Retro Love Story - Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe

"No one could speak for these two  young people nor tell with any truth of their days and nights together. Only Robert and I could tell it. Our story, as he called it. And, having gone, he left the task to me to tell it to you."

I remember the first time I read Just Kids by Patti Smith. I was working an absolutely miserable job in the middle of a suffocating Georgia summer and the highlight of my whole workday was sitting in my car on my lunch break, windows rolled down, my bare feet sticking out the driver's side devouring the pages of one of the most tender, poetic, affecting love stories. Ever.  

And since it's February and six days before Valentine's Day and all, I figured I'd share some of it with you guys.

Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe met by chance in the midst of a cultural revolution in New York City in the sixties. As she put it, "It was the summer that Coltrane died... Flower children raised their empty arms and China exploded the H-bomb. Jimi Hendrix set his guitar in flames in Monterey... the summer of love. And in this shifting, inhospitable atmosphere, a chance encounter changed the course of my life. It was the summer I met Robert Mapplethorpe."

They were both beatniks, lanky and disheveled and endlessly searching for a way to create themselves. And theirs was an immediate, unmistakeable understanding of the other. In the book, Patti said of Robert, "[he] seemed to appreciate all the qualities that repelled or alienated me from others," and in the span of just one night spent pouring over books on Surrealism, "[they] had mutually surrendered [their] loneliness and replaced it with trust." They formed an unconquerable friendship that served as the basis of their love story, and lasted the rest of their lives together. 

Patti and Robert were glorified dreamers at a time when such a thing was considered a valid profession. They subsisted on art, music, and good vibes while breezing in and out of the glamourous poverty of New York's city streets, always together in a way that was nurturing instead of codependent.  They worked side by side on their respective arts - hers, rock music and his, photography. He understood her as a shaman, a mystic, an urban gypsy and musician, a lover, and also as a girl trying to get a foothold on the world during a time when everything around them seemed slippery and temporary. 

Imagine for a minute being on a first name basis with Janis Joplin, wandering into a coffee house and being welcomed to a table by Nico from the Velvet Underground, making a trip to the Bowery to see William Burroughs, being nomads in your own city with a temporary address at the Chelsea Hotel. This was the New York of Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe.

What they had is a dichotomy so rare that I can count the times I've personally seen it for myself on one hand. Loyalty without legality, a love built from respect and friendship instead of obligation. Patti Smith said it this way: "Both of us had given ourselves to others. We vacillated and lost everyone, but we had found one another again. We wanted, it seemed, what we already had, a lover and a friend to create with, side by side. To be loyal, yet be free."

I can think of no better definition of what love should be.

They held onto each other, through Patti's move from New York to Detroit to marry someone else, through the ups and occasional downs of both their careers, through drugs and Andy Warhol, and finally, through Robert's battle with AIDS, which he ultimately lost in 1989. The love between them went beyond sentimentality and ego. It was the profound understanding of another person's soul. And regardless of the relentless pull of life, they never left each other.

Their love was the gravity of their lives.

"Where does it all lead? What will become of us? These were our young questions and young answers were revealed.
It leads to each other. We become ourselves." -Patti Smith

Happy Friday, loves :)

xo.

images courtesy of Google images