Love, Janis

by Laura Joplin

  In Buried Alive, author Myra Friedman repeated stories by Linda Knoll, who knew Janis in New York during this period. According to Linda, Janis shot speed throughout the summer of ’64 in an apartment on the Lower East Side. My sources refuted Knoll’s closeness to Janis, saying that she was a peripheral person. Janis probably used some speed, but Linda Gottfried believes that Janis didn’t get heavily into speed until much later.

  Janis was also performing in New York. She invited Gilbert Shelton and Joe E. Brown to come to a club to hear her. They arrived, enjoyed the music, and then realized it was a gay bar. Uncomfortable, they politely beat a hasty retreat. Sexual exploration was part of her life; she bragged later to friends about her black female lover.

  In August Janis left New York driving a yellow Morris Minor convertible, a VW Bug look-alike. She drove several hundred miles out of her way to visit us again. I was in the ninth grade then, in summer band practice. In line with the many Chrysler sedans and Chevrolet station wagons waiting to pick up my fellow band musicians was a convertible with the top down. A hand waved and a voice yelled my name in excited, happy tones.

  “How are you?” Janis asked me, and then quickly launched into describing her life. “New York was great!” she raved. “I just had to stop and tell y’all about it. Isn’t my car wonderful? I love it! It’s so great to just drive cross-country with my hair in the breeze.”

  We loved having Janis home. The house was always livelier when she was around. The trivia of everyday life was more exciting. Discussions at dinnertime, always interesting, took on a grander note, with more laughter and puns punctuating the banter.

  “I have a surprise for you,” Janis said, laughing. “I got a twelve-string guitar for myself in New York, so my old six-string is for you.” I was wowed. She was broadening my horizons beyond band music for the saxophone! The neck was warped and the strings were so far from the frets I had to use a capo just to play, but it was my first guitar and my sister had given it to me.

  We practiced in the front bedroom off the kitchen. Janis sang some deep-throated blues and showed me how to barre chord and slide across the frets. She said, “Here, you play a while,” and went off to the next room. I was fourteen and envied her larger, stronger hands, but I was always game to try. I slung back my head and hollered, “Highway Fifty-one,” then did the guitar slides, “done turned its back on me.” Three lines into the verse, Janis laughingly jumped around the corner. “I heard that!” Okay, so my voice was more a church soprano at the time, without the guttural strength needed for that song. But it was fun. Janis was my only exposure to such music, and I reveled in it while she was home.

  Pop shook his head as she headed out of the driveway, waving as she started back to San Francisco. He had his fingers crossed, hoping she would make it, but he worried like a father. It was a funky, broken-down car, leaking so much oil he figured she might run out of money feeding it.

  She passed through Austin on the way to California. She impressed the gang there with her tales of singing for money in New York clubs. They were proud one of their own had broken out of playing for free in college gatherings and was making money performing. Pat Brown complimented her on her new look. Janis was wearing a simple dress, had lost weight, and had her hair up. She was bright and optimistic, and obviously proud of herself.

  She arrived in fine shape in San Francisco, sending two postcards home during her drive.

  September 1964

  Spent the night in Reno-unfortunately the Nugget was filled so I slept in the back seat of my car parked in a Royal gas station—but still—a night in Reno! Lost 60¢ in the slot machines—phoo. San Francisco by noon. A letter should arrive shortly.

  XXX

  September 1964

  Thurs—10:30 A.M.

  SIGH!!

  XXX

  Janis quickly settled back into the West Coast scene. The longer she stayed in California, the more committed she became to the Beat focus on living in the present. She consumed alcohol flamboyantly. She equated drunkenness with personal spontaneity because it temporarily freed people from social restraints. With the artistic community, she sampled other drugs for their potential to enhance the unbridled freedom she sought.

  Janis pursued truth, but didn’t ignore fun. Linda Gottfried said she was “sardonic, sarcastic, and funny.” Janis made her laugh. It was social-commentary humor—inside jokes that had a truth beyond factual life. “We knew J. Edgar Hoover was gay”—that was her type of humor. Janis’s group knew that the rest of society hid their desires, compulsions, and pleasures in extramarital sex, homosexual acts, and mind-altering substances like alcohol or other drugs. The humor reinforced their belief that they differed from the rest of America only by admitting what they did.

  In 1964 Congress passed the Civil Rights Act, and racial integration finally became law. Linda Gottfried remembered the intensity of Janis’s views on the subject by saying, “Janis called herself the first black-white person.” It wasn’t enough to sing black music or live Kerouac’s view of the black man’s noble existence. Janis sought internal self-integration, to quit being just white. She wanted to become all the good things from all heritages. In February 1964, Bob Dylan released his album The Times They Are A-Changin’, a fitting description of the events.

  Music was integral to Janis’s experience of North Beach. Nick Gravenites, who played in the local clubs, knew music as a way of explaining things that weren’t otherwise communicable. “It’s a way to make sense of your life,” he stated, his deep, powerful voice and commanding look belying his words’ simplicity. Janis, Nick, and many others performed for each other at the local clubs. There was no music profession. It was all done for love, three dollars, and a cheeseburger, said Nick.

  City Lights Book Shop published a literary journal called the Journal for the Protection of All Beings, a “revolutionary review.” It was an open forum for uncensored discourse on any subject. The second issue came out in 1964 and the cover was graced with a picture of Ezra Pound. “The artists are the antennae of the race,” Pound wrote in “The Teacher’s Mission.” Janis’s antennae were alert and receiving on all channels.

  In the midst of the Beat pursuit of open discussion, Pop came to visit. He left Port Arthur claiming a business trip, but his only goal was to check on his daughter. He came to help Janis find herself, and to be sure she was all right. He looked Janis in the eye and never made any judgments about her life-style. He chose his comments carefully, trying to help. Pop complimented her artwork and the wonderful songs she wrote. He affirmed that she was a beautiful person. Pop told Janis, “You will achieve.”

  He also held on for dear life, entering the world of his wild, young daughter. She took him around town in her Morris Minor, driving as fast downhill as up. “Slow down,” he implored. “Never,” she laughed.

  Pop took Janis and Linda to dinner, and counseled them not to divorce themselves from the mainstream of society—the audience who would buy Janis’s paintings and sing her songs. He made one suggestion to help them stay in touch with society: “Every week you should buy Time magazine and read it cover to cover. Time will give you all you need to know about the world, and still allow you to make independent decisions.”

  Even after Pop left, his suggestion was de rigueur on Thursday afternoons. Following the afternoon movie and a quick check to see if they had won on Dialing for Dollars, Janis and Linda would walk to the newsstand. They would purchase a copy of Time and read it front to back.

  Away from Pop’s steadying influence, Janis’s artistic pursuits began consuming her. “Janis called herself a candle, burning on both ends,” Linda Gottfried said. Janis would ask, “When am I going to burn out?” Linda felt Janis knew she was going to die young, because she said it so often.

  She drank to excess, frequently. Was she copying her inspirations, Billie Holiday and Bessie Smith? Billie Holiday was a spontaneous and emotional singer who turned her tragic life into music that moved her audiences. She fought a
heroin addiction all her life and served time in prison for it. By the time she died at the age of forty-four, her voice showed the signs of alcohol and drug abuse. Surely Janis absorbed the details of the life of a blues singer by reading Billie Holiday’s 1956 autobiography, Lady Sings the Blues.

  Linda Gottfried believes Janis was a reincarnation of Bessie Smith. Bessie was called “the Empress of the Blues.” She used her innate drama and power to project her personality into her music. She wore bright satiny clothes and feathers in her hair. She was foulmouthed and bisexual. Her brief period of public acclaim came between 1923 and 1928. When the public’s taste changed, Bessie’s life entered an era of excessive drinking, fistfights with men and women, and other reckless behavior. She died in an automobile accident at the age of forty-three. I’m sure that Janis rose emotionally to her defense on hearing that she died from blood loss supposedly because she was refused treatment in a whites-only hospital. I wonder if Janis was able to glorify Bessie and Billie only by copying them down to their weaknesses.

  Janis wandered around the apartment she shared with Linda Gottfried, singing, “Fame, fortune, and humility.” It became her motto and goal. To be successful and haughty was too white, too elitist. Janis’s intellectual views demanded that she remain humble while her internal drives and her Anglo-Saxon culture impressed upon her the need to achieve.

  Janis said, “A lot of artists have one way of art and another way of life. They’re the same for me.” Was it art that drove Janis to try speed, or speed that consumed her art? Linda said that both she and Janis started chipping (using infrequently) in 1964, and by the latter part of the year, drugs owned them. “I remember when we knew,” Linda said. “We had planned to go to the de Young Museum and then the Laundromat. On the way we looked at each other and said, ‘Let’s go home and do some meth.’” Linda continued, “No one knew about drugs then. They were an experiment. We thought we were growing by leaps and bounds. We worked day and night. We did more paintings, more poems, and more songs.” Meth made them think they were being more creative.

  By 1964 Janis had increased her speed use. Like many users, she began to deal a little. “I heard this pounding on the front door of my apartment building,” recalled Pat Nichols. Pat was a large-boned woman of impressive presence and earthy beauty. She had grown up in Los Angeles, where she had felt the outsider role like the one Janis wore on her sleeve. They would become fast friends. Janis hardly knew Pat then, but she was insistently pounding anyway. When Pat yelled, “Who is it?” Janis yelled back with forthright bravura, caring little for those who might hear, “It’s Janis Joplin. I want to sell you some speed!”

  Pat Nichols, Kenai, and other friends said that people who were into speed often got into heroin. Meth was so easily available then, it was too easy to get too high. How to come down? Ahhh, you take a bit of heroin. Like a self-regulating emotion machine, people used a little additive to go up and a bit of something else to come down. The American belief in science led people to trust the use of chemicals. Drugs initially gave Janis the sense that she was getting somewhere, merely because things seemed so different. Life looked brighter, sounds seemed louder, and she felt more creative. It’s quite possible that Janis first sampled heroin as part of her pull-out-the-stops speed experience.

  Anglo-Saxon America dealt with the emotional aspects of life by hiding them, ignoring them, or defining them as problematic. Janis rebelled against those habits, yet there was no guidance beyond the ramblings of Kerouac’s novels. Releasing one’s feelings from years of bondage was a righteous and dangerous experiment.

  Some of Janis’s desire to explore the emotional aspects of life must have come as a reaction to our analytical family. Our parents were more comfortable thinking about their passions than feeling them. Mother would say, “Think before you talk, Janis,” as though that would change what she said. Mom and Pop tried to validate what Janis felt, but often summarized by saying that she should ignore her feelings because the world didn’t agree. That had worked for them, but it wasn’t enough for Janis. She needed more. Janis had found the structural weakness in our cultural heritage. Searching for guidance, meaning, and a way to release the whole range of emotions brought Janis to others as confused as she was.

  In early 1965, Janis met a fellow meth enthusiast Peter de Blanc. He was special. He dressed in suits, had money, studied international news, and drove a fancy car. He had a genteel demeanor. He was also charismatic and intelligent, though his behavior was often manic, heightened by his use of speed. He was taken with proper social etiquette, and romanced Janis so much that she felt lovely, soft, gentle, and womanly. He wasn’t perfect, but he had some of everything that Janis needed in a mate. He was creative and suave, and talked of big dreams for his life. Linda said, “It was a great love affair! It was the first time I saw Janis’s heart open. Peter was a gentleman. . . . They loved each other.”

  Janis followed him into his intense use of speed. They both sailed over the edge of manageable use into a habit-forming compulsion to hit up. One dose lasts up to seven hours and gives users the feeling of energy and mental sharpness. They lose the desire to eat. They hurry about life consumed by the profound importance of trivial tasks and the thoughts that streak through their minds. Inevitably they come down to a world of blandness and boredom. Prolonged or heavy use almost always causes depression and fatigue.

  The Consumers Union Report—Licit & Illicit Drugs explains that some San Francisco area physicians sincerely believed the drug provided a new path for treating heroin addiction—even though they were arrested for practicing this belief. Other medical personnel were not so sincere. The book reports one addict recounting “that for $6 or $7 he could get from one physician a prescription for 100 Methedrine ampules, plus hypodermic needles and sedatives.” It was an easy way to make money, selling the drugs on the street for $1.50 an ampule. Some area pharmacies sold injectable amphetamines without prescription, while others accepted loosely authenticated scripts from telephone callers posing as doctors.

  Janis and Peter lived in San Francisco in the midst of this ill-fated looseness. They injected speed, easily attainable from the many speed labs operating in the Bay Area by 1962. A typical pattern of abuse is that over a period of several months, the user develops a gradual shortening of the time between injections until it is several times in one day. Malnutrition and sleep deprivation complicate the effects of the drug. The result for many is paranoid psychosis-delirium, panic, and hallucination. The drug can cause psychosis in people without prior major psychological problems and can also worsen existing emotional problems. Dr. John C. Kramer, California psychiatrist and researcher, holds the opinion that “anyone given a large enough dose over a long enough time will become psychotic.”

  Janis was devoted to Peter. He was a big step up from her last romance with a man who dealt drugs and seldom gave her any strokes. Peter, whom girls nicknamed Mr. Smooth Talk, was on the inevitable path to psychosis. Janis and Linda watched him go crazy. He thought he was receiving messages from people on the moon. He outfitted his car with guns though he never used them. Eventually he wound up in the mental ward of a hospital, unable to deal with reality. Linda Gottfried remembered, “At that time no one was saying drugs were bad, and no one had any information.”

  Janis and Linda visited Peter in the hospital as he was regaining his sanity. Janis told her friends, “One day I woke up and realized I was going to die.” The girls decided to quit. They tried to check Peter out of the hospital, but as Janis walked with him down the street, she realized he needed to go back. Weeks later he emerged a sane man again. With Peter out, the three reformers planned their futures. Linda would go to Hawaii to be with her boyfriend, Malcolm Wauldron. Janis would go to Port Arthur to prepare for her marriage to Peter.

  Peter threw a bus-fare party for Janis. Everyone they knew was invited. Entrance to the party was a contribution to the pot to help send Janis home on a Greyhound. The people who came knew that Janis needed to
get out of there. The pitfalls of her environment were too obvious to all.

  Janis’s resolve to leave this dark life was an oddly triumphant failure. She had truly hit bottom. Weighing only eighty-eight pounds, she was terrified by what she’d done to herself. Speed had overtaken any pursuit of truth and creativity. Janis was on the edge; a few more steps along the same path looked like sure death. Her moment of clarity and grace was the willingness to act on the horror she saw. She was proving to herself that she had not yet lost all of her sanity.

  In the novels she consumed, all female heroes either died or got married. Was that bred into her subconscious? Was the only solution Janis could see to her bohemian involvement with drugs a return to convention, to wedding bells and happily-ever-afters?

  Janis left San Francisco in early May 1965.

  We welcomed her with open arms.

  EIGHT

  HOME AGAIN

  I guess I’m just like a turtle

  Hiding underneath its horny shell

  But you know I’m very well protected

  I know this goddamned life too well

  —JANIS JOPLIN, “Turtle Blues”

  WHEN JANIS CAME HOME in May 1965, she moved into my room at first, the one I had decorated in white, plum, and green, copied from a Seventeen magazine article. During those first few days of getting her acclimated, I took her to the Jefferson City Shopping Center to buy some new clothes. I couldn’t understand why she insisted that all the dresses have long sleeves. In Port Arthur? In May? Surely she had forgotten the weather. “Sleeves,” she insisted. I didn’t know she was trying to hide needle tracks from her days of speed use. She never mentioned them, and I wouldn’t have understood if she had.

  She was uncomfortable in the middle-class comfort of the store. I was almost supervising. When we went to try on clothes and Janis didn’t have underwear on, I went to Woolworth’s and bought her a few pairs while she waited in the dressing room. I chose size 8, not knowing what she wore, remembering only that she was larger than me. She laughed. “How big do you think I am?” The panties draped loosely around her lean frame, evidence of her recent drug abuse.