Janis Joplin’s Friend Carried Something Of Hers For 4 Years. At Mama Cass’s Funeral — Took It Out.

For four years after Janice Joplain died, one of her closest friends carried something of hers. Not as a plan, not as a deliberate act of memorial, just carried it. The way you carry things that belong to someone you loved when you are not ready to put them down and not ready to show them to anyone and not ready to explain why you still have them. At Mama Cass’s funeral in 1974, the carrying ended in a cemetery in Los Angeles in front of the people who had known both of them. The thing finally

came out of the pocket. And what happened next is what this story is about. Mama Cass Elliot died on July 29th, 1974. She was 32 years old. She had been in London performing at the Palladium and she had died in a flat in Mayfair that belonged to Harry Nilson, the same flat where Keith Moon would die four years later. And the news had arrived the way the worst news always arrives, suddenly in a moment that divides everything into before and after. The people who loved her received it in different places and

at different times and came together in Los Angeles for the funeral. The way people come together when someone enormous has left a room looking for each other in the space the person used to occupy. Linda Eastman was there. Grace Slick was there. Michelle Phillips was there. The people from Laurel Canyon and from the hate and from the years when the music and the friendship and the parties at Cass’s house had all been the same thing. They were there and they were standing together for the first time

since Janice’s funeral in 1970. Four years. 4 years since they had all been in the same room with the same specific grief of losing someone whose size had been larger than the spaces she occupied. Four years of carrying the weight of October 4th, 1970 and their separate lives and their separate ways of managing what could not be resolved. The woman’s name was Carol. She had been one of Janice’s closest friends since the early San Francisco days. She had been at the Fillmore when it mattered. She had been at the parties at

Cass’s house. She had been one of the people who understood what Janice was before the world had a word for it. She had been at Janice’s funeral in October 1970. And she had been carrying something ever since. Something small, something that fit in a coat pocket without weight or bulk. something that she had picked up in the days after Janice died from among the things that were being sorted and cataloged and distributed to the people who were supposed to have them and had put in her pocket and had not taken out.

Not because she had decided to keep it, because putting it down required a finality she had not been able to achieve, because as long as it was in her pocket, there was a sense, not rational, not something she could have explained to anyone who asked, that the carrying was a form of continuation, that as long as she was carrying it, something of Janice was still moving through the world, still in a pocket, still going places still present in the ordinary way of things that are carried by people who are alive.

She carried it for 4 years to the grocery store and to the post office and to the concerts she attended and to the dinners she had and to the ordinary Tuesday afternoons that accumulated in the space left by Janice’s absence. She carried it to Mama Cass’s funeral. She had not planned to take it out. She had not planned anything about that day except to be there and to stand with the people who had loved Cass and to receive again the specific grief of losing someone who had been one of the people

who made the world feel like it was the right size. She was standing in the cemetery in the group of women who had been at the Hate and at Laurel Canyon and at the parties where Cass had held court with the specific generosity of someone who understood that the most valuable thing you could give people was a room where they could be exactly who they were. And someone in the group said something not about Cass, about Janice, a memory, a small one. something that had happened at one of Cass’s parties that involved

both of them, Cass and Janice, in a moment that was funny and specific, and that the person telling it had not thought about in years, and had suddenly remembered with the vividness that grief sometimes produces, the way loss sharpens certain memories into a clarity they did not have when they were happening. Carol heard the memory. She stood in the cemetery and listened to the small story about a moment at one of Cass’s parties that involved Janice, and she felt something shift in the specific way that

things shift when they have been held in one position for too long, and the muscles holding them finally release. She put her hand in her coat pocket, her fingers closed around it. She held it for a moment, then she took it out. She held it in her open palm and she showed it to the women standing around her. It was a ring, not an expensive ring, not a stage ring or a statement piece of the kind Janice wore on stage. The large layered theatrical jewelry that was part of the performance. A simple ring, silver, small, the kind

of ring that exists in a pocket rather than on a finger. the kind of ring that was personal rather than performative. The women looked at it. Linda recognized it. She said, “That’s Janice’s.” Carol said, “Yes.” Nobody spoke for a moment. Then Carol said, “I found it in the days after. It was on the nightstand. I don’t know why I took it. I just couldn’t leave it there. She said, “I’ve been carrying it for 4 years.” She said, “I didn’t know what to

do with it.” She said, “I still don’t know what to do with it.” She said, “But today it feels like it should be here.” She looked at the women around her. She said, “It feels like it should be in a place where people who loved her are standing.” Nobody said anything for a moment. Then Grace Slick said she would have hated this. Everyone knew what she meant. Janice would have hated the semnity, the ceremony, the standing in a cemetery with an object being treated as sacred

when she had always treated the sacred things as ordinary and the ordinary things as everything. She would have made a joke. She would have said something that made everyone laugh and then made everyone cry from laughing and then made everyone understand something they had not known they did not know. She would have held the ring up to the California light and said something about how it looked better in a pocket anyway. And then she would have put it back because some things belong in pockets,

not on altars, not in museums, not in the official record of who a person was in pockets. moving through the world with the people who carry them. Carol put the ring back in her pocket. She kept it. She has it still, or she had it for as long as she was alive to carry it. Nobody knows for certain now where it is. What is known is that for four years it traveled in a coat pocket through the ordinary geography of a San Francisco life, grocery stores and post offices and Tuesday afternoons, and that on a July day in 1974 in a Los

Angeles cemetery, it came out of the pocket for a moment and was held in an open palm in front of the women who had loved both of them. and that Grace Slick said she would have hated this and that everyone knew what she meant. And that everyone also knew that Janice would have loved that the ring had been in a pocket moving, carried, present for 4 years. That was the right place for it. Not on an altar, not in a museum, not in the official record, in a pocket, with someone who loved her. still going places

the way Janice had always gone places without ceremony, without asking permission, without making herself smaller than she was, just going until she couldn’t and then carried in a pocket by someone who Good.

Leave a Reply Cancel reply