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Some friendships are too beautiful for words. Fortunately, in the hands of Patti Smith, the 22-year bond between her and Robert Mapplethorpe is not one of them. But Just Kids is more than a memoir of a relationship that started as a romance and later, when Mapplethorpe realized he was gay, endured as a profound, platonic mating of souls. It is a rare portrait of the artists as a young man and woman. Twinned not only in their looks but in their inchoate desire to produce something, anything as long as it was visionary—to uncork an insistent creative impulse—each of these 20somethings was the other’s muse, critic and best friend from the get-go. In a riveting way, Smith dispels any notion that the brassy androgyne that defined the avant-garde scene with the 1975 release of Horses, her seminal rock/punk/poetry record, sprang full-blown from an Art God. Similarly, Mapplethorpe went through many mutations—as an artist and a man—before finding his signature blend of elegance and sado-masochism. Indeed, he only picked up a camera after Smith repeatedly suggested that he take his own pictures to create the collages he favored. Finally, though, as the book closes in on Mapplethorpe’s death from AIDS in 1989, it soars as a love story—the kind of loyal lifetime love that is surely uncommon and perhaps endures for the very fact that it was nonsexual. “Nobody sees as we do, Patti,” Mapplethorpe told her, and it’s clear the comment applies not only to their artistic visions but also to how they perceived each other.
The setting is New York City, late 1960s-early 1970s. Warhol, Reed, Joplin, Verlaine, Hendrix, Rundgren, Dylan, Slick, Shepard, Burroughs, Corso, Ginsberg—they’re all there along with many others. Times Square is still a filthy, exciting patchwork of sex workers, street characters and cheap thrills. The Chelsea Hotel, where Mapplethorpe and Smith shack up for a while as he recovers from abscessed wisdom teeth and gonorrhea, is exactly what you think it is. Impoverished, curious, caring, the two lovers shoplift, eat badly, exchange little gifts, and encourage the outsider status that fuels their art. Reflecting on their differing childhoods, “We used to laugh at our small selves,” Smith writes, “saying that I was a bad girl trying to be good and that he was a good boy trying to be bad. Through the years these roles would reverse, then reverse again, until we came to accept our dual natures. We contained opposing principles, light and dark.”
In writing this book, Smith seems to have tapped yet another side of her nature. She departs from the incantatory style of her early poetry and the shamanistic presence known to her concertgoers. Loving but measured journalism might well describe the memoir’s style. Make no mistake, it’s as vivid a read as anything she has written until now and will not disappoint longtime fans even as it opens the doors to fans of his, or readers who want to visit an era of boundary-crossing now seemingly impossible in the era of marketing-ready music and art. After Mappelthorpe dies, Smith reflects on the mute state she finds herself in. “Why can’t I write something that would wake the dead,” she asks. “That pursuit is what burns most deeply.” The question has no answer, but I will submit that she has written something that stirs the soul.
