Patti Smith - “Just Kids”

In the “Books” section of Sunday SF Chronicle, there is a great review of the new Memoir by Patti Smith, titled “Just Kids.”  Here is a link to the review, and be sure you click on the thumbnails to enlarge the picture of Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe on the Coney Island boardwalk in 1969.

The review is informative and prompted me to order the book.  An excerpt from the review:

Smith made her way from New Jersey to New York at age 20, after giving up a baby for adoption. She and Mapplethorpe fell hard and fast for each other. "He radiated a charm that was sweet and mischievous, shy and protective," she writes. They rented a squalid apartment in Brooklyn, where Smith posted pictures of idols such as Dylan and Rimbaud on the wall. With no TV set or telephone, they passed the time listening to LPs and making drawings, paintings and collages.

"We gathered our colored pencils and sheets of paper and drew like wild, feral children into the night, until, exhausted, we fell into bed," Smith writes.

They were true starving artists, sometimes choosing art supplies over food. "I was not ready for the constant hunger that gnawed at me," she recalls. "I was a skinny thing with a high metabolism and a strong appetite. Romanticism could not quench my need for food. Even Baudelaire had to eat."

They slept on their coats and scavenged the streets for furniture. Dinner was often day-old bread, doughnuts or a soup that Smith made with lettuce and bouillon cubes. She started earning a bit of money working at famous bookstores such as Scribner's, where Edward Gorey and Katharine Hepburn were customers.

Smith and Mapplethorpe were "irrevocably entwined," no matter what. Even as he began having sex with men, he clung to his relationship with her, denying that he was gay. They moved to the infamous Chelsea Hotel, a wondrous scene in the 1970s. Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso and William Burroughs passed through the lobby, and became her friends and mentors. She and Mapplethorpe were regulars at a bar-restaurant next door, El Quixote, where they found themselves among luminaries such as Janis Joplin, Grace Slick and Jimi Hendrix.

My former wife and I stayed for one night at the Chelsea in the spring of 1970, just so we could say we had stayed there.  We did not see anyone famous that evening, but I do remember the two rather large cockroaches in the bathtub!  Anyway, this book sounds like a real winner for all of us who lived through those times and are still around to remember those times.  If you need any further prompting, consider the last lines of the review:

There's no need to ghettoize this book by praising it as an impressive memoir by a famous musician. It is simply one of the best memoirs to be published in recent years: inspiring, sad, wise and beautifully written.

~ Tom