Dancing Barefoot: The Patti Smith Story Read Online Free Page B

dark glasses, to disguise the black eye that she would soon be revealing. “Anouk Aimée with that black eye,” Patti marveled in a 1976 Circus interview with Scott Cohen. “It made me always want to have a black eye forever. It made me want to get a guy to knock me around. I’d always look great.”
    Still, she remained an incorrigible tomboy. “I was always jealous because I wasn’t homosexual,” she declared at a poetry reading in New York in 1975. “I’d have these dreams that I could steal boys’ skins at night, and put them on and pee and stuff like that.” In the poem “Piss Factory,” she mused on the way boys smell … that odor rising roses and ammonia, and noted the way their schoolboy legs flap under the desk in study hall and the way their dicks droop like lilacs.
    She tried to remain romantic, to convince herself that her first love would be her forever love. But it didn’t work out like that. She was the girl who did the guys’ homework for them but was never rewarded withanything more than a thank-you. She was crazy about boys, but she was one of the boys, great to hang with, but not to date. She recalled one in particular, the splendidly named Butchie Magic. He allowed her to carry his switchblade. But that was as far as their relationship went. No matter whom she fell for, he was always the most inaccessible, not to mention inappropriate, guy around.
    But she was a survivor. She would tell Rolling Stone, “I grew up in a tougher part of Jersey than Bruce Springsteen”—raising herself above the last Jersey native to make it big in the mid-1970s. “Every high school dance I went to, somebody was stabbed.” Talking to Penthouse, she ran through a mental checklist of the “cool people” whom she hung out with in her teens. Most, she declared, were either dead or in jail. “A couple are pimps in Philly.”
    And at the same time as she struggled to be accepted as something more than the class clown—an appellation that would pursue her into the pages of her high school yearbook—she delighted in her outsider status. In fact, she worked to cultivate it.
    “The worst wallflower weirdo” joined the jazz club and fell under the spell of John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, and Miles Davis. She demonstrated her precocity by trying to get into some of Philadelphia’s most legendary nightspots: “I tried to hang at jazz clubs like the Showboat, just to see the musicians,” she told the Philadelphia City Paper, “but I was way too young.” She owned her own copy of Coltrane’s My Favorite Things, and when Coltrane played the local nightclub Pep’s, she made her way in and was able to stick around for one complete song, the opening “Nature Boy,” before she was carded and evicted.
    Patti graduated high school in June 1964 and promptly sought out a place at Glassboro State Teachers College (now Rowan University) in Glassboro, New Jersey. The two-year program would ostensibly equip her for a career as an art teacher. She loathed it, and hated even more the fact that she had to work through her vacations to pay her way through its classes, in minimum-wage factory jobs that devoured the only free time she had to look forward to.
    “I was really a good girl,” she told Blast magazine. “I didn’t curse and I was a virgin and I didn’t drink or nothing when I went to college.” And to Amy Gross, she added, “I was in my Greta Garbo period…. I was so innocent. I didn’t even know there was a war on…. All I knew in South Jersey was black culture.”
    Her horizons expanded. She would take the bus up Broad Street from her Woodbury home and get out in Camden, New Jersey. She would buy an orange juice and some donuts, then stand and stare at the Walt Whitman Hotel. In her imagination, the great man himself had stayed there. Patti was also in Philly a lot now, taking the bus across the river and spending her Saturdays in morning classes at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
    She also plunged