Love, Janis

by Laura Joplin

  By the end of the fall semester, Janis was disillusioned with college life. The school was designed to train engineers to work in the local petroleum industry. Lamar was not the hothouse of artistic stimulation that Janis needed and sought. She spoke to our parents on one of her weekends at home. “I don’t want to go back.” “What will you do instead?” they queried. “You have no skills to support yourself.”

  Mother worked at a business college and saw in its short-term training programs an answer to Janis’s dilemma. Janis enrolled at Port Arthur College to study keypunch, typing, and other clerical skills. After her training she would be equipped to move to the more accepting atmosphere of a larger city and support herself. Janis trained just long enough to pass the skill level required to get work. She enrolled in March 1961 as a half-day special student. She missed all or a portion of nineteen days of class in the four months she was enrolled. The reason given was “ill.”

  Janis lived at home that spring. She and Patti spent a lot of time together hanging out in town. They sometimes went downtown to a record store. In 1961, music stores had listening booths. The girls spent hours playing everything, including jazz and country, but only bought things like Bessie Smith. Sometimes Janis and Patti used Patti’s father’s Webcor reel-to-reel tape recorder. Janis sang into it and then they listened critically. They weren’t pleased with any of it.

  Once Phillip and Janis dropped by to fetch Patti to a shrimp boil down on the pier. It was a typical rainy day and the two had picked up a young black hitchhiker on the way, planning to drop him at his home downtown. As Patti bopped out to the car, her father caught a glimpse of the black guy in the backseat. He then accused her of going out with him. Even their good deeds brought them trouble.

  The parties were growing ever more bawdy. Few people had internal limits about how much to drink. They drank what they could afford to buy. With increasing liquor, many parties disintegrated into crude grab-ass kinds of things, with drunken men making a play for Janis or any other women around. It was a demeaning way to find physical intimacy.

  Parties were often held at the house of whoever’s parents were out of town or away for the evening. One gathering at Phillip Carter’s house was notable for the demolishing of a four-by-eight-foot model of an oil tanker that belonged to Phillip’s father. The accident evolved from verbal sparring between Janis and G. W. Bailey, a Port Arthuran who later played Sergeant Rizzo on the television show M*A*S*H. G.W. was a good friend of Patti Mock’s brother, and he warned Patti about hanging out with Janis. Mixing liquor and two hostile attitudes produced strings of insulting accusations from G.W. to Janis and back. Trotting defiantly over to Jack Smith, Janis said, “Be my white knight. Do something.” Jack accepted the challenge and ended up fighting G.W. over Janis’s honor. The ship model was the unfortunate victim of their fury.

  One evening a group of eight—Jim, Dave, Adrian, Randy, Janis, and three other girls—walked up the steep pathway along the narrow two-lane roadway of the Rainbow Bridge. The bridge spanned a narrow river, but it had to be tall to allow the uppermost spires of the oceangoing vessels to pass easily underneath. Reaching the top, the group swung their legs over the side railing and climbed down a ladder to the catwalk underneath. It was dark, quiet, safe, and forbidden. Far below, the tiny tugboats pushed their heavy barges of oil. Silently, someone leaned over and dropped an empty beer bottle, aiming for a tug. Everyone held their breath to see if it would hit the target. Suddenly, sirens split the air—one, then two, three, and more piercing wails. A passing motorist had seen the last girl climb over the railing. Fearing a possible suicide, the police had been called. Every patrol car within twenty miles blocked both lanes of traffic as the kids were called to the road surface. “This is it,” the guys mumbled. But feminine charm sometimes works wonders, and the police were cajoled into letting them off.

  New Year’s Eve at Phillip’s house, Janis and Patti were goaded by the guys into showing female fighting tactics. They went at it on the floor in a true cat fight, pulling hair and popping buttons. The girls enjoyed the tussle. As they bopped down the stairs to get a fresh bottle of whiskey, the front door opened. The Carter parents caught them looking disheveled, their shirts hanging open, and swigging bourbon. They quickly threw the whole crew out.

  People started traveling. One weekend Jim Langdon and Rae Logan, his future wife, along with Adrian and Gloria and Janis, drove to Austin and stayed in a hotel. They wanted to visit their old chums Dave Moriaty and Randy Tennant. During a school vacation when Adrian couldn’t stand being parted from his true love, the old Port Arthur group drove to Galveston to visit Gloria. As evening approached, Janis and the guys bid good-bye to Gloria and decided to get a cheap motel room instead of driving the few hours’ journey back to Port Arthur. They flipped a coin to determine which two people would get to sleep on the bed. Janis and Adrian won. The other guys slept uncomfortably on the floor around them. The next day, Gloria went with them to wait for the Galveston ferry to dock and return them to the Port Arthur side of the ship channel. The car held six groggy, hung over, sleepy, and bored people. Janis, ever interested in enlivening things, said, “Gloria, guess who I slept with last night?” Adrian groaned, “Oh, no!” and everyone else in the car howled at the mischievous gibe. They’d all been there and knew that nothing except sleeping had happened.

  A lot of the people in the group had moved out of Port Arthur. Dave Moriaty and Randy Tennant attended the University of Texas in Austin. Grant Lyons went to Tulane in Louisiana. Janis was itching to be on to grander places. She and our parents hatched a plan to move Janis to Los Angeles, where Mother’s two sisters, Barbara and Mimi, lived. Our parents were hoping that removing Janis from the influence of the gang would enable her to find another base for herself. Los Angeles seemed like a great spot because Janis’s two aunts could provide some oversight. However, Los Angeles also held a thriving artist community, one of the three largest Beat groups in the United States. Janis was thrilled at the idea of going to Los Angeles, a place she saw as full of possibilities.

  We drove her downtown one Saturday morning to put her on a large, smelly Greyhound bus. I was dead set against Janis leaving me behind but was powerless to influence anything except my own anger and frustration. “Just don’t go,” I kept saying, a plea that fell on deaf ears that already heard the roar of the Pacific Ocean.

  Barbara and Mimi met Janis at the bus station in Los Angeles. They found her standing by a pile of beautiful new luggage and talking to a young black man. “He’s been on the bus with me the whole way,” Janis said happily. Neither of them commented about her selection of friends, but they didn’t need to say that it seemed improper to them that Janis visit with a black man. “That is awfully nice luggage,” they said to Janis. She replied, “Mother insisted on buying it for me. I didn’t want it. I was all set to stuff my things in an old bag, but she insisted.”

  Piling in the car, Barbara and Mimi began a guided tour of the city they loved. They showed her the sights and took her for breakfast at a posh place near Beverly Hills. Janis was shy and polite but a bit aloof.

  Janis soon settled into an artist’s shack behind Mimi’s house in Brentwood. It was a small building where Mimi’s husband, Harry, painted. He kept it well stocked with oil paints and canvases. Mimi didn’t realize that Janis painted too and was surprised the next day to find that Janis had stayed up half the night painting. Janis thought she’d moved into heaven! She liked Los Angeles already.

  Our parents insisted that Janis work, and with the assistance of her aunts, she soon got a job as a keypunch operator at the telephone company. She kept to herself in the back house most of the time, but came home from work one day and went into the kitchen to talk. “A guy’s coming by in a little bit and I don’t want you to think I’m crazy about him or anything. I’m not. I’m just using him. I asked him to come over and pose.” Then Janis cracked up laughing. “He’s in for a shock when he finds out I just want to paint his hands. He has perfec
t hands to finish the picture I’ve been working on.” Janis was on her second attempt at painting a man playing a guitar.

  Mimi took her niece out one evening to get to know her better. She brought Janis to a pizza place near the university, thinking she would like being around other people her age. It was a lively spot where a small band played. Before Mimi had settled down, she turned to see Janis stand up, kick off her shoes, and march in place as she sang at the top of her lungs “When the Saints Go Marching In.” For five minutes Mimi and everyone in the audience clapped along as the young enthusiast from Texas stole the show.

  Barbara eventually helped Janis find an appropriate apartment, but she didn’t stay there long. Money was tight, and she moved into Barbara’s two-bedroom apartment. It was an awkward fit with Janis squeezed in beside Jean, Barbara’s teenage daughter. Life at Barbara’s apartment couldn’t be more different from the calm normalcy of Mimi and Harry’s routine with Mimi’s daughter, Donna.

  Barbara sold real estate and had a special relationship with her broker, a married man named Ed. Barbara had been married twice. They worked well together and their days often started with Ed coming by at ten A.M. for martinis. Frequently they took a client out for lunch and drinks. Regularly Ed came to the apartment at four P.M. for the cocktail hour. Janis was impressed. She thought Barbara’s life was wonderful; she had found freedom.

  Janis grew very close to Barbara. The two shared a zest for living and a tough, decisive style of interacting with the world. Janis often joined Ed and Barbara for drinks and conversation. However, Jean resented Janis, and that tension made everyone’s life difficult in the apartment.

  One afternoon while returning from work to Barbara’s house, Janis started visiting with a guy on the bus. He was going all the way to Venice Beach, on the outskirts of L.A. Janis passed her stop and went with him.

  Venice was the embodied dream of Albert Kinney, who had made a fortune in tobacco. He had envisioned a Renaissance town like Venice, Italy, with gondolas and charming bridges over sixteen miles of linked canals. The area grew, embellished by rococo-style hotels and amusement parks, the Coney Island of the West. Hundreds of tourists savored its charm. However, the discovery of oil destroyed the development of this fanciful burg. Standing derricks and the stench of oil just didn’t blend into the quaint Venetian stucco architecture. Many of the canals were filled in with dirt. The tourists quit coming. By the 1950s the beatniks took over Venice’s cheap apartments along picturesque narrow streets and alleys.

  Venice had never looked like a regular L.A. suburb, and seemed unwilling to act like one either. It attracted a unique group of residents who had little money but a strong aesthetic sense. They lived in “voluntary poverty.” They liked the winding streets, the area of the city prohibited to cars, and the proximity to the beautiful Pacific Ocean. Alexander Trocchi, an American who had edited a literary magazine in Paris, came to Venice and wrote Cain’s Book, his tale of craving and battling heroin. Stu Perkoff was the most famous poet to emerge from the Venice coffeehouse scene, a group that included Charles Bukowski, who later wrote “Notes of a Dirty Old Man,” a column in the Los Angeles Free Press.

  Lawrence Lipton gave what he termed “Venice West” national recognition in his epic tale of Beat life there, The Holy Barbarians. Published in late 1959, it changed the local scene forever. Time ran a full review of it. It was the new guide to the Beat generation. The tourists returned to Venice, intent upon drinking coffee in a “real” coffeehouse and gawking at beatniks involved in their artistic tasks.

  Lipton was intent upon turning Venice into the new North Beach, where his friend Kenneth Rexroth held court with the Northern California Beats. Lipton’s novel was aimed at achieving recognition for the Southern California scene. Few others wanted it, though. Most had moved there to escape. Now they were in the limelight.

  There were about fifty coffeehouses in the Los Angeles area in the 1960s. Venice West Café Espresso was the first hip coffeehouse and restaurant. It was opened by Stu Perkoff as a business to support his family and to enable him to continue writing poetry. He sold it in early 1959, prior to the publication of Lipton’s book, at a time when the café was empty and losing money. By late 1959, it was packed and profitable.

  The Gas House was the most notorious coffeehouse in Venice because it had become the target of a citizens’ group that hated the influx of tourists and artists. The Gas House was the first place they wanted to close. It was supposed to be an art gallery where tourists could not only see art on the walls but also see artists at work producing new pieces. It was also supposed to serve as a venue for poetry readings and as a members-only flophouse. It struggled to do much of any of those things, but the court case lodged against it gave it so much publicity, everyone stopped by.

  Another product of the Venice beatnik scene was Henry Miller’s The Air Conditioned Nightmare, a saga of a family’s automobile trip across country. Miller’s heroes believed that California was the only place in the country where there was any hope for culture, where people had any zest or joy in their lives.

  There was a deliberate mixing of the races in the coffeehouses. The literary movement in Venice owed much to the earlier bohemian movements and also a deep debt to the creative energies of Watts. Many frustrated blacks from the South streamed West to Los Angeles and founded a thriving community in the 1930s. Langston Hughes, the great black writer, came from there, and Arna Bontempts also wrote of Watts. Jelly Roll Morton’s best years were in Watts.

  Janis moved into the low-rent Venice district. Aunt Barbara and Ed came to visit her new home. Barbara’s jaw dropped as she scanned the dirty dump that Janis had chosen. In the middle of the living room was a large steel barrel into which all trash was thrown. On the wall hung a collage Janis had made from a dried-up pot of split pea soup with a ham bone solidified on an old rope. She turned to Janis and raged, “You weren’t raised to live like this!” A verbal barrage ensued between Janis and Barbara, a device that the two had perfected and seemed to find useful in resolving their differences. This time Barbara left angry and resolute. She wouldn’t visit Janis at home again.

  Janis had moved to Venice well past its heyday. She came on the limping tail end of the tide of publicity-enticed newcomers who had read Lipton’s book. The area had become mean-spirited. Crime was commonplace—murders, robbery, and rape. The amusement park stood rotting. At night the beach belonged to the muggers. No longer on the fringe of the drug world, it was now one of the centers. Grass, Benzedrine, heroin, and codeine cough syrup all had their followings.

  The Los Angeles and Venice Beat scenes were saturated with drugs and their effects on artistry. A totem of the movement was the all-night drive to create art in any form. Wine and marijuana were most popular, but heroin was used by a small percentage of the group. Painting, music, or writing occupied hours of everyone’s days. Janis was undoubtedly influenced by the wealth of ability she witnessed there. She still considered herself a painter and focused on that. In addition she was emerging as something of a singer, performing spontaneously at the Gas House or at late-night gatherings among friends.

  Sexual exploration fascinated and united these students of aesthetics. They welcomed uninhibited pleasure between men and women, as well as between men and men, women and women, or groups of enthusiasts. One’s virginity was often the first thing a novice lost after wandering curiously onto the scene. An even better symbol of freedom was interracial sex. Straight society developed a paranoia about the Beats, a feeling that the police helped to start by arresting Lawrence Ferlinghetti in 1956 because he had published “Howl,” the startling poem by Allen Ginsberg.

  Janis frequented the Gas House and met “Big Daddy,” the official spokesperson for the establishment. His real name was Harry Hilmuth Pastor, but he was also known as Eric Nord. He was six feet seven inches tall and weighed three hundred pounds. He had been living in the North Beach community, where he owned the Co-Existence Bagel Shop. Hanging out around him an
d others, Janis heard about the North Beach scene. She called Mimi and Barbara one day and said, “I’m going to San Francisco and I wanted to say good-bye.” They replied, “How are you going to get there?” Janis sighed and said simply, “I’m going to hitchhike.” “Oh, no,” our aunts cried, “we’ll give you the money for the bus.” Janis was firm. “I don’t want your money. I want to go and go my way.” She arrived in North Beach and strolled down Grant Street. Then she went into the City Lights Book Shop and rubbed shoulders with Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

  AROUND CHRISTMAS IN 1961 Janis returned to Port Arthur wearing a World War II bomber jacket turned inside out so the sheepskin lining showed. She came unannounced in a taxi that pulled up in front of our house, something that never happened. Pop went outside to greet her and was astonished to see his daughter emerge from the backseat of the car tumbling small shoe boxes tied with string onto the lawn. There she hugged him with a warm, gleeful smile, ignoring the oddity of her arrival. We were glad to have her home.

  Janis returned a more experienced person, capable of impressing the local gang with her tales of the real life in California. Janis went with Jim Langdon to a private club on New Year’s Eve to hear a Lamar friend of his, Jimmy Simmons, and his small jazz band. Jim brought Janis to the stage and Jimmy asked her to sing a few tunes with them. After the first one, he said, “Enough.” Janis’s rough style wasn’t the pretty-voiced sound he had expected.

  Janis had tasted freedom in Los Angeles and was uncomfortable living under parental oversight again. She and Jack Smith found an abandoned drive-in theater one day while tooling around town. She grew excited by the apartment in the base of the screen and argued with our parents about moving into it. Our folks never considered the possibility, and Janis ranted and raved about their getting in her way.