I don’t remember buying this bong, or stealing it. I just remember having it, ever since my junior or senior year in college. It was just there, in the house I lived in, a couple of blocks from campus.
The house, as we called it, is where I lived with other guys for three years of college. We played a lot of music and threw a lot of frisbee and had a pretty good time. We called this bong the Blue Buddha, there in that house, hidden in a patch of woods, just behind the faculty apartments at Wake Forest. It was a 4-bedroom house with a big, wooded yard and a screened porch upstairs, giving one the feeling of being in the trees.
I remember reading Shakespeare on that porch, sometimes two or three plays per sitting. I had a habit of waiting until the night before a test to do the reading for most any course. I probably would have comprehended more of it had I not been accompanied by this bong.
My original roommates were a few guys I knew from being in Venice a semester. In Venice, I was the youngest person in the dorm. I also had two senior years, sort of. So, alas, I had some good friends that graduated before I did. In my memory, college years were fun years, and this bong is a reminder of younger days and great people.
How kept it all these years I do not know. I pretty much stopped smoking pot when I became a parent and a teacher, at the age of 25. I revived the bong last year when we started carrying THCA flower in our store. It was used one other time, in the movie Coffee Therapy (which reminds me of another very wonderful group of people). Other than that, it went unused for 46 years. It needed a good cleaning, but it’s still working great.
The bong scene is cued up here. The bong itself appears at 26:11 in the movie.