Freedom's Just Another Word Read online

  Larry glanced at my frottoir.

  “My grandma has a washboard just like that,” he said.

  “It’s not a washboard,” I replied. “It’s a musical instrument.”

  “Will you play it for me? And sing?” asked Larry, his eyebrows raised in a pleading sort of way, like he was asking for a new puppy. Or like he was a puppy, and was begging me for a treat.

  “Why don’t you come over to the liquor store some night after work? You can throw money at me there.”

  A strange look came over his face.

  “Liquor store?” He sighed while blowing air slowly out of his mouth. “I promised my mother I’d keep a hundred paces from any place with alcohol.” He grabbed a tire from the rack and rolled it past me. “She’s a worrier.”

  “She’d never know.”

  Larry thought for a minute. “Yeah,” he said, “but I would.”

  “Won’t there be liquor at this wedding we’re going to on Saturday?” I wondered.

  “Oh, gosh no,” said Larry. “They’re all Baptists.”

  Oh, my God. A wedding with no liquor, a bunch of Baptists—and Skooter. How did I get myself into this?

  Larry looked weird again, then stepped backwards to the red metal chest of drawers where he kept his screwdrivers and drill bits. When he thought I wasn’t watching, he checked behind it like he was worried about spies or termites or something. Then he walked back to where I was working and in a big loud nervous voice, said, “Why don’t you play the washboard and sing for me now?”

  It was nearing eleven.

  I wanted to be trackside by noon.

  I put down the starter motor I was repairing. “Maybe another time,” I said. “Right now, I’ve got to get cleaned up.” I headed to the stairs that led up to our apartment. Larry grabbed my sleeve.

  “Oh, c’mon,” he urged. “I want to hear you. It’ll be practice for when you meet with those famous people today.”

  “I’m not meeting them, Larry—just waving to them. If I’m lucky.”

  “Please.” He was clenching his teeth.

  “No.”

  “Please with a cherry on top.”

  Oh, for heaven’s sake! “Okay, but I’ve only got a minute.” I gave in and sang for him, but not with the frottoir. “Here’s one from Janis Joplin’s Cheap Thrills album,” I said, and Larry squinted his eyes. I opted for “Summertime.”

  “Don’t worry. It’s not dirty,” I added, clearing my throat. I started to sing and almost felt myself holding a baby I didn’t intend to have, at least for another decade.

  Larry liked it—I could tell by the grin on his face—so I kept on singing, and even threw in a little extra vibrato for effect. By the time I’d finished the last verse, though, I sensed that Larry was up to something, and his smile had nothing to do with a passion for Gershwin. He started to giggle like a ten-year-old boy who’d hidden in the bathroom closet to peek at me in the shower. Then he dashed back to his tool cabinet, reached behind it, and lifted up a tape recorder.

  “You recorded me,” was my matter-of-fact response. I guess I should have pulled his ear and said “You little devil.”

  “Yup!” He pushed a button, then bobbed his head from side to side while the tape rewound.

  Then he played it back. And it sounded good. Really good.

  “So where’d you get the recorder, Larry?”

  “I borrowed it from Mrs. Hill,” he said.

  “Part of her surveillance equipment,” I surmised. I knew she’d been operating with various spy apparatuses because I’d heard that she’d loaned someone a camera to obtain a photograph of our neighbor’s new lampshade. It was pink satin with black lace and had chiffon over top. According to Mrs. Hill, it proved that the woman was up to no good, since her husband’s new sales job had taken him to Regina once a week, and a late-model Chevrolet had been seen parked around the corner from her place every time he was gone.

  “I don’t imagine you told Mrs. Hill what you were borrowing the recorder for,” I asked Larry.

  “No. She didn’t ask, so I didn’t worry about it.” He smiled. “I wanted to hear how you sound. Everybody always sounds different on tape.” He pulled out the plug. “I sound like Elmer Newgast.”

  “Who is Elmer Newgast?”

  “He’s the Rawleigh man in Porcupine Plain,” answered Larry.

  “Rawleigh man?”

  “Ointments. Foot powder,” he said. “Once, I bought my mom some violet perfume from him.”

  “Oh,” I said. “A salesman.”

  Larry nodded. “Anyway,” he said, “your voice is real pretty. Even on a tape recorder.”

  “Pretty?” Now there was an adjective I’d never heard applied to music before.

  “Yeah.”

  “I imagine that in Porcupine Plain, everyone listens to country and western, right?”

  Larry smiled. “Johnny Cash—now there’s a good singer.” He stopped. “I mean…like you. As good as you.”

  I knew Larry meant well, and I was glad that he thought I had a “pretty” voice, but any possible enthusiasm I might have had about his compliment was overshadowed by the realization that in Porcupine Plain, I wouldn’t come up to Johnny Cash’s bootstraps.

  

  I was surprised that, besides me, two drunks tossing pieces of gravel onto the track, some members of Hare Krishna chanting in a semi-circle, and a small group of Deadheads, there wasn’t the huge gathering I’d expected waiting for the Festival Express. All the Hare Krishna guys had close-set, pale green eyes (and shaved heads) and were high on life; the Deadheads—fans of the Grateful Dead—wore black T-shirts with skulls and roses and were high on grass.

  One of the drunks beside the track was shirtless; the other had red wine spilled down the front of a multi-colored blouse that was obviously made for a woman, since it had darts in the breast area.

  “We didn’t miss it, did we?” I asked out loud, hoping somebody would answer.

  One of the drunks leaned toward the other one.

  “Did we miss it?”

  “Miss what?”

  “It.”

  “I guess.”

  “What was it?”

  “I don’t know. I missed it.”

  Then a Deadhead walked over to me. He emerged from the cloud of smoke that surrounded his buddies.

  “I’ve been here all morning, so no way we missed it,” he said. “Friend of mine was at the concert in Winnipeg last night and said the train left there a couple hours after they’d finished.”

  “You mean in the middle of the night?”

  “Yeah, so they’ll pass through here around two, I guess.” He took a drag from his joint. The end of it was stained dark green, and was soaking wet from his lips. I watched as he inhaled deeply, then sotto voce said, “Wanna toke?”

  “No thanks.” I clunked down my accordion and put the frottoir around my neck. “So, you’re obviously a fan of the Dead. What about Joplin, do you like her?”

  “Great chick,” he said. “I’d like to—” He stopped himself. “Great chick.”

  I nodded in agreement.

  Then he hissed, “You’re a Janis fan and you don’t smoke dope?”

  “Can’t. Gotta keep my mind clear for singing,” I said.

  The Deadhead studied my frottoir from every angle, like he was trying to solve a murder mystery. Finally he asked, “What is it?”

  “Cajun blues instrument.” I played on it for a minute, humming a few bars of a Clifton Chenier song from the bayou. A couple more Deadheads came over.

  “Dead started out as a jug band, man,” one of them told me.

  “No way,” I said.

  “Yeah. Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Champions. Before they got known by the Haight-Ashbury crowd in San Francisco.”

  “That’s where
Joplin started out,” I added. “She played with the Dead at Monterey Pop.” I glanced over at the semi-circle of chanters. “What are they doing here?” I asked. “They’re not Deadheads.”

  “Yeah, they are.”

  “What? You’re kidding me.”

  “The Dead had a concert at the Hare Krishna temple in San Francisco—to help them out.” He asked the other guy, “Janis played there, too, right?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “With Big Brother and the Holding Company.”

  God, I thought. The things you can learn by the railroad tracks. “She’s with Full Tilt Boogie Band, now,” I said. Then I wondered why these Deadheads didn’t make their way to see one of the Festival Express concerts. “So why didn’t you guys go to Winnipeg or Calgary?”

  “No bread, man.”

  “Yeah,” said the other guy. “There was a riot in Toronto over the ticket prices. Jerry Garcia wound up playing for free outside the gates to stop the crowd from destroying the place, man.” He watched as I opened up my accordion case and got ready to busk. I threw a few nickels and dimes in there to give people the idea. “Why didn’t you go?” he asked me.

  “Saving my money for my own career. I’m heading down to New Orleans soon. Gonna sing the blues.”

  “Far out.”

  I moved my stuff closer to the doors of the liquor store; although it wasn’t busy at that time of day, the odd person sauntered past. I played a full hour of zydeco tunes, interspersed with my favorite Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday songs. Even the Hare Krishna guys stopped chanting at one point and listened to me. And everyone that walked by threw change into my case.

  It was when I’d stopped for a break that everything happened. I was sitting with my back against the shady side of the building, looking up at the indifferent blue sky and watching a cloud drift past when I heard the whistle.

  The whistle!

  I jumped up, grabbed my stuff and ran to the track.

  The whistle again!

  Oh my God. Here it comes.

  Once I heard the thunder of the train’s engines, my heart started pounding.

  The Deadheads were lighting joints and cheering. The Hare Krishnas were still chanting, but they weren’t in unison anymore.

  Once it got close enough, I could see the giant yellow letters across the side of the train that read Festival Express. My breathing became so shallow I thought I’d drown in my own excitement.

  Wow! I scoured the windows for Janis. Janis? Janis? Where the hell are you Janis? Damn it all, you didn’t take an aisle seat, did you? C’mon…look out the window.

  And then the train began to brake.

  “They’re slowing down!” I screamed to the Deadhead closest to me. “I think they’re going to stop!”

  He looked at me, and if he hadn’t smoked so much grass, his eyes would have been as wide as mine. All his buddies stood in a line, their chins sticking up and out as they scanned the train for the Dead.

  And then it happened.

  The train stopped. All twelve coaches.

  Screech!

  At the liquor store. In Saskatoon.

  Right where I stood.

  And the first person to step off was none other than Janis Joplin.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Janis stumbled when her feet hit the pavement.

  “Jeeeesus Key-riste,” she hollered, “where the hell am I?” Then she tossed her head and cackled. “I’m in the middle of the goddamn prairies.”

  Behind her, a huge gang of musicians and managers and sound guys and who-knows-who ambled out of the train, stretched, looked from side to side like they’d just landed on the moon, then headed into the liquor store. They were all at least partially anesthetized, but Janis was further gone than that. She looked like she’d been clipped with an iron bar. It was clear they’d run out of booze, and that was why they’d made the emergency stop, since some guy they called Ken was passing around a shoebox to collect money. Their talk was loud and boisterous and punctuated with claps of laughter—about what, I didn’t know—but I had a sneaking suspicion that being stone drunk and finding themselves in Saskatoon might have had something to do with it.

  The guy with the shoebox walked right past me, and I heard him call out to Janis about having collected almost four hundred dollars. Four hundred dollars? I recognized some members of The Band, and I saw Sylvia Tyson; the only sober one to emerge from the train, she looked lovely in a red mini-dress, her perfectly straight, long dark hair pushed back with a matching headband.

  Janis, drunken and braless, wearing gaudy beads and bracelets (and that flock of colored feathers in her matted hair), looked like a cross between a sick old madam and a red-hot hippie mama. If you had tested her blood, it would have been 100 proof. But she stood out so much from everyone around her—and was so far above the rest of us anyway—it was like watching Gulliver with the Lilliputians.

  My Deadhead friend skidded over to tell me that he’d gotten Jerry Garcia’s autograph on a pack of cigarettes. Before I’d had a chance to take a look at it, he spotted another member of the group—I think it was Ron “Pigpen” McKernan—and ran after him. But when the singer hopped back on the train without so much as a nod, the Deadhead began to droop; that was when I decided not to approach Janis. I didn’t want to be shunned. I preferred to register this moment of my life as a rare, exciting one that I could treasure and bring out every once in a while to fondle and remember.

  I guess life had other plans, though, because Janis approached me.

  Throwing her lips to the left, she yelled to the guy with the shoebox, “Don’t forget the Southern Comfort, man.” She turned up her bottle and shook it to show him it was empty. Then she pointed at my frottoir and accordion.

  “I thought we were in Canada, man, not New Orleans,” she said with a twang. She was so Texan you could almost hear her spurs jangle. “Where the hell did you get those instruments?”

  No matter how many times I go over it in my mind, I cannot figure out why I replied the way I did. It must have been temporary insanity, but instead of telling her about my musical background in zydeco—and blues, of course—I said, “I saw you on the Dick Cavett Show.”

  Dick Cavett? Good God. I quickly added, “You were fantastic.”

  “Thanks, man,” she said. Then she came so close to me that I could see right into her glassy eyes and smell her liquor-soaked breath. “So you heard me tell him about my class reunion,” she said, brushing back hair and feathers with her hand.

  “Yes, I—”

  “Can’t wait. It’s like I told Dick, they laughed me out of class, out of town, and out of the state,” declared Janis. “Now I’m going back.”

  “I can’t believe you were unpopular,” I mumbled.

  “Ha!” she spurted. “Now I’m going back,” she repeated. She was about to say something else, but followed my gaze to a tattoo on her wrist. “So you heard me tell Dick about the cat in San Francisco who did this. Great, isn’t it?”

  I nodded.

  “Aren’t you going to play that goddamn frottoir for me?” she asked.

  I stood frozen. I felt like I was waiting for a sneeze. Janis picked up the instrument and banged on it with her fingernails; everything she did was so cool and everything she touched— including my frottoir—throbbed hopefully. I would have crawled on my hands and knees over broken glass just to be near her. And there she was asking me to play for her! It was a good thing that my pal, the Deadhead, had given up on Pigpen and made his way over to where I stood. He nudged me and said “G’wan, sing.” I felt like a fledgling, teetering on the edge of a nest, terrified, but hoping for a push.

  I picked up my accordion, and sang the first Bessie Smith song that entered my head. Oddly, it was “Downhearted Blues,” and although I was petrified, I certainly wasn’t downhearted. Despite my bad nerves, I must have done a fairly dec
ent job of it because Janis joined in—a vibrant, earthy, unrestrained version of the song that compelled me to stop singing and listen to her instead. She skipped over half the words, missed a few runs, but gave such an effortless performance that mine seemed more like something from one of Miss Poultice’s recitals.

  “You’re good, man,” she told me.

  I am? Me?

  Then she told me why I was good. “Chick singers, man, they tend to stay on top of a song, you know? The secret is to get down to the bottom of the melody. You’re down there.”

  “Well, uh—”

  “That’s why you’re good.” She pulled a cigarette out of a thin, gold case. “You do a lot of Bessie Smith?” she asked.

  “Yes. And Billie Holiday. Thank you.”

  Thank you? God, that sounded bad.

  “I learned to sing by listening to Bessie Smith,” she said.

  “Me, too,” I responded weakly, since next to Janis, how I learned to sing seemed about as important as yesterday’s news.

  She lit the cigarette and took a long drag. “You know what I’m doing?” She said it in such a way that I knew she wasn’t expecting me to guess.

  “No. I don’t.”

  Another drag, this one shorter.

  “I’m getting a headstone put on her grave.”

  “Whose grave?” asked the Deadhead.

  “Bessie Smith’s.” By now, there was a gathering of fans around her, including some Hare Krishnas, the Grateful Dead guys, and some I didn’t recognize. “Goddamn bastards didn’t mark her grave. Goddamn—”

  “They didn’t?” I asked her.

  “Goddamn bastards killed her.” She squinted her eyes into a glassy stare and let smoke flow slowly from her nose. “She was in a car accident near Memphis and the ambulance wouldn’t take her to the hospital because it was for whites only.” She pulled the liquor bottle out of her purse, remembered it was empty, then hurled it over her shoulder. “They took her to a hospital for blacks, but it was too late.” She shook her head from side to side. “Ugly bastards.”