Jazz Funeral

she sat quietly on the bus, but it didn’t matter. Maybe she couldn’t do it, but she sure as hell was going to try.
    She’d finally gotten the idea of following the railroad tracks to Schwegmann’s, knowing she wasn’t about to see any of her friends’ moms there. Mothers of Country Day kids didn’t shop at Schwegmann’s. Melody laughed, knowing she was through with that crap forever. She was an artist now, above the petty concerns of the petite bourgeoisie .
    Once at Schwegmann’s, all she had to do was wait at the bus stop on Airline Highway, and zap!, she was on her way to la boheme .
    Gradually, the memory of what had just happened began to recede in her consciousness. Thoughts of the past gave way to thoughts of the future. True, self-doubt intruded, but it drifted in and out. A horrible thing had just happened. And yet, she thought, I’m okay. I think I’m okay .
    Daydreaming, looking out the window, seeing nothing but her own internal movie, she was actually happy. She saw herself singing on a street corner in the Quarter, tourists surrounding her, throwing money in an open guitar case, murmuring to each other, “She’s good,” as if it were the last thing they expected. “She sounds like Janis Joplin.” “She’s fabulous. What do you think she’s doing here?”
    And their friends would say, “She’s a runaway, probably. Poor thing, they probably beat her at home.”
    Or she’d fool them; they’d never think she was underage. Some of them would be from large recording companies and one or two would give her their cards and ask her to lunch and buy her champagne (not realizing she was only sixteen). They’d say they’d recognized her talent and give her advice on what to do—help her make a demo tape, that sort of thing—she wasn’t sure exactly what was entailed—and then they’d fly her out to California and sign her up.
    And next year she’d sing at JazzFest. Or maybe the year after—not next year, she might be recognized. She saw herself on the stage—a big stage, not one of the little ones for local groups—and this time she was also surrounded by admirers, but hundreds, thousands of them, and they wouldn’t be expressing surprise that she was good—they’d know her by her albums. And when she came out, she’d sing her favorite song, Janis’s song, “Get It While You Can.” That’s the way she’d warm them up, it would be her trademark, because it was what she lived by. You had to get what you wanted, what you could get, you couldn’t go waiting around, because you might not be here tomorrow.
    Melody believed that. The song was about love, but she thought it a metaphor for life. It didn’t seem sad or tragic to her that she would die young, she just knew she would. Well, she didn’t really know it, she just thought it was possible; very likely, actually. She couldn’t say why. It just seemed that way. Janis had died young, and her life had been wonderful. She had escaped her provincial Texas roots and people had loved her, had stood and cheered for her; Janis had achieved love on a national scale. And she had done everything there was to do before she was twenty-seven. She had defied convention and gone her own way, and been her own woman. The fact that she died young seemed romantic, almost poetic.
    I know! I’ll write a song about it.
    She couldn’t believe she hadn’t thought of that before. What a wonderful homage, what a perfect … but wait. She saw why it hadn’t occurred to her. Because she hadn’t been ready. And now she was. If ever she was going to be, she was now, when she saw how fragile life was, how you could lose everything—including, maybe, your mind—in about thirty seconds.
    Ham had turned her on to Janis Joplin. I lost him and he gave me Janis . She marveled at the tragedy, the fearful symmetry of it. The minute Melody heard those throaty, hoarse, all-body tones coming up from the bottom of Janis’s toes, full-out, full-tilt boogie, which was the way she always sang, (“CCrrrryy, baaaaaaaaby!” or “Ttttrrrrryyyyyyyyyyy just a little bit harder!”) she had thought, I didn’t know a white woman could do that . She knew Etta and Irma, Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, all the great blues singers—Ham had given her a terrific music education—but she’d simply had no idea a white woman could produce a sound like that. Ti-Belle sang great, sure—Melody’d love to be as good as Ti-Belle—but the fullness of Janis, the total