Just Kids

presented my dream to publishers, to travel magazines and literary foundations. But I found the imagined secret papers of Rimbaud were not a fashionable cause in 1973. Far from letting it go, I felt the idea had grown to the extent that I truly believed I was destined to find them. When I dreamed of a frankincense tree on a hill throwing no shadow, I believed the valise to be buried there.

I decided to ask Sam to sponsor my trip to Ethiopia. He was adventurous and sympathetic and was intrigued by my proposition. Robert was appalled at the idea. He succeeded in convincing Sam that I would get lost, kidnapped, or be eaten alive by wild hyenas. We sat in a cafe on Christopher Street and, as our laughter mingled with the steam of many espressos, I bade farewell to the coffee fields of Harar, resigned that the treasure’s resting place would not be disturbed in this century.

I really wanted to leave the Strand. I hated being stuck in the basement unpacking overstock. Tony Ingrassia, who had directed me in Island, asked me to be in a one-act play called Identity. I read the script and I just didn’t get it. It was a dialogue between me and another girl. After a few lackluster rehearsals he asked me to show more tenderness toward the girl. “You’re too stiff, too distant,” he said, exasperated. I was openly affectionate with my sister Linda and applied that in my interpretation of tender. “These girls are lovers. You have to get that across.” He threw his arms up. I was taken aback. There was nothing in the script that intimated this. “Just pretend she’s one of your girlfriends.” Tony and I had a heated exchange that ended with him incredulous with laughter. “You don’t shoot up and you’re not a lesbian. What do you actually do?”

I did my best to feel up the other girl, but I decided this would be my last play. I didn’t have the stuff to be an actor.

Robert had Sam bail me out of the Strand, hiring me to catalog his vast collection of books and kachina dolls that he was donating to a university. Without realizing it, I had said goodbye to traditional employment. I never punched a clock again. I made my own time and my own money.

After failing as a believable lesbian in Identity, I decided that if I took the stage again, it would be as myself. I joined forces with Jane Friedman, who found me an occasional job reading poetry in bars. Jane had a successful publicity firm and enjoyed a reputation for supporting the efforts of fringe artists. Although I was not enthusiastically received, it sharpened my abilities to spar with a hostile audience with some amount of humor. She arranged for me to have a series of slots opening for bands like the New York Dolls at the Mercer Arts Center, located in the decaying Broadway Central Hotel, a once-opulent nineteenth-century edifice where Diamond Jim Brady and Lillian Russell dined, where Jubilee Jim Fisk was shot on the marble staircase. If there were few remnants of its former grandeur, it now housed a culturally rich community, including theater, poetry, and rock and roll.

Performing poetry night after night to an unreceptive and unruly crowd who were primed to see the New York Dolls proved a challenging education. I had no musicians or crew, but the soul of my sibling army, Linda, acted as roadie, foil, and guardian angel. She had an unaffected simplicity, yet could be fearless. It was she who took on the unenviable task of passing the hat when our troupe had sung and performed on the streets of Paris. At the Mercer, Linda manned my bag of tricks, which included a small tape recorder, a megaphone, and a toy piano. I read my poems, fielded insults, and sometimes sang songs accompanied by bits of music on my cassette player.

At the end of each performance, Jane would take a five-dollar bill out of her back pocket, saying that was our cut of the take. It took me a while to understand that I had gotten no pay at all, and that Jane was paying me, literally, out of her own pocket. It was a tough and spirited run, and by summer I was starting to hit my stride, with people calling out for poems and genuinely seeming to be in my corner. I took to ending each performance with “Piss Factory,” a prose poem I had improvised, framing my escape from a nonunion assembly line to the freedom of New York City. It seemed to bring the audience and me together.

On Friday, the thirteenth of July, I gave a reading in memory of Jim Morrison on the roof of underground filmmaker Jack Smith’s loft at Greene Street and Canal. It was my own bill, and anyone who was there had come to celebrate Jim Morrison with me. Among them was Lenny Kaye, and although we would not perform together that night, it would soon come to pass that I would not perform without him.

The strong attendance for a self-produced poetry reading fired up Jane. She felt that, together with Lenny, we could find a way to bring my poetry to a wider audience. We even spoke of adding a real piano, which Linda jokingly said would put her out of business. In this she was not wrong. Jane was undaunted. She came from old Broadway stock; her father, Sam Friedman, was a legendary press agent, working with Gypsy Rose Lee, Lotte Lenya, and Josephine Baker, among others. He had seen all the openings and closings Broadway had to offer. Jane had his vision and stubborn determination; she would find another way for us to break on through.

I went back to the typewriter.

* * *

“Patti, no!” Robert gasped. “You’re smoking pot.” I looked up sheepishly. Busted.

I had seen The Harder They Come, and was stirred by the music. When I began listening to the soundtrack, following its trail to Big Youth and the Roys, U and I, it led me back to Ethiopia. I found irresistible the Rastafarian connection to Solomon and Sheba, and the Abyssinia of Rimbaud, and somewhere along the line I decided to try their sacred herb.

That was my secret pleasure until Robert caught me sitting alone, trying to stuff some pot in an empty Kool cigarette wrapper. I had no idea how to roll a joint. I was a little embarrassed, but he sat down on the floor, picked the seeds out of my small stash of Mexican pot, and rolled me a couple of skinny joints. He just grinned at me and we had a smoke, our first together.

With Robert, I was not transported into the Abyssinian plain, but into the valley of uncontrollable laughter. I told him that pot was supposed to be for writing poetry, not fooling around. But all we did was laugh. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s go to the B&H.” It was my first entrance into the outside world stoned on pot. It took an extralong time for me to lace my boots, find my gloves, my cap. Robert stood grinning, watching me moving in circles. I now saw why it took so much time for Harry and Robert to get ready to go to Horn and Hardart.

After that, as fun as it was, I kept my pot smoking to myself, listening to Screaming Target, writing impossible prose. I never thought of pot as a social drug. I liked to use it to work, to think, and eventually for improvising with Lenny Kaye and Richard Sohl as the three of us would gather under a frankincense tree dreaming of Haile Selassie.

* * *

Sam Wagstaff lived on the fifth floor of a classic imposing white structure on the corner of Bowery and Bond. As I climbed the stairs, I always knew that there would be something new and wonderful for me to look at, to touch, to catalog: glass negatives, salt prints of forgotten poets, gravures of the tepees of Hopi Indians. Sam, with Robert’s urging, had begun collecting photographs, first slowly, with an amused curiosity, and then obsessively, like a lepidopterist in a tropical forest. Sam bought what he wanted and sometimes it seemed he wanted everything.

The first photograph Sam bought was an exquisite daguerreotype in a red velvet case with a soft gold clasp. It was in impeccable condition, and Robert’s own daguerreotypes, found in secondhand stores buried among piles of old family photographs, paled in comparison. This at times bothered Robert, who was the first to begin collecting photographs. “I can’t compete with him,” he said somewhat ruefully. “I’ve created a monster.”

The three of us would scour Book Row, the dusty secondhand bookstores that once lined Fourth Avenue. Robert would go through boxes of old postcards, stereo cards, and tintypes carefully to find a gem. Sam, impatient, and not impeded by cost, would simply buy the whole box. I would stand aside listening to them argue. It sounded very familiar.

Scouting bookstores was one of my specialties. In rare instances, I would root out a desirable Victorian cabinet card, or an important portfolio of turn-of-the-century cathedrals, and on one lucky excursion, an overlooked Cameron. It was on the cusp of collecting photography, the last period where one could find a bargain. It was still possible to come upon gravure prints of large-format field photographs by Edward Curtis. Sam was taken with the beauty and the historical value of these photographs of the North American Indian, and acquired several volumes. Later, as we sat on the floor looking at them, in his large empty apartment flooded with natural light, we were impressed not only by the images but by the process. Sam would feel the edge of the photograph between his thumb and forefingers. “There’s something about the paper,” he would say.

Consumed by his new passion, Sam haunted auction houses, often traveling across the sea to acquire a specific photograph. Robert accompanied him on these expeditions, and was sometimes able to influence Sam’s