Northwest of hell and straight into Patti

January, 1978.

My pace quickens to match my pulse. She hastens ahead into the darkness past the fading light while I follow at questionable distance down the alley, a block from home. Wracked with guilt and lost to the neighborhood, I'm now simply a strange shadow they catch occasionally from the corner of their eye. Where I was once a staple to the throng, straight forward and seemingly carefree, I'm now "complicated" and confounding, a sad mystery even to myself. Only fifteen and a half but exhausted by life, I feel more like a bitter, senile codger out of phase with time than I do a contemporary teen. Fear and self-loathing feed my dreams and rule my days.

I reach the end of the alley and stop cold, struck by a spiky-haired vision compelling me to paralysis: she has turned and is looking dead at me. I pray to the god I don't believe in that I might blend into the alley gravel. No dice. She calls out something enticing or insulting but I've already turned tail and miss the message. I'm halfway up the fence of the nearest backyard as her words echo behind me, falling onto the pebbles with an indecipherable rumble. I'm across the street and into my house before I realize I've moved, the flight instinct taking hold as it does so frequently these days.  I feel a strong kinship with the mouse running for the hole under the stove after an unexpected flick of the light switch catches him in the act of existence (for me, the kitchen is my town and the hole under the stove is my room).

Who is she? I'm not sure I know exactly. She's a contemporary, a "classmate" of sorts. But we know one another only vaguely. She seems a kindred spirit, but I'm psychotically shy and she's beyond aloof, so I can go only by her appearance, demeanor, and the books I've seen her read at the coffee/soda shop near the high school campus (Ginsberg, Kesey, Miller among her interests). She attracts and terrifies me: purple streaked raven-black hair matching her pre-goth ebony ensemble (nails, lipstick, outfit, shoes). Patti Smith meets Ari Up meets Edie Sedgwick. Or so I imagine. I do a lot of imagining but it rarely intersects with reality (fast forward to the present and it perhaps does so now only by happenstance).

And so goes a typical trip home from "school." In fact, I haven't been to class in a while. Instead, I spend my days in back of the second floor of the Everett Public Library. There I pour over back issues of Rolling Stone and read Hunter Thompson's entire catalog to that point, along with most of the 50's beat writers and more than a few of the classic rebels (Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Chandler). I'd continue to do this into the spring before staff from Everett High come and get me. I'm not sure who clued them into my whereabouts. Likely it was the librarian. Maybe my sister. Certainly not my mom. In some ways it was a relief being nabbed. Truth be told, I love the education aspect of school (it's the people I can't stand). I don't fit into the social order (don't much fit into any order). I'd be sent off to Cascade High a few miles to the south to repeat my sophomore year come the fall (six months of my own "library schooling" apparently not enough to make up for lost credit). It would be my last year of high school, and not all that much more successful than the Everett High years. But all that is to come. Today, I'm back into the dank cavern that is my house, thinking about her.

Later that night, I'm shaking with cold though the heat is blasting, a stranger in my own home. I can't see my way clear to the door of my room so I crouch by the bed, next to my books. And I shake. Uncontrollably. I am listening to Horses on the 8-Track. "Jesus died for somebody's sins but not mine - my sins my own, they belong to me." Clearly not Them's Gloria. Or Shadows of Knight for that matter. Pure Patti. She lets me know I'm not alone in my madness. But it's an illusion. A mistake on my part. Songs and albums are heightened moments in time to strike a chord in the now or a remembrance of the past, not prolonged states of being or a way of life (unless you consider the musical a form of documentary).  But that fact of life never really sank in for me from then to now, though I knew it at some level even back sucking in the 70s.

And on the cycle droned, broken up for me by a singular "heightened moment in time" arriving in April of that year. As I said, I occasionally make it back to high school, or at least to the near-by kids hang-out just off-campus on 25th and Colby. I'd call it a coffee shop, but they don't really have such things in 1978; it is more a soda shop, I suppose. They do serve coffee, though, and I duck in just after school lets out once every couple of weeks to get my caffeine fix while I try to get a bead on teenage socializing (at least as an observer). She was often there and I admired her in silence in the corner, listening to the shitty top 40 usually rattling from the jukebox. Until April. I don't know what came over me that I'd approach her then. Perhaps I was hopped up on caffeine and Gonzo Journalism but it was mainly that she was reading Junky, which I'd just finished.

"I see you're reading Burroughs - can I ask you something?" She looked up, annoyed. "What?" She wasn't in a chatty mood, certainly not with me. "Do you prefer the realism of Junky to his more abstract work like Naked Lunch?" She looked at me for a what seemed like forever before breaking into a faint smile that for me lit up the room like an explosion. "They both have their uses. Now beat it, you're blocking my light." And that was it. I never talked to her again. But this was a moment, one I recall pretty vividly over 30 years later. For a brief shining sliver of life I was lifted out of doldrums of isolation into the warmth of a shared connection.  It was as though I'd fallen straight into Patti and I didn't want to get up again.

But the moment passes and my fears and weakness assert themselves once more, emphasizing that she did dismiss me in the end, the comment was fucking lame, and so on.  So in that sense, she and I have a lot in common after all: neither of us have much use for me.