In 1963, a group of students at the University of Texas in Austin nominated Janis Joplin for ugliest man on campus. Not ugliest woman, man. She was 20 years old. She had been at the university for two semesters, having arrived from Port Arthur with the specific hope that a new place would be different from the old one.
It was not different enough. The nomination was not a mistake or an accident. It was deliberate. The students who organized it understood exactly what they were doing. They were not simply calling her unattractive. They were calling her wrong in a more fundamental way. Wrong in her category of being. Not properly female.
Not properly anything that the University of Texas in 1963 had a comfortable word for. She dressed differently. She held opinions too loudly and too publicly about things that young women in early 60s Texas were not expected to hold opinions about at all. She liked music that came from black artists, from the roadhouses and the juke joints and the recording studios that white college students were not supposed to know about and certainly not supposed to prefer.
She was too much. She had always been too much. And the University of Texas, like Port Arthur before it, had decided that too much required management. She heard about the nomination before the results were announced. She told people she thought it was funny. She delivered this assessment with the specific timing and precision of someone who has learned to make armor out of humor and who wears it in public because the alternative costs more than she is willing to spend in front of other people.
In private, it was not funny. It was never funny. It was the continuation of something that had started in the hallways of Thomas Jefferson High School in Port Arthur and that had followed her north to Austin and that was, she was beginning to understand, not going to stop following her simply because she moved somewhere new.
The wound was portable. It traveled with her. She left Austin not long after the nomination. She went back to Port Arthur, which was the place she was always returning to even when she was trying to leave it. She tried sobriety and normalcy and a beehive hairdo and enrollment at Lamar University in Beaumont and a life that looked from the outside like a person who had decided to be reasonable.
It did not take. Nothing ordinary ever took with Janis. In 1966, her friend Chet Helms told her about a band in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco that needed a singer. She went and within a year she was standing on the stage at the Monterey Pop Festival making 5,000 people forget how to breathe.
The years between Monterey and the summer of 1970 had been everything and nothing simultaneously. Everything because of the music, Cheap Thrills going to number one, Piece of My Heart becoming an anthem, Woodstock, the sold-out tours, the magazine covers, the specific quality of fame that arrives fast and total and rearranges everything.
Nothing because the wound that had been opened in Port Arthur and deepened in Austin had not healed simply because the world had decided she was worth paying attention to. Fame is not a cure for the specific damage that rejection does when it arrives early enough and thoroughly enough. It is a distraction. A very loud, very bright, very all-consuming distraction.
But underneath it, the wound remained exactly what it had always been. In the spring of 1970, the invitation arrived. Thomas Jefferson High School, Port Arthur, Texas, class of 1960 10-year reunion. Janis received it in San Francisco in the apartment on Larkspur that she had been renting while the Pearl sessions were being prepared.
She held it for a moment. She put it on the kitchen table. She left it there for 3 days. Then she called a friend and said she was going to go. The friend said, “Are you sure?” Janis said she was sure. She was not entirely sure. But going was the brave thing and she had learned early that the brave thing was usually the right thing even when the right thing was also the uncomfortable thing.
Even when the right thing was driving a hand-painted Porsche into the parking lot of a reunion where the people who had once decided she was the wrong kind of person were going to be standing around with drinks and name tags. She drove to Port Arthur in stages. The Porsche, the 1964 356C that her roadie Dave Richards had covered in swirling psychedelic color, every shade available layered and spiraling, the visual equivalent of refusing to be subtle, made the trip in a way that a different car would not have made it.
The car was not incidental. The car was the statement. She was not returning to Port Arthur in ordinary clothes, in an ordinary vehicle, attempting to blend into the version of the world that Port Arthur had always wanted her to inhabit. She was arriving in a hand-painted Porsche with a bottle of Southern Comfort on the passenger seat and a wardrobe that announced itself from across a parking lot.
She was arriving as exactly who she had become without apology, without performance of humility, just herself, the most complete version of herself that she had assembled from the years since she had last been in this town. She arrived on a Friday evening in August. The reunion was held at a local venue on the edge of town.
The kind of place that gets rented for gatherings that are too large for someone’s house and too informal for a proper event space. She parked the Porsche in the parking lot. She sat in the car for a moment. Not because she was afraid exactly. Because she was doing the thing she had always done before walking into rooms that were going to be difficult.
The brief internal accounting that told her what she had and whether it was enough. She had plenty. She had more than plenty. She got out of the car. She walked into the reunion. The room did the thing rooms do when something unexpected enters them. The conversations did not stop all at once. They stopped in a spreading wave.
The way silence spreads when information moves through a crowd. The people nearest the door first, then the people who saw the people nearest the door react, then the people who saw those people until the entire room had adjusted its attention toward the woman who had just walked in. Janis Joplin in Port Arthur at the reunion.
She was recognizable in the way that only very famous people are recognizable. Not just as a face, but as a fact. As something that exists in the world at a scale that makes its presence in an ordinary room feel slightly surreal. She moved through the room. She got a drink from the bar. She talked to people. This is the part of the story that surprises people the most when they hear it.
She talked to people. Not triumphantly. Not with the performance of victory that the situation might have seemed to require. Just talked. She asked about their lives. She listened to the answers. She told stories about San Francisco and about the band and about the places she had been. But not in the way of someone who is keeping score, who is cataloging evidence of how far she has come relative to the people she left behind.
In the way of someone who is simply talking, who is simply in a room with people she has history with, who is choosing consciously and with full awareness of what she is choosing to make that history into conversation rather than into something to be settled. She talked to a man who had been in her chemistry class.
She talked to a woman who had worked at the same diner where Janis had occasionally eaten lunch. She talked to three people she had barely known then and barely knew now. And then she talked to a woman who had been at the center of the social world that had excluded her. The woman approached Janis near the end of the evening.
She approached in the specific way of someone who has been building up to something for the entire duration of an event and has finally decided that the event is almost over and now or never applies. She said, “I’m glad you came.” She said it simply without elaborate preface. Without the apology machinery that might have been expected to accompany such a statement given the history between them.
Just, “I’m glad you came.” Janis looked at her. She said, “Me, too.” And she meant it. Not as a performance of magnanimity. Not as the gracious winner taking the high road. She meant it because she had come back to find out something and she had found it out and the finding had been worth the drive. What she had come to find out was whether this place still had power over her.
Whether the wound that Port Arthur had opened and Austin had deepened and that fame had not healed was still the thing that defined the shape of her internal landscape. The answer she discovered at the reunion was yes and no. Yes, it still had power. The wound was still there. She could feel it in the room.
The specific pull of old pain when you were standing in the place where it was made. And no, it did not have the same power. Because she was still standing. Because she had built something from the wound. Rather than being destroyed by it. Because the voice that Port Arthur had tried to silence had turned out to be the loudest voice in the room at Monterey and at Woodstock and at every other stage she had stood on since she left.
She drove back to San Francisco. She did not know that she would not see Port Arthur again. She thought she was going back to finish an album. She thought there were more drives ahead, more rooms to walk into, more conversations to have. There were 6 weeks and then there were not. Dick Cavett asked her about the reunion on his show that same year.
She paused. She smiled. She said, “I just went back to show them I was doing fine.” She said it lightly with the cadence of someone telling a small, slightly amusing story about themselves. But her eyes said something else. Her eyes said, “I went back because I needed to know if I had made it far enough from that place that it could not reach me anymore.
” And what she found out was that the answer was yes. And also no. And that yes and also no was the best answer she was ever going to get. And that it was enough. It was more than enough. She had gone back. She had sat down. She had talked to the people. She had driven away in the hand-painted Porsche. And she had been fine.
Not healed. Fine. Which is a different thing. And which she understood on the drive back through the Texas night was the thing she had always actually been asking for. Not the wound to disappear. Just to be fine anyway. She had always been fine anyway. She just had not always known it.
