Love, Janis

by Laura Joplin

  She enrolled as a student at Lamar and commuted back and forth. She lived at home. Janis increasingly looked to Jim Langdon as a mentor. Jim was a gifted musician coming into his own at Lamar. He played in the Beaumont symphony, various jazz clubs around town, and dance bands like the ones formed by Johnny and Edgar Winter, who lived in Beaumont. Sometimes, late at night when Jim was playing and the crowd had thinned out, Janis could be coaxed onstage to sing something like “Cherry Pie.”

  Janis and gang met George Alexander, a jazz trumpet player who had played with Gatemouth Brown and many others. He was back living in Port Arthur, teaching at the local high school. He played jazz on the weekends and tutored his fans.

  Jim Langdon worked with a group called Ray Solis, which had a contract to do a radio and television commercial for a bank in Nacogdoches, Texas, that was celebrating its fiftieth birthday. The band recorded an instrumental track of the Woody Guthrie tune “This Land Is Your Land.” They asked Janis to do a vocal version. She sang:

  This bank is your bank

  This bank is my bank

  From Nacogdoches

  To the Gulf Coast waters

  Fifty years of saving

  Fifty years of service

  This bank belongs to you and me.

  The vocal was never used.

  In March, right before Mardi Gras, Patti Mock and Dave McQueen got married. They honeymooned in New Orleans, and Janis and Phillip Carter went along to enjoy the thrill of the city. They went in Phillip’s father’s car and had only ten dollars between them aside from Phillip’s father’s credit card. They slept in shifts in the car parked in Pirate’s Alley. One slept in the front seat and another in the backseat while the other two roamed around. When Janis and Phillip knocked at the window to get their turn sleeping, Dave couldn’t be budged. In frustration Janis marched off into the crowd. In the morning she returned with a tale of having picked up a sailor who got them a motel room. She said it matter-of-factly, as a way to solve a problem.

  Janis got a job in Port Arthur at the local bowling alley waiting tables in the restaurant. Earning her own money gave her a feeling of independence, and she needed that. She worked till midnight and was then ready to unwind. Frequently she met Jack Smith after he got off work at the drugstore. They liked to go across the canal to the pier on the lake and talk. The view of gently lapping waves under a broad expanse of sky stimulated profound thoughts.

  “Why is everyone a pair except me?” Janis wondered. There was Jack and Nova, Jim and Rae, Adrian and Gloria, etc. “I want to want the white house with the picket fence covered with climbing roses, but I just don’t,” she often said with a sigh.

  There was a drawbridge across the canal that connected the pier on Pleasure Island to the town. If a tanker was passing by, cars had to wait twenty minutes or so for it to inch its way carefully under the narrow upraised bridge. One night as they sat waiting in Jack’s car, Janis got the impulsive idea to take one of the portable flashing lights that were set up at the base of the raised bridge. She taunted Jack until he slid a broken one out of sight in the backseat. They hadn’t considered that the bridge attendant would call the police. A squad car waited for them on the other side of the road. Jack was arrested and put in jail. Janis was frantic, feeling that she was the cause of his misfortune. She went to the police station and stayed for three hours talking to the desk sergeant. She tried every approach possible, pleading, taking responsibility, and even demonstrating that the light had been broken when they took it. Finally they let Jack off. Walking outside he expressed his gratitude, and the tough young girl said, “I was too frightened to call my parents at this hour of the night.”

  Our folks tolerated much of Janis’s personal activity as long as she got her work done. Her activities still ranged from the expected attendance at church to the outrageous. They hoped that Janis, like most teenage rebels, would make an about-face and return to her former self.

  They drew an invisible line between Janis and Michael and me, tolerating things in her behavior but ruling them out for us. Their seething hostility greeted Janis’s attempts to encourage Michael and me to adopt her ways. Otherwise they tried to accept their eldest’s behavior.

  There must have been some discussions about drinking because Michael pulled Janis aside once and asked her if she had ever seen anyone drunk. He wanted to know how they behaved. She roared and said, “Hey, I’ve been drunk. It’s cool.” He was shocked. He had no idea she even drank. “Next time you’ve had something to drink, tell me,” he implored. Not too long after that she knocked on his door. “Well,” she said, “can you tell? [Pause] I’m drunk.” He was floored. He couldn’t tell at all.

  Parties had become intense, mind-probing affairs. Grant Lyons might be found throwing darts across the room. Near him lay Jim Langdon head-to-head with another person. The wall was lined with records, and another person was carefully selecting among them. Placing the album on the stereo, the challenge would be presented: “Who is playing the three-quarter-time flugelhorn passage on the first cut?” Jim was a serious musician and his passion set the tone.

  A typical evening started with people tossing coins to test Newton’s law of probability or playing a few hands of bridge. Janis created a new bidding convention, which she called a googly, as in, “I bid a googly heart.” It meant that she knew she wasn’t supposed to bid but she wanted to bid, so she called it a googly to sanction its improper basis. Soon people would tire of cards and start drinking and listening to music. The last run for beer was ten P.M. If the energy level was still up around midnight, the group might head to Vinton to see what was happening.

  The amount of alcohol consumed often determined the tone of an evening’s antics. In one blurry evening at Patti and Dave McQueen’s garage apartment, in the midst of the camaraderie, Patti and Janis spontaneously embraced, kissing on the mouth. It was the only remotely homosexual encounter that had occurred in the group.

  The kiss shocked both girls. They stepped back. It was late, about midnight, and Dave McQueen, Patti’s husband, and Jim Langdon had just entered the door after their late-night jobs. They had walked into the room just in time to witness the kiss. No one said anything. The party continued.

  Janis and Patti never shared another kiss or hug. No sexual relationship grew between them. Patti said that they loved each other very much, but their feelings had nothing to do with sex. Janis was hot to explore the world and she wanted Patti to take off and live a fantasy life in California, but Patti was married. She found her future in her husband.

  Much later that evening, Jim, Dave, and a few others were talking in a small hallway by the bath in the rear of the one-room apartment. By that time, two or three A.M., the apartment held only a few people, and most were drinking, sloppy drunk, or passed out. Patti had fallen asleep fully clothed between two similarly incapacitated men on the bed in the corner. Finally Dave’s anger exploded as he finished his beer and hurled the bottle toward Patti with all the force his powerful build held. The bottle missed, smashing instead into the sleeping Jack Smith’s jaw and knocking out several front teeth.

  Janis entered the fray, frantic as she took Jack under her arm and drove him to the hospital. “This wasn’t supposed to happen. This is horrible! Why did this happen?” she kept mumbling.

  In the spring of 1962, Janis and her friends Dave Moriaty, Randy Tennant, Grant Lyons, Adrian Haston, and Bob Clark went to the Cameron Shrimp Festival. It was a rambling affair where you could buy boiled shrimp and crayfish at booths all over town. People roamed, eating and drinking beer. Janis wore a “69” T-shirt, which she used to inflame the locals. Some festival-goers tried to negotiate with her male friends to “buy” Janis’s services. The guys thought this was great fun and haggled over a price, all in jest. Adrian tried to negotiate an end to the prank, but eventually it was necessary for Janis’s friends to fight to extricate themselves from the scene. Luckily, no one was hurt.

  Janis and Patti developed a whole shtick for pl
aying with the guys they encountered in the Louisiana bars. Sometimes the group didn’t have enough money for everyone to get past the cover charge. The girls became proficient at duping a stranger to pay their way in. Once inside, they continued flirting and leading them on, seeing how many free drinks they could get. They felt safe because they knew they were with a whole gang of trusted male protectors. When things had gone far enough or it was time to leave, they would either indicate that they were with other men or quietly steal away. It came close to fistfights more than once, but the Texas gang seemed to know how to handle the hot-blooded Cajuns and navy men stationed nearby whom the girls had humiliated. They either stood up to them or slipped out, running like hell to the car.

  One evening when they had been at the Shady Motel Restaurant and Lounge playing pool and drinking beer, Patti was flirting a bit too much for Dave McQueen’s taste. He restrained his fury until everyone piled into his secondhand Oldsmobile. As he drove home, fuming silently, he pushed his foot harder and harder on the gas pedal. The numbers on the speedometer went up to 120, but the car wouldn’t budge over 110 mph. He yelled and pounded on the dash. Leaning into a curve, the car spun out of control and rolled over and over down the side of a bank. Finally it came to rest, and the group of seven began calling each other and climbing out of the auto. Unbelievably, no one was hurt.

  That spring Janis helped Jack Smith fill out an application to West Point. She was frustrated by his desire to leave, feeling he was deserting her. Perhaps she had more than a friend’s interest in Jack; it sometimes seemed that she had a latent jealousy of Jack’s girlfriend, Nova. But Janis and Jack never discussed any romantic reason she might have had for wanting him to stay. Instead, she argued with Jack that she thought it was hypocritical for him to go to West Point because he drank beer and smoked. “You can’t be a soldier with honor and duty to country if you act like we do,” she complained.

  Purity of action guided Janis’s behavior. If she was going to be good, she was very, very good. If she was going to be bad, she let all the stops out. Anything less than full commitment to an idea or activity was “hypocritical,” the worst adjective anyone could hurl at another.

  The spring of 1962 was a time to plan new beginnings. The activities of the Port Authur-Beaumont crowd were wearing thin. Jim and Rae Langdon were married and had a baby. Others were planning their lives after one remaining year of college. Jack Smith said to Janis, “You can’t just hang out here and party.”

  SIX

  AUSTIN, TEXAS

  Home of the brave, land of the free

  I don’t wanna be mistreated by no bourgeoisie

  Lawd, in a bourgeois town

  Hee, it’s a bourgeois town

  I got the bourgeois blues

  I’m gonna spread the news all around

  —LEADBELLY, “Bourgeois Blues”

  RUMORS OF A SPIRITED COMMUNITY in Austin were trickling back to Port Arthur. Intent on checking them out, Janis surreptitiously took Pop’s car for the weekend. She hadn’t planned it, but about midnight during a weekend party when everyone else was heading off to Vinton, she and Jack ran off to Austin. Jack guided her straight to the apartment house at 2812½ Nueces Street. It was lovingly called “the Ghetto,” reflecting the group’s view of its role in campus life. Stepping through the kitchen doorway of one apartment, Janis found free-flowing beer and intent conversation. John Clay, a local folkie, was sitting atop the refrigerator playing the banjo. “You’re right, Jack,” she exclaimed. “I’m going to like this place!”

  Her weekend of music and partying was broken only by occasional pangs of belated guilt about being there without permission. So she cleaned fallen leaves off Pop’s car, as though taking extra care of it would make up for the error of her ways. Returning home, she had to face the consequences, but that was hardly an uncommon experience by this time in her life. The clamor of her disagreements with the folks always ended with the question, “What are you going to do with your life?” The question was so serious, Janis persuaded them to let her enroll at the University of Texas—UT.

  Mother, Janis, and I drove to Austin, moving my sister to yet another college. Janis was excited, intent on what she knew to be there. She dragged Mom and me to the Ghetto, as though Mother would ever approve of that as a home for Janis. It was a small cluster of run-down apartments that rented for forty dollars a month and attracted a hodgepodge of nonmainstream students who roomed in fours and used the place like a revolving commune. Mother was emphatic that we find Janis another home. The university finally settled the question of where she would live. Like most institutions of higher learning at that time, the UT administration saw its responsibility toward students through the concept of “in loco parentis” (in place of the parents). They required freshman and sophomore girls to live in supervised housing.

  We found a suitably funky rooming house for Janis, a large clapboard building in need of paint. The wooden screen door had that bent dark-wire screen so common in the unair-conditioned, bug-infested Southern climate. The door banged and quivered when I trudged in and out, carrying her things up to her new home. I ran my shoulder, like others before me, along the shiny paint, yellowed with age, that covered the walls of the stairwell. Everything there said she was entering a new world, and in the rhythm of my climbing it sang, “Good-bye, good-bye.”

  The university, they called it in Texas, since in 1962 there was only one university in Texas. About forty thousand students attended, mostly Texans attracted by the cheap twenty-five-dollars-a-semester tuition. Rich grazing lands where oil had been discovered endowed the school and enabled it to build aggressively and expand academically.

  Janis didn’t care much for the school, but she craved the offbeat society. It was located on the edge of the picturesque Texas hill country. “Oxford on the Perdenales River,” Jim Langdon described it. The Regents never anticipated all the groups that a great education might attract or develop. In 1962 the local powers burned with indignant confusion that a small subgroup of social inventors had taken root in the largesse of almost free university education. So surprised were they that the police monitored the group’s activities. They feared subversives, but all they found were underage drinkers and college-level pranks.

  Janis was exhilarated by the stimulation of a larger social group and broader cultural opportunities. She gulped it down like a homesteader whose throat was parched from a fruitless search for water until he finally drilled a good well. The art films and musical performances shouted that she had found Nirvana! Austin wasn’t just a university town, it was decidedly Texan. The rugged, defiant orneriness of Texas worked to trample polite intelligentsia. In Austin, ideas screamed to be recognized.

  Janis slid comfortably into a group already steeped in outrageous behavior. Their parties were known for such activities as shooting twenty-five pistol shots into the walls, knocking holes in a closet door, and putting a bare fist through a window. People were thrown into a fountain on campus, whereupon they entertained their audience. Graffiti flowered from their paintbrushes, which were propelled by drink to scrawl “Aw shit” and “Fuck it,” with the inside slogan “Poddy rules the world!” referring to a local comic-book character created by Gilbert Shelton. Joe E. Brown climbed to the flat roof of a building and wrote, “Fuck you, Sky King,” so that he would see it when he flew over.

  The new group consisted of a loose association of musicians, writers and cartoonists for the Texas Ranger humor magazine, and a club of spelunkers. They were the loyal opposition. They were outsiders with an acute sense of the absurd who delighted in nothing more than poking fun at and mocking society. By necessity there was a great deal of tolerance within the group, a respect for individual differences and overflowing praise for personal creativity.

  Wally Stopher, who was part of the movement of the Beaumont gang to Austin, became a memorable symbol of the times. Called “Oat Willie,” he was Austin’s unofficial mascot. A photo of Wally standing in a bucket of oats, dresse
d in an aviator cap and polka-dot underwear, was given the caption “Onward Through the Fog.”

  One evening a group of girls pledging a sorority were locked into a house across the street from a Ghetto party. Janis and friends delighted in teasing the pledges, trying to get them to leave the house and come to the party. Janis went over and sang them a couple of songs, and a few of them did leave. The cops arrived after midnight. They walked up to a few musicians sitting on the porch and reprimanded them by asking, “Do you know there’s a little old lady dying next door?” Lieuen Adkins, one of the musicians and a good friend of Janis’s, said, “No, but hum a few bars and we’ll fake it.” Janis thought the reply was hilarious and wrote some instant lyrics, which the two of them proceeded to perform. Janis and John Clay were caricatured (see image) in a handbook of party tips in the Ranger, a piece titled “What to Do Until the Cops Come,” written by Lieuen Adkins and drawn by Hal Normand.

  Janis’s Austin days coincided with a turbulent period in American history, including racial demonstrations and the Cuban missile crisis. The shadow that hovered over most conversations was an atomic one. In everyone’s minds was always the question of whether the future they argued about so heatedly would have a chance to bloom before the bomb was dropped. Women were just starting to assert their demands for equal pay and equal orgasms. Racial integration was just beginning in Texas. The university admitted blacks, but if a class assignment involved seeing a movie at a local theater, they couldn’t get in the door because of their skin color. In 1962 the state was taking down the segregated bathroom signs in the capitol building and the restaurants began to accept black diners. Those changes propelled Janis’s gang onward to hot talk at parties and interracial excursions into the music world. Janis revealed to a close friend, “I wish I were black because black people have more emotion.”