Five Women (14 page)

“Consider it summer school,” her father said.

So there she was all summer long between her junior and senior years, learning how to understand and keep the books, how to order food and booze from the suppliers, why to put certain people at certain tables, how to watch for waste and stealing. He even made her waitress. At least he paid her for that, and there were also tips. She saved her money with a vengeance, for her escape into the music world.

“I'm never going to have to do this,” Billie protested.

“You'll hire people to do whatever you don't want to do, but you have to know how to do it yourself so you don't get cheated.”

In spite of herself she started to find it interesting. Her father acted so affable at work, but it was clear that he was always aware of everything and in control. In a way, Billie realized, what her father did was not so far from what she was doing. He, too, had to manipulate an audience. Les Redmond worked hard, but his roadhouse was also a social thing. He was not home for a single evening of the week. If his wife and children wanted to see him for dinner they would have to come to him, which they sometimes did, and he always gave them a table near the bar with a good view of the room and people treated them with respect. Billie thought it was kind of neat.

She would never end up here, though, she promised herself that. Her father's work might be his art, but it was still only his job. Hers was her soul. When she sang she often entered an altered state, close to ecstasy. It was clear to her that she had been given her voice for a reason, and not to take advantage of her talent would be bitterly self-destructive. Besides, she couldn't help it. Being able to sing was what gave her entire life purpose and made it bearable.

When she graduated from high school Billie let her parents talk her into temporarily working full-time in the roadhouse as the hostess while she saved more money. They knew she planned to leave home, but they wanted her to be able to take care of herself for at least a while when she was pursuing her career. She was not a hippie, they said, despite the way she had taken to dressing; she was a person with purpose. Life should be taken a step at a time. She thought they were right about the nest egg, but a stronger reason for delaying was that after growing up in a place where she knew so many people, the idea of going off to a city where she knew no one at all frightened her. She was only eighteen.

Kids she'd gone to school with were getting married to their high school sweethearts, planning to have kids of their own. How much easier it was for them, Billie thought, to have a dream that was close to home. A few of her friends were off to college, and she knew they wouldn't come back. She didn't regret not having applied to college—college had seemed an impediment—but now she thought of it as another protected environment on the road to success, which was not for her either. Some of her friends had simply left town. The world out there was suddenly full of young people their own age, warm with love and drugs, making their own rules. They wouldn't be strangers to her for long if she ventured out there alone, she knew that. But she stayed poised on the edge of freedom, ready to step off, and afraid. She didn't want anyone to find out because it would seem so out of character, and humiliating.

She continued to sing at the roadhouse on weekends and sometimes she got a job singing at a party with the guys in the band, who liked her and treated her like a niece. Even they, these men she'd known for years, devoted musicians, had regular jobs during the week, and families to keep them anchored. She knew they had regrets and that everything was a tradeoff. She wouldn't let herself have their lives. She steeled herself for the loneliness to come.

It took two years for her to know she was ready, and it almost came by accident. She was twenty that summer. Her friend Lily Ann and Lily Ann's boyfriend Scooter wanted to see the West Coast. “If we don't go now while we're young we'll never go,” they said, already afraid of being old. They invited Billie to come along to help drive, and she was glad to join them. She was afraid of being old, too.

They planned to see movie stars' homes in Los Angeles, and movie studios, and scenery very different from what they were used to, and palm trees and the Pacific Ocean; and in San Francisco they would check out the hippie scene, and at Billie's suggestion, the little coffeehouses where there were singers. But the highlight of the trip would be the Monterey Pop Festival where everyone Billie wanted to hear and see would be, the best of sixties' rock and blues: the Who, the Jimi Hendrix Experience, Aretha Franklin, Otis Redding, Johnny Rivers, the Byrds, Eric Burdon and the Animals, Canned Heat, the Electric Flag, Quicksilver Messenger Service, the Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, and many more. They would stay in cheap motels along the way, and for the three-day-long festival itself they brought sleeping bags and blankets. Billie felt that in some way, at last, she was going to put her fantasies of her destiny together with the reality of what it could be.

When they got to the county fairgrounds in the little coastal town of Monterey she was stunned. She had never seen so many people in her life, a sea of people, an outdoor city of love. They wore love beads, boots, faded Levis, granny dresses, even stovepipe hats, and some had bells and tambourines. They looked just like her.

She and her friends joined the slow-moving, peaceful throngs strolling through booths selling paper dresses, underground pins, earrings, crosses, posters, and macrobiotic food. There was corn on the cob and pastrami sandwiches. Bright flags with astrology signs on them waved in the breeze. There were psychedelic movies and loud makeshift steel bands. When people were tired they put out their blankets in the warm California sunshine and played guitars, sang, socialized, or just slept.

“Somebody said there are fifty thousand people here,” Lily Ann marveled. “That's three times as many people as in our entire town.”

“Let's stay forever,” Scooter said, grinning.

“But they won't . . . or I would.”

There was a banner over the stage in the seven-thousand-seat arena that said
LOVE
,
FLOWERS
AND
MUSIC
, and onstage there was nonstop total-volume sound. Delta blues, electric guitar, cool harmonica, acid rock, shaking and shouting, music that set the whole audience dancing. Day went into night. Dazed and gaping, drowning in music, totally happy, Billie knew she was on the verge of something important, but she didn't know what.

And then they saw Janis Joplin, a Texas girl too, almost unknown, and Billie's life changed.

Janis Joplin with her band, Big Brother and the Holding Company, Janis Joplin dressed in a gold knit pants suit, jumping and stamping her feet as if possessed, belting it out in a wild and passionate voice that sounded as if it would tear her throat apart . . . She was the best white woman blues singer Billie had ever heard. She was performing so far away from where Billie and her friends were standing that she seemed to be in miniature. But the sound was right there, and the energy, and the honesty, and the unabashed pain. It touched Billie in a way she had never been touched before. The sea of people receded, and Billie stood there hypnotized. For the first time, she understood that the future would be something she could deal with. This is who I want to be, she told herself. I would do anything to do this. She is me.
My God, she's not afraid to be afraid.

Other things happened during the festival—the Who made their amplifier go wild with feedback and then Peter Townshend dropped smoke bombs and smashed his guitar to bits while Keith Moon kicked his drum to pieces. Jimi Hendrix's finale to his session was to burn his guitar onstage. But none of that violence impressed Billie at all. She had seen what she had come to see. All the rest was show business.

When she got back to Plano, Billie packed her things and left for New York City. She was still capable of being shocked by masses of people, tall buildings and traffic jams, but not for long. She rented a tiny apartment in Greenwich Village, slept on a mattress on the floor, and haunted the little Village clubs; and finally she began to get gigs playing there. She strummed her guitar and sang her own songs, doing what she had done at home in Plano, but this time she didn't have a band, not that it mattered since the stages were so small there wouldn't have been room for one. She had a lot more artistic freedom here than she'd had at home because the audiences were hip. They didn't demand she sing well-known songs whether she liked them or not.

Dark, smoky rooms that smelled of beer were familiar to her, and so were audiences, and so were admiring men. What was unfamiliar, although she had thought she was prepared for it, was the loneliness that touched her the moment she woke up in the morning and stayed with her all day like a creature with its claws in her heart.

She began to buy bottles of wine for her apartment, and kept a little buzz on all day. Wine, she told herself, was not hard liquor. It was just something to keep the creature at bay. She found out how to buy pot in Washington Square Park and from friendly neighbors. People were generous and shared. Pot was a social thing, like cigarettes, and it made you relax.

Everybody she knew took something. You could get pills in clubs, or at parties, and a prescription if you needed one and knew the right people. She started to take an upper from time to time when she was tired or sad, and a downer when it was hard to sleep. Everyone knew it was unnatural to try to go to sleep when the sun was already blasting in the sky.

That first summer in New York she lost her virginity at last, not that she hadn't had plenty of chances at home. At twenty she thought she was probably the oldest virgin in America. What had made her so cautious in Plano was that she was still living with her parents, and the men who wanted to have sex with her were the ones she met in her father's roadhouse. She didn't want anybody to talk about her, to say that you could get Billie Redmond as a kind of dessert after dinner and the show. As for the boys she had known at school, they had rejected her for so long that when they finally decided she was hot because of her performances, she already thought of
them
as rejects, and she wanted them to know it. She was haughty and mysterious, and all the guys simply assumed she was having sex with someone else. No one knew she was a virgin; it was her secret.

But in New York she was free. After she finished her gig she would go to the after-hours rock clubs, like the Scene, where the music greats came to jam all night, or to a hall like the Electric Circus to drink and smoke and dance. She slept late, often awoke with a beautiful man in her bed whom she had met only hours before, and sometimes she even saw him again. In the afternoons she wrote songs or took long walks around the city. She was still young enough to have short hangovers.

There were little record labels that came and went. You could get signed by one if they saw you performing in a club and liked you, and if you and they were lucky the little label might be bought by a big one. Elvis had started with Sun, and Sun had later been bought by RCA. Or you might even be signed by a big one in the first place. That was her dream.

Janis Joplin was famous now. Billie had followed Janis's every career move because Janis had unknowingly changed her life. After the Monterey Pop Festival, Janis and Big Brother and the Holding Company had been signed by Columbia Records, where they made a terrific album called
Cheap Thrills.
Then she left them and formed her own group, the Kosmic Blues Band. But Janis was getting increasingly bad publicity: she drank Southern Comfort all the time, even onstage, and Billie had heard from people who were in a position to know that she was on heroin. It amazed her that anyone could sing so well while indulging in that kind of self-abuse, and she determined she would never do anything like that to herself, no matter how lonely she was.

That winter, the last of the sixties, Billie was singing at the Village Vanguard when she met Harry Lawless, the man who would change her life again. She knew it the moment she saw him, although she was not sure why she knew or how he would do it. He sat alone drinking beer from a longneck bottle and smoking, and never took his eyes off her. She kept glancing at him to be sure. He was older than she but still young, and he had a craggy, scarred face that looked as if it had survived many bar brawls, mitigated by long, soft dark hair and velvet eyes. There was something familiar about that ravaged face, a face she might have seen in her father's roadhouse, and it comforted rather than repelled her. He looked to be a little shorter than she was, which she didn't mind because she was used to it, and he was hard and lean in his jeans, faded work shirt, and expensive leather jacket. He was attractive in an odd way, and very sexy.

When her set was over he raised the bottle to her with a nod of respect. She nodded back and smiled. When she came down to look for the friends she was going to meet, he stopped her. Billie let anyone stop her who looked as if he might be someone in the record business, but in this case she would have stopped anyway.

“You need a manager,” he said, in an accent she recognized from all of her life.

“How do you know I don't have one?”

“I asked,” he said. He handed her his card.
Harry Lawless
it read,
Outlaw Records.

“Cute,” Billie said.

“I thought so. Will you sit down and let me buy you a drink?”

“I'm meeting some friends here, but okay, just for a minute.” She let him pull out her chair for her and she ordered a glass of wine. “So you're from Texas, too?” she said.

“Houston.”

“Oh, the big city. I'm from Plano.”

“How long have you been in New York?”

“Not long enough and too long,” Billie said. “So who do you suggest I get to be my manager?”

“Me.”

She thought about that. “If you have a record company, how come you're a manager? I never heard of anybody being both.”