Finding Joy

Chapter 3

I was seventeen when the bong years came to a close. When the pipe’s gurgling water morphed from concentric circles on a pond, to a drowning undertow. Jolted from a Kodachrome dream of psychedelic turquoise, I struggled to the surface, back toward the beautiful light.

Why should you give a s**t about another stoner kid inhaling her last? You’d probably think she was just another f**k-up doing something stupid. And you’d be right. I’d done a friggin’ factory of idiotic things during the bong years. From taking downers before chugging Coors, to sneaking the car out while my parents played golf, I’d churned out more stupid widgets than’d fill a Pakistani sweatshop.

But you know, every stunt made perfect sense in my daydreaming head. I’d work out the details on how bitchin it’d be when everyone saw me cruising through the park, tunes cranked, flicking Marlboro ashes out the window. Of course, I didn’t count on my uncle being there with his kids, or running out of gas two blocks from home.

everyonShit.

When I was seventeen, the sweet ambrosia of Hawaiian, Thai Stick and Columbian Red turned to bitter resin. The chamber’s glowing bowl flared and spat embers while I fought to stoke that dying flame. I searched both purse and pockets, but all of my matches had burned, leaving the rolling smoke withering to ash on my tongue.

That year, you could have changed my name to Naïve. Or Dreamer and Head-in-the-clouds-Hippie-Wannabe.

Anything but my real name, Joy Chappell. I know, it sounds like a holy-roller churchy girl. I guess that’s what Mom was going for when she named me. Wanted me to sound all innocent and s**t. And maybe I was. In my own way.

How can a car-stealing, pot-smoking, LSD-tripping chick be innocent? If you were born in the 1960s, like me, you’d know. All around, there was this message of optimism and hope saying that soon people were going to come together in love and peace. From the films where smiling hippies lived off the land, to songs like All You Need is Love, to news broadcasts about people taking to the streets in brotherhood, the Utopian message rang out.

All You Need is LoveEven Mom, with her Vote for Nixon button, teased beehive hairdo and miniskirts, started to speak of women’s rights and stopping the war in Vietnam. But it was the teenagers I met that had the most profound effect on my idealism. They told me that by the time I grew up, the world was going to be a far-out, fantastical planet where all we had to do was sing a few songs and smile for bursting cannon balls to become rainbows.

Vote for NixonAnd I believed every freaking word.

So here I was, a kid certain that someday the light of hippie sun would shine on all our faces as we danced barefoot in meadows. I had so much faith in this dream that I thought, if you can really talk to a person, get them face to face and bare the beauty of your child soul, you could soften the hardest of hearts. When I was really little, I even believed that if I told the President to stop the war, he would. He’d just look in my kid eyes and make peace.

Naïve, I know. But when you’re a kid, you see the world through your own eyes. And when you’re high to boot, everything is tinged with this soft mist, like an out-of-focus camera, and you trust people, thinking they just want to give you a ride.

Yeah, I never knew people were truly ugly until April 7, 1981. The night I peered into the tunnel of darkness.

You know, I really thought the face inside was just a mask. One I could melt away with my Kodachrome soul.

But I was wrong. And by the time I figured it out, it was too late.

I was seventeen and I was about to die.