Dancing Barefoot: The Patti Smith Story by Dave Thompson Page A

cement his position among the city’s literary elite by publishing an excerpt from his book The Basketball Diaries, an autobiographical account of falling off the rails at oneof the city’s most exclusive private schools, Trinity. Carroll had served a stint in Rikers for possession of heroin; by spring 1970 he was living at the Chelsea, penning the poetry that would become the Pulitzer-nominated Living at the Movies.
    Inevitably, he and Patti met just outside the Chelsea, although Carroll had seen her around before that, “checking me out” at Max’s Kansas City or watching his readings at St. Mark’s Church. According to Carroll’s account in Please Kill Me, Patti and Mapplethorpe were fighting as Carroll came into view, but the battle stopped the moment she spotted him. “Hey, you’re Jim Carroll, right? I’m Patti.”
    They small-talked for a moment, and then Patti asked if she could drop by his room the following day. She had a book about Native Americans that she wanted to give him.
    “Sure,” Carroll began. “I’m in room …”
    “I know what room you’re in,” she replied.
    “Already he was pretty much universally recognized as the best poet of his generation,” Patti told the New York Times’ William Grimes in 2009. “The work was sophisticated and elegant. He had beauty.” The wiry blond also became her confidant and sounding board for at least as long as their relationship lasted, a tempestuous era that Carroll later celebrated in his book, Forced Entries: The Downtown Diaries, 1971–1973.
    Moving into the West Twenty-Third Street loft that Patti and Mapplethorpe had started renting as an “art factory” but that quickly supplanted the Chelsea as their home, he followed Bobby Neuwirth into the select band of people with whom she’d share her poetry. She’d been seduced, Carroll said, not only by the fact that he, too, was a poet, but also by his heroin habit. “I think she would have been disappointed if I’d stopped,” he told Patricia Morrisroe.
    But an even more powerful figure was approaching, one who would finally offer Patti the strength to stop dreaming about her ambitions and start living them.
    Sam Shepard, three years Patti’s senior, had arrived in New York City in 1963. He’d worked as a bus boy around Greenwich Village while he insinuated himself into the city’s lifeblood. He was a musician, a playwright, an author, an actor, and over the course of the next five years, each of these ambitions drew him into its soul.
    The band he played drums for, the Holy Modal Rounders, made something of a local impact even before they landed a track on the soundtrack to the film Easy Rider in 1969. Shepard was a fixture off-off-Broadway, leading the Theatre Genesis—another of the artistic endeavors that called St. Mark’s Church home—to glory. He collected Obies, the Village Voice’s greatest theatrical award, like other actors collected reviews: by 1970, he had won half a dozen.
    If there was any man on the arts scene at that time who could have given Patti Smith a glimpse of her own future glory, it was Shepard.

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    THE AMAZING TALE OF SKUNKDOG
    P ATTI WAS DATING Todd Rundgren, the brilliant young Philadelphian who had escaped the clutches of his last band, the Nazz, to launch a wildly idiosyncratic solo career from the upstate New York headquarters of his manager Albert Grossman—the same Albert Grossman who had once managed Dylan and now handled Joplin. Bobby Neuwirth had introduced Patti to Rundgren, and now Rundgren introduced her to Sam Shepard, backstage at a Rounders gig at the Village Gate. His own relationship with Patti wound up soon afterward.
    Patti quickly discovered that Shepard was married, with a young son, no less, but their attraction, she insisted, was so pronounced that neither she nor Sam had any choice in the matter. They were destined to be together, for however long they could last. Together they visited the Italian gypsy tattooist Vali to be engraved