PART
TWO - San Francisco 1969
She was wearing patchouli oil and something she’d mixed with it, a strong gardenia smell. The scents didn’t blend, but stayed separate, so that as I became desensitized to one,
the other would kick in, and together they were almost overpowering. She’d brought me some beads she said she’d strung—but they weren’t really beads, more like monkey bones or some other animal with little bones. She put them over my head and kept her hands on my neck. She kissed me, putting her tongue in my mouth, and it was a strange moment, as though she’d put a lei around my neck with a kiss, welcoming me to her island. She became someone else, some other sort of person—all woman, all female. She took me into a soft, deep place with some sort of a curving upward motion that shook through each of us. I could feel her heart beating in her ribs. I was penetrating through her, coming out the other side of her body. Her thighs moved like arms, and she made sounds—strange, foreign sounds that had nothing to do with who we were or where we were. Some desperate connection was being forged. We weren’t the same people we’d been just moments before. Something was happening, but even as it erupted there was that edge, that impasse that let you know it would never happen again. It was only
circumstance - like a murder. I pressed my mouth deeply to her, to take her into myself. Then, when it was finished, when we’d caught our breath, she said, “I need a drink!”
Who could love Janis Joplin? Kris Kristofferson said he’d tried, but the money and the fame had shot her up too fast . . .
Was she loved by the bisexual friends or lesbians she’d see when the mood struck her? Was she loved by her mother and father? Her sister? What about Michael J. Pollard—the
stubby actor who played my younger brother on a New York television show, and who cried so much when Janis died? Or the square she was engaged to marry? Country Joe McDonald? Myself? In the rapid-fire Hollywood hustle, could I have loved Janis, and left my wife and child for a nose-first skid into rock and roll’s hallelujah? Did the creeps and losers on the East Coast streets, or the ones she’d find in San Francisco or L.A., care about her?
Dennis Hopper supposedly told a pal he’d have liked to see her body laid out after she was dead. He said, “I want to stand there naked myself and look at her naked corpse, and not touch her, man, but let her spirit come into me . . .” Warren Beatty said she was too messy for him personally. She was “too loud,” he said. She drank too much, and “didn’t have good manners.”
Grateful Dead’s 
Jerry Garcia said, “I’m tired of caring about her . . . She was a hard case chick doing what she was doing as hard as she could do it. She did what she did and that was it. She died at the best possible time to go, and if you know any people who get past that point, they go into a decline and it’s all over . . . but going up, it’s like a skyrocket, and Janis was a skyrocket chick.”
I’d first met Janis six years earlier in San Francisco. Back then, nobody knew or cared who she was—a lump-faced kid with sores on her skin, frumpy like someone working a hot-dog stand. She was “floatin’.” There was “no such thing as God,” she said, because if there was, he’d set her straight with a stash of dope “that’d make the devil’s hair stand on end.” That was all she wanted, all she cared about. Between staying stoned and singing blues or folk for tips, she said the only other thing she wanted was to get laid three times a day. “I don’t mean by the same guy,” she told me. She had a whole pack of friends, and sometimes she balled some of them, she said, although I didn’t always believe she was balling “friends.” One would-be musician said he never saw her before the night he took her to his room over a bar across from City Lights book shop. “She fucks like a truck,” he said. “She wants to get on top and jam up and down. She practically busted my rib cage.”
She once arranged to use the screened-in porch of a black girl named Chip. “Just to pull a few bucks ballin’ for bread,” she told Chip, grinning. Later she confessed she couldn’t get anyone interested in balling her and paying for it, so she didn’t have any money for
dope. 
Floating. None of us had any money.
One day Janis wanted to borrow carfare to go downtown to a coin shop on Market Street out toward the Bay Bridge. She’d found an old penny in her tip cup at the coffeehouse where she’d been singing. She showed me the penny and I said, “So what?” She said that Chip was a silversmith, and that she’d looked it up in a coin book at the library and said it was worth twenty or thirty bucks.
“On that,” she said, “I can stay stoned for a couple of weeks!” She told me this while we were having coffee in the bagel shop on that triangle of Vallejo Street and Grant in the North Beach section, a hangout for artists, poets and drifters, and a handful of Beatniks who still hadn’t sold out
— a small island with little cash flow.
I was almost broke after paying the tab in the bagel shop, and only had a dime to give Janis for carfare. She told me later she’d spent the dime on a Tootsie Roll and walked to the coin shop since nobody would give her a ride hitchhiking.
It was a long way, and when she got to the coin shop they told her the penny was worth only a couple dollars because it wasn’t in mint condition. Janis saw this as a deliberate attack. The “fates” were bringing her down, she said, for “kicking over the holy ideas” she’d been saddled with back in Port Arthur, and for going around saying there wasn’t any God.
She was still mad that night when I saw her at the coffeehouse. Her pasty-faced lethargy was gone and she was snapping, her gestures whip-like and erratic. She kept talking about being screwed out of the money for the penny. “Mint! Mint!” she kept saying. “What the fuck’s mint?”
I was with my friend Dick Warren, a painter I knew from New York who’d fallen down a flight of stairs in the Woolworth Building and was trying for disability. Luckily, he’d brought along a cigar tube of pills. I urged him to let Janis have what she wanted. He’d also brought a pint of Old Crow which we passed back and forth, Janis gulping it to chase the pills. Since she knew Dick had money she went into a patter—her usual spiel when fishing for compliments or dope or sympathy. She liked people to feel sorry for her, and she worked the act like a nervous juggler or a one-armed paperhanger. She was good. She could look almost tragic, crushed, dead on the top. But beneath the patter her feelings ran wild; they were trapped inside her, jarring out against her nerves.
Janis, who’d be numero uno Queen of Rock in a short time, had bad skin and “not a pot to piss in,” as she put it, and a look that flip-flopped between plain crazy and open-eyed unconsciousness. I believed it was the pills because I’d seen that look before. I told her about a girl I knew in New York who did bennies by the bagful. Her heart became enlarged to the point of putting pressure on her other organs, and this caused some kind of epilepsy-like fits for which she had to be hospitalized.
“The story doesn’t mean anything,” Janis said. “It was obviously the chick and not the dope.”
We got into a conversation about altering one’s perceptions. I’d talked to Aldous Huxley the year before at the Hollywood Franklin Hotel just after his hillside home burned down. I’d see him in the hotel coffee shop across the street from the Hollywood Tower where I lived, in Dick Powell’s old second-level penthouse. Huxley drove a late-model four-door, leaning close to the wheel and squinting through the windshield. There was a round metal ashtray with a rubber suction cup stuck to the dashboard in which he had water and a yellow flower picked from the burned property. He very politely told me that due to the experience of losing everything in that devastating fire, his doors of perception had not only been opened but “torn off the hinges.”
Janis said she didn’t care about her personal perceptions, only about staying high, because when she wasn’t high it was like “falling on your ass without any pants on.” Like the rug that was yanked from under Huxley, who died shortly after the
fire.
Staying stoned kept Janis on her feet, but she had to be careful, she said. She drank, too, though not as much as she would later when she could afford “sugared booze,”
as she called it—part Jack Daniels, part Southern Comfort (which she called “sugar”)—”Presto! Fire water!” Drinking the cheap stuff in the coffeehouse, she’d let out a high-pitched yell like nails going down a blackboard or someone stepping on a cat’s tail. Everybody cringed except the dishwasher, a skinny guy with a soggy apron dragging down on his shoe tops and soapy steam over his glasses. He’d come out to see what she was yelling about.
“You are one cool chick,” he’d say. He liked her so much he’d bring cheap bottles of wine to share with her in the rear. She said the booze leveled out the speed. “It keeps me from racing too high,” she said, “like keeping a tab on the score.” She’d pop speed to get over the nose dive from booze, keeping a “tab” on the speed with a little grass or some hash if she could get her hands on any.
I remember Janis one night, very late, in the far dark corner with the dishwasher after drinking a bottle of Night Train, tilting to one side like she was slowly falling over. He had his left hand crossed under his right arm and his fingers bunched and pushing between her legs while he held a cigarette in his right hand.
The weather had been rotten. “Cold,” I wrote in a letter, “drizzly gray and foggy, and the sun never shines.” Janis was hanging around another coffeehouse on Grant near Green Street, one of the few Beat-bohemian joints still going—a bleary place that smelled of mold and iodine, and ammonia used in the mop water. It was a storefront, but the glass on Grant was sashed over with layers of sacks and cloth. The woodwork was old San Francisco gingerbread painted to match the yellowing walls, cluttered with beatnik paintings, mostly abstractions that looked like wilting flowers or chunks of decomposing meat, the rickety chairs and tables around the floor, and the steam pipes that kept the air too hot and gassy from the mop water fumes. They burned incense to kill the smell, and people sat around sweating in the baggy clothes they wore against the cold outside.
Part One
::
Part Two
From LAID BARE: A Memoir of Wrecked Lives and the Hollywood
Death Trip
and