London Diary: Michael Fassbender and The National Day of Patti

Hamptstead Theatre, before the play and before the arrival

On the long flight home from London to San Francisco yesterday, I listened to

Patti Smith

reading M Train. Hearing her voice wash over me in my half-awake state smoothed out all the rough edges of my urban adventure. I had downloaded a “nervous while flying” meditation onto my phone, but it wouldn’t play, so I searched my audiobook library for something relaxing, preferably something in the first person, something true. And there was M Train, which for some reason I had purchased but never listened to. I settled in. What peace. What presence. What a calm in the storm.

I hereby propose a National Day of Patti, wherein we all discover that listening to Patti Smith talk about pretty much anything is more soothing than a stiff drink or one of those gummies everybody seems to know how to procure except me¹. Patti Smith uses the word “hoarfrost” as casually as a lesser person (like me) might use the word “pancake” or “wagon.” With Patti Smith, words like hoarfrost and names like Jean Genet just roll right off the tongue.

I especially loved the chapter on Berlin and London, Patti Smith’s story (I can only call her by her full name, for how can one refer to the Patti Smith simply as Smith?) of how a flight delay during her layover in London inspired her to take the Heathrow Express to Paddington Station, then a black cab to a hotel in Covent Garden, just to spend a couple of days watching British detective shows on the tele.

At one point she goes to have a drink at the Honesty Bar during a "break between Detective Frost and Whitechapel,” while waiting for a Cracker marathon. (When she said she was waiting for a Cracker marathon, I thought, “Oh, does

David Lowery

know he’s in Patti Smith’s book?” But then it turned out she was talking about a different Cracker). Anyway, at the elevator, she finds herself standing beside the actor Robbie Coltrane, who played the criminal psychologist Dr. Edward ‘Fitz’ Fitzgerald in, you guessed it, Cracker (the British TV show, not the American band). "I've been waiting for you all week," she says to Coltrane, to which he replies, "Here I am."

So I’m listening to this on the plane, and it puts me in mind of something that happened two nights earlier, when my husband, son, and I caught a play for 15 pounds at the Hampstead Theatre. It was a David Mamet play, sort of—House of Games—adapted by Richard Bean for the stage from Mamet’s screenplay of the same name. Earlier that day we had gone to Abbey Road to gawk at the crosswalk, as one does. While we were there it began to rain. This was, after all, London.

My son didn’t care for Abbey Road, so he went off on his own. My husband and I took a photo in the crosswalk with the rest of the tourists, then went in search of a restroom, aka “WC,” eventually finding one at the St. John’s Station, a WC which I cannot in good conscience recommend. And though we were right there in the tube station, and though it was pouring rain, my husband said, “Let’s walk,” because the tube would have required a transfer, and if there’s one thing my one-and-only can’t abide, it’s a subterranean transfer. He would trek two miles in the snow to avoid walking twenty meters underground to a different platform. So I pulled out the umbrella I’d purchased from a tourist kiosk at the end of Westminster Bridge and ventured back out into the storm.