Dancing Barefoot: The Patti Smith Story by Dave Thompson Read Free Book Online

place to stay, a place to work.
    She headed back to Manhattan, painfully conscious that every subway token took another bite out of her nest egg, but equally aware that the Village never slept, and it wouldn’t let a sister starve either.
    The Summer of Love was at its fulsome height. Over on the West Coast, as the radio sang, the kids all danced with flowers in their hair, but the East Coast was no slouch in the cultural stakes either, and New York City was the center of everything. Every park was packed with kids—hippies in the common vernacular, dropouts and dope fiends in the adult opinion—draft dodgers, junkies, and freaks. Free drugs, free love, tune in, turn on … peace, man.
    If you walked the streets of Greenwich Village from West Houston to Washington Square, past every patch of open space, every corner and every courtyard, you could have been passing through the Twelve Days of Hipmas: eleven leafletters leafletting, ten drummers drumming, nine protest singers protesting, eight radicals radicalizing, and all of them living large on the promise of the teenage dream.
    Radio blared the FM of the day. The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper was barely a month old and still spinning on every record player. The Doors’ “Light My Fire” was on its way to #1; the Association’s “Windy” would make way for its ascent. Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit” was in the wind, and you saw a lot of copies of Alice in Wonderland being studied by the readers on the grass, and a lot of chess matches being fought as well, the players waiting for the chessmen to tell them where to go. Hey, kid—try this, sniff that, feel this, cop that. Patti had never seen anything like it.
    Unfortunately, nobody saw her. She spent a night in Central Park, in the shadow of the statue of Alice’s Mad Hatter, and the next day sheresumed her wanderings. Up and down Fifth Avenue to ask if the stores had any openings. She filled in applications when they did, although she hadn’t yet figured out how they’d contact her after that. Maybe she’d just drop in every few days to see if anyone needed her.
    Down to Forty-Second Street and Times Square, the neon-lit heart of America’s sleaziest soul, where every artery pumped sex and souvenirs. There were X-rated peepshow holes where a pocket full of quarters could buy you twenty minutes in a sticky, lust-filled booth and ragged hookers lurked outside to relieve you of your bills. The occasional door might lead you elsewhere: it was only the storefronts that glowed with seedy grandeur; upstairs there might be a movie house, a library, even a recording studio. In two years’ time, John Cale, the man destined to produce Patti’s first LP, would oversee the recording of the Stooges’ first LP at the Hit Factory, one floor above a Times Square peepshow.
    The best Patti could muster was to find herself a job, waitressing at an Italian restaurant called Joe’s. But she lost it within three hours after spilling a meal into a customer’s lap.
    Patti kept walking. She’d left her suitcase in a lockup in Brooklyn, which flushed more cash down the drain, and carried everything she needed in a bundle beneath her arm. She’d more or less given up eating by now; she just pinned her hopes on finding a friend, who’d help her find a home, which would help her find a job. At last, she found a place to sleep: riding the subway from one end to the other, nodding off between stops and her fellow passengers’ noises. Or she’d go back out to Brooklyn, where she occasionally bumped into someone she recognized as a friend of a friend, who’d let her use the shower or crash on the couch.
    She gravitated to St. Mark’s Place, sensing that this East Village street was the epicenter of something, and so it was, ever since Andy Warhol touched down there earlier in the year. Warhol had since moved on; the Dom, the nightclub where his plastic inevitable had exploded through the spring, was under new management, as the