They were just kids
From the complex mind of American musician and poet Patti Smith comes “Just Kids” — a raw and inevitably honest account of the human experience.
It’s a memoir highlighting lives lived to the fullest and people who wanted desperately to make it.
The book begins, in the very first sentence, with the death of Robert Mapplethorpe, who became Smith’s muse and closest confidant. To Patti, Mapplethorpe was art — an all encapsulated piece personified.
Following the foreword, the book is written chronologically and takes the reader through the youth of Smith and her arrival and introduction to the underbelly of the 1970s art scene in New York City.
She paints an enigmatic picture: one of art and music and sex and poverty and exploration exploding in Brooklyn in the 60s and 70s. This is an ode to Smith and Mapplethorpe’s formative years as creators and thinkers, painters and photographers, as writers and lovers.
“The light poured through the windows upon his photographs and the poem of us sitting together a last time. Robert dying: creating silence. Myself, destined to live, listening closely, destined closely to a silence that would take a lifetime to express.”
Before she established herself as the “mother of punk” with the release of her debut album Horses, in 1975, Smith was young and in love with poets such as Arthur Rimbaud, Charles Baudelaire and Bob Dylan. Born in 1946 and hailing from the north side of Chicago, she realized she wasn’t meant to be a waitress like her mother and on July 3, 1967 hopped a bus to Brooklyn, New York.
Upon arrival in New York City in 1967, Smith was in possession of nothing but stolen money from a later-returned purse and an address. The address leads her to a brownstone and a sleeping boy whom she describes looking like a “hippie shepherd” — Robert Mapplethorpe.
“It was the summer Coltrane died. The summer of “Crystal Ship”. Flower children raised their empty arms and China exploded the H-bomb. Jimi Hendrix set his guitar in flames in Monetery. AM radio played “Ode to Billie Joe.” There were riots in Newark, Milwaukee, and Detroit. It was the summer of Elvira Madigan, the summer of love. And in this shifting, inhospitable atmosphere, a chance encounter changed the course of my life. It was the summer I met Robert Mapplethorpe.”
Mapplethorpe was ambitious. He was an artist himself and they immediately formed a bond tied through obsession with their crafts. The oxymoron of Smith’s simple yet achingly intricate prose tells the tale of two desperately poor artists who had a record player, their work and each other.
The reverence with which Smith writes of her ever-evolving relationship with Mapplethorpe speaks to the awe and respect she held for him. “Robert and I kept our vow. Neither would leave the other. I never saw him through the lens of sexuality. My picture of him remained intact. He was the artist of my life.”
Smith’s uncanny ability to plant the reader right in the middle of the room makes it seem as though we sat in room 204 at the Chelsea Hotel, drank bad coffee at Max’s Kansas City, stood behind the camera lens with Robert and witnessed every stroke of genius as Patti wrote feverishly, surrounded by discarded paper, the tinny sound of History of Motown on the record player.
They were young and figuring it out with the backdrop of the Brooklyn skyline behind them.
“There were days, rainy gray days, when the streets of Brooklyn were worthy of a photograph, every window the lens of a Leica, the view grainy and immobile. We gathered our colored pencils and sheets of paper and drew like wild, feral children into the night, until, exhausted, we fell into bed. We lay in each other’s arms, still awkward but happy, exchanging breathless kisses into sleep.”
Smith writes not to chronicle the success they both found, but the moments right before they turned that corner. She writes on moments of naivete, innocence and the hope that accompanies potential.
“One day we were walking toward the fountain, the epicenter of activity, when an older couple stopped and openly observed us. Robert enjoyed being noticed, and he affectionately squeezed my hand. “Oh take their picture,” said the woman to her bemused husband, “I think they’re artists.” “Oh go on,” he said. “They’re just kids.””