On Sunday morning, I rose early. I had decided the
night before to go to the ocean, so I slipped a book and a bottle of
water into a sack and caught a ride to Rockaway Beach. It felt like a
significant date, but I failed to conjure anything specific. The beach
was empty, and, with the anniversary of Hurricane Sandy looming, the
quiet sea seemed to embody the contradictory truth of nature. I stood
there for a while, tracing the path of a low-flying plane, when I
received a text message from my daughter, Jesse. Lou Reed was dead. I
flinched and took a deep breath. I had seen him with his wife, Laurie,
in the city recently, and I’d sensed that he was ill. A weariness
shadowed her customary brightness. When Lou said goodbye, his dark eyes
seemed to contain an infinite and benevolent sadness.
I met Lou at
Max’s Kansas City in 1970. The Velvet Underground played two sets a
night for several weeks that summer. The critic and scholar Donald Lyons
was shocked that I had never seen them, and he escorted me upstairs for
the second set of their first night. I loved to dance, and you could
dance for hours to the music of the Velvet Underground. A dissonant surf
doo-wop drone allowing you to move very fast or very slow. It was my
late and revelatory introduction to “Sister Ray.”
Within a few
years, in that same room upstairs at Max’s, Lenny Kaye, Richard Sohl,
and I presented our own land of a thousand dances. Lou would often stop
by to see what we were up to. A complicated man, he encouraged our
efforts, then turned and provoked me like a Machiavellian schoolboy. I
would try to steer clear of him, but, catlike, he would suddenly
reappear, and disarm me with some Delmore Schwartz line about love or
courage. I didn’t understand his erratic behavior or the intensity of
his moods, which shifted, like his speech patterns, from speedy to
laconic. But I understood his devotion to poetry and the transporting
quality of his performances. He had black eyes, black T-shirt, pale
skin. He was curious, sometimes suspicious, a voracious reader, and a
sonic explorer. An obscure guitar pedal was for him another kind of
poem. He was our connection to the infamous air of the Factory. He had
made Edie Sedgwick dance. Andy Warhol whispered in his ear. Lou brought
the sensibilities of art and literature into his music. He was our
generation’s New York poet, championing its misfits as Whitman had
championed its workingman and Lorca its persecuted.
As my band
evolved and covered his songs, Lou bestowed his blessings. Toward the
end of the seventies, I was preparing to leave the city for Detroit when
I bumped into him by the elevator in the old Gramercy Park Hotel. I was
carrying a book of poems by Rupert Brooke. He took the book out of my
hand and we looked at the poet’s photograph together. So beautiful, he
said, so sad. It was a moment of complete peace.
As news of Lou’s
death spread, a rippling sensation mounted, then burst, filling the
atmosphere with hyperkinetic energy. Scores of messages found their way
to me. A call from Sam Shepard, driving a truck through Kentucky. A
modest Japanese photographer sending a text from Tokyo—“I am crying.”
As
I mourned by the sea, two images came to mind, watermarking the paper-
colored sky. The first was the face of his wife, Laurie. She was his
mirror; in her eyes you can see his kindness, sincerity, and empathy.
The second was the “great big clipper ship” that he longed to board,
from the lyrics of his masterpiece, “Heroin.” I envisioned it waiting
for him beneath the constellation formed by the souls of the poets he so
wished to join. Before I slept, I searched for the significance of the
date—October 27th—and found it to be the birthday of both Dylan Thomas
and Sylvia Plath. Lou had chosen the perfect day to set sail—the day of
poets, on Sunday morning, the world behind him.
~ Patti Smith