Just Kids

"Before Robert died, I promised him that I would one day write his story," Patti Smith writes in the acknowledgements for her beautiful memoir of her life with Robert Mapplethorpe, Just Kids. I've raved about Patti on her before, but now I want to rave briefly about this love letter to the late 1960's/early 1970's in the New York City art and music scene as a girl from New Jersey found her voice, her art, and her love. Patti comes to the Big Apple and finds her ballast in Robert, a boy who would become known for his provocative black and white photographs of gay men, but a boy with a sweetness and compassion unparalleled. This is a love story of a queer sort, about an artist and a muse and yet those categories ricochet back and forth as Patti tells of encounters with Allen Ginsberg (who was bought her a sandwich thinking her a beautiful boy), the inhabitants of Chelsea Hotel, of sitting with Janis Joplin, of talking to Jimi Hendrix outside a party, of uncovering an inner beauty. It's a story of intimacy that has the rhythm of a Patti Smith novel, that place between singing and poetry where we can all alight if given the chance. It's an elegy, it's a love song. When Patti makes her first album Horses (one of my all time favorites), Robert asks for a song he can dance to and Just Kids is a slow dance, a sad dance, a happy dance, a private dance, a house party at the Chelsea Hotel. It meanders at times, but never loses Patti's incomparable voice and her ability to find beauty in the moments.