Freedom's Just Another Word Read online

  Busted flat in Baton Rouge

  From the first few lines I knew I was witnessing something spectacular. Janis Joplin wasn’t a well-trained singer; she wasn’t even a particularly good guitar player. Her vibrant alto voice was earthy and twangy, and I loved it, but even that didn’t explain why everyone in the room was mesmerized by her. Janis had something inexplicable—something I knew I’d never have.

  Freedom’s just another word

  for nothing left to lose…

  That was it. Right there. That was the clue.

  Janis was one hundred percent free. Free of inhibitions. Free of fear. And, some might say, free of the self-control that would have stopped her from addiction. But Janis didn’t allow any shackles on her life. That’s why, when she sang, she took everyone to that same place of freedom. And that’s why, when she sang, it felt so good.

  She finished the song to a room full of ecstatic screaming. I looked into her eyes, and oddly, despite all the attention and love from the audience, they were dead.

  It wasn’t my place to analyze her, but it didn’t take a genius to see that despite bringing life to everyone around her, she had killed a part of herself in the process. Like Jesus, I told myself. And given the scars on her arms, I wasn’t far off the mark.

  I wasn’t sure if I should remind her that she invited me to sing, or if I should wait until she noticed me. I didn’t know if she’d even recognize me.

  She chatted with people she knew, and after about ten minutes, her eyes caught mine. She pointed at me with her cigarette, then smiled. That was when I knew that all the anticipatory days leading up to that moment had been worth it.

  “What’s your name again? Wait! Louisiana. That’s right. I really dig that name.” She grabbed one of her friends, an attractive woman whom I could tell was a Californian from the clothes she wore, and explained our chance meeting in Saskatoon.

  “She’s terrific,” Janis told her. “She plays zydeco on her accordion and frottoir—did you bring them?” She looked at the chair next to me. “You did! Yeah!”

  Speechless, and trying to think of something just this side of human sacrifice to show my appreciation, I must have appeared foolish, but the whole scene—one that I had acted out in my head seven hundred times by then—transported me to some kind of a dream world.

  Janis pulled the Southern Comfort out of her purse and took a swig. She offered it to me, but I declined.

  “Every fucking bottle but this,” she told her friend. “And Leezy…Louisie—”

  “Easy.”

  “Oh, God, I love that name.” When she leaned toward me, her breath was sweet and warm. “Are you ready to sing?”

  And then, exactly then, at the moment I’d been waiting for my whole life, with Janis Joplin asking me, Louisiana Merritt, to sing the blues at the very place where she had been discovered, Thelma came into my head. And this time, nothing would get her to leave. She wouldn’t even wait her turn.

  Think of all the black folks, Easy. Think of them.

  Think of all the black singers that would have given their right arm to sing at Threadgill’s but weren’t allowed in the door.

  Bessie Smith wouldn’t have been allowed to sing there. Billie Holiday would have been tossed out with the garbage. Janis, now she glorifies these women right down to their faults, their addictions. You can go that route, Easy. Or you can honor them another way—by standing for something.

  What are you going to do, Easy?

  I picked up my accordion and frottoir, and headed for the stage, determined that nothing would stop me from singing, not even Thelma.

  Janis cheered me on.

  I sat my instruments down on the stage and looked out to the audience. I watched as Janis whispered something to Threadgill—maybe she was apologizing for my being black.

  Apologizing. Because I was black.

  If I’d been white, she wouldn’t have needed to.

  Looking back at that moment, I don’t know if I made the right choice or not. I’ll never know. But I thought about Clarence and Thelma, and Agnes and Johnny. I thought about Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday. I thought about myself.

  And I decided not to sing.

  Even though it meant the end of my career as a blues singer.

  I picked up my things, and walked over to Janis. The crowd made sounds—a mixture of boos and whispers and questions—and Threadgill took over the stage to calm everybody down.

  “I’m sorry,” I told her, “but the only reason I’m allowed to sing here is because of you. If I’d been any other black singer, they would have told me to hit the road.”

  Janis didn’t say anything. She made no comment at all. Deep in thought, she dragged on her cigarette with more force than usual.

  I headed through the building, past the gawking crowd once again. I didn’t feel threatened, the way I did in the diner. But I was certain that a lot of things were being said about me—things that weren’t true. I wanted to shout out and explain, but that would have only made things worse. The only thing left to do was keep walking, and never look back.

  It seemed like an hour before I finally found my way to the front entrance.

  When I did, Marsha was standing inside the door.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Judging by the look on her face, it was clear that Marsha had entered Threadgill’s with the same amount of enthusiasm as Daniel must have had when entering the lion’s den.

  “I came,” she said, sounding like a coiled spring of willpower.

  “Good for you.”

  Marsha’s two steps into the bar were the farthest thing from my mind, so if she was looking for congratulations from me, she wasn’t going to get them.

  “I did it,” she said, in the same tone of voice as someone who’d finally gone through with a root canal.

  “Good for you,” I repeated. “Now I’m leaving.” I squeezed past her and started for the road. I figured on hitchhiking to the airport then heading for home. Back to the garage. Back to being a grease monkey. At least I could look myself in the mirror.

  Marsha shadowed behind me, and it was like being in kindergarten again and having the kid with jam on his face follow you everywhere you went.

  “Oh, what is it?” I snapped.

  “What happened? Didn’t you sing?”

  “What do you care if I sang or not? You hate music except for hymns, you can’t stand me, and you’ve always treated my desire to sing as a recurring illness. Like malaria.”

  “That is incorrect,” she said, sounding like a schoolteacher again.

  I turned to leave, and would have made it to the road, except that Janis found me, and Janis is one of those people you don’t walk away from.

  She pushed her round Foster Grants to the top of her head, then screamed at me. “Hey!” A bunch of people had trailed her out the door and were clambering around, so she motioned to a couple of bouncers. “Get them out of my hair,” she insisted. “G’wan!” She shooed them away. Once they’d dispersed, she found a place to sit on a picnic bench, plunked down her liquor bottle, lit another cigarette, and hollered at me again.

  “Get the hell over here!”

  I walked back, feeling uneasy about what I’d done. Marsha came too, but her attitude was completely different—she resembled a high-ranking officer being forced to intermingle with the recruits.

  “Sit down,” said Janis, and I did.

  Marsha stood.

  There was a moment of silence while Janis let smoke out of her mouth and it hovered around her like a genie. Then I spoke up.

  “I’m sorry,” was all I could muster. I was going to say something about my conscience—how it stopped me from singing. But Janis knew that already, and it would have sounded pretentious. After all, it had been six years since Dylan wrote that the times, they were a-changin’. Who was I to argue
? And I knew that Janis had always gone out of her way to venerate the black singers like Bessie Smith who had influenced her.

  “Ken’s not a racist,” said Janis, as if she was reading my mind. “He’s just tryin’ to run a business, is all. I mean he started serving beer here in the forties, for God’s sake. He’s a good ol’ boy, you know?”

  I didn’t argue with Janis Joplin.

  Marsha did.

  “He could be arrested. It’s against the law to segregate,” she said, and while it was nice of her to stand up for me, it wasn’t very helpful. It was like being held up by a gunman and having a little old lady slam him with her purse.

  “Mr. Threadgill didn’t stop me from singing,” I told Marsha.

  “The place is filled with assholes,” said Janis. “I don’t blame you for walking away.” She and Marsha stared at each other for a Texas minute. Janis was trying to figure out if Marsha was a Mennonite or just a square, and Marsha was aghast at the fact that Janis was braless.

  “Are you a—”

  Marsha interrupted her. “I’m a postulant.” When she said the word postulant, she rose a foot off the ground.

  “Gonna be a nun?” Janis took a swig of her booze. Marsha indicated her disapproval by turning her lips into a small pink rosette, but she answered the question.

  “Yes.”

  I waited for her to say, so what you gonna do about it?

  She didn’t.

  Then Janis surprised us all.

  “Good for you,” she remarked, and I was pretty sure she knew what she was saying, although she still looked glassy-eyed and disheveled, like somebody’d put her head in a blender. Then she had questions for Marsha. “When do you take your vows or whatever it is you do?”

  “The first week in October I will become a novice and take my new name. Then I’ll be serving the church in Calgary. My vows come later.” She said it with such finality, I felt like putting a Rest In Peace wreath around her neck.

  “I was just in Calgary,” said Janis. “Before Hawaii. Hell of a show. Can’t remember any of it.”

  They stared at each other again, so I decided to explain why Marsha was with me.

  “She and another nun, Sister Beatrice, were on their way to Albuquerque—they’re staying there for the summer to learn about the mission—so I got a ride with them. To save money.”

  “Albuquerque,” repeated Janis, taking another swig. “So what are you doing in Austin?”

  I wondered if Marsha was going to tell her the truth, hedge the question, or just plain lie. When she took on that sepulchral tone again, I knew she’d decided to go with the first option.

  “I was ordered by the Mother Superior to meet you.”

  Janis laughed so loud that Marsha shook her head to get her hearing back.

  “Me? What the hell for? To show you what not to do?”

  “No.” Marsha swelled her nostrils. “To learn about—well, to experience—”

  “G’wan,” said Janis, blowing smoke into the air. “Give it to me straight.”

  I cringed, hoping she wouldn’t, but she did.

  “Mother Superior wants me to understand the nature of heroin addiction so that I will be ready for my work with drug-dependent teens.”

  When Janis left that sentence hanging there, I decided I’d better try to soften it a bit.

  “That’s not it—not exactly,” I declared. “You see there’s this young man in Albuquerque who the Mother Superior is trying to help. His name is Roy and she thinks he’s going to die from heroin. She’s really worried about him, and thought that meeting you would be the best thing for him.”

  Janis raised her eyebrows, so I continued.

  “He grabs people’s arms to see if they can pull him back in.”

  While that remark wouldn’t make sense to anyone else, Janis nodded, as if she knew exactly what Roy was trying to do.

  “He told us that you could pull him back in—if he could grab your arm—because you know what it’s like to wrestle with…well, addiction. I guess.” I took a deep breath and kept trying to explain. “He thought I was on my way to Yasgur’s and begged me to take him along.”

  “So where is he?” asked Janis.

  “Well, uh—” Marsha cut in. “He’s still in Albuquerque. He couldn’t make it.”

  Boy, for a nun, she’s an excellent liar. Did it with a straight face even.

  Janis started removing bangles one by one from her forearm. At first, I thought she was going to show us her track marks, but then I realized she was trying to get at one of the bracelets. Many of them were cheap plastic things, or beads, but halfway up her arm was a real nice one. It looked like it was solid gold. She pulled it off and handed it to Marsha.

  “Give this to Roy.”

  When Janis handed her the bangle, Marsha looked at it disdainfully, holding it between two fingers as if she was dispensing of it like a dirty tissue. She dropped it into the side pocket of her purse.

  Somebody called out to Janis, and she told them she’d be there in a minute, so I knew my time with her was about to end. I wondered what she was going to say to me. As it turned out, she was more interested in Marsha.

  “First week in October, eh?”

  “Yes, Miss Joplin.”

  What do you know? Marsha’s finally showing some respect for the world-famous singer. Or is she just trying to keep her distance?

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake—oops! Not Miss Joplin.” Janis cackled again. “Call me Pearl.”

  I smiled, Marsha looked at the ground, and Janis got up to leave.

  “So what’s your new name gonna be?” she asked Marsha.

  Marsha didn’t reply, so I did.

  “She can’t decide between Sister Bohuslava or Sister Ivanna. And another one I can’t remember.”

  “Sister Nastasiya,” said Marsha.

  “Do they mean something?” asked Janis, and when Marsha explained all those holier-than-thou names, the singer looked puzzled, then said, “I’m no nun, that’s for sure, but maybe your name should be something easier to say. You know, for guys like Roy.”

  I agreed with Janis.

  “Easy?” Janis put her hand on my shoulder.

  “Yeah?”

  “Can you get to California?”

  “To sing?”

  Of course to sing, you idiot. She isn’t inviting you to clean her house.

  “When I’m done touring, I’m heading to Los Angeles to record an album. I’ll be done by the end of September, or early in October. Then I’ll have some time. There’s some people—I’d like them to hear you, ’cause I think you’re great.” She staggered again, then picked up her bag. “Are you going back to Saskatoon—I could take down your number and call you there.”

  I quickly grabbed a pen from my purse and scrambled to find a piece of paper. All I had was an old invoice from the garage, but it did the trick. I wrote down all the information, neatly and clearly, then handed it back to her. She shoved it into her bag, not nearly as carefully as I’d wished. But at least it was in there. Right then, Janis was ambushed by a bunch of fans demanding autographs and grabbing onto her like she was the last available antidote for a worldwide epidemic of some killer disease.

  They loved her, they loved her music, they loved the new Bobby McGee song. Love, love, love. By the time they’d confessed all this love, and Janis had given them everything she could (then had a bouncer get rid of them), it was as if she’d been to the blood-donor clinic about seventeen times, all in the same day. She was drained.

  No sooner did that group dissolve than another formed, and I wondered if she’d survive it.

  The second wave was meaner than the first. They were in love with Janis, just as the first group had been, but a few of them made it clear with gestures and facial expressions that they didn’t like me. No one said anything—
probably because it was a well-known fact that Janis did not tolerate racism—but they made me feel uncomfortable nonetheless.

  While running into people like that was inevitable, and after what happened to me in Denver and Wichita Falls, I almost expected to be put down, what I didn’t anticipate was their turning their attention to Marsha.

  “What the hell’s that thing on your head?” said one of the young women, a tough-looking chick with black globules at the end of her eyelashes.

  Marsha shook from the top of her head to the bottom of her skinny legs. If one of them had so much as brushed against her, I think she would have shattered into a million pieces.

  “I said, what is that thing?” demanded the tough one.

  “Leave her alone,” I said.

  Then Janis cut in. “What’s your fucking problem? You got a problem with nuns?”

  The bunch of them started to laugh.

  “Nun!” The tough one leered contemptuously at poor Marsha, who must have felt like she’d just peed her pants. (It’s a wonder she didn’t, but she seldom drinks liquids.)

  I felt sorry for her, and realized why she preferred to hang out in convents and churches; at the same time, I could see why Mother Grace had insisted she face the real world and learn to live in it.

  Janis gave them all a piece of her mind.

  “You’re bastards,” she told them. She called them a lot of other things, too, most of which I don’t think Marsha had ever heard before.

  The young woman with the mascara mumbled something, but by then her friends were busy trying to get Janis’s autograph. A bouncer got rid of them eventually, then Janis said to Marsha, “Good luck, honey. It ain’t gonna be an easy life. I admire you.” She pulled down her sunglasses over her eyes, stuck her bottle back into her bag (I hoped she’d put the lid on tight, because she threw it right on top of my address), and headed back to the bar. Then she turned and said to Marsha, “Tell Roy something for me, will ya? Tell him to live in the moment, man. Tell him—tell him that in the end, it’s all the same fucking day.”