Bongs of Yore

I was cleaning the kitchen this morning and reminiscing about some old drinking escapades. (Yes, I clean the kitchen. I'm not the best looking guy around but I can handle myself pretty well with a can of Lysol or Mr. Clean and all of the other helpful chemicals that DuPont and Dow can come up with.) Probably I was trying to distract myself from cleaning the kitchen, which I hate to do, and wondering why SuperK was sleeping in and not cleaning the kitchen herself. It's bad enough that I have to give her directions if she wants a cracker or a chip.

I digress. One of the stories that got me chuckling involved a friend of mine who had just started medical school. We were driving around looking for a small bowling alley that had been rented by someone - did it ever matter who? - for a private party. We pull into the lot and start taking hits off of his homemade bong. It was about three feet tall. It was purple. It was a real beauty. It delivered hits as smooth as a mountain lake in the early morning. I'm pulling on a quart or two of Colt 45 which I have nestled between my legs. There's a loud crack on the driver's side window.

"Hey, watch it," my friend says, laughing, thinking no doubt that someone we knew saw us pull in. He had a distinctive car. He rolls down the window. A uniformed hand reaches in and snatches the bong, quick as that. My door flies open and a couple of flashlights start probing the interior of the car, quickly locating the bag of pot and beer detritus. More cop cars pull up, lights flashing, and train their headlights on us. We were not inconspicuous. We were not making a subtle entrance.

"Books, how bad is this?" my friend asked after they read us the riot act and disappeared for a minute.

"I don't know," I replied. I imagined a jail cell. It's not that I'm too pretty for a jail cell but I'm not ugly enough either.


For some reason the police take all of our party material and let us go. We sit in the car for a minute and breathe a sigh of relief.

"Do you think we should ask them for the pot back?" the doc asks.

"I don't think so," I say.

"How about the bong? That's not illegal, is it? That was a pretty cool bong. It wasn't easy to make."

"Let it go, " I advise.

He thinks for a minute.

"That pot cost me a lot of money," he says.