Just Kids

to choose any one I wanted. We looked at a lot of Martins, including some pretty ones with mother-of-pearl inlay, but what caught my eye was a battered black Gibson, a 1931 Depression model. The back had been cracked and repaired, and the gears of the tuning pegs were rusted. But something about it captured my heart. I thought by the looks of it that nobody would want it but me.

“Are you sure this is the one, Patti Lee?” Sam asked me.

“It’s the only one,” I said.

Sam paid two hundred dollars for it. I thought the owner would be glad, but he followed us down the street saying, “If you ever don’t want it, I’ll buy it back.”

It was a beautiful gesture that Sam got me the guitar. It put me in mind of a movie I saw called Beau Geste, with Gary Cooper. He plays a soldier in the French Foreign Legion who, at the price of his own reputation, shields the woman who raised him. I decided to call the guitar Bo, a short form of Beau. It was to remind me of Sam, who in truth had fallen in love with the guitar himself.

Bo, which I still have and treasure, became my true guitar. On it, I have written the greater measure of my songs. The first was written for Sam, anticipating his leave-taking. Our conscience was closing in on us, in our work and life. We were as close as ever, but it was getting time for him to go and we both knew it.

One night we were sitting in silence, thinking the same thing. He leapt up and brought his typewriter onto the bed. “Let’s write a play,” he said.

“I don’t know anything about writing plays,” I answered.

“It’s easy,” he said. “I’ll start.” He described my room on Twenty-third Street: the license plates, the Hank Williams records, the toy lamb, the bed on the floor, and then introduced his own character, Slim Shadow.

Then he shoved the typewriter my way and said, “You’re on, Patti Lee.”

I decided to call my character Cavale. I got it from a French-Algerian writer named Albertine Sarrazin, who, like Genet, was a precocious orphan who moved seamlessly between literature and crime. My favorite of her books was called La Cavale, which is the French word for escape.

Sam was right. It wasn’t hard at all to write the play. We just told each other stories. The characters were ourselves, and we encoded our love, imagination, and indiscretions in Cowboy Mouth. Perhaps it wasn’t so much a play as a ritual. We ritualized the end of our adventure and created a portal of escape for Sam.

Cavale is the criminal in the story. She kidnaps Slim and holes him up in her lair. The two of them love and spar, and create a language of their own, improvising poetry. When we got to the part where we had to improvise an argument in a poetic language, I got cold feet. “I can’t do this,” I said. “I don’t know what to say.”

“Say anything,” he said. “You can’t make a mistake when you improvise.”

“What if I mess it up? What if I screw up the rhythm?”

“You can’t,” he said. “It’s like drumming. If you miss a beat, you create another.”

In this simple exchange, Sam taught me the secret of improvisation, one that I have accessed my whole life.

Cowboy Mouth opened at the end of April at the American Place Theatre on West Forty-sixth Street. In the play, Cavale tries to recreate Slim into her image of a rock and roll savior. Slim, at first intoxicated with the idea and beguiled by Cavale, finally has to tell her that he can’t realize her dream. Slim Shadow goes back into his own world, his family, his responsibilities, leaving Cavale alone, setting her free.

Sam was excited because the play was good, but the reality of exposing himself onstage was deeply stressful. Directed by Robert Glaudini, the rehearsals were uneven and high-spirited but unfettered by an audience. The first preview was for local schoolchildren, and it was liberating as the kids laughed and cheered and egged us on. It was if we were collaborating with them. But at the official preview, it was as if Sam woke up, having to confront real people with his real problems.

On the third night, Sam disappeared. We closed the play. And like Slim Shadow, Sam returned to his own world, his family, and his responsibilities.

Experiencing the play taught me things about myself as well. I couldn’t imagine how Cavale’s image of a “rock ’n’ roll Jesus with a cowboy mouth” could apply to anything I was doing, but as we sang, sparred, and drew each other out, I found myself at home onstage. I was no actress; I drew no line between life and art. I was the same on- as offstage.

Before Sam left New York City for Nova Scotia, he gave me some money in an envelope. It was for me to take care of myself.

He looked at me, my cowboy with Indian ways. “You know, the dreams you had for me weren’t my dreams,” he said. “Maybe those dreams are meant for you.”

* * *

I was at a crossroads, not sure of what to do. Robert did not gloat when Sam left. And when Steve Paul offered to take me to Mexico with some other musicians to write songs, Robert encouraged me to go. Mexico represented two things that I loved: coffee and Diego Rivera. We arrived in Acapulco in mid-June and stayed in a sprawling villa overlooking the sea. I didn’t get much songwriting done, but I drank a lot of coffee.

A dangerous storm drove everyone home, but I stayed on, and eventually made my way back through Los Angeles. It was there I saw a huge billboard for the Doors’ new album, L.A. Woman, an image of a woman crucified on a telegraph pole. A car drove by and I heard the strains of their new single coming over the radio, “Riders on the Storm.” I felt remorse that I had almost forgotten what an important influence Jim Morrison had been. He had led me on the path of merging poetry into rock and roll, and I resolved to buy the album and write a worthy piece on his behalf.

By the time I returned to New York, fragmented news of his passing in Paris filtered back from Europe. For a day or two, no one was certain what had happened. Jim had died in his bathtub from mysterious causes; on July 3, the same date as Brian Jones.

* * *

As I ascended the stairs I knew something was wrong. I could hear Robert crying out, “I love you! I hate you! I love you!” I flung open the door to Robert’s studio. He was staring into an oval mirror, flanked by a black whip and a devil’s mask he had spray-painted months before. He was having a bad trip, wrestling good and evil. The devil was gaining on him, morphing his features, which like the mask were distorted and blood red.

I had no experience with this kind of situation. Remembering how he had helped me when I was dosed at the Chelsea, I calmly talked him down as I removed the mask and mirror from his sight. At first he looked at me as if I were a stranger, but soon his labored breathing slowed down. Exhausted, he followed me to the bed and put his head in my lap and fell asleep.

His dual nature troubled me, mostly because I feared it troubled him. When we first met, his work reflected a belief in God as universal love. Somehow he got off track. His Catholic preoccupation with good and evil reasserted itself, as if he had to choose one over the other. He had broken from the Church, now it was breaking within him. His trip magnified his fear that he had aligned himself irrevocably with darker forces, his Faustian pact.

Robert took to describing himself as evil, partially joking or just needing to be different. I sat and watched as he strapped on a leather codpiece. He was certainly more Dionysian than satanic, embracing freedom and heightened experience.

“You know you don’t have to be evil to be different,” I said. “You are different. Artists are their own breed.”

He gave me a hug. The codpiece pressed against me. “Robert,” I squealed, “you’re so bad.”

“I told you,” he said, winking.

He went off and I went back to my side. I caught sight of him through my window as he hurried past the YMCA. The artist and hustler was also the good son and altar boy. I believed he would once again embrace the knowledge that there is no pure evil, nor pure good, only purity.

Not having the income to devote to one pursuit, Robert continued working in several media simultaneously. He shot film when he could afford it, made necklaces when he had the available components, and created constructions with found materials. But there was no question that he was gravitating toward photography.

I was Robert’s first model and he was his second. He began by taking photographs of me incorporating my treasures or his ritual objects, and graduated to nudes and portraits. I was eventually relieved of some of my duties by David, who was the perfect muse for Robert. David was photogenic and flexible, open to some of Robert’s unusual scenarios, such as lying clothed in nothing but socks, wrapped naked in black net, or gagged in a bow