My Buddy
August 1, 2017
Sam Shepard and Patti Smith at the Hotel Chelsea in 1971.
Photograph by David Gahr/Getty
"He would call me late in the night from somewhere on the road, a ghost
town in Texas, a rest stop near Pittsburgh, or from Santa Fe, where he
was parked in the desert, listening to the coyotes howling. But most
often he would call from his place in Kentucky, on a cold, still night,
when one could hear the stars breathing. Just a late-night phone call
out of a blue, as startling as a canvas by Yves Klein; a blue to get
lost in, a blue that might lead anywhere. I’d happily awake, stir up
some Nescafé and we’d talk about anything. About the emeralds of Cortez,
or the white crosses in Flanders Fields, about our kids, or the history
of the Kentucky Derby. But mostly we talked about writers and their
books. Latin writers. Rudy Wurlitzer. Nabokov. Bruno Schulz.
“Gogol was Ukrainian,” he once said, seemingly out of nowhere. Only not
just any nowhere, but a sliver of a many-faceted nowhere that, when
lifted in a certain light, became a somewhere. I’d pick up the thread,
and we’d improvise into dawn, like two beat-up tenor saxophones,
exchanging riffs.
He sent a message from the mountains of Bolivia, where Mateo Gil was
shooting “Blackthorn.” The air was thin up there in the Andes, but he
navigated it fine, outlasting, and surely outriding, the younger
fellows, saddling up no fewer than five different horses. He said that
he would bring me back a serape, a black one with rust-colored stripes.
He sang in those mountains by a bonfire, old songs written by broken men
in love with their own vanishing nature. Wrapped in blankets, he slept
under the stars, adrift on Magellanic Clouds.
Sam liked being on the move. He’d throw a fishing rod or an old acoustic
guitar in the back seat of his truck, maybe take a dog, but for sure a
notebook, and a pen, and a pile of books. He liked packing up and
leaving just like that, going west. He liked getting a role that would
take him somewhere he really didn’t want to be, but where he would wind
up taking in its strangeness; lonely fodder for future work.
In the winter of 2012, we met up in Dublin, where he received an
Honorary Doctorate of Letters from Trinity College. He was often
embarrassed by accolades but embraced this one, coming from the same
institution where Samuel Beckett walked and studied. He loved Beckett,
and had a few pieces of writing, in Beckett’s own hand, framed in the
kitchen, along with pictures of his kids. That day, we saw the
typewriter of John Millington Synge and James Joyce’s spectacles, and,
in the night, we joined musicians at Sam’s favorite local pub, the
Cobblestone, on the other side of the river. As we playfully staggered
across the bridge, he recited reams of Beckett off the top of his head.
Sam promised me that one day he’d show me the landscape of the
Southwest, for though well-travelled, I’d not seen much of our own
country. But Sam was dealt a whole other hand, stricken with a
debilitating affliction. He eventually stopped picking up and leaving.
From then on, I visited him, and we read and talked, but mostly we
worked. Laboring over his last manuscript, he courageously summoned a
reservoir of mental stamina, facing each challenge that fate apportioned
him. His hand, with a crescent moon tattooed between his thumb and
forefinger, rested on the table before him. The tattoo was a souvenir
from our younger days, mine a lightning bolt on the left knee.
Going over a passage describing the Western landscape, he suddenly
looked up and said, “I’m sorry I can’t take you there.” I just smiled,
for somehow he had already done just that. Without a word, eyes closed,
we tramped through the American desert that rolled out a carpet of many
colors—saffron dust, then russet, even the color of green glass, golden
greens, and then, suddenly, an almost inhuman blue. Blue sand, I said,
filled with wonder. Blue everything, he said, and the songs we sang had
a color of their own.
We had our routine: Awake. Prepare for the day. Have coffee, a little
grub. Set to work, writing. Then a break, outside, to sit in the
Adirondack chairs and look at the land. We didn’t have to talk then, and
that is real friendship. Never uncomfortable with silence, which, in its
welcome form, is yet an extension of conversation. We knew each other
for such a long time. Our ways could not be defined or dismissed with a
few words describing a careless youth. We were friends; good or bad, we
were just ourselves. The passing of time did nothing but strengthen
that. Challenges escalated, but we kept going and he finished his work
on the manuscript. It was sitting on the table. Nothing was left unsaid.
When I departed, Sam was reading Proust.
Long, slow days passed. It was a Kentucky evening filled with the
darting light of fireflies, and the sound of the crickets and choruses
of bullfrogs. Sam walked to his bed and lay down and went to sleep, a
stoic, noble sleep. A sleep that led to an unwitnessed moment, as love
surrounded him and breathed the same air. The rain fell when he took his
last breath, quietly, just as he would have wished. Sam was a private
man. I know something of such men. You have to let them dictate how
things go, even to the end. The rain fell, obscuring tears. His
children, Jesse, Walker, and Hannah, said goodbye to their father. His
sisters Roxanne and Sandy said goodbye to their brother.
I was far away, standing in the rain before the sleeping lion of
Lucerne, a colossal, noble, stoic lion carved from the rock of a low
cliff. The rain fell, obscuring tears. I knew that I would see Sam again
somewhere in the landscape of dream, but at that moment I imagined I was
back in Kentucky, with the rolling fields and the creek that widens into
a small river. I pictured Sam’s books lining the shelves, his boots
lined against the wall, beneath the window where he would watch the
horses grazing by the wooden fence. I pictured myself sitting at the
kitchen table, reaching for that tattooed hand.
A long time ago, Sam sent me a letter. A long one, where he told me of a
dream that he had hoped would never end. “He dreams of horses,” I told
the lion. “Fix it for him, will you? Have Big Red waiting for him, a
true champion. He won’t need a saddle, he won’t need anything.” I headed
to the French border, a crescent moon rising in the black sky. I said
goodbye to my buddy, calling to him, in the dead of night."
The above article is found here: http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/my-buddy-sam-shepard
"The singer, poet and author Patti Smith has written a farewell note
to her longtime friend and collaborator Sam Shepard. Published on
Tuesday in the New Yorker, the piece comes in the wake of the playwright
and actor's
death at 73 last week due to complications from ALS.
Called
"My Buddy," the short essay focuses on a friendship that endured nearly
six decades and extended across continents as the two artists were
making their mark on culture.
"We knew each other for such a long
time," Smith writes. "Our ways could not be defined or dismissed with a
few words describing a careless youth. We were friends; good or bad, we
were just ourselves. The passing of time did nothing but strengthen
that."
Smith met Shepard in New York
when he was drumming
for the experimental folk band the Holy Modal Rounders, she wrote in
her memoir, "Just Kids." Despite Shepard being married, the pair
developed a relationship that culminated in the theatrical work "Cowboy
Mouth."
It was at Shepard's urging, in fact, that Smith first
toyed with the idea of turning her poetry into musical performance
pieces. Although their romantic relationship ended, the two remained
close in the decades to follow, which is evident from Smith's words..." - http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/la-et-entertainment-news-updates-august-patti-smith-writes-ode-to-her-buddy-1501624356-htmlstory.html
