Dancing Barefoot: The Patti Smith Story Read Online Free

further weight to the already barely manageable medical bills.
    One of Patti’s most profound memories of the period was of the day a Household Finance debt collector was banging on the front door, trying to pick up the money her parents owed. Her mother told Patti to tell them she was out, then hid herself in another part of the house. “My mommy’s in the bathroom,” Patti told the visitor. “But she’s not home.”
    Another memory preserves the night that a barn across the road burst into flames following a lightning strike. Patti’s youngest sister, Kimberly, had just been born, and “I went outside and I was holding her, watching this barn in flames. Hundreds of bats lived in it, and you could hear them screeching, and see bats and owls and buzzards flying out,” she told the Observer in 2005. She elaborated in a note published in her collected lyrics book Patti Smith Complete: “And Kimberly was shining in my hands like a phosphorescent living doll.” The images of that night would become the poem “Kimberly.”
    But Patti was not yet a poet herself. As she approached her teens, her imagination turned toward the visual arts. It was not a purely aesthetic love; art taught her new ways to confront the challenges of her looming adolescence. “With a lower class upbringing, it was real desirable to have big tits and big ass,” she told Hit Parader’s Lisa Robinson in 1976. Patti, on the other hand, was so thin—“skinny” and “creepy” as she put it—that her body tormented her. When it was time for her class to be weighed before gym class, she would load her pockets down with heavy metal locks—anything to add a few pounds to her scrawny frame. Until a teacher took Patti to the school library and hauled a few art books out, opening them to the Modiglianis and the El Grecos, giving the insecure young woman for the very first time something physical to which she could relate her appearance. Patti had just one difficulty, as she confessed to Oui magazine: “It wasn’t easy for a girl who fancied herself the cosmic mistress of Modigliani to sing Tex Ritter songs.”
    Not all her pursuits were artistic, however. Interviewed by Penny Green for Andy Warhol’s Interview in 1973, she laughed, “Yes, I’m just a Jersey girl. I really loved that I was from South Jersey because it was a real spade area. I learned to dance real good … there was a lot of colloquial stuff I picked up, that’s where I get my bad speech from. Even though my father was an intellectual, I wanted to be like the kids I went to school with, so I intentionally never learned to speak good…. I thought I couldn’t use it on the dance floor, so what good was it?”
    She practiced dancing, teaching herself in her bedroom by loading a stack of singles onto her record player and dancing till they’d all played through. Then she’d pile on another batch and dance them away as well.
    She enrolled in Deptford Township High School, and although she was perhaps a little disingenuous when she told Blast magazine’s Michael Gross that “the school I went to was a real experimental school,” in her own mind that may have been the case. “It’s like a weird school because it was one of these new kind of experimental schools where they sent special children, geniuses. High-strung geniuses whose fathers were head of MIT or something. Retarded kids and lots of Spanish-speaking people. There were a lot of epileptics. It was one of the schools that accepted epileptic children and had a regular program for them.
    “My school nobody was weird. Everybody was special in their own way. So I never got a sense of myself being any different than anybody else. I was sort of like a beatnik kid, but so what?”
    It was at Deptford that Patti found herself plunging, not necessarily consciously, into the increasingly muddy waters of the nascent civil rights movement. Buoyed by the Buddhist belief system that she was slowly acquiring, she found herself