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

way he was—making me aware of the life of a chimney sweep,” she told the Guardian. “But then I grew with Blake, with his sense of spirituality, of social activism, his visionary experience, his compassion for the flaws in human nature and his own nature.” Now, it was Blake who first bound her to Mapplethorpe. “We would spend whatever money we had on books, even if we had nothing to eat, and spent a lot of time together with our Blake books. Both of us had what I’d call a Blakean palette.”
    And soon she was telling Robert her life story. He enjoyed listening to her tell him stories, so she did. Every night—or almost every night, because on some evenings they were too tired to even try to stay awake, and on others they didn’t close their eyes at all—Patti would talk Mapplethorpe to sleep. Sometimes he would request particular tales; othertimes he would simply tell her to begin and then drift to the cadence of her rhythm and tone. Other times he would ask her to draw what she saw when she looked back into her past, and the sound of her pencil would lull him away. And slowly, over time, she recalled in Just Kids, her most precious childhood memories became his.
    But Patti’s stories could be infuriating as well as comforting. Even attempting to have a simple conversation could wrap you up in her word games; you never knew what she was talking about. “She was on the edge of being psychotic in a schizophrenic way,” Mapplethorpe admitted to his future biographer Patricia Morrisroe. “She told me stories, and I didn’t know whether they were fiction or nonfiction. If she hadn’t discovered art, she would have wound up in a mental institution.”
    Instead, she wound up crashing with Mapplethorpe at an apartment on Waverley Avenue in Brooklyn that he was already sharing with a college friend, Patrick Kennedy, and Margaret, his wife-to-be. It was not the happiest of domestic arrangements. Apparently, Margaret found Patti to be judgmental, manipulative, angry, and thoughtless; Patti thought nothing of marching naked through the apartment, no matter who else might be visiting—Pat Kennedy’s midwestern parents on one memorable occasion.
    Patti and Robert spent what little money they had cautiously. Food or a book? A book or a record? Whenever they could, they would bypass such decisions by visiting their parents for a free meal. The elder Map-plethorpes were never taken with Patti, even after Robert told them that they were secretly married; Patti’s mother and father liked Mapplethorpe, but they didn’t see him much. It was so much cheaper for Patti to make the long hike into Jersey on her own, especially since she could bring the loot back in her bag. And the money they saved, on the fare and the food and anything else she returned with, could be put toward more important things.
    Milk or a magazine? Sustenance or a subway token? The Village or Midtown?
    It was Mapplethorpe’s dream to visit Andy Warhol’s Factory, so they did. Located on East Forty-Seventh Street, on the fourth floor of a warehouse buried in the shadow of the Empire State Building, the Factory glittered beneath the artist’s fame and notoriety. Warhol’s own art and works aside, in late 1967 the Factory was home to the Velvet Underground, the musical experience that remained a tightly guarded secret among the city’s artiest cognoscenti. Their debut album was in the stores, its distinctive Warhol cover art of a peelable banana a vivid contrast to the traditional teenybop-friendly mugshots with which most artists bedecked their LPs, but visitors to the Factory could hear it for free, because there was always a copy spinning on the gramophone there.
    “The first time I ever saw Patti was at Andy’s,” the Velvets’ golden-haired chanteuse, the German-born Nico, recalled. “She was skinny, like a rat, but she was from New Jersey and so was Lou [Reed, the Velvets’ front man], so that was all right. She didn’t speak much; she