Bohemian rhapsody

JUST KIDS

By Patti Smith  281 pages

Available at Powerbooks

There’s a scene toward the end of Patti Smith’s memoir Just Kids where artist Robert Mapplethorpe, dying of AIDS, clings to the punk poetess and asks this question: “Patti, did art get us?”

Smith’s response at first: “I don’t know, Robert, I don’t know.”

Later on, she explores the idea. “Perhaps it did, but no one could regret that,” Smith writes. “Only a fool would regret being had by art; or a saint.”

You could substitute “love” for “art” here, or any other thing in life we cling to or try to squeeze meaning out of. It all gets us eventually. Life is to be used, after all, and it uses us as well.

Patti Smith is an unlikely poet. Born in New Jersey, with a voice that Rolling Stone publisher Jann Wenner likened to a truck driver’s, she nevertheless aspired to be punk’s Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Jim Morrison and Genet. Whether you like the results of her efforts — in books of poetry, in seminal ‘70s rock albums like “Horses” or “Easter,” in her drawings and paintings — is another matter. Just Kids is about how she found her way, and her voice, through art. Her co-conspirator through all this was Mapplethorpe, a rich kid and former altar boy who quit military academy to become a Greenwich Village artist.

A gallery of New York celebs wander through Just Kids like cameo players, evoking time and place. There’s Jimi Hendrix mounting the steps of Electric Ladyland. There’s Janis Joplin with her bottle of Jack Daniels. There’s playwright Sam Shepard, playing drums in the Holy Modal Rounders. Smith met Mapplethorpe in 1967, and they became friends, then lovers. The two pushed each other into drawing, painting, doing collages. Mapplethorpe told her she should sing songs; Smith said he should take pictures. These would eventually become their calling cards to fame.

The ‘60s bled into the ‘70s, just as the folks gathered in the lobby of the Chelsea Hotel or in the back room of Max’s Kansas City shifted from Beat writers Gregory Corso and William Burroughs to Warhol’s Superstars, and then to rock’s new kids — Tom Verlaine, Richard Hell, and so on. Smith draws lessons from them all. Indeed, she’s so wide-eyed among the hustlers in downtown New York, she doesn’t even know how to fake shooting a syringe or kiss a girl while acting in a friend’s play. “You don’t shoot up, you’re not a lesbian,” the playwright scoffs. “What is it that you do, Patti?”

In contrast, Mapplethorpe is drawn to the dark side: to junkies, S&M people, drugs, extreme gay sex. Through it all, Smith is never judging; rather she’s like a thoughtful sponge, taking it all in, using it, squeezing it out. Mapplethorpe was both best friend and lover to Smith, even after he realized he was homosexual. Patti found her friend’s path to art fascinating, inspiring, but also brutal and frightening. (“Later Robert would say the Church led him to God, and LSD led him to the universe. He also said that art led him to the devil, and sex kept him with the devil.”)

Saints and devils, angels and demons: it’s a dichotomy that infuses Just Kids. But the book also has a gauzy, fairytale quality, as though describing a New York just waiting to accommodate this pair of feral innocents.

Well-written (as you would expect from a published poet) and sometimes moving, Smith’s memoir draws meaning from a life lived inside art. In fact, it might be a new type of memoir: literary hindsight. Smith can’t stop sifting through even the most mundane events in their lives together and unearthing metaphorical gold, or imbuing them with holy light. As a memoirist, she has more in common with the Andre Gides and Jean Cocteaus of old Paris than the hard-nosed tell-all scribblers of today. Yet the material she has to work with couldn’t be more marketable: sex, death, art, celebrities, rock, punk. The only thing missing is money, and that would come later.

The nexus of this NYC demimonde was, of course, Andy Warhol, who is never actually depicted by Smith; rather he exists as a spirit hovering above the ever-changing New York scene (whether an evil or good spirit depends on who you ask). But Smith, who loved William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience, was no wide-eyed naïf: there’s no question she was canny and ambitious. She and Robert constantly talk about their drawings hanging in this or that gallery someday. She makes just the right friends along the way — like Dylan pal Bobby Neuwirth and pop producer Todd Rundgren, both of whom push her into music. Seeing Jim Morrison perform with The Doors the first time, she coolly analyzes his performance, then tells herself: “I can do that.” Patti quietly files away her those life lessons — the value of cutting your hair like Keith Richards’, for example, or how to improvise onstage — until all the stars align for her ascent. When she does eventually hear her own song playing on the radio (1978’s hit, Because the Night) Mapplethorpe frets: “Patti, you got famous before me!”

But in the earlier days, it was Mapplethorpe rescuing Smith from creepy older guys in Automats; or Smith dragging her friend into a cab to the Chelsea Hotel, calling a doctor to treat his trench mouth and high fever. The Chelsea was notorious as a place where poets and artists bartered for rent by offering the owner poems or canvases to decorate the lobby: perfect for two bohos who are practically Siamese twins, in other words. The two soak up the scene until it’s time to move on: Mapplethorpe into his photography and lovers and museum connections, Smith into her rock band, with eventual husband Fred “Sonic” Smith and Czech bassist Ivan Kral providing just the right backdrop for her kinetic word streams. She has a knack for framing moments of rock mythology, such as when Mapplethorpe shot the iconic cover photo for her debut album “Horses” in 1975: “I flung my jacket over my shoulder, Frank Sinatra style. I was full of references. Robert was full of light and shadow.” Canny indeed.

While the two friends eventually go their separate ways, they never really lose touch, and it’s the final deathbed moments between Smith and Mapplethorpe that linger on the page:

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 to a silence that would take a lifetime to express.

In those careful lines, you can’t help sensing: this is a woman who has no apologies for art.