PATTI SMITH

My first literary crush was on Patti Smith. Moving to New York in 1982 after graduating from Berkeley was in part a pilgrimage inspired by Patti. I wanted to walk where she had walked in the lower east side, the Chelsea, CBGB, Scribners, and her other haunts.

I was also trying to get away from the first big love of my life, K, who was then living in San Francisco but later made New York his home. We had broken up in 1981, but we were still very much in love and we could not manage to stop seeing each other while living in the same city.

K had turned me onto Patti Smith the first night we slept together, in November of 1977, when he put Horses on his turntable in his room at Barrington Hall. Horses launched our five-year love affair and now forty-plus year friendship, and defined my coming of age. We went to see Patti together at Winterland in May of 1978.

In a moment of passion I took off my shirt and threw it on stage. To my horror when the shirt landed, Patti stopped singing and berated the audience, threatening to stop the show if people threw anything else at her. I was topless in the mosh pit, obviously the source of her anger, ashamed at my stupid gesture of adulation. Then the humiliation of taking the F Bus home to Berkeley with no shirt on. 

K and I became deeply involved in the punk scene in Berkeley and San Francisco, sparked by Patti Smith. She changed everything.

Through the years, I have continued to follow Patti, devouring all her books, from Babel to Just Kids to Bread of Angels. I have gone to every concert and reading I could, including the recent tour that landed her at the Fox Theater in Oakland in November of 2025. She continues to inspire and amaze with her energy, her authenticity, her rawness, her honesty. The entire hall was filled with people shaking their fists singing, People Have the Power!

A picture of her taken by Robert Mapplethorpe from the Horses photo session sits on my writing desk to inspire me. She’s still a badass at 79!