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co-workers’ liking, she was first tormented, then bullied, and finally threatened. One day, she was cornered in the restroom and challenged to shatter her goody-goody demeanor by letting out a few swear words. When she refused, they threatened to push her head into an unflushed toilet bowl. Patti gave in and unleashed a torrent of the foulest language she could think of, until her tormenters backed away. But, she said, she was devastated, because she had desperately wanted to become a part of their world, and now she had blown it.
    Not long after that incident, Patti was nestled somewhere in the building, reading her treasured bilingual copy of Rimbaud’s Illuminations, when her shift supervisor came up behind her and spotted the French text that ran down every alternate page. The woman demanded to know why Patti was reading a foreign language.
    “It’s not a foreign language,” she replied, pointing to the English text on the facing page that she had been devouring. But her supervisor was not fooled. She knew what she’d seen. And what was that? Communist literature, of course, because in her view (which she shared with an awful lot of people in those days, thanks to the Cuban Missile Crisis and Khrushchev banging his shoes on the table), “if it’s foreign, it’s Communist, because anything foreign is Communist.”
    She probably said a lot more than that, but her other words were drowned by the hue and cry that her first remark made, as the rest of the women crowded around to see the real-life commie that was wriggling in their midst.
    Patti stormed home, and her final paycheck followed her. She’d been fired for reading a book. It was, she sighed later to Mick Gold of the UK magazine Street Life, “a real drag,” having to go home to South Jersey and tell her parents she’d been fired, because it wasn’t easy to find work in the area at that time. There were a few opportunities. The Columbia Records pressing plant in Pitman had her on their waiting list, and there was the Campbell Soup factory in Camden. She would take whichever came up first and then count down the days until she returned to Glassboro. But she already knew that whatever job she found was unlikely to offer any kind of improvement on life at the Piss Factory. She was notsimply unemployed. She suddenly realized that in the eyes of her New Jersey peers, she was also unemployable.
    That was the first shock. The second, just months later, was the discovery that she was pregnant.
    She was existing on a staple diet of the Rolling Stones’ album Aftermath and the Beatles’ Revolver when she got the news of her pregnancy, torn between the twin axes of Lennon’s “Doctor Robert” and Jagger and Richards’s “Mother’s Little Helper,” a stupid girl who understood that tomorrow never knows. Somewhere between those philosophical poles, she knew what she had to do.
    She made up her mind to carry the child to term and then give it up for adoption.
    The father was just a boy, almost three years younger than she was, a high schooler while she was at teacher training college. Not that she would remain there for long, not after the authorities discovered her condition. Nor could she stay at home with her parents, where she had lived for the last nineteen years. “Judgmental neighbors made it impossible for my family,” she wrote in Just Kids, “treating them as if they were harboring a criminal.” Finally, some far-off friends took her in, a painter and a potter who lived by the south Jersey shore and were happy to see the girl through her confinement.
    She hated, she wrote in the poem “Female,” being bloated, feeling like a lame dog, wanting nothing more than to pull my fat baby belly to the sea.
    But she was also aware that the first phase of her life had come to an end, and she realized with a start that she was not too sorry to see it go. Without the pregnancy, she might have drifted on forever, rootlessly dreaming and stargazing from