I’ve run an auto repair shop in Port Arthur my whole life. My daddy started it. I took it over when he got sick. My son runs it now. Three generations, same building, more or less, same town. I’m going to tell you about a car that came in the spring of 1965. Nothing special about the car. It was a used thing, beat up some.
needed what a lot of cars needed at that age. Carburetor work, I think. Maybe a belt. I don’t remember the mechanical details anymore. But I remember who brought it in. It was Janice Joplain. And I want to tell you what I saw because what I saw was something I’ve thought about for 60 years. I saw somebody trying as hard as they could to be something they weren’t.
And I watched it not work. First, let me tell you about Port Arthur because you need to understand Port Arthur to understand what I’m telling you. Port Arthur is a refinery town on the Gulf Coast. It’s flat. It smells like sulfur on certain days when the wind comes in off the water. The men work at the plants or they work the boats or they run shops like mine.
The women keep the houses. Everybody goes to church. Everybody knows everybody else’s business. It’s not a bad place. I’m not saying it’s a bad place. I’ve lived here my whole life and I don’t regret it. But it has a very clear idea of what a person should be. And if you don’t fit that idea, Port Arthur let you know. Not with cruelty exactly, more like indifference.
Like you’re speaking a language nobody here has any use for. Janice Joplain spoke a language Port Arthur had no use for. Everybody knew it. I think she knew it better than anybody. In 1965, she’d been gone for a while. San Francisco, from what I heard. She’d gone out there with some idea about music, and it hadn’t worked out the way she’d hoped, and she’d come back.
Now, I want to be careful about this because I only know what I saw with my own eyes and what filtered through in a small town. But what I heard was that she’d come back to try again. Not to give San Francisco another shot, to try being Port Arthur. To try being the person Port Arthur expected. She’d cut her hair. That was the first thing people noticed.
The wild curly mess she’d always had. She’d cut it and fixed it more conventional. She was engaged to some young man, a student, I think, from somewhere else, not from here. They were making plans. She was taking classes at Lamar. She was from all appearances trying to become a Port Arthur woman. And that’s who walked into my shop in the spring of ‘ 65. I recognized her.
I was maybe three or four years older than her. We hadn’t been in the same grade, but Port Arthur is small enough that you know who people are. She looked different from what I remembered. Not bad different, just effortful, like she was wearing something that didn’t quite fit and was concentrating on making it look like it fit.
The hair was neat, the clothes were plain and modest. She said hello like somebody practicing saying hello correctly. She told me what was wrong with the car. She was organized about it, had written down the symptoms on a piece of paper, which is something I appreciate. >> I told her I’d take a look. She asked how long.
I said a few hours probably if it was what I thought it was. She said she’d wait. So she sat on the shop stool while I worked. And we talked the way you talk in a garage in and out between the sounds of the work. Not a conversation exactly, but something like one. She asked about the shop, how long we’d been here, whether my father was still involved.
Polite questions, Port Arthur questions. I asked about school. She said it was fine. She was studying I don’t remember what business maybe or education, something practical. I asked about the engagement. Word gets around. She said, “Yes, we’re planning for next year.” Something in the way she said it. Not wrong, not dishonest, just the way you say something you’re still deciding is true.
Like she was testing a sentence to see if it held. I kept working. I didn’t push it. In a small town, you learn not to push things. About an hour in, she’d been quiet for a while. And then she said something. She said, “Do you ever feel like you’re doing everything right and it still doesn’t feel right?” I looked up from the engine.
I said, “What do you mean?” She said, “Like you make all the correct decisions. You do the things you’re supposed to do and it all looks right from the outside, but inside it’s like wearing shoes on the wrong feet. Everything works, but nothing fits. I thought about it. I said, “I think some people just fit where they are and some people don’t.
” She said, “And if you’re the kind that doesn’t,” I said, “Well, I guess you figure out where you do fit eventually.” She was quiet for a little while after that. Then she said, “I thought maybe if I tried hard enough, I could become the kind that fits here.” She said it real quiet. Not to me exactly.
More like she was saying it out loud to hear how it sounded. I didn’t say anything because what do you say to that? I was 20ome years old and I was already exactly where I was always going to be. I was the kind that fit poor Arthur. I didn’t know anything about the kind that doesn’t. So I went back to work and we didn’t talk about it again.
I finished the car late afternoon. She paid fair price. I didn’t charge her anything extra and I didn’t give her a discount, just the straight price for the work. She said thank you. She was polite about it. I watched her get in and drive away and I thought that is a person trying real hard to stay somewhere she doesn’t belong.
Not because Port Arthur was bad, not because she was better than Port Arthur, just because some things don’t fit. And you can feel it when you’re in the room with them. She felt like someone wearing shoes on the wrong feet. She said so herself. Sometime in ‘ 66, she left again. The engagement ended.
She let her hair go back to what it was. She went to San Francisco and didn’t come back this time, not to stay. Port Arthur went on like it always does. I went on. The shop went on. In 1968, I was working on something. I don’t remember what. And the radio was on like it always is in a garage. And this voice came on.
Peace of my heart. I stopped what I was doing. Because I knew that voice, not from records or radio. I knew it from my shop stool. I knew it from I thought maybe if I tried hard enough, I could become the kind that fits here. That was the voice. Turned out the whole world was hearing that voice now.
Turned out it had been there all along, and Port Arthur had just had no use for it. I sat down on the shop stool, her stool, the same one, and I listened to the whole song. Then I went back to work. October of 70, she died. I heard it on that same radio, probably. The news travels fast, even when you’re not listening for it. 27 years old.
I thought about 65, about the carburetor and the stool and the shoes on the wrong feet. I thought she figured out where she fit. She went there. She gave everything she had. I thought that’s more than most people do. Most people spend their whole lives in the wrong shoes and never even try to find the right ones.
She tried and she found them and she wore them out completely. 27 years old. I’ve thought about that a lot. whether the time was enough, whether she got to do what she needed to do. I think she did. I think if you ask the people who were in those rooms, Monteray, Woodstock, all of it, I think they’d tell you that whatever she had to give, she gave it. All of it.
Every show. She didn’t hold anything back trying to save it for later. There was no later. There was just every show, every night, everything. Port Arthur has a museum for her now. I’ve been My wife and I went a few years back. They have her paintings in there. She painted apparently, which I didn’t know.
And her records and photographs. There’s one photograph from around 65. The hair short and neat, the plain clothes, the trying. I stood in front of that photograph for a while. I said to my wife, I fixed a car once. My wife said, “You never told me that.” I said, “I know. Some things you just carry for a while before you set them down.
” I thought maybe if I tried hard enough, I could become the kind that fits here. She said that on a shop stool in ‘ 65. She couldn’t do it. Thank God she couldn’t do it >> because the thing she was trying not to be, that’s the thing that mattered. That’s the thing we’re still talking about.
That’s the thing playing on the radio. >> Shoes on the wrong feet. That’s what she said. She went and found the right ones and she ran.
Disclaimer : This content may be created by AI for entertainment purposes. Any resemblance to real persons, events, or places is coincidental.
