Even before I knew we were both serious coffee drinkers, like countless others, I’ve been a Patti Smith fan. When her first album, “Horses” was released, it was 1975. I was in college lending my ears to Led Zeppelin, Bruce Springsteen, Pink Floyd and Queen, but Patti’s music mesmerized me in a different way. As a budding writer myself, it did not pass my notice when Rolling Stone magazine anointed Patti a “rock poet,” but more important to me even than her music, was the album cover of “Horses” featuring a black and white portrait of Patti. She looked like no one else and her hair, her air, her clothes, her stance, even her eyebrows were all that I wanted for myself. Patti Smith was smokin’, no, smolderingly cool. Emerging (like Springsteen) from some of the most blighted parts of New Jersey, Patti figured out how to get out using her essentially badass smarts. Patti was born in Chicago, I was from Atlantic City, but we both lived for a few years and went to high school in a tiny rural corner of South Jersey known as Woodbury. When “Horses” was released, Patti was not yet a famous name, but she was already famous in Woodbury for quitting Glassboro State College (now Rowan University) and heading straight out to the highway. She caught the bus to New York City with no particular plan in mind except to pursue her art, instantly turning her into a legend and an idol to kids a few years younger who yearned to do the same thing. When I arrived in Manhattan in the summer of ’76, I glimpsed Patti now and then on the Greenwich Village Streets. Even though she had become the leader of the Patti Smith Group, traveling around the planet singing about Patty Heart, her band financed by Andy Warhol’s friend and lover Sam Wagstaff, when she was in town she still hung out at Max’s Kansas City and continued to live, on and off, in the Chelsea Hotel with her friend and former romantic partner, the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. Mapplethorpe was already pretty famous in 1985 when I hired him to do a photo shoot for a pornographic magazine I was editing. It’s a silly but entertaining story how the publisher didn’t understand the layout and paid Mapplethorpe a kill fee even though at the time I was practically standing on my head shouting, “Don’t you know who Robert Mapplethorpe is?” He didn’t. Mapplethorpe died in ’89. By then Patti was married to Fred “Sonic” Smith, a guitarist for MC5. Fred and Patti met when his band opened a show for her; they married in ’80. By the time Mapplethorpe died of complications from AIDS, Patti was living in a Detroit suburb with Fred and their two kids. She wrote about her relationship with Mapplethorpe in her National Book Award winning memoir, “Just Kids.” I wept reading it, thinking about the three occasions for work I met with Mapplethorpe in his Great Jones Street studio or the Broome Street Bar or his favorite morning place on Lafayette Street, the Noho Star. I’m reading Patti’s memoir now. It’s called “M Train.” In this slender volume she recalls her mid-stage career, traveling to French Guiana to seek out a penal colony visited by Jean Genet; going to Berlin for a meeting of the Continental Drift Club (now disbanded); visiting the grave of Mishio Mishima in Japan. She writes about discovering a tiny run-down house she bought in the Rockaways she calls her “Alamo” and how it was destroyed in Hurricane Sandy and now must be fixed up. She writes about coffee, a dark stream that travels like a river through the pages, take-out coffee, needing coffee, when there’s nothing else, Nescafe. She writes about her New York City morning routine of getting up and feeding the cats and pulling on her watch cap and her dungarees to cross Sixth Avenue in lower Manhattan to get her coffee from Café Ino, the place she considers “her place.” One of the most poignant moments in the book is when she discovers the café has closed. The owner makes her one last coffee. I confess I’m having a tough time finishing the book even though it’s only 253 pages long. I have to keep closing it to practice deep breathing to not feel overwhelmed. I don’t want the “M Train” to end. Smith’s great gift in this book is her great sense of generosity. She shares her favorite writers and musicians and poets, even her favorite TV programs. She has a weakness for “CSI” and is perhaps a little too addicted to “The Killing.” She writes about feeling blocked and feeling sad and that her adaptation to Metro Cards versus subway tokens has not been happy.
As far as structure, she’s kicked the rules to the curb. There’s no particular rhyme or reason to how the chapters unfold and time shifts back and forth. One of the most heartfelt passages in the book is about losing her favorite black coat, gifted on the occasion of her 57th birthday by a poet friend. “It had been his, an ill-fitting, unlined Comme Des Garcons overcoat that I had secretly coveted,” Smith said.
The most important subject Smith covers in her memoir is the concept of time. Patti Smith is older now. She’s 75. “These are modern times,” she tells herself. “But we are not trapped in them.” Through memory, she writes, we can commune with angels. “Shard by shard we are released from the tyranny of so-called time,” Patti Smith writes. And then she picks up her camera and her notebook and heads off for, what else, more coffee.