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

Electric Circus. But the boutiques and bars that blossomed in his shadow were still alive and well, and there was always something going on: seven mime-artists miming, six fire-eaters eating, five old queens.
    Patti found another job, but this was one she could pull off, at Brentano’s bookstore across from the Rockefeller Center on Fifth Avenue. While she waited for her first week’s pay—which, of course, was withheld for a week, to keep staff from walking out without notice—she spent her nights in the store itself, stashing herself away in a bathroom, then creeping out when the last door was locked.
    But it wasn’t just a job or a place to sleep at night. For Patti, Brentano’s was also paradise. “Booksellers to the World: All Books, All Languages,” boasted Brentano’s logo, and it was true. Before the company was subsumed into the Waldenbooks/Borders empire during the 1980s and ‘90s, it was both a publisher whose Éditions Brentano’s imprint was home to the French writers exiled from their homeland during the Vichy period, and a storehouse whose shelves creaked beneath the weight of valued and valuable tomes. There, in that century-old forest of bound paper and carved wood, dominated by the curving staircase and the little wooden benches where browsers could relax, Patti could absorb literary history firsthand.
    Other people moved to the city and found themselves devoured by its friendless emptiness. Patti found herself enfolded within its magnanimity. But only one of the people she met during those first weeks in the city would be allowed to see inside of her: an absurdly photogenic young art student named Robert Mapplethorpe.
    He was precisely fifty-six days older than she, born on November 4, 1946, at Irwin Sanitarium in Hollis, Queens, and raised in another neighborhood in the borough, Floral Park. His half-German father, Harry, and Irish Catholic mother, Joan, already had two children (there would be three more after Robert was born), but Robert was always the odd one out.
    “A mischievous little boy whose carefree youth was delicately tinged with a fascination with beauty” is how Patti recalled him in her memoir Just Kids. He was a budding artist before he could even color inside the lines, a skilled one after he abandoned his crayons, and now an art student with so much potential that even his beloved LSD only scratched the surface of his imagination. The first time Patti saw his paintings, she said, they reminded her of Henri Michaux and Richard Pousette-Dart.
    They met by chance, one day during Patti’s first week at Brentano’s, where they discovered that they’d already run into one another once before, on her first day in the city, while she was looking for somebody else. Mapplethorpe was the silent young man who had escorted her to her absent friend’s door.
    This time, he came into the bookstore with a credit slip from another Brentano’s branch, where he worked, and bought a Persian necklace that she’d fallen in love with. They swapped smiles and words but didn’t exchange names. That happened a few days later in Greenwich Village, while Patti was enduring the attentions of an unwanted dinner date, a customer from the bookstore whom, in her mind, she was beginning to equate with a potential serial killer. Then she spotted Mapplethorpe walking toward her through crowded Tompkins Square. She rushed over, greeted him as though they were longtime lovers, and waved away her original date.
    They began to talk, and at first it may have seemed that they had little in common. They were both artists, Patti later explained to Ed Vulliamy of the Guardian, but she was into abstract impression, while Mapplethorpe was working in tantric art. One of the few things they found they shared was their love of poet William Blake (1757–1827).
    As a child, Patti had devoured Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience, and for a long time she viewed him as a children’s writer. Which “in a