How fate allowed Patti Smith to move to New York
“I got something to hide here called desire,” Patti Smith sings in ‘Piss Factory’, her debut single, which chronicles her life before she got herself out of it and into the New York poetry scene. But before all that, while she was stuck working a grim job in a small town, she was hatching a plan. In the summer of 1967, Smith was plotting her escape, and fate moved to help her.
However, Smith’s story isn’t the classically boring one of a person looking down on the living of so-called ‘normies’. She didn’t resent having to work, nor did she resent the world of her early life in New Jersey, where she was deeply inspired by her parent’s hard graft and their openness, introducing her to music and encouraging her to look beyond their domestic realm. She pays homage to that now by calling her gigs ‘jobs’, paying her respects to not only her blue-collar beginnings but to the knowledge that to be a working artist is to be putting in shifts, day after day.
But what Smith yearned for was community. She wanted to see her dreams and desires reflected in the world around her. As she wrote in Just Kids, “I had no proof that I had the stuff to be an artist, though I hungered to be one.” From a young age, she’d wanted to be amidst the ranks of Rimbaud or a Jo March-type figure as she read Little Women as a child and found herself in that driven, creative character. But in a town that wasn’t exactly “pro-artist”, she doubted herself.
“I wondered if I had really been called as an artist,” she said, always desiring a sense of higher purpose, “I didn’t mind the misery of a vocation, but I dreaded not being called.”
By the time she was an adult, she knew she had to take action. She’s just suffered through the pain of having a child and putting them up for adoption. She’d spent all summer working in a factory where the boss bullied her relentlessly. Even outside of work, her friends had left as she said, “My few comrades had moved to New York to write poetry and study art and I felt very alone.”
So, in her own words, “I had my plan.” She would head to the city, seek out friends who had already moved there, and then go to one bookshop after another until she found work to support herself. It seemed doable, sensible, and as she packed her suitcase, she thought she “had enough money for a one-way ticket.”
She was wrong. On July, 3rd, 1967, she caught the bus to Philadelphia, planning to change from there onto a bus to New York. She killed some time in between the change, spending some spare cash on a jukebox or browsing bookstores. But then, when it came to buying her ticket to the city, things had changed.
“It was a big blow that the fare to New York had nearly doubled since the last time I travelled,” she wrote in her memoir, “I was unable to buy my ticket.”
In an instant, her plan crumbled. Her dreams of making it to the city, reuniting with her artistic friends and finally joining their ranks disappeared at the bottom of her empty coin purse as she took her last amounts out, ready to call her parents and have them come to pick her up and bring her back home to the small town life. But then, right there in the telephone booth, fate took the form of a lost wallet.
“There, on the shelf beneath the telephone, lying on thick yellow pages, was a white patent purse. It contained a locket and thirty-two dollars, almost a week’s paycheck at my last job,” she remembered. Patti Smith is a woman of great conscience. Facing the prospect of stealing in order to secure her dream was a moral dilemma, but sometimes, we have to take action. She chose to see it as a higher power’s guiding hand; “I accepted the grant of the small white purse as the hand of fate pushing me on.”
She went to New York and made her name, but Smith still thinks about that purse and the role that the stranger it belonged to played in her story. “I can only thank, as I have within myself many times throughout the years, this unknown benefactor,” she said, “She was the one who gave me the last piece of encouragement, a thief’s good luck sign.”
