If it
were love that drove her, she would have quit a long time ago. Juniper was a 64
year old woman who sang herself lullabies. She needed nobody and nobody needed
her. Juniper grew up in the 1960s and continued to spend most of her time there
in the decades that were too come. She was born around 1939 but no one really
knows. She was born with the name Magill but she never really identified with
it. She did identify with Lil for a bit but everyone else knew her as Nancy. It
was around 1955 Magill ran away from home. The days were long, dry and
hopeless. She started her departure from Bismarck and travelled east to
Michigan. She had not an idea where to go and how to get there but she knew
what she wanted. She wanted to meet Big Bill Broonzy and rumour had it he was
in Michigan cooking lunches for children. She hitchhiked, jumped on the back of
trains and walked. Magill saw a string of faces, sewing the fabric of the year that
passed, and forgot them all almost instantly.
She warily
walked up the stairs and was almost instantly greeted with a "Hi, welcome
to Circle Pines Centre. Is there a specific reason you came up here?"
Magill planned this out for a whole year. With what she believed was grace and
tact, she foolishly responded, "I've come here for lunch". The plan
was to act delighted with the meal she was given and ask to congratulate the
chef but the food was so unpalatable even she couldn't mask her wrinkled
countenance. "Is Big Bill Broonzy around?" she asked. From behind her
she heard a man say "Lord knows I didn't cook that meal". Big Bill
Broonzy walked towards her and asked her a series of questions. Shortly after,
he offered her some cannabis. Not only had she never seen marijuana, she had
never heard of it either. The two laughed for the next few hours to come before
Big Bill Broonzy had to leave. He handed her some cannabis for the go and told
her to be on her way. Magill was now a girl with no plan, no family and some
cannabis."
"Is that
all Juniper?" asked her daughter. "No one is going to know you well
enough, let alone care enough, to buy your damned biography". Magill
assumed the alias Juniper in the year 1968 after a turbulent summer. Her
daughter's name was Christine and Christine's sons name was Ravi. Christine
adopted Ravi from India and Ravi was only just a baby. Juniper spent many hours
with Ravi in the little cigarette shop, made from scraps, she opened. If it
weren't for her customer loyalty, Juniper would probably be a part of the
fertiliser of Christine's poppy farm. Not too many people knew about the
cigarette shop, but the few to have been there never bought a cigarette from
another. Juniper laced all tobacco with heroin but she put too little in the
mix to be traced by amateur policemen. Whenever she did believe she was being
watched, she would put in heavier dosages of heroin into the food to make sure
the agents would leave the shop but to come back the next time as customers. She
would watch diligent social workers become hopeless addicts and she loved it.
Although the dash of heroin she added to her food and cigarettes wouldn't
really give her customers a high, there was just enough in there to make her
customers run to heroin like a fly to dung, except the dung in this case was
excreted after a night of drug-abuse by the cow. In fact, Juniper believed that
cow dung contained hallucinogens, benefitting the fly, the plant and the cows
drug addled anus.
"They're
after me again and I don't have enough heroin today", Juniper said
worriedly to Ravi. Ravi smiled back. Ravi always smiled back. Perhaps for the
same reason Christine always smiled back as a child. "They've got me for
sure this time". Two suspected agents sipped on her tea and waited. The
reason the two of them came to the shop was on recommendation from their once,
but now happier, colleagues. They weren't impressed by the cigarette shop and
proceeded unhindered to bust the aged woman. Juniper sat still. The two agents
spoke to Juniper and told her she wasn't getting away this time. They took away
Ravi while Juniper pondered. She thought of a world where drugs were legal at
the consumers own risk. She thought this would happen had the Beach Boys
released their album SMiLE back in the 1960s. She believed had this album been
conceptualised on time, the Beatles would only go on to attempt to outdo the
Beach Boys. Had this happened, she thought, the world would get a more surreal
experience through music and hence lead to the eventual legalisation of many
drugs. She likened the loss of SMiLE for the world to the loss of Ravi to
Christine. Her time was coming to an end and she requested the agents to give
her one last night with Ravi. On this particular night, Juniper took a higher
dosage of heroin than usual. In the climax of her high it hit her. The gram of
cannabis that Big Bill Broonzy gave her was shared with a perfect stranger. She
forgot about him through the years but suddenly he came back to her in her high
to give her her final moment of clarity before she was to visit Elvis Presley.
The stranger she shared the cannabis with went by the name Bobby Finn. Juniper
only then realised she changed the world.
Bobby Finn was
a young man from Hibbing doing almost exactly what Juniper was doing. Except,
he was looking for Woody Guthrie. She shared a joint with Bobby Finn on the
road and forgot about him, like the many faces she had seen before, almost
instantly. Bobby Finn was soon to go by the alias Bob Dylan. She turned him
onto marijuana who later turned the Beatles onto marijuana. What marijuana did
for the Beatles was similar to what the Beatles did for the world. Just when
she was finding the words to articulate to Christine the relevance of her
existence, Juniper jived amongst the fauna. Through the leaves, beams of white
flooded her sight and she broke on through to the other side in what she once
imagined the perfect ending.
