by Rona Jaffe
“Thank you,” they all said, raising their glasses to her. She nodded graciously.
“Funny about music,” Billie said. “When you hear an old song you always remember where you were. Nothing pinpoints a moment in your life like music. It just brings everything back, as if you were there again. In my opinion the only really good songs were written between the mid-sixties and the mid-seventies, with the exception of the blues. I can never figure out if that’s because they really were so much better or because I felt everything so strongly then.”
“Both, I would guess,” Gara said.
“Do you think anybody remembers ‘Polka Dot Bikini’ with their heart pounding?” Kathryn asked.
“Nobody we would know,” Gara said.
“I never met Janis Joplin,” Billie said, “but I always wanted to. So many of the great ones died young. I sat next to Jimi Hendrix at a discotheque one night in the sixties, but the closest I ever got to Janis was looking at her from afar with about a million other people at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967. She was with Big Brother and the Holding Company. She sang ‘Ball and Chain.’ I was twenty years old and I’d gone to California for a vacation with some friends. You know, San Francisco with flowers in your hair kind of thing. I was singing already, had for a long time, in my daddy’s roadhouse in Plano. But when I saw and heard Janis, I said to myself: ‘That’s who I want to be.’ Three years later she was dead.”
She took a sip of her vodka, remembering, and sighed. It wasn’t a sad sigh, it was more one of nostalgia, because the past was so far away. “Later on, when I was starting out, every dingy little club was full of screaming Joplin wannabes. I had my own style, but in so many ways she was my inspiration. Then I got successful, toured around, doing arenas, civic centers, rock clubs, the Fillmore East, the Fillmore West, the Troubadour in L.A., the Hungry I in San Francisco, had a couple of hits, and I thought I’d be her.”
“Arenas!” Brad said, impressed.
“Well, it wasn’t like today,” Billie said, “where you have only one band, or one singer. You’d get six or seven people on each show, like a mini festival.”
“Still . . .” he said.
“Yes, still,” she agreed. “It was an amazing time.”
She let some of the pictures come back into her mind, holding them away just a little so she didn’t have to relive the feelings, remembering in tiny flashes the life, the sounds, the electric nights, the man she had loved, and the darkness of the soul. She was here, safe and mellow and looking at the past, that achingly sad and gloriously high and pathetically confused period of her youth that seemed to have happened to someone else. And then she said the same thing she always did, which everyone thought they understood and which, although they were wrong, she never explained.
“I could have been Janis Joplin,” Billie said.
“You certainly could,” Brad said.
Billie smiled calmly. Everybody always assumed she meant successful. But she meant more; she meant dead.
She concentrated on her drink and the song on the sound system, so the others would know she was finished talking about the old days for tonight. She never liked to talk about that stuff for too long. Maybe I’ll tell them some time, she thought. But I don’t think so. There’s one thing I don’t want in my life, and that’s to be anybody’s interesting story.
* * *
Billie Redmond was born in Plano, Texas, in 1947, after her father had come home from the war and opened the little bar and grill that turned into the successful roadhouse he ran for the rest of his life. She had an older brother, Al, whose musical talent consisted of playing a comb with a piece of tissue paper on it. But from the time she first heard music, Billie sang along with perfect pitch. She had a deep voice for a little kid, and people thought it was cute. Then when she got older she grew into it, and by the time she was ten she was begging to be allowed to sing with the band at the Saturday night amateur nights her father had started to hold once a month. He finally let her.
“You should have a kid’s contest,” Billie told him. “I can’t compete with grownups, even though none of them are much good.”
“Well, don’t tell them they’re not much good,” her father said, winking at her. Les Redmond was a tall, strong man with a big mustache and a sunny disposition. He liked having a lot of people around, brought in the band to entertain them on weekends, was generous with his customers both with advice and free beers, and when any of them got unruly he threw him out himself. Les was proud of the fact that he didn’t need to hire a bouncer.
Her mother, Wilma, gave piano lessons. They didn’t need the money but she loved music and she loved children. She taught Billie how to read music and play the piano, and Billie taught herself how to play the guitar. Billie liked to listen to country music and gospel and the blues.
“Les, why don’t you have a little amateur night for the kids?” her mother said.
“They’ll be even more painful to listen to than the adults,” her father said.
“Their parents won’t think so.”
“You have a point, my love.”
Thus began the kids’ contests, with an independent judge, and Billie won so often she had to stop competing. She heard the customers whispering, “That kid should be a pro,” and she knew she was lucky to have her life all figured out before she was even old enough to worry about the future. She knew she would not marry anybody in Plano, that she would go wherever her career took her, and that she would have adventures. By the time she was in high school she was singing every weekend with the roadhouse band, had demanded and gotten a salary instead of an allowance, and was writing songs of her own, which she slipped in once in a while among the hits the hard-drinking customers wanted to hear.
Her social life, however, was not as good as the rest of it. She was too tall for the current fashion, as tall as the boys and taller than some, and as rangy as a cowboy, so although she had male friends she’d never had a real boyfriend. She concentrated on being dramatic-looking. She had great legs so she wore tight jeans and cowboy boots. She had no cleavage, which was a disaster for a would-be country singer or a high school girl, so she turned it into an advantage by wearing a man’s shirt unbuttoned to the waist and then tied securely in a knot. It was curiously seductive. She wore an armful of silver bracelets, a silver ring on each finger, and while every woman and girl in town who could afford it went to the beauty salon to have her hair teased and sprayed into a beehive, Billie let her straight brown hair grow down to her hips. When she sang she tossed her head and her hair flew like ribbons of silk. When she bowed after her number her hair touched the floor. Men started to want her.
Onstage she seemed to be the woman they wanted offstage, so after her set they offered to buy her drinks, and sometimes she said yes. She liked the yearning look in their eyes and the remarks they made, the way they leaned toward her and pretended it was an accident when they touched her.
Good, she thought. When you could do the picking you didn’t want me. Now I do the picking. She was seventeen and already in charge.
Sometimes they touched her deliberately, but if she didn’t want to be touched she could be fierce. A man she didn’t know pinched her on the ass once, and she hit him so fast and so hard that she knocked him off his barstool. She hadn’t really meant to, it had just been a reflex, but when she saw what she had done she was glad. After that the word got out that she was a little weird, that she didn’t act like a normal woman. You had to be polite to Billie Redmond or else. Some of the men called her a dyke, or a ballbuster, but the ones who didn’t only wanted her more.
“I have as much faith as you do that you’re going to make your career in music,” her father said to her that year. “But I want you to have something to fall back on. The entertainment business is unpredictable and crazy. I’m teaching your brother how to run a bar and restaurant, and I’m going to teach you.”
“You mean you want me to run this place someday?” Billie asked, aghast. She wasn’t going to spend her old age in this town, that was for sure. She couldn’t imagine being anything but a singer. Besides, what her father did was too hard, it gave her a headache even thinking about doing it.
“Consider it summer school,” her father said.
So there she was all summer long between her junior and senior years, learning how to understand and keep the books, how to order food and booze from the suppliers, why to put certain people at certain tables, how to watch for waste and stealing. He even made her waitress. At least he paid her for that, and there were also tips. She saved her money with a vengeance, for her escape into the music world.
“I’m never going to have to do this,” Billie protested.
“You’ll hire people to do whatever you don’t want to do, but you have to know how to do it yourself so you don’t get cheated.”
In spite of herself she started to find it interesting. Her father acted so affable at work, but it was clear that he was always aware of everything and in control. In a way, Billie realized, what her father did was not so far from what she was doing. He, too, had to manipulate an audience. Les Redmond worked hard, but his roadhouse was also a social thing. He was not home for a single evening of the week. If his wife and children wanted to see him for dinner they would have to come to him, which they sometimes did, and he always gave them a table near the bar with a good view of the room and people treated them with respect. Billie thought it was kind of neat.
She would never end up here, though, she promised herself that. Her father’s work might be his art, but it was still only his job. Hers was her soul. When she sang she often entered an altered state, close to ecstasy. It was clear to her that she had been given her voice for a reason, and not to take advantage of her talent would be bitterly self-destructive. Besides, she couldn’t help it. Being able to sing was what gave her entire life purpose and made it bearable.
When she graduated from high school Billie let her parents talk her into temporarily working full-time in the roadhouse as the hostess while she saved more money. They knew she planned to leave home, but they wanted her to be able to take care of herself for at least a while when she was pursuing her career. She was not a hippie, they said, despite the way she had taken to dressing; she was a person with purpose. Life should be taken a step at a time. She thought they were right about the nest egg, but a stronger reason for delaying was that after growing up in a place where she knew so many people, the idea of going off to a city where she knew no one at all frightened her. She was only eighteen.
Kids she’d gone to school with were getting married to their high school sweethearts, planning to have kids of their own. How much easier it was for them, Billie thought, to have a dream that was close to home. A few of her friends were off to college, and she knew they wouldn’t come back. She didn’t regret not having applied to college—college had seemed an impediment—but now she thought of it as another protected environment on the road to success, which was not for her either. Some of her friends had simply left town. The world out there was suddenly full of young people their own age, warm with love and drugs, making their own rules. They wouldn’t be strangers to her for long if she ventured out there alone, she knew that. But she stayed poised on the edge of freedom, ready to step off, and afraid. She didn’t want anyone to find out because it would seem so out of character, and humiliating.
She continued to sing at the roadhouse on weekends and sometimes she got a job singing at a party with the guys in the band, who liked her and treated her like a niece. Even they, these men she’d known for years, devoted musicians, had regular jobs during the week, and families to keep them anchored. She knew they had regrets and that everything was a tradeoff. She wouldn’t let herself have their lives. She steeled herself for the loneliness to come.
It took two years for her to know she was ready, and it almost came by accident. She was twenty that summer. Her friend Lily Ann and Lily Ann’s boyfriend Scooter wanted to see the West Coast. “If we don’t go now while we’re young we’ll never go,” they said, already afraid of being old. They invited Billie to come along to help drive, and she was glad to join them. She was afraid of being old, too.
They planned to see movie stars’ homes in Los Angeles, and movie studios, and scenery very different from what they were used to, and palm trees and the Pacific Ocean; and in San Francisco they would check out the hippie scene, and at Billie’s suggestion, the little coffeehouses where there were singers. But the highlight of the trip would be the Monterey Pop Festival where everyone Billie wanted to hear and see would be, the best of sixties’ rock and blues: the Who, the Jimi Hendrix Experience, Aretha Franklin, Otis Redding, Johnny Rivers, the Byrds, Eric Burdon and the Animals, Canned Heat, the Electric Flag, Quicksilver Messenger Service, the Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, and many more. They would stay in cheap motels along the way, and for the three-day-long festival itself they brought sleeping bags and blankets. Billie felt that in some way, at last, she was going to put her fantasies of her destiny together with the reality of what it could be.
When they got to the county fairgrounds in the little coastal town of Monterey she was stunned. She had never seen so many people in her life, a sea of people, an outdoor city of love. They wore love beads, boots, faded Levis, granny dresses, even stovepipe hats, and some had bells and tambourines. They looked just like her.
She and her friends joined the slow-moving, peaceful throngs strolling through booths selling paper dresses, underground pins, earrings, crosses, posters, and macrobiotic food. There was corn on the cob and pastrami sandwiches. Bright flags with astrology signs on them waved in the breeze. There were psychedelic movies and loud makeshift steel bands. When people were tired they put out their blankets in the warm California sunshine and played guitars, sang, socialized, or just slept.
“Somebody said there are fifty thousand people here,” Lily Ann marveled. “That’s three times as many people as in our entire town.”
“Let’s stay forever,” Scooter said, grinning.
“But they won’t . . . or I would.”
There was a banner over the stage in the seven-thousand-seat arena that said LOVE, FLOWERS AND MUSIC, and onstage there was nonstop total-volume sound. Delta blues, electric guitar, cool harmonica, acid rock, shaking and shouting, music that set the whole audience dancing. Day went into night. Dazed and gaping, drowning in music, totally happy, Billie knew she was on the verge of something important, but she didn’t know what.
And then they saw Janis Joplin, a Texas girl too, almost unknown, and Billie’s life changed.
Janis Joplin with her band, Big Brother and the Holding Company, Janis Joplin dressed in a gold knit pants suit, jumping and stamping her feet as if possessed, belting it out in a wild and passionate voice that sounded as if it would tear her throat apart . . . She was the best white woman blues singer Billie had ever heard. She was performing so far away from where Billie and her friends were standing that she seemed to be in miniature. But the sound was right there, and the energy, and the honesty, and the unabashed pain. It touched Billie in a way she had never been touched before. The sea of people receded, and Billie stood there hypnotized. For the first time, she understood that the future would be something she could deal with. This is who I want to be, she told herself. I would do anything to do this. She is me. My God, she’s not afraid to be afraid.
Other things happened during the festival—the Who made their amplifier go wild with feedback and then Peter Townshend dropped smoke bombs and smashed his guitar to bits while Keith Moon kicked his drum to pieces. Jimi Hendrix’s finale to his session was to burn his guitar onstage. But none of that violence impressed Billie at all. She had seen what she had come to see. All the rest was show business.
When she got back to Plano, Billie packed her things and left for New York City.
She was still capable of being shocked by masses of people, tall buildings and traffic jams, but not for long. She rented a tiny apartment in Greenwich Village, slept on a mattress on the floor, and haunted the little Village clubs; and finally she began to get gigs playing there. She strummed her guitar and sang her own songs, doing what she had done at home in Plano, but this time she didn’t have a band, not that it mattered since the stages were so small there wouldn’t have been room for one. She had a lot more artistic freedom here than she’d had at home because the audiences were hip. They didn’t demand she sing well-known songs whether she liked them or not.
Dark, smoky rooms that smelled of beer were familiar to her, and so were audiences, and so were admiring men. What was unfamiliar, although she had thought she was prepared for it, was the loneliness that touched her the moment she woke up in the morning and stayed with her all day like a creature with its claws in her heart.
She began to buy bottles of wine for her apartment, and kept a little buzz on all day. Wine, she told herself, was not hard liquor. It was just something to keep the creature at bay. She found out how to buy pot in Washington Square Park and from friendly neighbors. People were generous and shared. Pot was a social thing, like cigarettes, and it made you relax.
Everybody she knew took something. You could get pills in clubs, or at parties, and a prescription if you needed one and knew the right people. She started to take an upper from time to time when she was tired or sad, and a downer when it was hard to sleep. Everyone knew it was unnatural to try to go to sleep when the sun was already blasting in the sky.
That first summer in New York she lost her virginity at last, not that she hadn’t had plenty of chances at home. At twenty she thought she was probably the oldest virgin in America. What had made her so cautious in Plano was that she was still living with her parents, and the men who wanted to have sex with her were the ones she met in her father’s roadhouse. She didn’t want anybody to talk about her, to say that you could get Billie Redmond as a kind of dessert after dinner and the show. As for the boys she had known at school, they had rejected her for so long that when they finally decided she was hot because of her performances, she already thought of them as rejects, and she wanted them to know it. She was haughty and mysterious, and all the guys simply assumed she was having sex with someone else. No one knew she was a virgin; it was her secret.