by Laura Joplin
The Sage gave Janis the opportunity to display her artwork and sell a few paintings. She hung her rendition of the three kings following a distant star. Someone from Galveston bought the piece as he passed through town. Janis went to the Sage as often as she could, and it usually required a struggle with our parents to get permission. At least once she sneaked out of the house at night, took my bicycle, and pedaled to the Sage, hiding the bike under the cooling tower of the A&P across the street from the coffeehouse. Wrangling a ride home, she left my bike. I was aghast the next day to see that someone had stolen my bicycle! I looked everywhere until Janis and Pop and I went to the A&P to do the grocery shopping. Janis casually suggested we drive in the back way, where we would be sure to drive by the cooling tower. As we drove I screamed, “My bike! There it is! I can’t believe we found it.” She never owned up to her involvement in taking it, and I might have resented her theft had I recognized her action, but I didn’t. Instead, I was overwhelmed by her helping to retrieve it.
The Sage and Vinton might have been quick jaunts to a brave, new world, but everyone knew that the really good music was in New Orleans, on down the highway. On January 26, 1960, near Janis’s seventeenth birthday, she talked Jim Langdon and two other guys at the Sage, Clyde Wade and Dale Gauthier, into going to New Orleans to listen to music. Our parents would never have let Janis go, so she went around them. She borrowed Pop’s work car and gave our parents a cover story about spending the night with Karleen. She figured they would never realize she left town. Who would believe she’d go to New Orleans for the weekend? It took almost that long to drive there and back! Perhaps she would have gotten away clean, had a minor wreck not damaged the radiator, leaving the car inoperable.
The Louisiana police started looking at papers and realized Janis was underage and across the state line with overage boys. “They were talking the Mann Act, statutory rape,” said Jim Langdon, “and the trip was all her idea!” The police called Mom and she told them there was no ill intent. She explained that Janis and the fellows often did things together. Being in Louisiana was not out of character for them. The police escorted Janis to the bus, but the fellows were left to hitchhike back.
This was not an adolescent prank in anyone’s eyes. Janis endured hours of misery and apprehension during the ride back home. It was so bad, our parents didn’t know what to say about it. Clearly Janis wouldn’t accept the limits they set for her and she wasn’t good at setting her own limits. The wounds festered for some time as they tried to decide how to deal with the problems that Janis seemed to be creating for herself. They feared that the real pain from this excursion would be visited on Janis at school.
They were right. The story made it back to campus, easily embellished on the gossip circuit. Janis was righteously indignant. In people’s dirty minds she had been doing naughty things with a group of guys in New Orleans. In truth she had spent the night going from bar to bar, listening to different bands. As she later said, “That sex thing they lay upon me is all in the viewer’s mind.” Society gave a freedom to boys that it withheld from girls. It was “sowing their oats” for the guys, but “tarnishing your reputation” for her.
It must have been awful being in school with whispered lies circulating around. Before this incident, Janis had only seemed a bit kooky to other kids because she wore beatnik clothes. After the gossip about the New Orleans trip in her last semester in high school, she picked up the banner of social outcast and began taunting them with it.
The school counselor called Janis to her office. She discussed rumors of Janis’s drinking and improper behavior. Janis denied them. She sat in the office defiant, telling Karleen later that there had been a wine bottle concealed in her purse the whole time. (Neither Janis nor her friends drank much in high school—alcohol was too hard to get. When they did get some, they bragged about it, which has led to conflicting stories about the extent of their drinking.)
The unresolved tension at home was thick. Our parents couldn’t believe the stupid things Janis was doing. The more problems her behavior created, the less she seemed to care about modifying her activities. She stayed out later, studied less, and developed a mile-wide mouth full of impolite expletives. Coming home at one A.M., she and Karleen were greeted by Mother, worked up into a lather about the idiocy of her daughter’s transgressions. Mother screamed in confusion, “You’re ruining your life! People will think you’re cheap!” Slamming the door to her room, Janis cried to Karleen, “How can she do this? I’m her daughter.”
In 1950s Texas, people were intolerant. Our parents saw Janis damaging her reputation, a thing so important and nebulous that a girl was supposed to do anything to keep it pure. Mother had tried everything and was clearly at her wit’s end. To make matters worse, she saw her daughter do the very things that had so terrified her in her own adolescence. Mother knew the grief of losing one’s social position through the action of her father’s publicly amorous affairs. She cringed in fear at the possibility of Janis losing the thing Mom had treasured in her own life, her reputation. It was so real to her that explaining it to Janis was impossible. Mom talked in generalities: “You just don’t do that!” Mother hadn’t dealt with her anger toward her parents enough to speak from her core. She was still reliving the pain of her own adolescence. She couldn’t empathize with Janis. She could only speak from the fear that still held her attached to her firm belief in not challenging society’s rules.
Our parents worried about Janis’s behavior. They talked, cajoled, lectured, set limits, urged, and tried everything else that came to mind. “Please don’t set the world against yourself,” they seemed to plead. They finally sent her to a counselor to help her move beyond her social anger. They pondered family therapy, to help in reducing the problems of the internal arguments, but opted for individual work with Janis. After a short time, the counselor seemed to have helped Janis to cope with her situation, though not to reach any cathartic illumination.
Pop offered Janis some solace. He had much less respect for society’s value system than did Mother, but he accepted life and counseled Janis to do the same. Still, Pop believed the world was greater than any localized set of values. The fact that Janis questioned them was intriguing to him, although he told Janis that the difficulties were not worth the price.
Pop had always laughed loudly and easily with his kids, until the girls started to become women. Then he withdrew. Somehow our femininity made it more awkward for him to express his feelings, a task that took effort at any time. He was shy, so what comfort he could offer Janis was not enough.
Friends tried to talk to Janis. Kristen Bowen tried including her in planning parties, thinking that what she really needed was more social acceptance. But even if Janis went to the gatherings, she didn’t feel included. Roger Pryor called one day and invited her out for a Coke. It was as big a disaster as you could imagine. Mother kept saying, “Don’t blow this. Roger is a nice young man.” Janis secretly felt Roger was interested in her only because he had heard the gossip about her loose morals and wanted to get laid. Instead, Roger lectured Janis about her improper conduct and urged her to reform. Janis scoffed at him belligerently, “Get lost!”
Things seemed to come to a head in mid-March. On the 17th, two days after my birthday, Janis was suspended from school for a few days. Then a little bit of reality seemed to sink in and she put her life together enough to finish school.
Karleen got wind of an attempt to deny Janis an invitation to the country club’s Black and White Ball for seniors. Karleen, whose parents were members and thus entitled to invitations, called Mary Carmen Fredeman and the two plotted. Mary Carmen told the steering committee that if Karleen didn’t give Janis an invitation to the dance, then she would. Mary Carmen was one of the most popular girls at school—they couldn’t deny her an invitation. She was also from a prominent and wealthy family. So Janis got an invitation. She and Karleen double-dated. They danced in their formal gowns on the arms of their dates and felt the icy st
ares of the narcissistically proper young ladies around them. There were no incidents, but it wounded Janis nonetheless.
Marijuana was starting to trickle into the high school scene. Janis first ran into it at a sock hop, where she got a joint from a fellow she knew at school. Karleen and Janis took a car and drove to the outskirts of town on Procter Street. It was typically muggy and hot, but the girls rolled up the windows before they lit up. Karleen wouldn’t smoke, but Janis was eager. “But Karleen, this is what all the beatniks do!” Janis implored. She drew deep drags on the forbidden drug and sighed in anticipation. The car slowly filled with smoke as the girls circled the edge of town.
On the night of their senior prom, Janis and Karleen went driving. They picked up a couple of guys who wanted a ride to Port Neches, so they took them. It was a fitting nonevent to end a three-year period of adolescent frustration. Of Port Arthur, Janis later said, “What’s happening never happens there. It’s all drive-in movies and Coke stands on the corner, and anyone with ambitions like me leaves as soon as they can or they’re taken over, repressed, and put down.” Reflecting on those days, she mused, “All I was looking for was some kind of personal freedom, and other people who felt the same way.”
Living with Janis in high school tested the bonds within the family. She bolted from the innocence of childhood insistent on finding a better replacement than a compromising adulthood. She demanded that her parents know what she was doing and accept her behavior. By her graduation a shaky truce was reached. Our folks accepted the fact that Janis would probably continue to do things they didn’t like and were comforted by the fact that she had reached a level of social independence by graduating from school. They were more willing to let her solve her own problems. Together the three of them decided that they loved each other and would agree to disagree.
FIVE
COLLEGE AND THE VENICE BEAT SCENE
Time keeps moving on
Friends they turn away
I keep moving on
But I never find out why . . .
But it don’t make no difference
And I know that I can always try
—JANIS JOPLIN AND GABRIEL MEKLER, “Kozmic Blues”
IN OUR FAMILY we never admitted defeat. Instead, we plotted strategy to remedy our problems. Janis’s fantasy for solving her frustrations in high school was to move to a more accepting and open-minded community. At age seventeen, fresh from graduation, Janis followed her friends to college, at Lamar State College of Technology in nearby Beaumont, Texas.
Weren’t colleges places where people wrestled with truth? Didn’t the power of intelligent ideas reign supreme among students who came to fine-tune the use of their minds? Wasn’t college a community where people coveted their free thought and free lives more than life itself? Wasn’t college a place that could value Janis’s gifts? Couldn’t she finally escape the repression of parental oversight?
We helped Janis move to a two-story modern-style brick dormitory the summer after high school. The dorm rooms were laid out in suites, with two double-occupancy rooms joined by a bath. An open balcony along the front of the rooms served as the hall. I helped haul her things up to the second floor and envied the crisp newness of the room, its golden-brown stained-wood cabinets and large windows. In her new home, she unpacked old treasures that took on new value in a world of unknown potential.
Janis shed no tears when we left; she almost hurried us out with promises of “See you soon!” With zest she attacked the task of settling into her digs. The centerpiece of decor that lit her new palace was a painting she’d just completed. Lacking a canvas, she had layered the oils on an oversized piece of plywood. Confidently she strolled to the campus wood shop with the picture in hand, ready to greet a fellow traveler, a woodworking artist who would trim off the lower edge of the plywood. Back in her room she wailed, beat the walls, and cussed up a storm. She hadn’t found a wood artist who treasured her work. She had encountered only a mindless hand on a saw that splintered the wood and ruined the picture!
In the midst of her verbal barrage, Gloria Lloreda entered the room. She was a feminine, dark-haired beauty from a Catholic Mexican-American family in Galveston. Gloria was enchanted with Janis, her energy, power, and talent, which seemed to assure Gloria that college life would be lively. Their friendship began in empathy over Janis’s deep frustration about the painting. It was an easy way for the girls to connect. Gloria and Janis became friends that summer. In the fall, they became roommates.
Janis and her new friends stayed up late that first night, talking endlessly about dreams and questions. Janis’s first day at college promised her a greater sense of belonging than she had felt in years.
Regrettably, the gossip mongers who had talked about Janis in high school had followed her to college. They pledged sororities and walked around in clusters of like-minded coiffured heads whose uniform challenged, “It’s just not proper to do that!” Gloria was soon warned that Janis was loose and that she should stay away from her and her friends. Luckily the talk never fazed Gloria. Besides, she was developing a crush on Adrian Haston, the man she later married. Gloria had already found Janis a warm and caring friend. But the gossip must have added an atmosphere of unease to Janis’s encounters with other new students. It created an automatic distance between the sorority girls who gossiped and the artist intellectuals who scoffed at them.
Both Jim Langdon and Adrian Haston were returning to Lamar for their sophomore years. Their network of intellectuals was growing, with as many fresh faces from Beaumont as there had been from Port Arthur in the original gang. Tommy Stopher, a wonderful artist, and his brother Wally were there, along with Patti Mock and her future husband, Dave McQueen, plus Phillip Carter, Jack Smith, and Tary Owens from Janis’s class in high school.
Janis listed her major as art and pursued her work seriously. She took figure-drawing classes in which Patti sometimes earned money as the model, always clothed in a bathing suit in prim Beaumont. Janis played with styles. She liked the broad, flat areas of color in much of Picasso’s work. She also liked the crispness of Braque and the color of van Gogh. Her all-time favorite was Modigliani, the impassioned Italian painter and sculptor who revolutionized the art world with his eerie fluid figures that showed a forceful African influence. His brief artistic life was spent in the ravaged world of wartime Paris. Janis studied the man as well as his work and found that he had drunk alcohol and experimented with hashish to such an extent that they had cursed his life. He had a persona that many portrayed as larger than life—a man who carried around a copy of Dante’s Divine Comedy and the Bible and was quoted as saying, “Your real duty is to save your dream.”
Janis went to Houston with Karleen, who wanted to visit a friend. Janis wanted to see the Purple Onion coffeehouse. Karleen dropped Janis at a cheap hotel, not realizing that it was a whorehouse. When the management explained this to Janis, she said, “Well, it’s cheap, isn’t it?” They took her under their wing for the day. Karleen picked her up the next day and they headed home, feeling young, free, wild, and capable of anything. It was typically hot and humid, and Janis took off her shirt to let the breeze from the car window cool her down. She cradled a bottle of red wine she’d managed to salvage from the adventure. “We’ve got trouble,” Karleen told Janis. “There’s a cop flashing his lights at us.” Hurriedly Janis put on her shirt and hid the bottle of wine. “Do you know how fast you were going, young lady?” the officer asked. The girls replied, “We’re lost.” He was kind and gave them an escort on their way.
Patti and Janis sometimes cut class together and went to a bar, where they drank and talked. Other times they would gather as many people as they needed to raise fifty cents and head to the Paragon Drive-In on Houston Avenue, where you could get a gallon of beer for fifty cents if you brought your own jug.
Behaving outrageously was part of the image the artistic crew felt they needed to maintain. When a situation didn’t arise on its own, they created it. One night
Janis and her three suitemates slipped into their nightgowns at bedtime. The boys’ dorm was right across a courtyard, visible through a huge window that was covered only by a drape. Gloria flashed the lamp in their room, on and off, on and off, and on. With the light creating a shadow, the four girls performed a pretend striptease, all the way down to the bathing suits they were wearing underneath. The next day some of the guys expressed their appreciation of the show, to the shock of the girls. The mock strippers had never believed anyone could determine who had put on the show. They didn’t try it again.
The girls almost got expelled because one of them had a date with the captain of an oil tanker in port. Janis, Gloria, and several other girls dined on the ship as well. The thrill of excitement vanished when the captain’s wife found out and complained to the dean of the college that the students had spent the night. “We didn’t sleep over, we didn’t do anything, and we didn’t know he was married!” they wailed earnestly. When they were able to present evidence of having slept in the dorm, the dean let them off with a warning: “In the future, please choose more appropriate behavior.”
Parties were seldom planned; they just happened when any group of three or more gathered. Some of the guys had apartments off campus, which were the preferred places to celebrate. Now that some of the gang were old enough to buy booze legally, the alcohol flowed freely. On a few occasions Janis drank too much and her friends had to struggle to get her back into the dorm. It was a challenge to loft the inebriated Janis from the lawn up and over the balcony railing to the waiting arms of her friends on the second floor. Somehow they always made it through curfew check.
Occasionally Janis and others would sneak out of the dorm for the heck of it. Many times the destination was to hang out “on the line”—the jive description of the bars just over the Texas-Louisiana state line. They grooved to the music of the Vinton clubs, especially when Jim Langdon was playing in the band.