Sitting at Wimmer's Place, Bein' Just Kids

Book Gang wrapped up our reading of Just Kids by Patti Smith on June 27th with a rock 'n roll ladies night at the posh pad of Wimmer. Her deluxe velvetty wrap-around brown sofa and backdrop of Smith's Horses record (authentically played on vinyl, nice touch!) provided the perfect conversation pit to revisit Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe's young days of romance in Washington Sq. Park, as residents of the Chelsea Hotel, and young lovers, artists and misfits in the 1970s New York City/Greenwich Village/Chelsea scene.

Many of us readers took note that Smith sure drops a lot of names when it comes to painting the Chelsea Hotel scene: Grace Slick and the other members of Jefferson Airplace swishing through the lobby, Patti running Bob Dylan and Bobby Neuwirth and befriending them, sharing a poem she wrote for Janis Joplin WITH Janis Jopin (the original Pearl)...

And then she and Robert sharing times there in the back of Max's Kansas were always the Warhol Factory crew that Mapplethorpe tried so hard to rub elbows with. Did we fault him for being so fame-hungry? No. We figured out that everybody back then was. Even Smith admits that they both fed off one another's passions for fame. Artists were simply who they were, and they both wanted the world to recognize their art.

The greatest catch of the book was Smith and Mapplethorpe's back-and-forth, undying love and respect for one another. Even after Mapplethorpe came out and Patti Smith moved on to other lovers, they remained true friends, muses for one another and deeply entwined twin-souls. She talks about the time that they moved from the Chelsea to a much larger, two-room studio loft space. The walls were white and sparse and the windows gi-normous. Robert took the bigger room in the back for his studio, and she took the smaller front room, where her eclectic, sporadic, artist mess quickly erupted and she had trouble working. She writes of sitting on the floor, trying to set up her typewriter on a crate in front of her, and getting frustrated because she could not work in her own mess. Robert was just a wall away, and his meticulous, orderly enclave provided her respite from her own crazy, messy den. She came to him, wrapped in a sheet after they'd been separated for a little while by other lovers and psychic space, and he said to her, simply, "Patti, what took you so long?"

This book is full of enchanting memories, gorgeous moving confessions, remembered moments of old New York, and the true lure of carefree youth, raw talent, and all kinds of promise and possibility. It gripped onto our hearts like velcro and would not let go, all the way through the very end, and the quiet, peaceful goodbye that Smith faced, alone in her kitchen, with one simple phone call.