Adventures of a Waterboy Read Online Free Page B

it with me because it’s good to have an old friend around on an adventure into the unknown.
    Suddenly a small, fragile voice calls my name. Twice. A white-cold wave of anticipation rushes through me. I rise from my seat and walk towards the voice, through an arched doorway, to the foot of the stairs. I look up and there, sitting on the top couple of steps in a white nightdress, is my New York rock’n’roll heroine Patti Smith. Her face is thin, her black hair a magnificent crow’s nest, her arms spindly, all elbows and long fingers. I’ve admired her, listened to her recordings, read her words and thought about her for two years; have come to London solely because of her, tracking her to this hotel, but I’ve never met or seen her in the flesh before. So the vision before me, this sudden private glimpse behind the gloss of fame, is super-real, blowing the gates of my young perception wide open, confounding all expectations.
    Questions clamour in my mind: Have I disturbed her? Is it always so easy to meet her or am I special and favoured above all fans? Why this degree of magic? How will I get my friends to believe me? Will I be worthy of this? And rumbling under them all: What does she think of me and who will I find myself to be in this new situation?
    I climb the steps and take her outstretched hand. It’s warm. She speaks to me in a kind of child-like half-asleep way, affectionate, with an older sister’s concern, and I feel inadequate, curling at the edges, transparent. She’s become a real living person, no longer my idea of Patti Smith-ness, and, paradoxically, under the penetration of her eyes, I’ve become a diminished shrunken idea of myself, an imposter, no longer real.
    She says, ‘I’m not getting up for ya ’cos I’ve gotta sleep, but I’ve booked you a room.’ I thank her and she uncurls herself, stands to her full height, towering above me like a giantess on her higher step of the stairs, then disappears through a door to the hotel lobby.
    I return to the basement lounge and pick up my half-read book. The sun is flooding through the window just as before, and the soul music plays softly. The world is still turning. I catch sight of my face in one of the mirrors. I’m becoming real again. I’m breathing.
    I first read about Patti Smith and her band in the British music press in early 1976. Word had it they played ‘intellectual garage rock’, a phrase suggesting a mix of instinct, intelligence and primal energy, exactly what I wanted to hear in those becalmed days before punk re-lit the touch-paper and made rock’n’roll revolutionary again. I had a pen pal in Wales who imported bootleg records from America and when his latest list included a Patti album called Teenage Perversity & Ships In The Night , I ordered it, sight unseen and sound unheard.
    With perfect timing it arrived in the mail the week I left school for the last time, at that golden shimmering moment when the world was wide open and everything was possible. It was a twelve-inch record in a plain white cover, shrink-wrapped, with reddish-brown photocopied insert bearing a picture of a crow-like, spark-eyed woman, and a set of unlikely song titles. These were unusual, charismatic, infinitely other : ‘The Smooth Stone Beyond’, ‘Radio Ethiopia’, ‘Strained On Strange’, ‘Redondo Beach’. What weird new culture was I about to enter?
    It turned out to be a live recording, tinny and thin but full of energy. First I loved Patti’s scrawny voice, a threadbare raven full of defiance and spunk. Then her words were like the clamourings of an urchin visionary who, against all odds, has found the key to the universe. And thirdly her band; raw and fast, with rough guitars and hammering piano bouncing off tumultuous, explosive drums. There was no virtuoso show-off playing and the music was coloured with improvisation and a spirited sense of rebellion. It was the first punk record I ever heard, and the best.
    A few days later I