This past week we had the honor to have Emily Rubin, founder of Wash and Dry Productions and producer of Dirty Laundry: Loads of Prose on The Jabbo and Crabbo Show. Guiesseppe and I got to attend Loads of Prose- quite literally poetry readings in a laundromat- this past weekend and were struck with how purely fun and meaningful this seemingly incongruous event was. “Playfully subversive” is the phrase Emily used to describe her artistic inspiration and playfully subversive is exactly what you get when you read Emily’s work (aha! it turns out Emily is a writer in her own right).
Emily, Guiesseppe, the chat room and I got a little carried away talking about Loads of Prose and all its potential (Podcamp Boston perhaps???) and forgot to leave time for her to do a reading of her own. So…in lieu of a live reading I am posting Emily’s beautiful short, “Janis and Red in Love”, here. Fun, funny, smart, sexy, inspiring, and of course- playfully subversive, I hope you love it as much as I do.
(little note- while all the materials on this site are posted with a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License, all rights to Emily’s work on this site are reserved by Emily Rubin.
Janis and Red in Love
Janis Joplin and Red Buttons are making love on my desk. I push my chair away to give them more room. Red winks at me and mouths a silent ‘thank you,’ as he slides his hand over Janis’ pelvis.
She whispers, “I like it when you touch me there, Red.”
Janis moves his hand to her hipbone in circles like a record turned slowly on a turntable. Her purple boa sticks to their skin as they settle around each other, every limb crossed.
“I want to touch you first with my hands, then with my lips,” Red says as he shifts his body over her.
His curled lips find their way to her musky thighs. The folds of her satin skirt rustle and move in and out with his breath. Janis flips over and fans the orange ruffles to give Red some air. He reaches up to cup her breasts and watches as her nipples darken to the color of blackberry sorbet.
My collection of foreign dolls, dressed in frilly costumes perched along the bookshelf against the brick wall, scold the raucous lovers in a variety of indigenous tongues.
“Mira!”
“A hum de l’allah!”
“Tranquilo!”
“Simameni!”
“Spukkoyny!”
The lovers are oblivious.
The skull of a longhorn bull looks down on the dolls and offers the wisdom of the plains in his deep Texas drawl, “I saw Red Buttons’ last live performance in Las Vegas. That was August 4, 1969. Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin had tears in their eyes and martinis in their hands. They toasted Red whenever he’d slip into another character. Red’s genius would be sorely missed by everyone.”
The dolls looked up at the white washed skull. A high squeaky voice came from the Salvadoran doll chopping sugar cane, “ Mira ! They distract me. I can’t keep to my machete rhythm with all their sonidos , I have much to harvest by nightfall!”
The longhorn continued, “Ladies don’t let the delirium of the lovers distract you, what are you? Nuns? Prudish pilgrims? We should all be happy they found each other.”
We over hear Janis say, “Take me away from all this Red.”
He responds, “Where would you like to go my sweet love?”
“Niagara Falls, I’ve never been, and they say the water is a beautiful shade of coke bottle green.”
A photograph of the falls, taken by a past lover, hangs above my desk. I remember holding onto Bradley’s khaki shorts as he leaned precariously over the edge to get the picture I wanted.
“Coke bottle green,” Red says as he tickles Janis’s ear, “I think there is a joke in there, but in your presence the irony escapes me.”
“Oh Red, I used to mix bourbon in coke bottles from Fedder’s Sunshine Market in Port Arthur.”
The New Orleans Voodoo doll shakes its yellow tongue and screeches, “Do you hear that longhorn, what is all that droogly love dribble about? What do they think this is, Mardi Gras?”
The Mexican with long wool braids cynically adds, “How can Red Buttons and Janis Joplin be amores ? We don’t trust it one bit.”
The plumeria plant, an illegal from Hawaii, responds, “You ladies needn’t be so suspicious, why where I come from hybrids of the strangest order are always being born. Right before I left a cockatoo fell in love with the moon. Since then the moon rises have been spectacles of purple, fuschia, mango and lime green. The ocean peals with laughter whenever the two make love.”
Longhorn responds, “I told ya, anythin’ is possible.”
Self satisfied, he spits out one of his few remaining teeth which hits the Jamaican doll with the basket of fruit on her head in the left eye.
In her lilting accent she blasts him, “Hey, what’s the big idea, bomba clot !”
All the other dolls gasp and cover their embroidered mouths with their delicately stitched hands. A leaf on the plumeria, hit by a drop of the longhorn’s saliva, curls up like a cocoon and drops to the ground. The plant shivers.
Longhorn yawns and replies, “I think you ladies have forgotten the pleasure of your men. Their bodies thrive on you. And by the way, where are they?”
“Conejo ! They’re fighting third world battles against U.S. Imperialist pigs! ” yelled the fiery Guatemalan with the glass bead beauty mark on her right cheekbone, she sighed, “Ahh, I’ll probably never see Juan Carlos ever again,” then wept into the bosom of her cousin from Panama.
The Cuban doll in the purple dress with a basket made from an underwater sponge hanging on her left arm piped in, “It’s a big world out there. I never thought I’d leave Cuba. Niagara Falls, how romantica. I left mi amor at the bar of the Hotel Nacional in Habana. If he were here now I would ask him to take me there. Why not let the lovers have their dreams.”
Janis and Red roll over one another, and looking into each other’s eyes their lashes touch and flutter.
Janis giggles, “Red, I can tell you love me.”
“I do, but what do you see?”
“When we’re close like this your eyes look moist and dreamy and wide.”
Red plays with Janis’ wild hair and tells her, “Even when I’m with you I dream about you.”
She buries her face in his chest and feels his heart beat. Her dark eyes meet the heat of his breath. Their skin tingles as he cradles her. With her teeth Janis grabs and pulls on the white handkerchief in the vest-pocket of his tuxedo jacket. Red slides inside her and the handkerchief opens into a bouquet of aqua, purple, orange and pink tissue flowers. As they rock into bliss, Red’s nimble hand pulls a white dove from inside the bouquet. The lover’s watch as the dove lands on tip of the Longhorn Bull’s right horn.
Flirting with the dove the Longhorn says, “Your wings fill me like the warm winds of Texas. I used to buck around the buffalo grass and chase my afternoon shadow in those warm desert breezes.”
The dove pays no attention. The longhorn breathes through his darkened nostrils in time to her soft cooing. His exhales build to a torrent, lifting the dolls’ dresses and scattering the contents of their baskets every which way.
Our Cuban gal rejoices, “ Mujeres ! Let’s rumba!”
“Bai–yeaaaaaa !” they all rejoice.
The dolls throw their arms around each other and stomp until the room is filled with rolling thunder of their dance. Still locked in a kiss, Janis and Red giggle with the joy of the dancers. The dove starts to flap her wings, and all of us turn to watch as she takes flight out the window and disappears over the tenement rooftops while the sun sets over the city. I pull my chair back to the desk and nudge myself between the lovers. The dolls straighten their dresses, pick up their baskets and organize themselves back onto the shelf. Janis and Red, in love, flirt with me as they quietly slide from my desk and move into the shadows at the other end of the room.
The End
