Bong Hits By The Pool

       “Bong hits by the pool?!”
       Running down the stairs, a beer in one hand, and a clear plastic milk container ingeniously converted into a smoking device in the other, my housemate paused before asking that question on the very tip of his tongue. He heard voices coming from downstairs. Voices he didn’t recognize. Voices that may not fully appreciate the spirit of his intentions.
       A few minutes before, when my housemate had gone upstairs to grab his home made apparatus, there was nothing unusual going on in our living room. Nothing unusual, that is, for The Skunk House.
       The abode I shared with six other gentlemen during my last two years of college was a vortex of hilarious absurdity. From the outside, the place looked like a common, unremarkable duplex. Something happened, though, once you entered the back door of 825 Ardmore Avenue. Like Alice going down the rabbit hole, reality shifted. The only thing that made sense was no sense. You never knew what you were going to see. You never knew what was going to happen.
       On this particular sunny, hot, May afternoon, there was a fully watered kiddie pool in our living room. In the kiddie pool were four naked men: Me, Mr. B, Mr. C, and Mr. Bubble. The three of us were having our way with Mr. Bubble, who was willingly providing the services we paid him for. Namely, bubbles. Tons of them. Hanging around the new addition to our living room were a few other men and women. Some alcohol. Some.....other stuff. And laughter. Lots of laughter.
       We had run a hose from an outside spigot through a window and into the house. Made sense, right? How else were we going to fill a pool in our living room? The problem was, we were in a drought, and metropolitan Philadelphia was under a water ban. Our landlord, who didn’t like us anyway, saw the hose going through the window and got.....suspicious. So he called the cops.
       You can imagine our surprise when our landlord Frank entered our sanctum flanked by two of Philly’s finest. At first, we were all rather flummoxed. A kiddie pool full of water, naked men, and Mr. Bubble in one’s own living room surely wasn’t illegal, was it? Not in America. Not in the city of brotherly love. When they explained that there was a water ban in effect, we argued that our actions were not in violation. After all, we weren’t using the water for something frivolous, like watering our lawn. We didn’t even have a lawn. We explained that we had just come from our Senior Class Picnic, and had been drinking. Heavily. And, legally, we added, for we were all twenty-one. Fearful of possible dehydration, we thought cooling off in our pool was not only prudent, but was precisely what a doctor would have recommended. If any of us had gone to a doctor. Which we hadn’t.
       They didn’t buy it.
       Unfortunately, that was not the end of our disappointment. Whilst in our home, the powers that be noticed something else contentious. Namely, the plethora of pilfered street signs that littered the surroundings. But that’s yet another story. And one that I will tell, along with many others, in another installment of The Skunk House Chronicles.
       By the way, after the cops and the landlord left, we broke out the bong and did hits by the pool. A pool with no water in it, but a pool nonetheless. Skunks are very adaptive animals.

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