Just Kids

Book Marks

Just Kids, by Patti Smith. Ecco Press, 280 pages, $27 hardcover.

Though the likes of William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg wander through the musty Chelsea Hotel hallways â?? where the juiciest bits are set â?? of this polished gem of a remembrance, theyâ??re merely bit players, albeit colorful. The real stars, memorialized in their pre-fame days, are then-waiflike memoirist Smith and her late 1960s cohort in cool ambition, Robert Mapplethorpe. She was soon to be a punk goddess merging the lyricism of poetry with the energy of a rock star; he was soon to be a leather-clad badboy with a photographerâ??s lens trained on both the sacred and the profane. But those lives came later; this is Smithâ??s elegiac account of their early years, in a bygone Manhattan recalled most recently in Edmund Whiteâ??s City Boys, when being bohemian was more than merely a pose. The â??kidsâ? met shortly after 20-year-old Smith moved to Manhattan, sharing hunger, poverty and a bed. Mapplethorpe eventually went his gay way, but their relationship endured until Mapplethorpeâ??s death and, as this exquisitely tender book makes clear, well beyond his passing.

by Richard Labonte