Year of the Monkey

by Patti Smith

I just sighed. Was it all a dream? Was everything a dream? Beginning with the Dream Motel straight on through all the monkey-induced mischief. I was in the middle of this circular rumination when I sensed that I was not alone. Making a quick scan of the bar, I spotted him. I hadn’t noticed him when I came in, but he was there all right, sitting in semi-darkness at a corner table tossing folded bits from his wallet. He hadn’t crossed my mind in quite a while, not so much since he left me stranded in a landscape near-biblical in its emptiness. I was determined to catch his eye but he looked straight through me. We met at the WOW, I was saying in my head. Well, actually we never met. I just sat down at the table and wandered into the conversation, the one about 2666, the one covering the dog races in St. Petersburg. Ernest did nothing to indicate he was getting the message, so I walked over and sat down. He began talking as if picking up in the middle of a former conversation, something about the opening scene of Apocalypse Now.

  —Martin Sheen drunk out of his mind, an act of pure bravery, the bravest thing on film, baffling that they pulled it off. The broken mirror and all that blood. Not movie blood. Martin Sheen blood.

  Then he stood up and headed to the john. I went up to the bar and got another drink. I’m not much of a drinker, but I figured diluted vodka, good vodka at that, wouldn’t hurt, not even in the dead of the afternoon. I motioned to where Ernest had been sitting.

  —Do you know what he’s been drinking?

  —Who wants to know? he said. But he placed an obscure-looking bottle of tequila before me. I asked him to wait a few minutes, then bring the bottle over and offer him a drink on the house. I laid some money down, when a woman came in with a wig case and some dry cleaning. She went through a door behind the bar. The guys with their heads a few inches apart had not moved. In fact, no one moved, no one reacted to her, or to me. Two women invading a third-rate man’s world.

  I went back to Ernest’s table. We sat awhile in edgy silence.

  —I wonder how Joseph Conrad would like Apocalypse Now, I said, mostly to break the ice.

  —That’s a rumor, he said. There’s no truth in it at all.

  —No truth in what?

  —That it’s just a redo of Heart of Darkness.

  —Well, yeah, that’s not true at all, but it did inspire it. Even Coppola said that. That’s half its beauty, how Coppola transformed a classic into a modern classic.

  —A twentieth-century classic, not even modern anymore.

  He suddenly leaned toward me.

  —Who had the darkest heart? Brando or Sheen?

  —Sheen, I said without hesitation.

  —Why?

  —He still wanted to live.

  The bartender brought the bottle over and set a shot glass before Ernest. Pour yourself one, on the house, he said. Ernest filled it to the brim. They water this stuff down, he told me, finishing it off rather quickly.

  —Everything comes from the heart. The drunken heart. You ever been drunk? Really drunk? I mean drunk for days, lost in the romance of everything down, pitched in the swirl of absurdity.

  That’s what he said, pouring himself another tequila. It occurred to me that I had never seen him drink anything but coffee. Of course, I knew little about him. His last name, for instance. But it’s like that sometimes. You know an imperfect stranger like no one else. No last names, no birthdates, no country of origin. Only eyes. Strange tics. Small indications of a state of mind.

  —He’ll build that damn wall, he was saying, and the money will come from the pockets of the poor. Things are changing at a speed we never dreamed. We’ll be talking nuclear war. Pesticides will be a food group. No songbirds, no wildflowers. Nothing but collapsing hives and lines of the rich getting ready to board a ship for a night on the moon.

  Then he went quiet. We both did. Ernest looked tired, the ravages of life seemed more pronounced than just a year ago. I could feel the bitter sadness that seemed to permeate the room. It rose like a suffocating gas, and the few scattered patrons looked up as if they heard a child crying.

  —I’m here about Tangier Island, he mumbled.

  I stood up, wrote Tangier Island in my notebook and slipped it into my back pocket. Ernest nodded slightly but gave no indication that I should stay. I noticed a penny on the floor and bent down to pick it up. As I exited I had the feeling that if I reentered, even if only a moment later, everything would be altered. Suddenly Technicolor, with the new bartender in charge, in her wig, full makeup, dry-cleaned dress.

  I walked out and sat on a nearby bench. I wondered what Ernest was doing in Virginia Beach. The little I knew of him pointed to some kind of mission. But then again, he may be wondering the same thing of me. I had come on an impulse, pure nostalgia. A bus to Richmond just to look at the James River where I had once stood with my brother Todd talking about Edgar Allan Poe and Roberto Clemente, his favorite ballplayer. Todd looked like Paul Newman. The same ice-blue eyes. The same self-effacing confidence. You could count on him for anything. Anything except staying alive.

  A few more stragglers, a guy walking his dog, an old Chinese woman wearing wooden sandals with thick socks with her grandson holding an oversized red ball. The red of the ball seemed to solarize. A big ball of silvery blood. The kid had a thin jacket on but didn’t seem cold; the wind was more prominent over the water, dying down on the boards.

  I wondered if I was waiting for Ernest to come out, though in all likelihood he was already gone. He seemed beaten down. Not the same agitated force he had been when we met at the WOW. Something went down and something drew him here. Some other conspiracy, maybe, something to do with Tangier Island. I saw him stagger from the bar. I had the urge to tail him as he headed down the boardwalk, but it seemed too dramatic. I watched him for a few minutes, then, distracted by a swooping gull, missed the moment when and where he turned off. The opportunity gone, I thought about looking around for a room. I had a lot of cash on me, credit card, notebook and a toothbrush. In the distance, a kid on a bike approached my bench and dismounted.

  —Excuse me, he said. A guy named Ernest said to give you this. He handed me a brown paper lunch bag.

  I looked up and smiled. Where is he now? I said.

  —I don’t know, he just asked me to give you that.

  —Thanks, I said, fishing in my pocket for a dollar.

  I had a few questions to ask but he jumped back on his bike and kept going. I watched him growing smaller and smaller, receding into the horizon, like one of Magellan’s ships. Sighing, I opened the sack and pulled out a beat-up paperback, the English translation of The Part About the Critics, obsessively notated in Spanish. I flipped through the pages to the dreams of water, where the pinup blonde, the Liz Norton of the lot of us, had referenced a space break. Reading it made me restless for a city. An unforgiving city. Low-rise housing. Mexico City in 1949. Miami in 1980. I could feel the insidious fingers of memory rustling through the underbrush like the dismembered hand of the pianist scrabbling toward Peter Lorre’s throat in The Beast with Five Fingers. One of my brother Todd’s favorite movies, the thought of which triggered unscripted scenes, other pictures of life. Todd smiling in the sun on the plot of land where he would build a house for his wife and daughter. Todd leaning over a pool table with a cigarette dangling. Driving across Pennsylvania in a truck with no heat and small clouds forming as we sang along to oldies on the radio. My Hero. Butterfly. I Sold My Heart to the Junkman. Not now, I said, shaking it off, and reopened the book and began at the beginning. The critics seemed more alive than the passersby and suddenly the sea was no longer the sea, but a backdrop for words, some of the greatest sequences of words strung together in the twenty-first century.

  When I looked up time had flown, as if on its own tiny plane. Ernest was standing only a few feet away. He seemed in total command of himself, not a bit intoxicated. I walked toward him, somewhat relieved yet hardly willing to go back in c
ircles with him.

  —I’m just a writer, I said wearily, nothing more.

  —I’m just a Mexican who believes in truth.

  I stared him down. He squirmed a bit, then laughed.

  —OK. My father was Russian, but he didn’t live long.

  —Was your father named Ernest?

  —No, but he was.

  I smiled even as I felt a surge of melancholy. A flash of a wallet, a hand extracting a photograph of a woman in a dark flowered dress with a boy in short pants, his hair neatly combed. Ernest’s eyes registered that he knew what I was seeing.

  —Why Tangier Island? I finally asked.

  —Since it suffered Hurricane Ernesto the island is receding into the sea. I have to make amends.

  I noticed clouds moving in. Rain, I was thinking.

  —You see, there’s a saying carved in Old English on a wooden plank on one of the oldest structures built in America. This is Tangier Island. As it goes, so do we.

  —Have you actually seen it? I asked.

  —You don’t see things like that. You feel them, as in all important things; they arrive, they come into your dreams. For instance, he added slyly, you’re dreaming now.

  I whirled around. We were standing in front of that same third-rate café.

  —See, he said in a voice oddly reminiscent of some other voice.

  —You’re the Dream Motel sign, I suddenly blurted.

  —It’s the Dream Inn, he said, fading.

  A KIND OF EPILOGUE

  First Muhammed Ali died, then Sandy and Castro and Princess Leia and her mother. A lot of rough things happened, begetting things even more terrible, and then there was the future that came and went, and here we are still watching the same human movie, a long chain of deprivation playing out in real time on massive perpetual screens. Heart-wrenching injustices constituting the new facts of life. The Year of the Monkey. The death of the last white rhinoceros. The ravaging of Puerto Rico. The massacre of schoolchildren. The disparaging words and actions against our immigrants. The orphaned Gaza Strip. And what of existence only a reach away? What of the stoic writer who held a miniature of the world in the palm of his tattooed hand? What will happen to him? I had asked myself, shuttling back and forth to Kentucky. When I first wrote these words, I didn’t yet know, and one could fast-forward or move backwards but time has a way of still going, ticking away, new things one cannot alter, cannot get down fast enough. We used to laugh, me and Sam, about this disconnect: you write in time then time is gone and in trying to catch up you’re writing a whole other book, like Pollock losing contact with a painting and making a whole other painting and losing the thread of both and in a rage kicking through glass walls. I can tell you this, the last time I saw Sam, his manuscript was all but done. It was there on the kitchen table like a small monolith, containing the uncontainable, a bright flicker that could not be extinguished. Why birds? wrote Sam. Why birds? echoed his sister. Their song wafted from a boom box partially buried in the sand. Why birds? cried the old man. And they flapped their wings, found then broke formation and eventually disappeared. What would happen to the writer? The answer is now encased in an epilogue that wasn’t meant to be an epilogue but has turned into one since all one can do is try to keep up as Hermes races before us with his chiseled ankles. How do we lay this out, other than speak the truth? Sam Shepard would not physically climb the steps of a Mayan pyramid or ascend the arched back of a sacred mountain. Instead he would skillfully slide into the great sleep, just as the children of the dead city spread waxed-paper sheets over mounds of corpses rushing toward paradise. You get there faster sliding downhill on waxed paper, every child knows that. This is what I know. Sam is dead. My brother is dead. My mother is dead. My father is dead. My husband is dead. My cat is dead. And my dog who was dead in 1957 is still dead. Yet still I keep thinking that something wonderful is about to happen. Maybe tomorrow. A tomorrow following a whole succession of tomorrows. But getting back to the moment, which is already gone, I was alone in Virginia Beach, suddenly left holding the bag. The brown paper bag containing the worn copy of The Part About the Critics. I stood there attempting to absorb the absurd truth of the punch line uttered by Ernest. Come on, you, I said to the mirror, one that had fallen from a compact with the gilt peeling away, one easily conjured. Come on, I said to one eye and then to the wandering other, get focused. You got to get a grip on the whole picture. The mirror slipped from my hand and as it hit the ground I could hear the voice of Sandy saying shards of love, Patti, shards of love. And then I walked in the other direction, the longer stretch of boardwalk. No one knows what is going to happen, I was thinking, not really. But then again, what if one could telescope the future? What if there, on the boardwalk, was a view finder that projected all the way through 2017 into the following Year of the Dog? What manner of things would one see? What spectacular and terrible twists of the golden rope, unraveling here and there, from the alpha to the omega? A few notches, a few million notches. The death of the writer the transfiguration of a friend the flecked eyes of Jesus Christ the flames engulfing Southern California the collapse of the Silverdome and men falling like chess pieces carved from the weight of centuries of indiscretions and the slaughter of worshippers and the guns and the guns and the guns and the guns. And there, on a winter’s afternoon, there on the map where the three great faiths once moved through the marketplace in kind, where David conquered, where Jesus walked, where Mohammed ascended. Look in shame as pilgrims are shooed away, troops made ready and who knows when the first stone will be thrown. The neutral capital slated to be the new capitalist stronghold. Shall the olive wither? Shall the mountains shudder? Will the children of the future never taste the sweetness of brotherhood? I kept walking, it seemed as if the boardwalk had no beginning or end. I knew there had to be a brass telescope mounted somewhere on the boards and I was determined to find it, not exactly a telescope but an instrument of beyondness, right on the esplanade. The kind you put a quarter in to see the islands just out of reach, ones occupied by wild horses—say, Cumberland Island or even Tangier Island. My pockets were brimming with coins so I set up camp and concentrated, first on a freighter, then on a star, and then all the way back to Earth. I could actually see that ball the world. I was in space and could see it all, as if the god of science let me peer through his personal lens. The turning Earth was slowly revealed in high definition. I could see every vein that was also a river. I could see the wavering illness air, the cold deep of the sea and the great bleached reef of Queensland and calcified manta rays sinking and lifeless organisms floating and the movement of wild ponies racing through the marshes overrunning the islands off the Georgian coast and the remains of stallions in the boneyards of North Dakota and a fleet of deer the color of saffron and the great dunes of Lake Michigan with sacred Indian names. I saw the center which was not holding and, just as Ernest had described, a small island like the navel of an orange gasping for breath and one huge tortoise and one darting fox and several old muskets rusting in the high grass. There were old men climbing the rocks and lying in the sun with their hands folded. There were small boys stomping the wildflowers. And I saw the ancient days. There were bells tolling and wreaths tossed and women turning in circles and there were bees performing their life-cycle dance and there were great winds and swollen moons and pyramids crumbling and coyotes crying and the waves mounting and it all smelled like the end and the beginning of freedom. And I saw my friends who were gone and my husband and my brother. I saw those counted as true fathers ascend the distant hills and I saw my mother with the children she had lost, whole again. And I saw myself with Sam in his kitchen in Kentucky and we were talking about writing. In the end, he was saying, everything is fodder for a story, which means, I guess, that we’re all fodder. I was sitting on a straight-back wooden chair. He was standing looking down at me just as always. Papa Was a Rolling Stone was playing on the radio, which was brown tweed, sort of forties
-looking. And I thought, as he reached down to brush the hair from my eyes, the trouble with dreaming is that we eventually wake up.

  ILLUSTRATIONS

  1Dream Inn, Santa Cruz

  2Bombay Beach

  3Ayers Rock, Uluru

  4WOW Café, OB Pier

  5Kovilj Monastery, Serbia

  6Greyhound terminal, Burbank

  7Peace Tower, Japantown

  8Hie Shrine, Tokyo

  9Bombay Beach

  10Joshua Tree cactus

  11Outpost, Salton Sea

  12The author

  13St. Jerome’s study, Albrecht Dürer

  14Sam’s Stetson

  15Adirondack chairs

  16Kitchen window

  17My father’s cup

  18Joseph Beuys’s felt suit, Oslo

  19My suitcase

  20Café A Brasileira, Lisbon

  21My chair, New York City

  22Window, Elizabeth Street

  23For Sandy, Rockaway Beach

  24Jackson and Jesse, Detroit

  25The writer’s shoes

  26Roberto Bolaño’s games

  27The Unicorn in Captivity, Cloisters

  28Alexander McQueen T-shirt

  29Van Eyck Altarpiece, Ghent, Belgium

  30Samuel Beckett, telephone, Dublin

  31Walking stick, Ghost Ranch

  32Phone booth, Mexico City

  Images on this page and this page are public domain.

  All photographs © by Patti Smith

  A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Patti Smith is a writer, performer, and visual artist. She gained recognition in the 1970s for her revolutionary merging of poetry and rock. She has released twelve albums, including Horses, which has been hailed as one of the top one hundred albums of all time by Rolling Stone.

  Smith had her first exhibit of drawings at the Gotham Book Mart in 1973 and was represented by the Robert Miller Gallery for three decades. Her retrospective exhibitions include the Andy Warhol Museum, the Fondation Cartier, and the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art. Her books include Just Kids, winner of the National Book Award in 2010, Wītt, Babel, Woolgathering, The Coral Sea, Auguries of Innocence, M Train, and Devotion.