by Laura Joplin
Janis returned home convinced that her past ways were wrong. For the first time, she was asking for advice from our parents and listening to their replies. She was no longer passing through town, content with her way of life. She had come home to recoup and repair. Her attitude brought a wonderful, pleasing peacefulness to the family. Everyone was pulling in the same direction.
Janis became a serious college student, eventually moving her major from art to sociology. She enrolled in the second summer-school session at Lamar Tech. She took swimming to feel fit, world history, and a survey of British Literature, one of her loves. She studied diligently and was rewarded by earning B’s in all the courses.
With her normal depth of intensity and sincerity, Janis pursued the rewards of living in the family, succeeding at school and preparing to marry Peter. In one of her first letters to him she thrilled, “I hope you get to leave San Francisco. Wow, everyone should leave—it’s so nice out here in the real world where people are happy and proud of themselves and good! Jeez I’m glad I’m gone from there. . . .” Another letter explained, “Fun isn’t what I want these days. Strange, I never thought I’d ever say that. I’m one of those old-fashioned thrill-crazy kids, you know, or at least I was. I never could see any value or anything to be sought after in anything except fun—and—now dig me, I’ve got better things to do than Fun. Fun is a drag! Strange . . .” She elaborated, “I stay home w/the family and quite frequently we play bridge. Strange, it’s such a quiet, peaceful existence and I’m enjoying it so thoroughly.”
Janis introduced her family to Peter in letter:
My mother—Dorothy—worries so and loves her children dearly. Republican and Methodist, very sincere, speaks in clichés which she really means and is very good to people. (She thinks you have a lovely voice and is terribly prepared to like you.)
My father—richer than when I knew him and kind of embarrassed about it—very well read—history his passion—quiet and very excited to have me home because I’m bright and we can talk (about anti-matter yet—that impressed him! I keep telling him how smart you are and how proud I am of you. . . .)
My sister—15 years old—lovely sweet girl (I very magnanimously brought her a makeup bag y’know—show her a few tricks, heh heh. You should see her! 2 drawers of hair rollers—a makeup table w/2 mirrors and 3 shelves of makeup—quite the young lady! I’m taking lessons from her!) She’s learned to play guitar quite well on a guitar I gave her last year and she sings Joan Baez ballads in a very sweet voice. In fact, tonight she’s singing at MYF and I’m going to hear her. She thinks quite a bit of me—much more than I thought. My father and I were talking and he said that Laura had said that she didn’t think that I was wrong in anything that I have ever done and that made me feel very nice. I keep slipping and calling her “Linda” which she recognizes as a compliment—i.e. she is like a friend to me. We talk about folk music and I talk about you and she’s thrilled for me.
My brother—Michael—now about 5' tall! Absolutely huge and grown almost—boyish grinning smile and floppy hair—Levi’s and bicycle. Loves me dearly—wants me to live at home and likes to show off and impress me—proud, embarrassed, wants my affection—Wow, he’s a nice little boy! I sure do love him. I’ve always wanted a boy just like Mike—I like him.”
In early August, Peter de Blanc visited Janis in Port Arthur. He was tall and slender with a dignified air. He had straight blond hair, parted to the side, that kept falling across his face. There was a certain nervous rhythm about his efforts to keep it out of his eyes. He wore a rumpled suit, but exuded a demeanor of calm strength. He stood politely in the living room, a bit uncomfortable but warming up to us as time went by. He was terribly proper and truly seemed devoted to Janis.
That Peter arrived at all must have involved some heavy heart-baring, air-clearing talk with Janis. He was already married and his wife was pregnant! Janis knew of this as Linda Gofftried had written her shortly after meeting the woman. Yet Janis accepted whatever story had been provided her by Peter. Her faith in the man or her need to believe was so strong that not a word about the situation ever reached the family.
Peter played the role of the respectable prospective son-in-law very well. He asked to speak to our father alone, so the rest of us retired to the back of the house. Soon Dad called us back and announced, “Peter has asked for my daughter’s hand in marriage, and I have consented.” Janis jumped up and down, hugging Peter and clutching his steady arm as if it were a tether to reality. The moment excited us all. It felt so right! We really liked Peter.
Peter stayed with us for several days in preparation for joining the family. Mother apologized for not having nicer guest quarters and for serving coffee out of the aluminum drip coffeepot instead of a server. Pop spent time with Peter socializing and discreetly judging his mental acumen and ethics. Janis was peeved that Peter wanted to spend time with the family. He took Michael swimming for three hours and went on a lengthy tour of the plant where our father worked, getting Pop’s enjoyable discourse on mechanization in the workplace. Janis fretted that he didn’t play golf with Mom or have time to go to a movie with her.
Too soon, Peter explained he needed to return home to take care of family business concerning the death of a relative. He talked of getting things squared away so that he could announce the marriage properly, requesting that the Joplins refrain from a notice as well. In keeping with his proper demeanor, he wrote a lengthy thank-you note, saying he’d been made to feel our house was as much his as Janis’s. He was surprised and deeply grateful that his reception had been so wholehearted. A package arrived a few days later, a silver coffee/tea service for Mother.
He exchanged letters with our father, describing his plans for the marriage. He wrote that he and Janis loved each other very much, and had shown that despite occasional arguments, there was a strong bond between them. He wanted to see Janis finish school. What she didn’t have before they were married, he claimed he would see that she got afterward.
He wrote and Janis wrote, and the two of them talked on the telephone. “Darling,” she wrote. “Sigh, I hope you don’t mind my calling you that but I’ve always wanted to open a letter that way and that’s the way I am feeling this evening, so I’ve thrown caution to the winds. Darling.” She was in love with Peter, but also—perhaps too much—in love with being loved. Her romantic dream carried her everywhere, as friend, guide, and much-appreciated chaperone. She clung to this vision where life was safe, where an adoring partner could protect her from her habit of poor choices. The vision was only broken by frequent attacks of fear. Whenever Peter was tardy in sending a letter or telephoning—which was frequent—she worked herself into an anxious state. With each passing thought she got ever more “upset and nervous and scared.” Janis wrote, “(I’m sorry I’m so insecure, baby, but I never even posed as someone well-adjusted. I mean, Jeez, I guess we both know where we’re at—at least we know that we tend to be afraid. If you object to my plural noun, I’ll retract it.) And so here I am fretting—really ridiculously, I wouldn’t even go outdoors Sunday in case the phone rang.”
Mom, ever the keeper of tradition, wanted to help Janis ready her trousseau. Janis started a quilt. It not only made the vision feel more real but also gave her nervous energy an outlet. She chose a large ever-bursting star made of elongated diamonds, the Lone Star pattern. It changed from light blue in the center to dark blue at the edges. She journeyed to Houston, where Dave and Patti McQueen were living. Janis and Patti went shopping for china and linens and cutlery at Pier 1. Her hope chest kept steadily growing.
Carpooling to college with old friend Adrian Haston, she often spoke of Peter and her new life. She thought she would fit more easily into the gang that consisted of married couples. Ensuring her social membership seemed as important to her as the feelings from the relationship itself. She told them that “some day, I’d be an even number—and have my own bridge partner and everything.” With simplistic trusting logic, Janis told Karleen th
at if he loved her, then it must be right. Karleen shook her head, thinking that the important question was whether Janis loved Peter and wanted the same kind of life. But to Janis the only question was whether he loved her. That was a monster question.
As their time apart grew, Janis learned of Peter’s involvement with other women. She wrote entreatingly and angrily to Peter after one confronting experience, “I couldn’t sleep too well and when I got up this morning the first thought I had was Peter. So, still a little groggy and smoking my first morning cigarette, I snuck in to call you while Mother and Dad were out. And then when that girl answered, I just felt really wronged. Just wronged. I just wanted you to say Oh wow baby, I love you and I’ve been doing this and this and this and well, of course she’s just my cousin silly and wow I was going to call you and why are you so upset Jesus Christ! But you didn’t. Wow you didn’t try and tell me anything! You just fucking sat there and acted like you didn’t care what I thought or if I felt hurt.”
In spite of all the obvious flaws in her fantasy, Janis held on tightly to Peter and the idea of marriage as a way to mold a new life. Whether her man was solid or not, Janis pursued the responsibilities of her envisioned wifely role. She enrolled in a “poise” class to explore the socially courted feminine demeanor. She learned to play golf, swam with the family at the country club, and picked up a recorder to join our family ensemble playing English madrigals.
She found medical help cleaning up her persistent acne, long a social embarrassment. She also went to a physician to determine if she was still physically healthy after years of drug abuse. She wrote “. . . this was sort-of my last showdown w/fuckedupedness—to see if I had really made it out or if it was still hurting me. And I really have made it! Jesus damn, I’m really alright, and ain’t nobody gonna make me be ugly again! I am not anemic, there is nothing wrong w/my liver or my blood and no gyn. problems that he can see now although if I have any more problems, he said he would probably give me some hormones. (He suspects hormone imbalance because of the fact that I’ve never gotten pregnant.) But talking about that kind-of embarrasses me—as if I weren’t really a woman or enough of one or something. But I suppose if I need them, I’d sure better have them. I’ll bet if I do need them that if I’d known about that 10 years ago, my life wouldn’t ever have been such a shambles. You know, maybe something as simple as a pill could have helped out or even changed that part of me I call ME and has been so messed up. Just maybe.”
In a reflective mood, Janis wrote, “Funniest thing though—thought that since I wasn’t KING-BEATNIK and ATTENTION-SEEKER anymore and I wore dresses and shoes and makeup and acted quietly and everything that I look like everyone else sort-of. But I’m still just sort of different somehow. I mean all those blithering coeds w/their cotton print dresses and blondish fluffy hair and Texas drawls and Oh now y’all cum on!’s just know that I’m not one of them. But then that’s fair I guess—I know they’re not one of my kind of people either.”
Janis started seeing a counselor in Beaumont, a psychiatric social worker named Bernard Giarratano who worked through a United Way-funded agency, Children and Family Services. She came to him saying she wanted to be like normal people, but she wasn’t. There were things about her past she wanted to change. She thought the answer was to emulate another model. At that time she felt that our parents and I represented the model, but she also felt we were too restrictive. She also looked for models within the lives of her friends, but clearly had rejected the detrimental habits of the music world. She wanted to be happy being what she called straight.
Her only guiding light was creativity. She felt alive when she let herself come forth into any sort of creative effort, from singing to writing letters to friends. Giarratano counseled her to accept herself and her creative strengths, saying “Creative people are okay, even if they are eccentric.” He encouraged her to experiment, to find what she called a balance between the straight life and a creative one. She penned a folk song about this elusive Middle Road:
Got no reason for livin’,
Got no cause to die
I got the blues,
I got to find that middle road
She told him emphatically about her identification with Bessie Smith, Odetta, and other singers of that genre. She brought her guitar into the counseling session and sang a few songs so he could understand the intensity of her feelings about art as life. She worried that she didn’t have what she needed to succeed on their level, but that did not prevent her from receiving satisfaction from music.
She talked about philosophical and cultural questions. Janis told Giarratano that when she had been in California, she had tried to live in a style she thought would help her break into the world in which she wanted to succeed. She’d pursued drugs as a component of that culture. For a while she had been heavily into pills, Quaaludes, heroin, Demerol (an opiate derivative), and other things that made people feel smooth, especially people who were agitated and believed their feelings might go out of control. After that period, she told Giarratano, she got heavily into speed. Her abuse of that drug brought her back home to Texas. While she was in counseling that year, a physician prescribed Librium, one of the first anti-anxiety medicines. She continued taking this tranquilizer (or another) until sometime after she returned to California. She wrote of liking its calming effects.
She told Peter stories like she told Giarratano, writing what she labeled a SAD letter, with a note “Don’t read if you’re depressed . . .”
Oct. 14
Dear Peter . . .
Got your special delivery letter today, sure was nice . . .
My sociology test went fine—4 essay questions and I had 3 of them perfect but the fourth not so well. I should make an easy “B.”
Funniest thing happened this evening—a guy I used to know in ’61 in Venice Beach called me. He and I used to run around together—at the time I was a grass head and used to take a lot of “reds.” So did he. His name was Big Richard because he wasn’t. I was eighteen and fucked-up. (Do you believe I was ever eighteen? Wow . . .) Well I haven’t seen him since the first of ’62, but he knew my phone and was in Houston so he called me and asked me for a date. I said NO of course. Asked him what he’d been doing—seems he’s been in jail for 3 years for pot. Which indirectly brings me to what I’ve been thinking about lately. Now please understand before I begin that this does not have any correlation w/what is happening now—I’ve just been attempting to look at my life objectively from my new happy vantage point.
In attempting to find a semblance of a pattern in my life since, say, high school graduation, I find this: I’ve gone out into the world 3, 4 specific times w/great vigor and need and every time gotten really fucked-up. First when I was seventeen, I went to Houston, took a lot of pills, drank huge quantities of wine and flipped out. I was sent home, put in the hospital and I did fine. Next, after business college, I went to Los Angeles and got a good job working for the telephone co. But shortly, I discovered Venice Beach and eagerly moved there. (Please note—this is the thing that is plaguing me, my eagerness and instability for “bad news” things.) Soon I was hanging out w/all sorts of big-league junkies although I didn’t understand it at the time. People kept burning me and stealing from me all the time and I finally got very unhappy w/everything and came home. I went back to school—did really well for one semester and then I went to Austin to go to school because I had gotten in w/some folk singers up there. All I did there was be wild—drank constantly, fucked people, sang/ and generally made a name for myself on the campus. Finally I decided Texas wasn’t enough for me, I wanted to go to California again. Gawd. So Chet Helms, who is now head of the Dog in San Francisco, and I hitch-hiked out. I did really great in my singing when I first got there—people treated me as if I was going to be famous, but it was only a few months till I was drunk all the time and hanging out on Green St at the Anxious Asp. Sure is a sordid story, isn’t it? Then came my gay period, first Jae, then Linda Poole and I wen
t to N.Y. where I was running around w/faggots and started taking deximil constantly. Then I finally escaped that stifling atmosphere and I returned to San Francisco for the first time kind-of wanting to find an old man and be happy. But I didn’t, I just found Linda and became a meth freak. Jesus fucking Christ!
Now dig, this is my point—I really seem to have been trying to do myself in. I don’t mean to say that I think it’s a pattern and that I haven’t changed because I’ve been worrying about this quite a bit but I’ve decided that there is no chance. No chance at all! I guess whatever I used to hate myself for, I don’t anymore. Or maybe I’ve just grown up. I don’t know, but it’s not there anymore. Heretofore, after each horrible experience during my recuperative period, I always nurtured the belief that what I had done or just left was really pretty cool—it made it, y’know? But damn, I’ve never felt so positive about anything not being desirable. I guess I’ve really changed my mind this time.
I don’t really think it was so good an idea my telling you all this because I’m sure you’ll read too much into it. I’m not worried (Well, hell, sitting around here happy for the first time in my whole life and constantly being besieged by all of this horrible shit from before isn’t exactly fun . . .) and not really depressed, so don’t be worried. Wow I do wish you were around though because my head is all the time full of this SHIT and I just—oh fuck, I just wish I could kiss you! Hell, I don’t know!
Dig . . . I’m not really upset, honest. I’ve just been thinking about “old times” and it’s really depressing. Every night I try to go to sleep, my head starts filling w/past unhappinesses—am I obsessed, and why? Why do I think about all of this shit? I don’t want to, God knows. Well, hell, in my letter this morning I said I was going to try to explain what I’ve been thinking about to you—maybe I shouldn’t have?—and so I’ve tried.