The Empire of the Dead (18 page)

“What do you remember most about the town?” someone asked Janis.

She stuttered and frowned. “I don't really remem … no comment.”

“You were different from your schoolmates, or were you?”

“I felt apart from them.”

“Did you go to many football games?”

“I think not. I didn't go to the high school prom and—”

“You
were
asked, weren't you?”

“No, I wasn't. They didn't think … they … I don't think they wanted to take me. And I've been suffering ever since.” She gave a ghastly smile, but it was clear she wasn't joking. “It's enough to make you want to sing the blues.”

Mildred picked up her bag. “Frankie, can you cover my drink? I'm going to the high school now.”

“Sure.”

“Head on over later. Behind the gym.”

“I don't think so. It doesn't seem right.”

“Don't worry about it. I told you. I can get you in. These guys I met—”

“No, thanks. Have a good time. I hope you get to meet her.”

After she left, I stayed for one more beer. In town, men ran up
the streets hauling microphones and cameras. Goateed disc jockeys gave away radio station T-shirts and 45s, bands no one knew. Steam drifted from the Texaco plant. This stuff will kill me, I thought. Don't breathe. It'll show up in your belly years from now. A drunk stopped me in a vacant lot. He pointed to the smudgy air. “Smell that, boy?” he said. “It's the smell of money, and don't you fucking forget it.”

I wound through darkened streets past the Pompano Club and a Walgreen's, cut behind City Hall and over to the Inter Coastal Canal. In a narrow alley, Vietnamese dishwashers smoked in the doorway of a tiny seafood joint. Wet boxes, shattered crabs lay at their feet.

Around 4 a.m., Mildred woke me, pounding my door. I unbolted it and slid back the chain. She staggered in with a bottle of Southern Comfort. Her clothes smelled as smoky as the town.

“Well, did you meet her?” I asked. I slipped into a shirt and buttoned it halfway.

“Damn straight.”

“What was she like?”

“Beautiful. Want some?” She held up the bottle.

“No, thanks.”

“Don't be a goddamn prig, Frankie.”

“Okay, just a little, in that glass over there—there, next to my sketchbook. What did she say?”

“Said people here had laughed her out of class, out of town, and out of Texas.”

“I believe it.”

“Her classmates, Frankie—they're fucking pigs. Still! Nothing ever changes. The world will always be high school. They gave her a tire because she had traveled the farthest to attend. ‘What am I going to do with a fucking tire?' she said. And then. Oh, Frankie. Then some asshole said she was still the ugliest girl in class.”

“No.”

“Yeah. But she was cool. She said, ‘Everybody lay whoever you're sitting next to.' I wouldn't have touched
any
of those suckers. But guess what? I got to hug her and get her a drink. And Frankie, you know what she told me?”

It was the finest night of Mildred's life. I raised my glass to her. “What?”

“She told me stardom was nothing but riding a bus.”

History records that, three months later, in Room 109 of the Landmark Motor Hotel in West Hollywood, California, Janis Joplin lay dead of “acute heroin-morphine intoxication.” Apparently, she had spent the evening in the Sunset Sound recording studios working on a track entitled “Buried Alive in the Blues.” At the end of the session, Janis and her band made a cassette recording of “Happy Birthday” to be sent to John Lennon for his thirtieth on October 9. Then she went to her room at the Landmark. Earlier, she had bought an unusually potent supply of smack; in the course of the weekend, it killed eight people. Janis shot up. Her eyes rolled backward in her head. She pitched forward onto the floor, busting her lip on a nightstand.

In New York, the night before she had flown to Port Arthur for her high school reunion, her fellow Texas exile, Robert Rauschenberg, had split a bottle of tequila with her. “I knew the reunion was going to be a disaster,” he told a reporter after she died. “But I couldn't convince her not to go.” He blamed her death on Thomas Fucking Jefferson. “She was devastated,” he said. “She needed confirmation from home and that's what got her into trouble. She wanted to be loved.”

Signs
(1970), one of Rauschenberg's finest collages, features Janis Joplin (“the voice of her generation,” he said) and an Apollo astronaut. Also in the picture: RFK and JFK, Martin Luther King Jr. in his casket, peace marchers, soldiers in the swamps of Vietnam. I've
hung a copy of
Signs
in the art room of Ely High School, in my old hometown, where I teach now. The collage is meant to “remind us of love, terror, violence,” Rauschenberg wrote. “The danger lies in forgetting.”

Appropriately, given my father's obsessions in his final, mostly silent years, the last time I saw Dad was the day Neil Armstrong stepped on the moon. This is so neat, it sounds like a trick of memory, but I swear it's true.

That day, I'd left the house early. Bob Mitchell, out on Farm Road 60, had a problem with runaway waste in his yard. His tank lines were old, and the D box seemed to pump most of the effluent into only one line at a time. Tree roots and a jerry-rigged system made it hard to find the actual problem. The leach beds were poorly designed.

I removed the D box lid to re-level the outlet pipe. I didn't have the tools I needed or a cap with an offset hole in it, so I tried to align the holes by sight. I kept missing the mark. This went on for hours. Finally, frustrated and angry, I kicked the pipes and sliced my knuckles on a tree root. I climbed out of the hole and told Mitchell I'd come back tomorrow for another go.

When I dragged into the house, my father met me at the door. He looked me over—spattered overalls, muddy boots in my hands, bloody knuckles. He placed his palm on my shoulder. “Frank,” he said. “You can't open a flower with a hammer.” He patted my back and went to sit on the couch.

Mother and Mildred sat raptly in front of the set: a blurry moon. “The Eagle has landed!” Mildred shouted.

I stood behind them. Whatever I touched, I'd soil. Mildred held her nose and laughed. “Mr. Beaver says this is America's finest hour,” she said. “Mr. Beaver” was her name for the heavily jowled Dick Nixon.

I squinted at the screen. A shifting white mass. Piccarda, are you there, I thought. Has your eternal soul been saved?

Armstrong bounced down the spacecraft's ladder.

Gingerly, my father stood, approached the set, and touched the screen's curved glass. “The gate is closing,” he said. Then he walked to his study.

Mildred rolled her eyes.

I moved down the hall toward my father's oak door. Lamp-glow spilled into the hallway. “Dad?” I said.

“Frank. Come in.”

He sat at his desk in a wedge of light. The rest of the room remained dark. I sat in a chair opposite him, careful not to dirty the cushion. “Dad?”

“Yes?”

“Are you happy?”

He smiled at me. “Of course I am.”

“What do you recall of the night we found you?” I asked. “Anything now?”

He stared at the ceiling. “Moonlight. Rain,” he said. “You and Mildred.”

I nodded. I didn't know why I'd followed him in here. Perhaps I knew I wouldn't see him anymore. I'd applied to college. In honor of my father, I'd been tempted to write in my application essays, “Martin Luther's enlightenment came to him on the toilet. ‘It is God's justice which justifies and saves us,' he declared. ‘This knowledge the Holy Spirit gave me on the privy in the tower.'”

Now Dad leaned toward me over his desk. “Frankie. Man is spreading contagion to the moon and beyond.”

I stared at him.

“Evil. You know what I think? I think it's a fellow clutching something tightly in his fist,” Dad said. He paused for a minute as if searching the shadows for something. “Everyone around him wants to know what it is. They're convinced, whatever he has, they can't
live without it. ‘Please!' they call. He laughs and opens his hand. And do you know what he's holding?”

I shook my head. He must have read this somewhere and memorized it, I thought. I listened to the wind.

“Nothing,” Dad said. He slumped, exhausted.

I rose, came around the desk, and kissed the top of his head. “Okay. Okay, Dad. Good night.” I thought:
I will not let you go until I have blessed you.

“She was a goddamn saint. And they fucking crucified her,” Mildred said.

We had rented a little blue canoe. A Friday afternoon. We were paddling down the Sabine River—in part because it was a crazy thing to do, and Mildred was always up for something like that, and in part because she wanted quiet time to grieve for Janis. She'd brought a bottle of bourbon and two paper cups.

We drifted past Gulf Island and the Rainbow Bridge. Along the banks, sooty brick walls of World War II–era factories rose above knotted kudzu. The factories' windows were smashed. Fire broke above the trees, from the smokestacks of nearby refineries. Ahead of us, a blue heron skimmed the surface of the water.

“Who the hell invented high school?” Mildred moaned, filling our cups.

“Some sadist.”

“Dickie Nixon is king and Janis is toast. Tell me about a world like that, Frankie, ‘cause, I gotta say, I don't think I can find my way around in it.”

“I don't know,” I said. I took one of her hands.

We didn't see each other for nearly three years. I moved away from Port Arthur, returned to the university. My art professor was disappointed that I'd picked up few new skills, and I began to avoid his courses.

One semester, I met a girl named Lori in a class on the American Puritans. After our first night making love, she asked about my family. I told her Mildred's story.

“She's still in Port Arthur?” Lori asked. She propped herself on a pillow and rolled a joint.

“Yeah. Washing dishes, waiting tables. Caring for Dad—it seemed to knock her off her rails and she's never gotten back.” Mom blamed me for
that
, too. “She calls me for money now and then. Booze and cigarettes.”

“Still, you'll regret it if you cut her out of your life, Frank. You should go see her.”

“Go see her,” Mother insisted on the phone.

And so, over Spring Break, I arranged to visit Mildred.

She didn't show up at the Greyhound station. I shouldered my duffel, checked the address—Mildred had moved out of the Wayfarer, into an apartment—and walked along the canal. Her place was up the street from TJ High, in the shadow of the auditorium and the gym, ugly round buildings dubbed “Twin Titties” by the high school students. Her apartment, a one-bedroom on the second balcony of a crumbly complex, was dark. The door, painted red over a layer of blue over another layer of yellow, stood open. “Hello?” I called. I dropped my duffel and fanned the door to keep from gagging: a combination of rat poison and spoiled meat. I switched on the overhead. A poster of Big Brother and the Holding Company was taped crookedly over a hound's-tooth couch, next to a poster of George Harrison with a long beard and flat felt hat. He looked like a monk. A portable TV sat, unplugged, on a green shag carpet in the center of the room. In a corner, by the kitchen, a purple beanbag chair bled Styrofoam pellets from a gash in its side. “Hello?” I called again.

I stepped outside and leaned against the balcony's iron railing, breathing deeply. The balcony overlooked a weedy courtyard. As I stood there, a sailor pulled a weary woman in high heels and a miniskirt toward a ground-floor apartment. He kicked open the door. I
had no experience with such things, but it occurred to me: this was the kind of place that might be called a Shooting Gallery.

For over an hour I waited for Mildred. Finally: “Oh shit.” Her voice at the bottom of the stairs. I heard her scrabble in her bag.

“You don't need your keys,” I called. “It's open.”

“Who's there?” she shouted. “What the fuck do you want? I don't have anything.”

“Mil, it's me.”

She straggled up the stairs, an unlit cigarette locked between two fingers. She wore only one shoe. Her hair, dirty brown, branched in all directions like an unpruned ivy plant. “Frankie!”

“The door was open.”

“Come in, come in! Welcome to
mi casa
!”

The apartment smelled a little better since I'd aired it out. In the light, I saw Mildred wore a rope for a belt over a tentlike dress. Bangles and beads. A rattan wrap with a pattern like rattlesnake skin. She smelled of garlic, sweat, incense. “What happened to your shoe?” I said.

She glanced at her left foot. The nail of her big toe, but only the big toe, was painted black. “I don't know,” she said. “I hope I donated it to a good cause!” She rushed me, affectionately, and shoved me into the beanbag. Styrofoam sprayed the room: confetti at a sad little party. “Frankie! It's so good to see you!”

“You, too.”

She stood. “So here's the thing. I didn't meet you because … because …”

“It's okay.”

“Well, anyway, before you judge me—”

“I'm not judging you.”

“All I'm doing?”

Her breath was a blast of gin-soaked cherries. I'd count our meeting a success if I could get her to bed without any fuss.

“All I'm doing—”

“Let's talk in the morning, okay?”

“—is my Daddy-thing.”

“Mil, what the hell are you talking about?”

“Frankie, did you ever see Dad in a suit and tie? I've been thinking about this. Listen. The proper, paunchy, hotshot bit? No! That wasn't him. Dad went his own way! Frankie?”

“Yes?”

“Frankie, listen, listen to me.” She frowned, suddenly serious. “It's about ignoring the so-called outer reality and seeking the inner light.
Feeling
it, man, as much as you can. The bullshit pain as well as the highs. I mean, Frankie, it's all about opening yourself to the whole fucking range of being a human goddamn person. You know?”