M Train

Fred Smith, more commonly known as Fred “Sonic” Smith, was a guitarist for the band MC5. He and Patti Smith met through the music world: Fred’s band opened for Smith, and then the two fell in love and began an affair. Fred was still married to his first wife at the time. Fred and Smith were married in 1980, had two children together, and remained together until Fred’s death from heart failure in 1994. Fred is a major figure in Smith’s memoir even though he has been dead for nearly 20 years in the present-day narrative. Smith remembers her travels and her life with her husband fondly. She feels that his death left a profound emptiness in her life: He disappeared completely, leaving an unbearable void. When she is Writing About Nothing, she is writing about the nothingness that Fred left behind when he died. In a particularly poignant scene, she begs him to come back to life because it is so painful for her to miss him.

Of course, Fred cannot come back from the dead. However, he does eventually become more than an emptiness in Smith’s current life. She finds echoes of him in unexpected places, which helps her heal from her Grief and Loss. Watching Master and Commander makes her feel briefly close to him, and telling stories about their time together keeps his memory alive. Smith is similar to the wife of Alfred Wegener; though her husband is dead, she and others who care about him can still remember him and create great things to honor his legacy. At the very end of the book, Smith starts to dream about Fred. This gives her the opportunity to connect with him and pull him out of the nothingness that she has felt in his absence. Though he is gone and, like all lost things, will never return completely, Smith is able to keep him alive in her memory, stories, and dreams.

The cowpoke is a mysterious figure whom Smith frequently meets in her dreams. She describes him as “[v]aguely handsome, intensely laconic” (13), and very cryptic. It is from the cowpoke that Smith first hears the phrase “It’s not so easy writing about nothing” (13). Over the course of the book, Smith dreams repeatedly about the cowpoke or hears him speak to her in her waking life. She meditates on his quote about Writing About Nothing and begins to explore what it could mean. Eventually, she starts to wonder who the cowpoke is. Clues to his identity are revealed in Chapter 18, “Valley of the Lost,” where Smith describes a toy cowboy figurine that Fred lost and then found again as a child. Smith connects that cowboy with the cowpoke in her description of both of them as “bowlegged.” In doing so, Smith also connects the cowpoke with Fred.

When Fred died, Smith felt that he left behind a void in her life. She could not feel his spirit; her loss was permanent and all-encompassing. However, through the cowpoke, Fred, in a way, returns to Smith. In their first meeting, the cowpoke says that people write about nothing to “redeem the lost” (13). After spending a lot of time contemplating what this means, Smith has a penultimate dream about the cowpoke, where he leads her to a high mountain cliff and then abandons her. Fred rescues her. She later sees Fred in the same dream. She has, after all these years of missing him, been reunited with his spirit in the dream world. He has come back to her, no longer a “nothing” but a being that exists in “a place with no beginning or end” (250). The cowpoke, the toy cowboy, and Fred all represent things that are lost and later found. In Smith’s final dream of the cowpoke, he shows her an ouroboros, which symbolizes the ultimate recurrence of all things.

Zak is a young man whom Smith befriends at Café ’Ino. He makes excellent coffee, and Smith is excited for him when he announces that he is leaving Café ’Ino to open a café of his own in Rockaway Beach. He promises to give her free coffee for life in exchange for her investment in the enterprise. Smith has always dreamed of having her own café and so presents Zak as an heir to this dream.

When Smith visits his café, she falls in love with Rockaway Beach and buys her bungalow there. When Zak’s café is destroyed in Hurricane Sandy, Smith feels this loss keenly, almost as if it were her own. She returns to Rockaway Beach and finds that the boardwalk has been completely wrecked and all traces of the café have been wiped away. However, Zak does not fade entirely from the story. Smith purchases a cup of coffee from a taco stand and asks if anyone has seen Zak. She is told that he is the one who made the coffee. Although his coffee shop is gone and his dream is shattered, he is still making coffee, so there is still hope for the future.