The Woman Who Looked Like Patti Smith by Catherine McNamara
What separates a significant moment from the ordinary? In “The Woman Who Looked Like Patti Smith,” Catherine McNamara utilizes a simple scenario: a man follows an intriguing woman through the street. He watches her choose bulbs of fennel in the market. Nothing more happens, but this action is a catalyst for the inner sprouting of a bulb: the narrator is reminded of his own sexual awakening. As it blooms, we see the shape and form of a generation—its stem and its stamen—the flowering of a sexual energy that changed culture as we know it. This moment, with its new roots, blossoms and reproduces. McNamara’s craft lies in the momentum of its moments, she creates resonance beyond the narrator’s singular voice. A universe of memory resides in each one of us; this universe is interrelated with the common culture. Regardless of whether her narrator’s perspective holds a personal relatability for the reader, we feel moved. We experience what he experiences in a flash of nostalgia, a shock of déjà vu. Through a lens into the supraordinary, Catherine McNamara hands us a bulb and invites us to watch it bloom. —CRAFT
It’s an ugly thing to follow a woman along the street but this is what I did. She was a copy of Patti Smith during the early Mapplethorpe years, before Horses and Mineshaft and all the BDSM, when they were kids who chopped their own hair and wove the strings around their necks. Contemporary Patti could have been an addict but she was too conscious in her gait, along her jawline. She had a dangerous Suzi Quatro haircut and eyes that had never been enchanted anywhere, anyhow.
I crossed the street in her wake, followed her ripped jeans and skimpy T-shirt through a stream of people; watched her ask for a light for her cigarette, watched her speak with a gaunt woman whose head was covered by a scarf; watched her select three fennel bulbs from the fruit stand on the corner, and place the brown paper bag in the crook of her arm. I felt queasy about what I was doing – I am a gay man and I have never shadowed a woman in my life – and I fought with this before resuming my pace behind her. I had a well-thumbed copy of Mapplethorpe’s BDSM nudes at home which I knew was the fruit of those early years when they were coupled. Every man has a springboard, a catalyst, an emblem that never washes away.
Contemporary Patti paused in front of a shop window. Trashy secondhand clothes. Then another shop with Doc Martens boots and a stand of knockoffs. And yet another: a religious book depot with bleached icons in the window, including a formerly brown-skinned man with a dense halo, raising his hand. At some point she must have known that I was tailing her, for she flicked around and her eyes socked into me.
She did an untroubled scan of my person that landed on my crotch, before her eyes went back to mine with a hint of labour, as though this had happened before and it wearied her. I had nothing to say, beyond my wish to photograph her, even though I had never held a camera in my hands. She mouthed a few words, such that I realised she was foreign and a vast misreading had taken place: she wasn’t an artistic descendant or a honed replica, she had merely turned up here and ended up quarry, fixation.
I should have left it there and bolted off but I felt there was more yet, unsaid or unframed. I felt that if we spoke it would be some sort of pidgin language between tribes, referencing common objects, dissimilar pronouns. I felt that if I saw her back and buttocks, they would have the cool clean pores of marble.
I had an uncle who appeared in Mapplethorpe’s works, long hair and puppy fat before his youth was siphoned out by that vile disease; it took an age for my family to surrender that fact. This is where Mapplethorpe went after his porn-wracked collages and glacial portraits of Patti. Into the arms of Sam Wagstaff with his profound eyes; and then the grand long limbs of nude men, cocks and balls in tribulation; drug-stupor faces and leather-roped Saint Sebastians with arrows pushed into flesh.
Now the paper bag shifted in the cradle of Young Patti’s elbow. She had seen something, or it contextualised, and there was a glitch in her facial muscles and her eyes became denser orbs. Maybe she had looked over the books too.
I felt the whole hauling ahead of time, and the promise beaten out of us, and the few that would be chosen, and all the manacled people posing in rooms in gusts of light; the hustling, the sales, the arses raised and fucked. We stood there, our decay within us.
CATHERINE McNAMARA grew up in Sydney, Australia, ran away to Paris, France, to write, and ended up running a bar in Accra, Ghana, while also working in Mogadishu, Somalia, and Milano, Italy, along the way. She is the author of the short fiction collections The Carnal Fugues, The Cartography of Others, Love Stories for Hectic People, and Pelt and Other Stories. She is flash fiction editor and a masterclass tutor for Litro Magazine, and was guest editor for Best Small Fictions 2023. Catherine currently lives in Italy. Find her on Twitter and Instagram @catinitaly.
Featured image by Priscilla du Preez, courtesy of Unsplash.
