Dancing Barefoot: The Patti Smith Story (3 page)

Neither would her beloved books. Neither would her records, nor most of the people who made them—and that included Little Richard, who gave up rock ‘n’ roll in 1957 after a vision warned him of his own damnation. He took Voice of Prophecy courses (Seventh-Day Adventist) and was ordained a minister in the Church of God of the Ten Commandments. And even that wouldn’t save him.

Patti quit the Witnesses.

At age twelve, she discovered Buddhism, after accidentally bringing divine wrath (or so she believed) on the innocent people of Tibet. She had selected the Chinese-occupied state as the subject of a school project, which asked her class to write regular news reports on the foreign country of their choice throughout the course of a year. She prayed that Tibet would provide newsworthy material for her assignments. Soon after, Tibetans in the capital rose up against their occupiers, Chinese troops violently put down the rebellion, and the Dalai Lama was forced into exile.

“I felt tremendously guilty,” she confessed to Stephen Foehr in the
Shambhala Sun.
“I felt that somehow my prayers had interfered with Tibetan history. I worried about the Dalai Lama. It was rumored thathis family had been killed by the Chinese. I was quite relieved when he reached India safely. I vowed to always say prayers for his safe-keeping, which I have done.” Her flirtation with Buddhism provided her with a spiritual center that her disillusionment with Christianity had temporarily robbed her of.

The previous year, 1958, had seen the birth of Patti’s second sister, Kimberly Ann, the fourth and last of the Smith kids. No matter how much she loved the newcomer, Patti was painfully aware of the further strain that she placed on the family finances, especially after the baby developed serious asthma, adding further weight to the already barely manageable medical bills.

One of Patti’s most profound memories of the period was of the day a Household Finance debt collector was banging on the front door, trying to pick up the money her parents owed. Her mother told Patti to tell them she was out, then hid herself in another part of the house. “My mommy’s in the bathroom,” Patti told the visitor. “But she’s not home.”

Another memory preserves the night that a barn across the road burst into flames following a lightning strike. Patti’s youngest sister, Kimberly, had just been born, and “I went outside and I was holding her, watching this barn in flames. Hundreds of bats lived in it, and you could hear them screeching, and see bats and owls and buzzards flying out,” she told the
Observer
in 2005. She elaborated in a note published in her collected lyrics book
Patti Smith Complete:
“And Kimberly was shining in my hands like a phosphorescent living doll.” The images of that night would become the poem “Kimberly.”

But Patti was not yet a poet herself. As she approached her teens, her imagination turned toward the visual arts. It was not a purely aesthetic love; art taught her new ways to confront the challenges of her looming adolescence. “With a lower class upbringing, it was real desirable to have big tits and big ass,” she told
Hit Parader’s
Lisa Robinson in 1976. Patti, on the other hand, was so thin—“skinny” and “creepy” as she put it—that her body tormented her. When it was time for her class to be weighed before gym class, she would load her pockets down with heavy metal locks—anything to add a few pounds to her scrawny frame. Until a teacher took Patti to the school library and hauled a few art books out, opening them to the Modiglianis and the El Grecos, giving the insecure young woman for the very first time something physical to which she could relate her appearance. Patti had just one difficulty, as she confessed to
Oui
magazine: “It wasn’t easy for a girl who fancied herself the cosmic mistress of Modigliani to sing Tex Ritter songs.”

Not all her pursuits were artistic, however. Interviewed by Penny Green for Andy Warhol’s
Interview
in 1973, she laughed, “Yes, I’m just a Jersey girl. I really loved that I was from South Jersey because it was a real spade area. I learned to dance real good … there was a lot of colloquial stuff I picked up, that’s where I get my bad speech from. Even though my father was an intellectual, I wanted to be like the kids I went to school with, so I intentionally never learned to speak good…. I thought I couldn’t use it on the dance floor, so what good was it?”

She practiced dancing, teaching herself in her bedroom by loading a stack of singles onto her record player and dancing till they’d all played through. Then she’d pile on another batch and dance them away as well.

She enrolled in Deptford Township High School, and although she was perhaps a little disingenuous when she told
Blast
magazine’s Michael Gross that “the school I went to was a real experimental school,” in her own mind that may have been the case. “It’s like a weird school because it was one of these new kind of experimental schools where they sent special children, geniuses. High-strung geniuses whose fathers were head of MIT or something. Retarded kids and lots of Spanish-speaking people. There were a lot of epileptics. It was one of the schools that accepted epileptic children and had a regular program for them.

“My school nobody was weird. Everybody was special in their own way. So I never got a sense of myself being any different than anybody else. I was sort of like a beatnik kid, but so what?”

It was at Deptford that Patti found herself plunging, not necessarily consciously, into the increasingly muddy waters of the nascent civil rights movement. Buoyed by the Buddhist belief system that she was slowly acquiring, she found herself cultivating ever sharper instincts not for the political aims of the upcoming struggles but for their humanitarian goals. She may well have been the first girl in her class to date a black boy following Deptford High’s integration, andshe was certainly the only one whose parents did not raise hell when they found out.

The fact that she was dating, however, did not mean that she was sexually active. “My one regret in life,” she told
Penthouse’s
Nick Tosches in 1976, “is that I didn’t know about masturbating. Think of all that fun I could’ve had!” As a teenager, she said, “I was horny, but I was innocent ‘cause I was a real-late bloomer and not particularly attractive…. Nobody told me that girls got horny. It was tragic, ‘cause I had all these feelings inside me…. I never touched myself or anything…. I did it all in my mind.”

All of her report cards, she recalled, complained that “Patti Lee daydreams too much.” They did not have a clue what she was daydreaming about.

Not all of her passions were conventional. Later in her teens, Patti relaxed into writing a series of lengthy poems in which she was arrested, for crimes unknown, by a beautifully blond Nazi sadist, and then tortured to death or orgasm, whichever came first. The notion that the two were not mutually incompatible, however, had its genesis in a most unexpected place: in the journals of Anne Frank. Since the 1959 release of a movie based on the young Jewish girl’s diary of the years she spent hiding from the Nazis, the media had taken a fresh look at the atrocities that were the backdrop to Frank’s tale. “I’d read that stuff and I’d get really cracklin’ down there,” Patti told
Penthouse.

By sixteen, Patti had decided it was time to put a stop to her yearning. She was reading
Peyton Place,
Grace Metalious’s then-shocking novel of the secret lives of small-town America, and one scene stuck in her mind: the one where heroine Allison McKenzie is told that you can tell if a woman is a virgin by the way she walks. It was a horrifying revelation for Patti, because it meant that everybody would know the same thing about her. So she set about cultivating what she described to Nick Tosches as “a fucked walk,” by watching actress Jeanne Moreau. “You watch her walk across the street on the screen,” she decided, “and you know she’s had at least a hundred men.”

Patti, on the other hand, had not had one, and she sometimes doubted that she ever would. Journalist Richard Meltzer later reflectedon the stories she told him during the years when she was best known as a poetess, and he was still laughing about them five years later. Like how she didn’t have a birth certificate any more, because the rats ate it, how her father was a gangster and her aunt once spent a hot night with Hank Williams, but best of all, how her father explained the facts of life by telling her, “The erect male penis is put into the female vagina, and you only do that when you’re in love.” And so, she told Meltzer, the first time a guy asked to fuck her, she said no, because she didn’t love him. So he asked if he could eat her instead, and what did Patti reply? She said she’d have to ask her father. Who told her, “Forget it.”

When American female teendom became obsessed with having eyes made up like Cleopatra, as played by Elizabeth Taylor; or, later, when the Ronettes sent their distinctive hairstyles soaring into vogue, Patti just shrugged and went back to her books. She once remarked that she read her entire childhood away—that she was far more intrigued by her interior world than the outside. When she did seek out idols, they were the ones her peers may not even have acknowledged: Edith Piaf. Folk singer Joan Baez. Actresses Moreau, Ava Gardner, and Anouk Aimée.

Aimée was the rising star who exploded out of Fellini’s
La dolce vita
in 1960 (alongside another of Patti’s later icons, Nico), shrouded in black dress and dark glasses, to disguise the black eye that she would soon be revealing. “Anouk Aimée with that black eye,” Patti marveled in a 1976
Circus
interview with Scott Cohen. “It made me always want to have a black eye forever. It made me want to get a guy to knock me around. I’d always look great.”

Still, she remained an incorrigible tomboy. “I was always jealous because I wasn’t homosexual,” she declared at a poetry reading in New York in 1975. “I’d have these dreams that I could steal boys’ skins at night, and put them on and pee and stuff like that.” In the poem “Piss Factory,” she mused on
the way boys smell … that odor rising roses and ammonia,
and noted the way their schoolboy legs
flap under the desk in study hall
and
the way their dicks droop like lilacs.

She tried to remain romantic, to convince herself that her first love would be her forever love. But it didn’t work out like that. She was the girl who did the guys’ homework for them but was never rewarded withanything more than a thank-you. She was crazy about boys, but she was
one of
the boys, great to hang with, but not to date. She recalled one in particular, the splendidly named Butchie Magic. He allowed her to carry his switchblade. But that was as far as their relationship went. No matter whom she fell for, he was always the most inaccessible, not to mention inappropriate, guy around.

But she was a survivor. She would tell
Rolling Stone,
“I grew up in a tougher part of Jersey than Bruce Springsteen”—raising herself above the last Jersey native to make it big in the mid-1970s. “Every high school dance I went to, somebody was stabbed.” Talking to
Penthouse,
she ran through a mental checklist of the “cool people” whom she hung out with in her teens. Most, she declared, were either dead or in jail. “A couple are pimps in Philly.”

And at the same time as she struggled to be accepted as something more than the class clown—an appellation that would pursue her into the pages of her high school yearbook—she delighted in her outsider status. In fact, she worked to cultivate it.

“The worst wallflower weirdo” joined the jazz club and fell under the spell of John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, and Miles Davis. She demonstrated her precocity by trying to get into some of Philadelphia’s most legendary nightspots: “I tried to hang at jazz clubs like the Showboat, just to see the musicians,” she told the
Philadelphia City Paper,
“but I was way too young.” She owned her own copy of Coltrane’s
My Favorite Things,
and when Coltrane played the local nightclub Pep’s, she made her way in and was able to stick around for one complete song, the opening “Nature Boy,” before she was carded and evicted.

Patti graduated high school in June 1964 and promptly sought out a place at Glassboro State Teachers College (now Rowan University) in Glassboro, New Jersey. The two-year program would ostensibly equip her for a career as an art teacher. She loathed it, and hated even more the fact that she had to work through her vacations to pay her way through its classes, in minimum-wage factory jobs that devoured the only free time she had to look forward to.

“I was really a good girl,” she told
Blast
magazine. “I didn’t curse and I was a virgin and I didn’t drink or nothing when I went to college.” And to Amy Gross, she added, “I was in my Greta Garbo period…. I was so innocent. I didn’t even know there was a war on…. All I knew in South Jersey was black culture.”

Her horizons expanded. She would take the bus up Broad Street from her Woodbury home and get out in Camden, New Jersey. She would buy an orange juice and some donuts, then stand and stare at the Walt Whitman Hotel. In her imagination, the great man himself had stayed there. Patti was also in Philly a lot now, taking the bus across the river and spending her Saturdays in morning classes at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

She also plunged into Philly’s Jewish culture—for its aesthetic rather than its religious value. “They were so hip,” she told Amy Gross. “They wore black leotards, they had sports cars and all these art supplies. So I went back to Glassboro dressed like a Jewish art student.

“I failed everything—I was so undisciplined.”

2

ANNA OF THE HARBOR

A
S P
ATTI TRIED
on different personas, she also cultivated an array of life ambitions. She would listen to Coltrane and then write poetry, trusting the freedom of one to unlock the doors to the other. She dreamed of being an actress like Jeanne Moreau or Anouk Aimée. And she looked forward to the day when she would become an artist’s mistress, the power behind the throne of creation. One day, she imagined, she would subsume herself behind the requirements of a man who would answer all of her questions, who could tell her what to say and what to think, when to laugh and when to cry. One day. But until then, she would dream—of Coltrane, of Bob Dylan, of William Burroughs. And Rimbaud. Especially Rimbaud.