by Lily Brett
A bowl of raw peeled carrots was being passed along the row. Lola was pleased to see the carrots. They cut short the conversation about Renia having been touched too much. Lola had already refused the neatly rolled joints that had been shared around and the box of white pills. She felt she had to say yes to the carrots. She took a carrot. Janis Joplin shook her head and said no to the carrots. She reached down into her bag and pulled out a bottle of Southern Comfort. She took a swig out of the bottle. Lola must have looked shocked because Janis Joplin laughed, and said, ‘I always make sure my purse is big enough to hold a book and a bottle.’
Lola had never seen anyone drink whiskey from a bottle. She hadn’t seen many people drinking whiskey. Janis Joplin took another few swigs. Lola didn’t think doing that could be good for Janis Joplin. It looked like a lot of whiskey to be swigging down.
‘Is that good for you?’ she said to Janis Joplin.
‘Hell, yes,’ said Janis Joplin. ‘Very good. Do you want some?’
‘Not really,’ said Lola. ‘I don’t like alcohol. I prefer chocolate.’ Janis Joplin laughed. She had a strange laugh. It was almost like a cackle. And almost like a giggle.
‘You don’t drink anything?’ Janis Joplin said.
‘No,’ said Lola. ‘I don’t drink at all.’
‘Do you take speed?’ said Janis Joplin.
‘No,’ said Lola.
‘What do you do?’ said Janis Joplin. ‘When all you want to do is sit around and mope?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Lola. She didn’t really sit around and mope, she thought. There was quite a bit of moping in Lola’s future, but Lola didn’t yet know that.
‘I’m usually pretty busy,’ Lola said to Janis Joplin. ‘I do my interviews, arrange more interviews, write the articles and then I plan diets.’
‘Good heavens,’ said Janis Joplin. ‘You plan diets?’ Lola was startled at Janis Joplin’s response. Not at the fact that Janis Joplin was surprised that Lola planned diets. Lola was surprised at the words Janis Joplin had used. ‘Good heavens.’ It was such a prim expression. There was nothing prim about Janis Joplin.
‘Yes,’ said Lola. ‘I plan diets all the time.’
‘Speed could help you with your diet,’ Janis Joplin said. ‘It really peps me up.’
‘I think I just need to eat less,’ said Lola.
‘Speed can meet a lot of your needs,’ said Janis Joplin.
‘I took it once when I was in high school,’ Lola said. ‘I couldn’t sleep for three days.’ Lola tried to think about whether she’d eaten any less after the speed, but she couldn’t remember.
‘Have you tried heroin?’ said Janis Joplin.
‘No,’ said Lola. ‘Do you use heroin?’
‘Only when I can afford it, and that’s not very often,’ Janis Joplin said.
‘Do you mope a lot?’ said Lola.
‘Sometimes,’ said Janis Joplin. ‘Now I’ve got George, I mope less.’
‘Who is George?’ Lola said.
‘My dog,’ said Janis Joplin. ‘He’s part German shepherd and part English shepherd. He was already called George when I got him, when he was a puppy. I didn’t want to confuse him, so I kept the name.’
‘What do you mope about?’ said Lola.
‘A feeling of emptiness, a feeling of loneliness, a feeling that I’m not good enough,’ Janis Joplin said.
‘Not good enough at what?’ said Lola.
‘Not good enough at anything,’ said Janis Joplin.
Lola felt sad. She recognised something about the sadness Janis Joplin was talking about, the loneliness Janis Joplin was talking about. It would take Lola decades to feel her own loneliness. She didn’t know she was lonely. She knew she was fat. And she knew she was hungry.
‘I feel a lot,’ said Janis Joplin. ‘And when you feel that much you have really horrible downs. Really bad downs. If I didn’t have my music I might have done myself in. When I’m on stage, singing, I feel good. I feel great. I got turned on to Otis Redding by a friend and saw how Otis really goes into the music. After that I got more and more into the music. When Otis Redding was on at the Fillmore, in San Francisco, for three nights, I went every night. I got there early every single night to make sure I could see. I got there so early they hadn’t even opened the building.’ When she was talking about Otis Redding, Janis Joplin’s face still had traces of the flush of excitement she must have felt when she was watching him perform.
‘What do you think about when you’re singing?’ Lola said.
‘I’m not thinking much when I sing,’ Janis Joplin said. ‘I just try to feel. Being on stage and singing is about trying to get those things that are inside you out. The things that don’t make for polite conversation.’
Lola thought that just about everything in her life was made up of things that didn’t make for polite conversation. Her fishnet tights and the way they dug into her thighs, her diets and the mess of her mother picking at another person’s vomit and having things done to her by dogs. Lola was glad that Janis Joplin’s dog George was only half German shepherd.
Janis Joplin looked at Lola. ‘I sometimes think I should just put my hair up in a bun, wear make-up and go back to Port Arthur,’ she said.
‘Really?’ said Lola.
‘No,’ said Janis Joplin. ‘I tried just over a year ago, and it definitely didn’t work.’
A very tall, dark-haired girl a couple of rows in front of Lola and Janis Joplin was taking photographs. She turned around and took a photograph of Janis Joplin. Janis Joplin smiled at her, and looked at her for a long time.
‘Boy, am I turned on by her,’ Janis Joplin said to Lola. Lola was surprised. She hardly knew anyone who was openly homosexual. She also knew hardly any girls or women who talked about feeling sexually aroused. The girls Lola knew talked mostly about love.
Lola must have looked surprised because Janis Joplin laughed. ‘I get turned on by chicks,’ she said, ‘and by dudes. I think it’s normal to be turned on by a person – not by their gender.’
‘It does make sense,’ said Lola, although she wasn’t sure that it really did.
Many years later a friend would tell Lola that she herself could never have been a rock journalist. ‘My sexuality would have gotten in the way,’ she said.
Lola had stared at her. ‘All I cared about was my Olivetti portable typewriter, my tape recorder and getting the best story I could,’ Lola said. But afterwards, she had worried for hours about where her sexuality was.
‘My sexual tastes are very broad,’ Janis Joplin said. Lola was stunned. She had never thought of taste as being sexual. Taste, Lola thought, involved food. Chocolate cake. Cheesecake. Poppy-seed strudel. Not men or women.
‘What are your sexual tastes?’ said Janis Joplin. ‘Do you make out with chicks?’ Lola felt she could hardly tell Janis Joplin she was reeling from the thought of tastes being sexual.
‘Not really,’ she said. ‘But then I’m not doing a whole lot of making out. I did some making out with girls when I was about thirteen or fourteen,’ Lola said.
‘Everyone does that,’ said Janis Joplin.
Lola thought Janis Joplin seemed very sure of herself when she was talking about sex. She spoke about sex with freedom and an air of authority. As though it was just another everyday subject that everyone thought about. Maybe it was, Lola thought.
‘I think I am more myself when I am with chicks,’ Janis Joplin said. ‘I probably feel more at ease. But then I’m turned on by so many dudes. I like fucking.’ Lola had heard that when Janis Joplin had been asked by someone she knew why she didn’t snort heroin rather than shoot up she had barked, ‘Why jerk off when you can fuck?’
‘I’m looking forward to hearing you sing tomorrow,’ Lola said.
‘I’m so nervous about it,’ said Janis Joplin, tapping her foot. ‘This is the biggest audience we’ve ever played to. What if they hate me?’
‘This is not Port Arthur,’ said Lola.
‘It’s definitel
y not Port Arthur,’ said Janis Joplin as a shirtless man with about twenty rows of beads around his neck and a daisy chain around his head stepped over them to get to his seat.
‘And it’s not Melbourne,’ said Lola. They both laughed.
A tall guy with long straight hair called out and beckoned to Janis Joplin. ‘That’s Sam Andrew, one of the band,’ Janis Joplin said to Lola. ‘He’s a great guitarist.’ Lola recognised Sam Andrew from photographs of Big Brother and the Holding Company. ‘I’m coming,’ Janis Joplin mouthed to Sam Andrew. She got up.
‘I’m so glad that we sat next to each other,’ Janis Joplin said to Lola.
‘Me too,’ said Lola.
Lola looked around. She saw Brian Jones sitting cross-legged in an aisle, in the dirt. He was clearly waiting for the concert to start. The arena was totally packed. Lola thought that Brian Jones probably hadn’t been able to find a seat. He looked comfortable and happy. Lola was relieved to see him awake. And alive.
The first band to play was The Association. Lola hadn’t liked their previous hits ‘Along Comes Mary’ and ‘Cherish’. The Association was playing their hit record ‘Windy’. Lola was irritated by ‘Windy’. She thought it was a tedious song with tepid lyrics. Lyrics about a character called Windy having stormy eyes and wings that fly. ‘Windy’ couldn’t have been less interesting if it had been about stomach pains and flatulence, she thought.
Lola mostly watched the audience and made notes. There was peacefulness in the air, and joy. Lola had never seen mass happiness. She thought that most people probably hadn’t. Most people had seen photographs of people in pain or in shock or in fear, but there were not many instances she could think of that contained an image of a lot of people radiating happiness. It wasn’t the happiness of a victorious crowd at a football match or a soccer game. That sort of happiness involved someone else’s defeat. This happiness, to Lola, looked like a pure happiness. Maybe she was witnessing a revolution? Maybe the world really was about to change. Maybe people would no longer be estranged from each other. Maybe everyone would be linked and joined and connected.
It was dark by the time Eric Burdon and The Animals started playing. Lola had heard them before. She liked Eric Burdon. There was a grittiness to Eric Burdon. It was in his voice, in his singing and in his person. Eric Burdon was short and solid and had a depth to him, Lola thought. He had belted out The Rolling Stones’ ‘Paint it Black’ until you felt you were enveloped by some of that blackness, some of that pain. Lola looked at Brian Jones. He was applauding wildly.
Simon and Garfunkel took the stage. They looked young and innocent. Maybe it was because of their clean-cut, more fresh-faced appearance and the sweetness of their music, Lola thought. They were singing ‘Homeward Bound’. Lola tried not to think about why she was going to go home to Australia in a few months and she tried not to think about what the future Mr Former Rock Star might be doing.
It was one-thirty a.m. by the time the night was over. People were moving to the camping area near the arena of the football field at the Monterey Peninsula College, which was close by. There were sleeping bags everywhere. The aroma of pot drifted through the air.
Lola went back to her motel room, not far from the fairground. A group of people, mostly musicians, were standing around in the grounds of the motel, talking and drinking and smoking. Lola went straight to her room. She’d been lucky to get a motel room. She’d heard that every motel and hotel within a thirty-minute radius of the fair-ground was completely booked out.
The room had a king-sized bed. Lola had never slept in a king-sized bed. She looked at a series of knobs on the bedhead and discovered that for ten cents, she could make the bed vibrate for ten minutes. America, Lola thought, was just extraordinary. It had non-fat ice-cream, chubby-teen sections in department stores and vibrating beds. She put ten cents into the slot on the bedhead and lay down. The bed began to rumble and shake. Lola didn’t like it. She started to feel sick. She had to get up and wait for the bed to stop vibrating before she could sit down again.
That night she dreamt about a woman who was walking very, very slowly. The woman was covered in layers of rags with ripped edges. Her clothes were so torn it looked as though she was wearing rows of stained and ragged fringed trimming. She looked hypnotised or drugged. But Lola knew the woman was in a daze. A daze of hunger and a daze of shock. She had short dark-brown hair and large dark-brown eyes. Lola could see that the woman must once have been very pretty. The woman stopped briefly. She tried to say something to Lola but the words fell out of her mouth in a jumbled and scrambled manner and it had been impossible for Lola to piece the fragments of sentences and separated letters together. The woman moved on. She walked past an emaciated child who was squatting in a doorway. Lola had tried to pick up the small boy and he had disintegrated in her arms like confetti. The woman had kept walking. Lola had tried to catch up to her, but she couldn’t. Every time Lola got close, the woman appeared a few steps out of Lola’s reach.
Lola woke up in a sweat. She looked around her. She was in Monterey, California, in a king-sized bed that could vibrate for ten minutes for ten cents. There was no short-haired, dark-eyed woman and no small skeletal boy. Lola got in the shower. She needed to wash off that dream. It felt as though it was still stuck to her skin.
Decades later, Lola would almost stop in her tracks when, watching a documentary filmed in the Warsaw Ghetto, Lola would see that woman with her slow, only partly-alive walk and her shocked, dazed face, walking on one of the squalid, over-crowded streets. In the film, the woman walked past a small hollow-cheeked boy squatting in a doorway. Lola would not be able to sleep for the next few nights trying to work out how you could dream about people you’d never seen.
Lola stood in the shower in the bathroom of her Monterey motel room for more than twenty minutes before she felt cleansed of her dream. She got dressed and went straight to the fairgrounds. Mama Cass was sitting in almost the same seat. There was an empty seat two seats down. She said hello to Mama Cass as she squeezed past her.
Mama Cass, Lola knew, was born Ellen Naomi Cohen. No one who was called Ellen Naomi Cohen could be anything other than Jewish. Lola contemplated mentioning to Mama Cass that she, too, was Jewish. She decided against it. Meeting another Jew was no big deal for American Jews. They didn’t treat you as though you were a relative or an old friend. Being a fellow Jew seemed almost inconsequential. It wasn’t like that in Melbourne. In Melbourne it was a big deal. You were embraced. If you were under thirty you got your cheeks pinched, your weight and appearance commented on, and, if you were single, your potential in the marriage market evaluated. When one Jew met another Jew there was an instant connection. A connection that Lola sometimes, in Melbourne, felt was constricting, yet here in America she found herself missing. Lola decided to introduce herself to Mama Cass anyway. She emphasised the word Bensky, but the friendly expression on Mama Cass’s face remained the same.
Lola was half-watching Canned Heat, on the stage. She didn’t think the band was very inspiring and decided that the readers of Rock-Out could live without a report on Canned Heat. Lola was waiting for Janis Joplin to perform. She very much hoped that Janis Joplin would do well. She knew Janis Joplin would feel terrible if she didn’t. Canned Heat finished their set.
Some stagehands rearranged the equipment, and then suddenly there was Janis Joplin fronting Big Brother and the Holding Company. Janis Joplin was wearing jeans and a top. She looked raw and unadorned. It took her less than one minute to stamp her foot down and take control of the stage. By the time she got to ‘Ball and Chain’ you could feel that Janis Joplin had seized every one of the seven thousand people in the audience. There was hardly any movement in the arena.
Janis Joplin began the song very slowly, singing about sitting at her window just looking at the rain. A minute later, her soul was pouring out with every note. Shaking her head and stamping one leg, she was half-singing, half-crying, with her eyes closed and her face twisted and contorted, s
he cried out, asking herself, the audience, God, anyone, why love had to be like a ball and chain.
The pain in her face and in her voice as she lingered over the word ‘pain’ later in the song, was almost painful to watch. Lola could see that Janis Joplin was lost. Lost in her wounds and injuries and aches. You could almost touch the lacerations and inflammations of her heart. Lola didn’t know how Janis Joplin was going to emerge from that immersion.
Lola looked at Mama Cass. Mama Cass was open-mouthed in astonishment. ‘Wow,’ she kept saying. When Janis Joplin sang the very last note, the audience erupted with wild applause. Slowly Janis Joplin started to smile. She looked happy. She bowed and began to walk off the stage. Halfway across the stage, the walk turned into a skip and then a jump. The arena, on that Saturday afternoon, felt as though it had been set alight.
Lola saw Janis Joplin later in the day. Janis Joplin ran up to her. ‘Was I good? Was I good?’ she said.
‘You were fabulous,’ Lola said. Lola knew that a lot of people must have already said the same thing to Janis Joplin, but Janis Joplin, despite her excitement, looked as though she couldn’t quite believe what had happened.
‘They’ve asked us to go on again tomorrow,’ Janis Joplin said. ‘Isn’t that groovy?’ She suddenly clasped her head. ‘Oh, Jesus, what am I going to wear?’ she said, and looked quite anxious as she asked the question.
Lola wished she could miraculously come up with something wonderful that Janis Joplin could wear.
Lola used to frequently have a fantasy in which she made Renia beautiful clothes. She would make Renia exquisitely constructed tailored suits, and evening dresses with lace and Lurex inserts. In her head, Lola designed and made outfits for Renia for every season. Shorts and tops and cotton dresses for summer, cocktail dresses for more formal occasions, and suits and skirts for when Renia went into the city. The truth was that Lola couldn’t even sew on a button. The dressmaking fantasies were as soothing to Lola as her car-crash daydreams. In the fantasies, Renia would shine with excitement at all her new clothes and glow like the adored youngest child she once was. Lola partly felt she was rescuing Renia from her sadness with beautiful clothes. Lola thought that the preoccupation of trying to rescue their parents from the past could easily eat away at the lives of children of survivors.