Houston, We Have a Problem
When I arrived in Austin in July of 1962, my personal funds were lower than a dachshund’s belly. Two months later, they were nonexistent. I survived on the profits from scalped football tickets, two of which were given to the Ranger staff for each Longhorn home game; they went largely unused and Shelton gave them to me. I kept one and sold one, the income being my sole means of gastronomic support, sometimes called “eating.” One fine morning, Lester Loyd Edmonds, the Director of Publications at UT, came into the magazine office and asked if anyone would be interested in an editor’s job at Trans-Texas Airways in Houston. They needed someone to head up their in-house publication and had called him for recommendations. Now, truth be told, old Loyd was not entirely comfortable with my working on the Ranger, me being a nefarious non-student and all, but he put up with it because I was productive and he didn’t want to argue with Shelton. Nonetheless, the Houston job offer was undoubtedly directed at me, what with everybody else being in school and pretty much unavailable. I asked Loyd about it and he told me he would deliver a “good endorsement,” which I had no doubt was true since I would then be out of his hair. I took my paltry funds and bought a bus ticket to Houston.
Did anyone ever tell you Houston is a BIG place? Try walking around the acreage sometime, it goes on forever. I shaved and cleaned up, stashed my stuff in a Greyhound locker and went off to see the town. I discovered the fancy Shamrock-Hilton, which was a fun place to hang out and the University of Houston campus, which was not. Traipsing around near UH in mid-evening, I decided to stop in at a friendly bowling alley and watch the combatants scatter some pins. Hey, it’s not like I had a heavy schedule. Anyway, I walked in the door and right away my keen sense of impending Whoops! kicked in. Hmmn, I thought to myself, there seem to be and awful lot of black people in here. People from Massachusetts are unaccustomed to this sort of thing. We never had enough Negroes to actually segregate. As I walked closer to the alleys, my superior powers of deduction suddenly came to the conclusion that I might be better off elsewhere. By now, several of the bowlers had turned around and were looking straight at me. Never one to panic, I took a gulp at the integrated water-cooler, made a quick u-turn and moseyed out the door. Nobody said a word that I could hear but there was an awful lot of muttering.
Next day, I was off to the bright, shiny offices of Trans-Texas, where I was well received. The job was promptly explained to me by the smiling suit. I could do it in my sleep. Heck, they even had staff members to help you. What a luxury. Yes, my good man, I think I will take this fine job. I can start tomorrow. Um, not exactly. “We’re very happy to have you apply, Mr. Killeen, and Mr. Edmonds’ testimonial weighs heavily in your favor, but we do have several other applicants to interview. We can give you a definite answer by the end of the week.”
Well, moan to that. Where does a person sleep til the end of the week? That’s four days of homelessness and miniburgers. Are there any hotel rooms available for three dollars?”
I decided to trek out to Rice Institute, having always got on well with Engineers. This was no different. The students saw me as sort of a latter-day Jack Kerouac, traveling the land alone and penniless. One of them pointed out a dormitory in the distance which was currently unoccupied and undergoing repairs. “The doors are locked,” he said, helpfully, “but some of the windows will be open. Just take the screens off until you find an unlocked window.”
I became hopeful. “Any sort of Security?”
A second aider and abetter piped in. “Yeah, but they only check the rooms at six a.m. and nine p.m. If you leave before six and come back after nine, you can stay there forever. Just don’t turn on any lights.”
Wow, I thought. There’s electricity. Maybe even hot water.
“Thank you, men! You are gentlemen and scholars!”
“We have professors who would argue the point.”
“Nevertheless.”
“If you run into any problems, here’s our phone number.”
Now all I had to do was wait til nine o’clock and find an open window. I got lucky on the fourth try. I was now an official….well, scratch that title….resident of Nothingbert Hall. I learned a lot about showering in the dark and rising early.
Time passes slowly when you’re having no fun, so it took several weeks for Friday to roll around. I dutifully returned to Trans-Texas to learn my fate. Bad news for Bill. “Well, I have to apologize, Mr. Killeen, we’re understaffed and I’ve had so much to do I had to put some interviews on the back burner. It will probably be the middle of next week before I can give you an answer.”
Sorry, Bub, don’t have til the middle of next week. It’s now or never.
“Well, I’m so very sorry to hear that. You were one of our leading candidates, Mr. Loyd Edmonds and all.”
He seemed genuinely regretful, but not as much as I would have been after another five days in Houston. Oh, well. In the immortal words of my old pal, Pat Brown, “Their f*ck*ng loss.”
I walked back to the highway, chirping a happy tune. No job. No money. No prospects. But who cared? Once again, I was Austin-bound.
A House By The Side Of The Road.
After the usual series of bizarre rides from unplugged chauffeurs, I hit the outskirts of Austin, phoning Lieuen Adkins with ten percent of my remaining funds. Lieuen usually knew where there was available real estate, as he did now. “Janis has a new house,” he told me. “You could go there.” I hadn’t seen Janis in a couple of weeks so I wasn’t sure what to expect, but I asked Lieuen to give her a heads-up before delivering me.
Janis’ new house was actually a pretty old house on a sidestreet off Guadalupe, only a few blocks from the UT campus. When I got there, she was standing on the top step, arms outstretched. “Welcome, unemployed Northerner,” she said, smiling. “Let me show you around my lavish estate.” Inside this Xanadu, there was absolutely no furniture but for two rickety chairs. A double-bed sized mattress was plunked in the middle of the living room floor. “The toilets work,” she said. “And I have a perfectly wonderful stove and refrigerator. What more could a young girl desire?”
“Where’d you get this place?”
“Winn Pratt. It’s one of his father’s unrented rentals. The old man is out of the country for awhile so I’m here until further notice. This here’s the Music Room. So’s that one over there. And that one and….”
Life was cozy in The House By The Side Of The Road. In the morning, Janis went to classes and I went to the Ranger office. Lieuen stopped by almost daily. In the evening, the three of us meandered off to whatever party was at hand—and in Austin, every night found some sort of party—Lieuen being the possessor of wheels. On Wednesday nights, of course, we went to the hallowed Folksings at the Texas Union so Janis could show off. She had tried to get a singing gig at various places around town but the venues were more inclined to the Joan Baez persona. She eventually took a waitressing job at the local Pancake House but it was short-lived. After being forced to miss two Wednesdays at the Folksings, Janis retired her apron. She decided to celebrate her freedom by preparing a magnificent feast for Lieuen and I, which was a big surprise to one and all since we had never seen her boil water.
“You two think I’m domestically inept, right?” Uh uh, nope, not us, Janis. “Well, I’ll show you what I learned from Mother. Port Arthur girls are skilled at cookery.” Well….some of them, maybe. Janis undercooked the chicken just a tad, not that Lieuen and I were inclined to mention it. We were merrily munching along, whistling a happy tune, when Janis, herself, rose up from the table in rage.
“There’s BLOOD in this goddam chicken!” she proclaimed, loudly. “I’m a culinary FAILURE!”
“Hey, mine’s okay,” I said, trying to salve her feelings. “Me, too,” agreed Lieuen, continuing to dine. Janis the hornet would have none of it.
“Gimme those plates!” she demanded, sweeping them up and tossing them into the sink with great clatter. She stood there for a moment, hands on hips, and thought about the problem. Then, pointing at the sink, uttered those immortal words: “That’ s what happens when you buy inferior chicken!”
Lieuen and I nodded our heads in outraged agreement.
The Hills Are Alive….
Janis was nothing if not diligent, constantly practicing her music in The House By The Side Of The Road. One afternoon, cradling her autoharp, she kept battling the lyrics of one elusive number unsuccessfully. Seeking to release her from her struggle, I asked her to sing the very familiar Banks Of The Ohio.
“I’m not taking requests over here,” she muttered. “This is work time.”
“Okay, fine,” I told her. “I’ll just go out and get my own autoharp. And then I’ll find a big blonde ukulele player, who looks like Daisy Mae in the Li’l Abner comic strip. And me and my autoharp/ukulele band will travel around to all the truck stops in America brightening the hearts of transportation workers everywhere.”
Janis jumped up with a big smile. “Killeen,” she said, “I wanna be in your autoharp/ukulele band!”
“Well, I don’t know, Janis….Daisy Mae might feel uncomfortable.”
“No, Daisy Mae would be good with it. Daisy Mae would love me! Listen, if you let me in your band, I’ll teach you how to play the autoharp.”
“I already know two songs.”
“Yeah, but you gotta learn to play it right. Tenderly. See how I run my fingers over the strings? Lightly, no smashing and pounding the poor thing. Okay, you got it? Now, you try it.”
“CLANGHONK! CLANGHONK!! CLANGHONK!!!”
“STOP, KILLEEN, STOP!! You’re making me bleed from my eyes! If you knock it off, I’ll play your song for you right this very minute.”
“Well, that’s all I wanted in the first place….”
Party Time
As mentioned earlier, Austin was Party Central. If you looked hard enough, there was some kind of gettogether in town almost every night, most of them involving music. Everything from a half-dozen beer-drinking jammers on somebody’s back porch to the liquor-financed Ranger soirees attended by staff, salesmen and anyone who could sneak in, to sprawling lakefront spectaculars at the estates of the jaded wealthy. Janice, comfortably ensconced in her new digs, decided we should contribute our part to the effort, so she scheduled an event at her new place for a Friday night, guaranteeing a crowd. It was my job to round up a few chairs, Janice having but two, and I diligently set about the task with great success, corralling about twenty of the critters from altruistic friends.
The night of the party was warm and clear and the guests began arriving early. Janis expected twenty or thirty people to show up but I knew that was massive underreaching. Within an hour of the party’s onset, there were almost a hundred and they kept on coming, flooding the little house and spilling out into the porch and yard. Janice took her autoharp outside and began singing there. Across the street was a sorority-owned house full of pledges who were not allowed outside. The autoharpist, advised of this, was appalled. “If they can’t go to the music,” she said, “the music will go to them!” Alrighty, then.
Janis took her act into the street and the sorority girls filled the windows, applauding the entertainment. Never one to shy from approval, Janis moved into their yard and kept playing and singing, beckoning the prisoners to escape. To the great hue and cry of the crowd, one of the girls popped out a back door, then another….a third, then a fourth whooped into the street to join this magical brew. Smug and satisfied with her accomplishment, The Instigator slowly withdrew, happy in the knowledge another blow had been struck against slavery and oppression in our midst.
Lannie Wiggins and Powell St. John, Janis’ bandmates in a group dubbed the Waller Creek Boys, arrived and the pace picked up even more. The party galloped late into the evening, past midnight, and lost few celebrants. The entire crowd was singing, some dancing in the street, when the first sign of trouble appeared, a lone police cruiser circling the block. After a second pass, the cops parked and advanced warily through the raucous crowd. They asked us to tone it down a bit and we agreed. The pact lasted for all of ten minutes and they were forced to return, unhappy at the fact.
“Alright, people!” the lead cop said. “Enough is enough! You are in violation of Austin Noise Ordinance Such-And-Such and you’re gonna haveta close this thing down.” Boos and hisses. Lots of them. A couple of aerial missives, to boot. Now came one of the Great Moments in Austin Counterculture History. You might want to ask the children to leave the room.
The indignant policeman rose to full stature. His voice was loud, his tone commanding. He appealed to intelligence, to Christian Charity, to Reason. “You college kids think everything in life should be the way YOU want it! You never think of anybody else! Do you know there’s a little old lady dying next door?”
Oh my God! This was too good to be true! Everyone there that night would like to claim as his own the immortal words which rang out next but the true author is lost to history:
“NO—BUT HUM A FEW BARS AND WE’LL FAKE IT!”
The crowd exploded with hilarity and delight at the purity of the moment. Humiliated beyond description, the forces of Law & Order slunk shamefacedly into the night. Janis, inspired, immediately concocted her new ditty—There’s A Little Old Lady Dying Next Door—She Won’t Complain Anymore!—sung the remainder of the night by the happy revelers. Should you think us cruel and heartless, know this: To the left of our house was a vacant cottage. To the right, a pair of perky transvestites, not even ailing. The little old lady? A figment of someone’s imagination? A clever red herring? We’ll never know. But despite her anonymity, now and forever, the most famous Little Old Lady in the stellar history of 1962 Austin. Raise a glass!
The University Of Texas At Austin
Pat Brown’s Favorite Story
Pat Brown, now departed to Greener Pastures, was an Austin institution, a woman of class and taste, an artist, an inspiration and, more important, a friend. I had a great number of friends in Austin, still have a few, but of them all, Pat was probably the most consistent and reliable. She worked for the Ranger for a time, introduced me to my eventual wife, Marilyn Todd, visited me later in Gainesville and paid me the honor of calling me back to Austin to accompany her through a trial in her life years later. If you were friends with Pat Brown, it was for life. She kept in touch. While other friends, seeking to be kind, often told you what you wanted to hear, Pat told you what you needed to hear. And as such, she would brook no nonsense. I made the terrible mistake one day of writing her that I was buried in work and she might not hear from me for awhile. This was totally unacceptable behavior in Pat Brown’s World Of Friendship. She didn’t communicate for a year. After that, I learned my lesson. Pat is as responsible as anyone for the onset of The Flying Pie. If you had a talent and were doing nothing with it, you heard from Pat, a leading exponent of “Don’t-just-sit-there,-DO something!”
As you might expect, you were also not getting by Pat without your best effort. If you tried to slide something by, you were confronted with a pair of large, sad eyes, strangely remindful of one of those Walter Keane paintings, and you promised never to do it again. You might as well disappoint your own mother as pull that stunt with Pat Brown.
I spoke with her often during her latter, cancer-riddled years, through comeback after comeback and I thought she’d never die. One time, around Christmas, I called her at a party she was giving at her house. From the background noise, it sounded pretty festive. I asked her how she was doing and she told me fine, getting ready to try another experimental drug the next week. “Here,” she said, suddenly—“Someone wants to speak to you.” It was Gilbert Shelton, who Pat had always loved and admired, and we reminisced expansively. I never spoke to her again. Pat was felled by cancer a month later and took to the heavens to see if anyone needed advice. She told me often that the following piece was her favorite story ever so I’m never going to stop telling it. After all, Pat Brown is pretty close to those thunderbolts now.
Janis Joplin Meets The Evil Folksinger
Captain Marvel had Dr. Sivana, Batman had The Joker, Superman had Lex Luthor and Janis Joplin had Lolita. Arch-enemies all, and people to reckon with. If you’re old enough to remember “hootenannies” and who among this crowd isn’t, we had a similar phenomenon at the University of Texas on Wednesday nights called “folksings.” I guess “hootenannies” was too Kingston Trio-ish. Anyway, there was no shortage of performers at these events, which was not always a good thing. Memories abide of an extremely large girl who showed up every painful week to lament the fate of the unfortunate Barbara Allen. Nonetheless, it was a democratically-administered affair and everyone got a turn. If you were lucky, you might get two or three before the night was over, and those in our crowd who attended tolerated the slings and arrows of outrageous performers so that we might enjoy the sterling efforts of Janis’ band, The Waller Creek Boys. Everything at the UT Student Union was hunky-dorey until that day. The day Lolita came.
Lolita was a pretty girl, slight and blond, the type that men fell all over and women resented, none more than Janis. Janis didn’t want to be considered unfeminine but did everything possible to achieve that impression. A pretty girl was okay with her as long as that girl was not given extra credits just for looks. Unfortunately, Lolita was actually good, singing her songs in the Joan Baez style which Janis fraudulently professed to hate, a position belied by an earlier hitchhiking mission she took to Dallas with Winn Pratt and a couple of others to watch Joan perform.
Lolita possessed a soft, lilting voice and an air of mystery, travelling alone and often showing up suddenly, out of nowhere, as if a puff of smoke had magically delivered her. The males in the audience were enraptured. Worst of all, Lolita accompanied herself on an autoharp, which she played beautifully. Arrayed against this sweet bird of song was the rough-hewn Janis, “one of the guys.”
Janis, of course, despised Lolita.. They slid around each other, both pretending to be oblivious of the other’s existence, but very aware, indeed. One hair-raising night, Lolita plaintively delivered a number Janis considered to be one of “her” songs. The last note had not sounded when Janis had the Waller Creek Boys rolling into an upbeat version of the same song, delivered with enormous energy and power. It was one of those few times in life when an entire roomful of people sit there stunned, waiting in dreaded anticipation of what might happen next.
Waiting for the certain Apocalypse, nobody was taking their turn. Janis looked over at me and winked. “Watch this,” she quietly said. Then delivered the same song as Lolita in exactly the same manner. She sounded a carbon copy of her foe. Flesh tingled and neck hair stood at rapt attention. It was a singular experience, not forgotten over fifty years later. The room experienced a colossal silence—and then a monstrous roar. Lolita, generally the embodiment of Cool, was obviously rocked. She gathered up her scarves and disappeared. It was like an abrupt knockout of the favorite in a heavyweight fight.
Janis, thrilled at her victory, was Animation Plus. “C’mon, Killeen—we gotta go home right NOW!” She whooped into the street on a killer high, defying the Guadalupe traffic to challenge the Warrior Queen. I had to run like hell to catch up as she pirouetted through the honking drivers. As she neared our house, she pulled her turtleneck over her head, wheeled and heaved it onto a neighbor’s lawn. Subsequent articles of clothing were strewn over the landscape as she nakedly dived for the doorway.
“Jesus, Killeen,” she said, amazed at herself, “for the first time in my life, I really locked that sucker!”
I picked her up and carried her around to the back porch, the house being locked and the keys lost somewhere in Janis’ discarded wardrobe.
“This’ll have to do,” I told her
“Shut up, stranger,” she laughed, “and whisper sweet nothings in my….uhm, ah….oh yeah, in my ear.”
Hilarious laughter. Curtain.
That’s all, folks….
Next Week: Nobody will believe it, especially Harry Edwards, but next week we finally get to Ghetto Life, starring the inimitable John Clay, take a visit to Threadgill’s, meet Bill’s first wife and pack the car for departure. It’s the end of 1962 and the beginning of everything else. Bittersweet. But life marches on and we march with it.
