by Laura Joplin
They devoured the poetry of Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the owner of the famed City Lights Pocket Book Shop in San Francisco, who gave new writers a start in the business. He wrote titles that caught their fancy, such as A Coney Island of the Mind. They jumped on the wild new works of Allen Ginsberg, whose initial poetry style, modeled on William Blake and Walt Whitman, had given way to performance poetry, introduced by his notorious poem “Howl.” They read Irving Stone’s Lust for Life, the fictionalized biography of Vincent van Gogh, a man driven to create art. They were drawn to D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterly’s Lover when it was banned as obscene by the U.S. postmaster general. Janis and Karleen read Leon Uris’s Battle Cry, James Jones’s From Here to Eternity, and Mickey Spillane’s detective novels. They sometimes chose books according to the number of cusswords in them. Pop often took the girls to the library with him. He went through a ritual of reviewing what they picked out. He would take the book and look at the title, and if he didn’t know it, he’d sit it on his open palm. He told them his secret method of determining the quality of a piece: “If a book is heavy, they used good paper and it’s probably a good book.”
The gang also dwelled on girls and sex. This was primarily a guys’ group that a girl had chosen to invade on their terms. Whom to date, how to put the moves on, what girl was putting out, and whether or not they had gotten laid were the topics discussed. Sex was never openly discussed in polite society. High school kids weren’t supposed to “do it.” They weren’t even supposed to know what it was!
Janis had the inside information from guys at school about what was and wasn’t happening, while she was participating in none of it. She and Karleen talked about sex, necking, and more, but Janis didn’t have a beau for experimenting.
“Oh, Janis, you’re a good old girl!” the intellectual guys often said. “Don’t call me a good old girl, dammit!” she replied. Janis was as much a woman as anyone, but she wasn’t considered so in the group. Women were seen as soft and nurturing, and Janis didn’t aim for either. The boys knew no other way to relate to women beyond sexual aggressiveness. The only other kind of relating they did was with each other, as buddies. Slowly Janis began to treat the men she met the same way she saw guys treating girls. She got sucked into the role of being a tough girl as the only way to be taken as an equal.
While other girls in the 1950s focused on dating and pairing off, Janis rejected the whole coupling ritual. Society encouraged young women to seek a man who would protect them from the perils of life. Janis refused. To adopt the female traits needed to make a relationship work was to take that fateful first step in denying her individual identity.
Grant Lyons was into serious folk music—roots music, not the watered-down Burl Ives that trickled into most homes. He searched out ten-inch records of obscure artists such as Huddie Ledbetter (“Lead-belly”), Woody Guthrie, Odetta, and Jean Ritchie. Jim, Adrian, and Dave were into the jazz of Dave Brubeck and others. Their bantering carried over into music, with the gang studying and analyzing the techniques of certain artists, time periods, and instruments. Both Dave and Jim also had large classical collections. Music wasn’t background for that group. It was the primary stuff.
Squeezing into Jim Langdon’s bedroom, the gang gathered around his small portable hi-fi. Jean Ritchie’s mountain music spoke of the harsh life of the Appalachian miners and the beautiful hills ruined by uncaring and ignorant mining corporations. Her music spoke to their guts, as the same conditions prevailed in our town’s relationship with the oil companies. The refinery fumes fouled the air daily. Their oil tankers, in releasing their ballast, periodically left globs of gunk on our sandy ocean beaches.
For Janis, the most compelling artists were the old-time black blues singers. They hit her with the experience of social oppression described in Kerouac’s books. Blues records allowed Janis to break out of the stereotypical limits of her white world, to move beyond race and meet the poetic hearts and minds of the black culture.
Sometimes the group brought their records to a church party or other large gathering that wasn’t just their group. In a calculated manner, they would put their records on the hi-fi. As the wailing of one artist after another spewed into the air, the party would slowly clear out and they would have it all to themselves. “Are you hip?” their actions asked.
Janis did the same thing at home. She tested our parents by replacing the resonant tones of classical symphonies with Willie Mae Thornton’s version of “Hound Dog.” She found out the music wasn’t appreciated. She eventually was able to gain equal time for her new taste in music, but only if she put on classical records between her selections.
While the gang was driving the “great American night,” as Jim Langdon called it, they sang in unison the folk tunes they listened to so faithfully in the day. One evening, while they were doing an Odetta tune, Janis refused to join. She sat silently, expressing her disdain. Unable to bear their butchering any longer, she broke out in a voice that sounded just like Odetta. The guys stopped singing. They were shocked. There was no point in singing along if she was going to sing like that. Later she called Jim Langdon, “Guess what? I can sing.” He replied, “Oh, really? What else is new?”
The group found new sounds by listening to the late-night radio stations out of Memphis, Nashville, Chicago, and Mexico, across the border. Locally they followed the Big Bopper’s show in nearby Beaumont. He was Jay Richardson, a white man who sounded black. They heard the sounds of Bobby “Blue” Bland out of Houston. The radio brought them insight into the hip sounds all around. At that time, many of the national acts had roots in their part of Texas.
With Karleen, Janis pursued her interest in the radio. She loved everything about the radio; it was the vehicle of cross-distance communication that allowed people to find like souls across the land. Port Arthur College, where Mother worked, had an affiliated radio station, KPAC, where technical students could practice. Roy May and John Robert, one year ahead of Janis in school, were two of the local kids who worked as DJs. Janis and Karleen often stopped by the station to visit while they worked. Sometimes they went to the broadcast booth of another station, KOLE, to talk to “Steve-O the Nightrider,” Steve O’Donohue, sitting quietly between his on-the-air spiels for the brief moments he could focus on their questions. He played rhythm and blues and rock and roll, and Janis wanted to pick his brain about the songs and musicians. Other times the two girls brought coffee to the guys manning the radio tower and sat and talked.
Janis was developing a bravura that left Karleen out. Like their contemporaries, the two girls rode aimlessly up and down the drag certain nights of the week. They peered into cars that passed as the other autos’ occupants stared back. Janis often slunk down in the backseat, hiding, knowing that if any of her intellectual pals saw her she would never hear the end of it. With Karleen she did things she didn’t do with them. Often she tried to steer Karleen off the drag and downtown to that den of sin in town, the Keyhole Club. They were too young to enter, so Janis would ask a passing patron to go inside and buy her one of their hot dogs that were so famous around town. Her brazenness embarrassed Karleen, who hid in the car until Janis returned, displaying her treasure like a trophy.
Janis saw herself as a painter in high school. She drew for hours. She was particularly interested in anatomy, forcing Karleen to sit for hours so she could sketch her hands or feet. “Don’t move, I’m just about to get this right,” she would say, showing her drive to perfect her work.
Janis took up oil painting, a challenge in both technique and pocketbook. The paints and canvases were expensive, and our parents didn’t have the extra cash to afford nearly as much as Janis’s artistic passions could consume. She occasionally took a small job, such as taking tickets at the Port Theater, in order to buy art materials.
Painting consumed Janis’s days. The emotions within her demanded an outlet. Her canvases displayed people, generally only one, male or female, and any viewer of her work could behold the artist’s pa
ssion for understanding humanity. Janis painted both religious themes, such as an angular Christ on the cross, and social themes, such as a picture of an old black man playing the banjo. Her brush strokes captured emotion, and her images shouted out her questions.
Janis was fascinated with the human form and became interested in painting nudes. The folks got quite flustered, thinking it was an inappropriate subject for a young girl. They wanted her to paint landscapes or buildings. Pop and I sometimes helped her pack her lunch and art materials and drove her to Pleasure Pier to a spot behind the old ballroom near the water. We left her there most of the day, to paint vistas of choppy water, sailboats, fishermen, and diving birds.
Janis decided to decorate her room with her art, painting the two panels on her closet door. On one panel she painted a nude figure. The folks were upset. They didn’t want Michael and I exposed to such visions. Janis went round and round with them about the finished painting until she was forced to replace it. Over the nude she painted a scene of tropical fish underwater with tendrils of lazy seaweed in the current.
Art still provided a forum for Janis to interact in the broader world. She won a football poster contest using a tiger skin in her senior year. She also entered Captain Kangaroo’s Play-Doh modeling contest with a model of the digestive system. She won an honorable mention.
Alcohol began to enter Janis’s social scene in her junior year. The drinking age in Texas was twenty-one, but like many adolescents, the gang spent evenings hunting for enough quarters to afford one six-pack of beer and someone to buy it for them. If successful, each of the gang would have one beer, sipped defiantly as they cruised the darkened byways of the Texas coast.
The first drink of liquor that Janis had was at Karleen Bennett’s house. Karleen’s mother wanted the girls to learn about alcohol in safe surroundings, not in clubs or the backseats of cars. Mrs. Bennett fixed Janis a whiskey sour, which she sipped with pride. “This is too great to believe, Karleen!” she exclaimed with pleasure. The girls felt especially sophisticated because the drink had a maraschino cherry in it.
The city of Port Arthur held pockets of independently governed communities like Griffing Park and Pear Ridge. Each had its own liquor laws under the Texas state law, which forbade liquor by the drink. Some areas were wet and others were dry. The system allowed a small enclave to loft the banner of abstinence by keeping liquor stores across the community boundary in Port Arthur. Even the wet areas didn’t allow full-service bars. Patrons had to buy a bottle, which was kept with their name on it and from which the bartender prepared their drinks. “Private clubs” could serve drinks if you paid a “membership fee” at the door. The cynicism, denial, and downright insanity of these laws and the accepted ways of circumventing them just increased the outlaw adolescents’ disgust with their hypocritical society, which seemed afraid to look at reality.
They learned about drinking from the books they read. They discovered the strong connection between literary genius and alcoholic weakness: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Thomas Wolfe, Dashiell Hammett, John Berryman, Jack Kerouac, Edgar Allan Poe, Ambrose Bierce, James Thurber, and Stephen Crane. Four of the eight American writers who had won the Nobel Prize by 1958 were alcoholics: Eugene O’Neill, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, and Sinclair Lewis.
Eventually Janis’s group found the local music halls. Luckily, or unluckily, Port Arthur was close to the Louisiana-Texas border, and the drinking age in Louisiana was eighteen. Louisiana also had liquor by the drink. Texas kids believed that the joints across the state line would serve anyone who was tall enough to get their money up on the bar. They were further enticed by a twenty-five-cent happy hour at a place called Buster’s. Jim Langdon began to get jobs playing in bands in Vinton, and his friends came to listen. Good girls in high school did drink alcohol, but they didn’t go to Vinton. Or if they went, they didn’t talk about it.
Vinton, Louisiana, offered Janis a glimpse into another way of life. It was Cajun. Both the language and the social attitude that came with it were different from the Anglo culture of Texas. There was a whole group of bars catering to the Texas youth: the Big Oak, Lou Ann’s, Buster’s, the Stateline, and more. Each had a large dance floor and several pool tables. After growing up glued to radio and hi-fi, Janis found her first good live music in Vinton. It may have been Cajun soul, rockabilly, or something else. There was certainly the white soul music of Jerry LeCroix and the Counts. Whatever it was, it sounded good, and uniquely Louisianan. Mixed into the atmosphere of the club was the Cajun priority of having a good time. These French-Arcadian descendants didn’t harbor the pent-up Anglo-Saxon attitude toward emotional expression. They let it flow and everyone accepted it.
Louisiana was as racially segregated as Texas in 1959–60, and in Vinton there were “whites only” bars that were off-limits to the blacks. However, there were several bars, such as Lou Ann’s, that catered primarily to the African-American trade but allowed whites inside to hear the black bands. Soul symbols began to creep into Janis’s life. They were part of the Beat scene, echoed in her experiences in Vinton. The group adopted the lingo, referring to hip people as “cats,” African-Americans as “spades,” and throwing in an artful use of “ain’t” and “man” in every sentence possible.
Janis was developing fluency in the new adolescent slang. She and Karleen practiced at Karleen’s home, holding cussing contests. Her parents laughed at the young girls practicing words they didn’t understand so that they could appear tough in their social circles. They sat on the couch with a dictionary. One would say a word and the other would have to define it, or they would both look it up in the dictionary.
Away from the guys, Janis was more of a girl. She and Karleen painted their nails together. Sometimes they would do weird things, like paint polka dots on their nails. Once they sprayed their hair with cans of purple and green color for Halloween. Karleen washed hers out before school the next day. Janis didn’t.
Our parents kept trying to support Janis and provide positive experiences for her to balance her hostile feelings. The summer between the eleventh and twelfth grades, they tried paying her to stay with Michael and me while Mother worked. They hoped Janis would develop a greater sense of responsibility. Janis played with the role, inviting the Bennett family over for a full dinner she prepared of chicken Hawaiian served as formal as we ever got.
Michael and I loved that time, but Janis wanted to break free and run with her friends. Mom eventually hired someone to replace Janis during the days. That’s when Janis enrolled for summer courses at Port Arthur Business College. The folks wouldn’t let Janis just loaf all summer, especially when Mom had to work and was unable to supervise. Janis enrolled on July 7 for half-days of clerical study. She lasted until August 7, when she withdrew. For the month she was enrolled she missed classes on nine days.
Janis did help with nighttime baby-sitting when required. One evening the three of us watched Father Knows Best on television and saw those kids enact a murder mystery for their parents. We decided to do the same thing. Michael became the deceased, with ketchup serving in place of blood on his shirt. Janis painted footprints on the front steps and we carefully hid a pipe—the murder weapon—in the living room. Our parents were delighted to come home and enter the game. This was the kind of breaking with tradition that they valued.
Janis had her own real police encounters. One summer afternoon Arlene got Janis and Karleen dates with some out-of-town friends. Riding around, the guys threw some firecrackers as a prank. Reported to the police, they were caught and brought to the Port Neches police station. Janis wailed, “What are they going to do to me?” as Arlene was let off because her father was a physician and Karleen was excused because her father’s company had done the plumbing in the new police station. Janis stood there in disbelief. “My father only works for Texaco! I’ll never get off!” Following a stern warning, Janis was also allowed to leave. Janis turned to Karleen. “What will I tell my parents?” With a typically cool approach to lif
e, Karleen shook her head at Janis’s ignorant query. “You tell them nothing!”
Janis’s senior year of high school was most different from her junior year in the absence of the core intellectual group, who had graduated and were on to college. The younger contingent pulled together, the core of which was Jack Smith, Tary Owens, Philip Carter, and Janis.
Janis loved hanging out at Karleen’s house. The Bennetts treated her more as an equal than as an adolescent. Karleen’s father would talk to her for hours on end about his views of life. He believed in reincarnation and that life was hell. He told her stories of his father, who had been a revival preacher, and how he’d been tarred and feathered because he took to tarrying with another man’s wife. Janis and Karleen sometimes took dates to the beach, along with the Bennett family. They cooked steaks and swam and had a regular celebration. Her involvement with the Bennetts was so constant that Karleen’s grandmother commented, “Don’t you ever leave her at home?”
Our parents liked Karleen, so it was easy for Janis to get permission to go to her house. It wasn’t always as easy to get out with the guys, though. In the winter of her senior year, Janis went to Karleen’s as a way to get to a coffeehouse—the Sage—that had just been opened by Elton Pasea, an older merchant seaman from Trinidad. He envisioned a relaxed social gathering spot, and served good coffee over a background of great jazz music. On the walls he hung original art, and on the tables he placed chessboards. It was modeled after the many similar places in Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, and Paris. Cutting-edge culture was attempting to take root in Port Arthur.
The Sage was only a simple storefront, just one man’s dream. On New Year’s Eve, 1959, the gang held a party at the Sage. Though it wasn’t a formal concert, Janis sang for the group. She also danced on the tables, reminiscent of our mother’s style so many years before.