by Rona Jaffe
But in New York she was free. After she finished her gig she would go to the after-hours rock clubs, like the Scene, where the music greats came to jam all night, or to a hall like the Electric Circus to drink and smoke and dance. She slept late, often awoke with a beautiful man in her bed whom she had met only hours before, and sometimes she even saw him again. In the afternoons she wrote songs or took long walks around the city. She was still young enough to have short hangovers.
There were little record labels that came and went. You could get signed by one if they saw you performing in a club and liked you, and if you and they were lucky the little label might be bought by a big one. Elvis had started with Sun, and Sun had later been bought by RCA. Or you might even be signed by a big one in the first place. That was her dream.
Janis Joplin was famous now. Billie had followed Janis’s every career move because Janis had unknowingly changed her life. After the Monterey Pop Festival, Janis and Big Brother and the Holding Company had been signed by Columbia Records, where they made a terrific album called Cheap Thrills. Then she left them and formed her own group, the Kosmic Blues Band. But Janis was getting increasingly bad publicity: she drank Southern Comfort all the time, even onstage, and Billie had heard from people who were in a position to know that she was on heroin. It amazed her that anyone could sing so well while indulging in that kind of self-abuse, and she determined she would never do anything like that to herself, no matter how lonely she was.
That winter, the last of the sixties, Billie was singing at the Village Vanguard when she met Harry Lawless, the man who would change her life again. She knew it the moment she saw him, although she was not sure why she knew or how he would do it. He sat alone drinking beer from a longneck bottle and smoking, and never took his eyes off her. She kept glancing at him to be sure. He was older than she but still young, and he had a craggy, scarred face that looked as if it had survived many bar brawls, mitigated by long, soft dark hair and velvet eyes. There was something familiar about that ravaged face, a face she might have seen in her father’s roadhouse, and it comforted rather than repelled her. He looked to be a little shorter than she was, which she didn’t mind because she was used to it, and he was hard and lean in his jeans, faded work shirt, and expensive leather jacket. He was attractive in an odd way, and very sexy.
When her set was over he raised the bottle to her with a nod of respect. She nodded back and smiled. When she came down to look for the friends she was going to meet, he stopped her. Billie let anyone stop her who looked as if he might be someone in the record business, but in this case she would have stopped anyway.
“You need a manager,” he said, in an accent she recognized from all of her life.
“How do you know I don’t have one?”
“I asked,” he said. He handed her his card. Harry Lawless it read, Outlaw Records.
“Cute,” Billie said.
“I thought so. Will you sit down and let me buy you a drink?”
“I’m meeting some friends here, but okay, just for a minute.” She let him pull out her chair for her and she ordered a glass of wine. “So you’re from Texas, too?” she said.
“Houston.”
“Oh, the big city. I’m from Plano.”
“How long have you been in New York?”
“Not long enough and too long,” Billie said. “So who do you suggest I get to be my manager?”
“Me.”
She thought about that. “If you have a record company, how come you’re a manager? I never heard of anybody being both.”
“Neither did I, but there’s always a first time,” he said. “Besides, it’s a small record company.”
“Well, I knew that.”
“They’re the best kind,” he said. “I can sign harder edged artists.”
“Anybody I know?”
“Pig Man and the Wanderers?”
She laughed. “What did they do, ‘Oink’?”
He smiled. “Are you always this obnoxious to men who are trying to make you famous?”
“Is that what you’re doing? Or just trying to make me?”
“A little of both. Seriously, Billie, you are very talented, and your voice is much too big for a room like this. I’d like to see you on a big stage, in an arena, strutting around, letting loose.”
“Me too,” she said.
She wanted to touch him but she didn’t. She could sense he felt the same. She had liked him right away, and now that she had seen him up close and listened to his voice and smelled his pheromones she liked him more. She felt safe with him, which did not reduce his physical attractiveness but made it stronger. She was so used to the courting antics of horny men that she could almost write the script for them, and the thing that had always been most apparent was that their attraction to her was impersonal. They didn’t know who she was, only how she seemed. They didn’t care to know. But she knew them very well. What she could sense about Harry Lawless, unless she was mistaken for the first time in her life, was that he and she were capable of digging into each other, right down to the vulnerable, trembling heart.
Her friends showed up then, and she introduced everybody. They were going to a club and she invited him to come along. While everybody else danced downstairs she and Harry sat at a little table in the corner of the upstairs bar and talked about music and their dreams, while the sound of the band downstairs came pumping through the floor.
“Every little independent record label wants to become another Motown,” he said. “Motown proved it could be done. A little label doesn’t have to be swallowed up as soon as it has a couple of hits.”
“I thought that was what they wanted.”
“No. And not me. For fifty thousand dollars I can finance a record. It costs ten cents to press a single that I sell to a distributor for fifty cents, and he sells it for a dollar, so I make forty cents a record. If I have a gold record that sells a million copies, I make four hundred thousand dollars.”
“Whew,” Billie said, impressed. “That’s money all right.”
“It could happen to us.”
“Who is ‘us’?”
“You and me. I’m in the process of putting together a band. It’s going to be called Bandit. I want you to be the singer.”
“Yes!” Billie said immediately. “Not to sound too eager.”
They smiled at each other. “I’ll put together a good mix of your songs and other people’s, and we’ll cut a record,” he said. “Some of the band members have written some very promising stuff.”
“Other people’s songs?” Billie said.
“And yours.”
“That’s fine.” Janis often sang other people’s songs.
“I’ll get you on the road. It’s time for you to tour.”
Billie thought about that, too. “If I’m going to do all this I guess I need an agent now.”
“You can use a lawyer for the contracts. Why pay all those commissions?”
“You’re going to be my manager and my agent and my record company?”
“You don’t think I’ll be fair to you?”
“I don’t know.”
“That’s what you have your lawyer for.”
“Then I’m getting my own lawyer,” Billie said. “Not some friend of yours.”
He laughed. “I insist on it.”
The whole thing was very tempting. She couldn’t keep on struggling forever the way she had been doing the past few years. She was impatient and itchy to make her mark, and besides, she had that feeling about him. She was an unknown and he was offering her a chance. Just for once in her life she might try letting someone else share the control.
“You’ll be the artist and I’ll be the businessman,” Harry said. “I’ll take care of everything.”
It sounded familiar. It was what her father had done, and she liked it. Teach me wha
t you do, Daddy, but don’t make me do it. An artist should be free to soar.
“How much is this managing going to cost me?” she asked.
“Twenty-five percent of everything, but don’t worry about it because I’ll make you rich. I promise.”
“I want to be famous,” Billie said.
“You don’t have a choice,” he said. “They go together.”
They fell silent.
“Are you going on the road with me?” she asked finally.
“Of course, whenever I can. You’ll never feel deserted.”
“Good.”
“Any other questions you forgot to ask?”
“Yes.” She paused, afraid of the answer. “Do you have a wife?”
“Not that I know of.”
She was infinitely relieved.
“Do you have a husband?” he asked.
She smiled. “Not that I know of.”
“A boyfriend?”
She shrugged. “Nobody special. And you?”
He shook his head. “Not at the moment.”
“It’s always good to know these things,” Billie said.
“That’s your next song,” he said. “I want you to go home and write it.”
“Now?”
“Not just this minute.”
She started to hum and then to play with ideas and phrases as they came to her. “Do you need me now, do you want me now, do you have somebody else and will you want me anyway? Did someone find you first, is she waiting there for you? It’s always good to know these things . . . not that it would have mattered.”
“Not that it would have mattered,” Harry said. They looked at each other and her heart began to pound.
“It’s not a sweet song,” she said.
“It doesn’t have to be. It just has to be real.”
“It’s real,” Billie said.
“For me too,” he said very quietly.
Their legs met under the table, and then their hands flew at each other and clutched, and then they kissed. They clung to each other and she ended up on his lap with her arms around his neck, necking wildly, thinking it was good the place was so dark and the clientele so stoned that no one noticed or cared.
“Come home with me,” he said. “I want to make love to you all night.”
If he can do that, Billie thought, I’m his.
He lived in an apartment that was clearly much more appealing than hers, although she didn’t notice that until the next day. They did indeed make love to each other all night, a luxury she had seldom had, and finally fell asleep for two hours from sheer exhaustion. When they woke up he made very good coffee, and she drank it wearing his bathrobe. He had a bedroom and living room and full kitchen, and nice-looking funky furniture. He even had an upright piano. There were framed memorabilia on the walls of various groups, none of whom she had heard of, but that was normal because groups that didn’t make it came and went like trains and changed their names all the time.
When she came out of the shower he was already on the phone. “Goodbye,” she said when he finally hung up. “I’m going to go home and write that song.”
“Good. And try to take a nap. I’ll catch your show. Afterward we’ll run over to your place and get some of your things so you can keep them here.”
He was managing her already. She didn’t mind; she sort of liked it. They lingered at the door, kissing. “If you don’t go now I won’t let you go,” he said. “So go. See you tonight.”
Billie hummed all the way home. They were a couple already. Neither of them had said they loved the other, but it was all right—they didn’t have to, they knew. That would come next.
Chapter Thirteen
FELICITY’S MOTHER and her mother’s lover, Jake, had been seeing each other for five years. They had a little anniversary celebration in Carolee’s kitchen, and Felicity and her sister, who knew how long they had been together, suspected what it was because there was a bottle of champagne instead of the usual wine. Then, in their domestic world that had long ago ceased to make sense to them, they knew it to be true because their mother told them, bubbly and happy, that she and Jake were celebrating their “long and special friendship,” while warning them for the thousandth time that it was a secret.
Felicity thought it was disgusting of her mother and Jake to make an issue of their illicit anniversary in her father’s house. Her mother was so open about it that Felicity wondered why her father was the only person in the world who didn’t know. But there seemed to be one other person who didn’t know: Jake’s wife.
His wife’s ignorance finally ended when she had Jake followed by a detective. After the detective told her all the particulars, Jake’s wife called Carolee’s husband, whom she had never met in her life, and told him. Thus it was that on a sharply cold and sunny winter afternoon Dr. Johnson, who had always been the most mild-mannered of men, came home unexpectedly from work with a gun in his hand and confronted his wife and her lover in his kitchen as Jake was finishing his usual delicious lunch.
It all happened so fast. Her father burst into the kitchen, her mother screamed, Felicity and Theodora screamed, and Jake stood up and knocked over his chair. Felicity could not believe that this angry man brandishing a huge blue-black gun was her father, the same man who had never had the guts to protect her from her mother’s beatings. His face was so distorted with anger and pain that she could not bear to look at it, but she couldn’t look at the gun either. She and Theodora fled to their rooms in fear and locked their doors. But the yelling and screaming floated upstairs and through the walls.
Felicity’s heart was pounding. She wanted to listen and she didn’t; she wanted to know everything and she was afraid to hear her mother die. If Jake died she wouldn’t care. She hated him and always had. But she didn’t want her father to commit murder. My father is going to kill my mother, she thought, and he’ll go to jail, and I’ll be an orphan. The thought of being totally abandoned made her begin to sob.
“I ought to kill you both,” her father’s voice roared. “His wife had to tell me. That’s how much I trusted you. You slut.”
“Oh please . . . no,” her mother was wailing.
“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” Jake was saying. “Please forgive me. I’m so sorry.”
“You were carrying on this disgusting affair for years, behind my back, while I was working so you could have a decent life . . .”
“I’m so sorry . . .”
“Get out of this house, you son of a bitch—now!” her father yelled. “And never come back!”
“Go!” her mother screamed. “Go!”
Felicity waited trembling for the sound of gunfire, which never came. What she did hear was the sound of the front door slamming, and when she went to her bedroom window she saw Jake running down the street through the snow, his suit jacket flapping. He had been in too much of a hurry to stop to take his coat. Felicity wondered if this was the end of it. She wished with all her heart that it was.
But of course it was not over. She could never underestimate her mother, and life was neither logical nor fair. The very next day her mother was on the phone with Jake, whispering and cooing and acting just as much in love as ever, making plans for a safer place to meet.
“I’ve made an arrangement with my friend Jeffrey,” she was saying. “He’s going to let us have his apartment in the afternoons. No, he’s not an old boyfriend, he’s a friend. He’s totally gay. No one will think anything of it if I go to his place. Oh you’re so sweet, but no you don’t have to pay him. It’s all taken care of. That’s what friends do.”
What friends did Felicity discovered a few days later. “You’re coming with me today,” her mother told her. She was in a decent mood—not happy, not angry, just matter of fact, almost resigned.
“Where?”
“To my friend Jeffrey’s apartment.
”
“Is Theodora coming?” Felicity murmured.
“No, just you. She’s fat and hopeless. You know you’re my favorite. You’re the one I love the best. You’re getting to look like me already. You’re going to be a beautiful woman. Come along now, cherub. We’ll have a mother-daughter time.”
Felicity didn’t know what to think. She knew she was her mother’s favorite daughter and she liked that even though she felt guilty about her sister. But she also knew that being the favorite, the one who resembled her beautiful mother (which she could still hardly believe because she knew she could never be as beautiful as her mother), was why her mother picked on her all the time. She didn’t know whether Carolee wanted her to be perfect or whether she was jealous of her daughter.
Jeffrey’s apartment was in a small building that had been divided up into six apartments. It wasn’t near where they lived and it seemed private. The apartment was very cluttered but obviously carefully put together, with dozens of little knickknacks arranged in groups everywhere, fake flower arrangements on the end tables, and a beaded curtain at the entrance to the bedroom, as if a woman lived there instead of a man. A woman with no taste. Her mother had the key.
“Why are we here?” Felicity asked.
“I have to clean Jeffrey’s apartment in return for him letting me borrow it. You’re going to help me.”
Felicity felt like crying. It was bad enough that her mother was cheating, but now she had to help her mother clean up the love nest. It wasn’t fair; it was sadistic.
“Pick up a rag and that can of Pledge and make yourself useful,” her mother said, nudging her.