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afar, imagining the magic that was off on some horizon, and standing stock still waiting for it to come down and embrace her.
    She was never cut out to be a teacher, and the school authorities knew it. By the time Patti fell pregnant, she had been a student at Glassboro College for two years, during which time she succeeded only in being repeatedly instructed to stick with the curriculum, and not to bring her own, distinctly individualistic teaching methods into the classroom. So many dreams, so many ideas, so many fanciful notions. Herpregnancy stripped them all away. But it did not simply transform the dreaming girl into a thinking adult. It forced her, too, to make a very important decision.
    If life was beginning, she was going to get started ahead of it. At Easter 1967, Patti’s parents came to the house where she was staying and drove her to the hospital in nearby Camden. There, Patti Smith’s daughter was born on April 26, 1967—the thirtieth anniversary of the bombing of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War, she later observed. She never saw her again. “I gave [the child] up … because I wanted to be an artist—simple as that,” Victor Bockris and Roberta Bayley’s biography quoted Patti as saying. “I wanted to create and re-create in my own way.”
    Nine weeks later, on July 3, Patti spent her savings on art supplies—a box of colored pencils and a wooden slate to draw on—and, with whatever was left over from the $16 she’d put together, set off for New York City. She caught the bus to Philadelphia, which was just about as far as she could go, because she’d completely underestimated the cost of a ticket to New York. But, just as she was about to call home in despair, she noticed that the last person to use the call box had left a wallet on the shelf. Inside that wallet was $32. She had her ticket.

3
    BALLAD OF A BAD BOY
    J ULY 3, 1967, was a Monday, but the next day was Independence Day. Anybody who had been given the chance was still out of town, enjoying the luxury of an extra-long weekend. The city wasn’t deserted, but it wasn’t crazed either, and the bus made good time as it wove through to Port Authority.
    Patti already knew her way around. On her previous, deliberately rare visits to the city, she’d made sure to memorize every place she needed, and she knew precisely where to go. Plus, she had a subway map: take the A train to Hoyt-Schermerhorn, then across to DeKalb Avenue. A Jersey friend, Howard “Howie” Michaels, had a brownstone in Brooklyn, while he studied at the nearby Pratt Institute of Art. She would crash with him for a few days while she found her feet, and then her life could begin. Except it didn’t quite work out that way.
    Her friend had moved on, said the guy who opened the door to her, and the only person who seemed to know where he might have gone was asleep at the back of the apartment. Patti insisted on waking him. The young man whose rest she disturbed later described her as looking like “a creature from another planet,” a skinny little thing in dungarees and a black turtleneck, with a funny way of looking at you, like she didn’t want you to know she was there. This day, however, he barely spoke a word to her. He simply dressed, walked her a few blocks across the neighborhood, deposited her on her friend’s doorstep, then headed back to bed.
    The apartment was in darkness, and when the sun set, it remained closed up and black. Night had fallen on her first day in the city, and she didn’t know where else to go. So she bundled up in her raincoat, with her little plaid suitcase for a pillow, and went to sleep on the stoop. In the morning, she realized the flaw in her mighty master plan: her friend was in school here, but school was out for the summer. It would be another two months before the streets of Brooklyn were alive with students again. She spent the next day, the next week, a large part of the next month, restlessly searching for a friendly face, a