didn’t put much stock in it, either, until several days later, back in New York City, unable to sleep, I was scrolling the channels and stopped at some music infomercial. I think it was one of those deals where they sell twenty-two CDs from the eighties, or maybe it was just girl groups, but there on the TV were the Go-Go’s, doing We Got the Beat on some English pop music show. All the girls were cool, but it was Belinda who had the moves, nothing flashy, kind of Beach Blanket Bingo with a modern swing and a bit of French Paradis, leggings and little high heels. Yeah, Belinda, I said aloud, you got the beat.
Her exuberance was infectious. I imagined a nonviolent hubris spreading across the land, like the boys in West Side Story buoyed by a mounting swagger, singing When you’re a Jet…Hundreds of thousands of girls and boys flooding the open perimeters, taking on Belinda Carlisle’s moves, singing We got the beat. And soldiers laying down their arms and sailors leaving their posts and thieves the scenes of their crimes and all at once we’re in the epicenter of one grand musical. No power, no race, no religion, no apologies. And with this vast spectacle racing through my head, some part of me leapt up and sashayed down the road, entering the scene, joining the chorus increasing ad infinitum, like William Blake’s angels streaming from the turning pages of the book of life.
THE HOLY SEE
It was the Day of the Dead
It was the Day of the Dead. The side streets wer
e dressed in sugar skulls and a kind of stale madness hung in the air. I had bad feelings about an election in the Year of the Monkey. Don’t worry, everyone said, the majority rules. Not so, I retaliated, the silent rule and it will be decided by them, those who do not vote. And who can blame them, when it’s all a pack of lies, a tainted election lined in waste? Millions poured down a hole lined with plasma, spent on endless contentious television commercials. A true darkening of days. All of the resources that could be used to scrape away lead from the walls of crumbling schools, to shelter the homeless, or to clean a foul river. Instead, one candidate desperately shovels money down a pit, and the other builds empty edifices in his own name, another kind of immoral waste. Nonetheless, despite all misgivings, I voted.
Election night I joined a gathering of good comrades and we watched the terrible soap opera called the American election unfold on a large-screen TV. One by one each stumbled off into dawn. The bully bellowed. Silence ruled. Twenty-four percent of the population had elected the worst of ourselves to represent the other seventy-six percent. All hail our American apathy, all hail the twisted wisdom of the Electoral College.
Unable to sleep, I walked over to Hell’s Kitchen. A few bars were already open, or else they never closed, and no one swept up or cleared the booths readying for a new day. Maybe as to deny it was a new day or merely to curtail its unfolding. It’s still yesterday, the debris called out, there’s still a chance in hell. I ordered a shot of vodka and a glass of water. I had to pick the ice out of both my drinks, dumping it into a dish of stale pretzels. The radio was on, a real one, Billie Holiday singing Strange Fruit. Her voice, one of laconic suffering, produced shudders of admiration and shame. I pictured her sitting at the bar, a gardenia in her hair and a Chihuahua in her lap. I pictured her sleeping in a rumpled white skirt and blouse on a diesel-fueled tour bus, turned away from a white Southern hotel despite the fact that she was Billie Holiday, despite the fact that she was simply a human being.