AbbieDoobie
Active member
http://www.trailerparkboys.org/forums/index.php/topic,10649.msg201059/topicseen.html#msg201059
By way of a thank you to everyone on this board for supporting my auction, I do not believe that the sale would have gone as well as it did without you guys I would like to offer the following story. Few people have ever heard it and I think you may get a kick out of it. Again Thank You all very much!!
Gather round my fellow trailer park denizens and I will tell the origin story of the skeleton bong. It’s a dark saga that spans 3 decades and involves punk rockers, Hells Angels, Satanists and insanity. And drugs! Lots and lots of drugs.
Our tail begins in Halifax during the summer of 1984 on the corner of Barrington and Prince St. This was about 20’ from the doorway of an arcade named Back Street Amusements. In the 1980’s Back Streets was the HQ of Halifax’s punk rock community and as a proud member of this rag tag band of nefarious deviants I spent most of my time there. There was a lot of excitement that summer, chiefly about the merger of our local outlaw bike gang, the 13th Tribe, with the Hells Angels and I had just been invited to a party to celebrate the event. This wasn’t an official club party. Just some of the local punks who had been strengthening their ties to the club as small time street dealers and who were now looking forward to larger and hopefully cheaper sources of drugs.
One of these fellows (I’m not going to use names because some of these people are still alive and a few of them are still capable of using a computer) had even secured hang around status with the gang and was being fast tracked to membership. It was at this party that I first set eyes on the Skeleton Bong as it was presented to our host, the hang around, by a guy who I feel was by far the most gifted creative individual I have ever met but who I also firmly believe was the most dangerously deranged individual that I’ve ever known. Now you have to put that in perspective. Back Streets was jammed with some really unstable individuals. I mean full blown sociopaths who would just as soon shatter your face as shake your hand but this guy, a self proclaimed Satanist, was so deeply warped that I found him unsettling to be around and yet he painted the most beautiful leather jackets, one of which I own. What I’m saying is that to win the crazy crown at Back Streets you had to really be fucked and this guy was Uber fucked. The first time I laid eyes on him was 2 years earlier at a gig when he bit me. He was blasted on 6 tabs of black acid, the nastiest shit available at the time, and had become convinced he was a spider. He was scuttling around the dance floor like a crab attacking people’s ankles, drawing blood in some cases. I was lucky the leather of my boots saved me from a painful rabies shot.
The bong, as any really good piece of drug paraphernalia, was manufactured using misappropriated materials in a high school shop class. The base of the bong is a lath turned maple cup. Into this is set several pieces of vintage Pyrex scientific glass stolen from the Dartmouth High School chemistry department. They were fitted together with an ingenuity that’s only possessed by those who smoke copious amounts of drugs. They have the uncanny ability to turn any thing into a bong. The bong then got its skeleton from a stolen biology class demonstration piece. A hole was carefully drilled in the skull and a stem placed through it. The arms and legs were placed in position and permanently fused with a lighter and wired to the pipe. The handle is a coat hanger wrapped with black electrical tape. A piece of wire mesh fitted into the top completes this masterpiece of juvenile subversion. I have always been a junk junky. I was collecting rocks, bottle caps and sea glass before I was 5. By the age of 12 I was buying antique glass sets one at a time with my paper route money. So by the time of that party I had already developed an eye for unusual and unique items and when I saw that bong I knew that it was destined for greatness.
Flash foreword 15 years. I have been working in the Halifax film community for a number of years and have recently completed work on an insane feature length film which we had shot on weekends over several months with borrowed gear. It was a delightfully surreal film about a pair of self styled pet assassins called the Trailer Park Boys. Mike Clattenburg asked me to help him make the movie one day when I had run into him in line at the royal bank on the corner of Queen and Spring Garden Rd. I had provided the guerilla art department services for Clattenburg for several of his films over 7 years and it was always a lot of fun because his work was always unconventional. He would shoot in B&W and to this day I still think his framing might be the most beautiful that I have ever seen. I was always proud to be of any help in bringing his vision to life.
It seemed like a dream a year later when I got the call that Showcase had picked up TBP for 6 episodes. We were going into production. My mandate was to bring the world that these guys lived in to life. There would be some changes, the pet assassins were gone. These guys made their money from drugs. So I was going to need some ‘greasy’ drug paraphernalia as Clattenburg put it. My mind almost instantly raced back to that bong. I knew I had to have it for the show but where was it now.
We had all kind of lost touch with each other over the intervening decade. But after a bit of detective work I discovered that its owner had run afoul of his biker friends and had been shot by them. He lived and was under police protection for a time but then just disappeared. Weather he’s in 9 different weighted sleeping bags at the bottom of a number of lakes or lurking in the swamps of Louisiana as he once said he would have liked to do is anyone’s guess but he’s never been seen again. As fate would have it his aunt who had all of his stuff in storage for several years had decided to sell it all at the flea market. She let me know when and on the appointed day I was first in line convinced that it was preordained that I was to own this bong.
When the doors opened I rushed through market looking for her table, when I finally found it I scanned it feverously looking for the bong. It wasn’t there. I asked the aunt and she in turn asked her daughter who was helping her sell stuff. The daughter said that a guy from one of the other tables had bought it before they opened the doors. I was dazed but unbroken. After getting a good description of the guy I found him several rows over. I was hoping that he was planning to resell the bong but it wasn’t on his table. The fellow in question was a rather large old school heavy metalist, he had the leather jacket with the jean vest over it and the tight black jeans with the large pair of Kodiak boots. I knew I had my work cut out for me. I asked about the bong and was told in no uncertain terms that it was not for sale. I offered him a fair amount of money, twice what he had paid for it. He again refused. Two subsequent higher offers were also rebuffed. It was at this point that I changed tact. Remember at this time no one knew anything about TPB. So I told him about Ricky and Julian and how that bong needed to be seen by Canadians across the country, that that bong was going to help change the way we see ourselves forever. It was at that point he agreed to sell the bong to me and you know the rest of the story. And that my friends is why this is the coolest bong ever to appear on Canadian TV.
~Abbie
By way of a thank you to everyone on this board for supporting my auction, I do not believe that the sale would have gone as well as it did without you guys I would like to offer the following story. Few people have ever heard it and I think you may get a kick out of it. Again Thank You all very much!!
Gather round my fellow trailer park denizens and I will tell the origin story of the skeleton bong. It’s a dark saga that spans 3 decades and involves punk rockers, Hells Angels, Satanists and insanity. And drugs! Lots and lots of drugs.
Our tail begins in Halifax during the summer of 1984 on the corner of Barrington and Prince St. This was about 20’ from the doorway of an arcade named Back Street Amusements. In the 1980’s Back Streets was the HQ of Halifax’s punk rock community and as a proud member of this rag tag band of nefarious deviants I spent most of my time there. There was a lot of excitement that summer, chiefly about the merger of our local outlaw bike gang, the 13th Tribe, with the Hells Angels and I had just been invited to a party to celebrate the event. This wasn’t an official club party. Just some of the local punks who had been strengthening their ties to the club as small time street dealers and who were now looking forward to larger and hopefully cheaper sources of drugs.
One of these fellows (I’m not going to use names because some of these people are still alive and a few of them are still capable of using a computer) had even secured hang around status with the gang and was being fast tracked to membership. It was at this party that I first set eyes on the Skeleton Bong as it was presented to our host, the hang around, by a guy who I feel was by far the most gifted creative individual I have ever met but who I also firmly believe was the most dangerously deranged individual that I’ve ever known. Now you have to put that in perspective. Back Streets was jammed with some really unstable individuals. I mean full blown sociopaths who would just as soon shatter your face as shake your hand but this guy, a self proclaimed Satanist, was so deeply warped that I found him unsettling to be around and yet he painted the most beautiful leather jackets, one of which I own. What I’m saying is that to win the crazy crown at Back Streets you had to really be fucked and this guy was Uber fucked. The first time I laid eyes on him was 2 years earlier at a gig when he bit me. He was blasted on 6 tabs of black acid, the nastiest shit available at the time, and had become convinced he was a spider. He was scuttling around the dance floor like a crab attacking people’s ankles, drawing blood in some cases. I was lucky the leather of my boots saved me from a painful rabies shot.
The bong, as any really good piece of drug paraphernalia, was manufactured using misappropriated materials in a high school shop class. The base of the bong is a lath turned maple cup. Into this is set several pieces of vintage Pyrex scientific glass stolen from the Dartmouth High School chemistry department. They were fitted together with an ingenuity that’s only possessed by those who smoke copious amounts of drugs. They have the uncanny ability to turn any thing into a bong. The bong then got its skeleton from a stolen biology class demonstration piece. A hole was carefully drilled in the skull and a stem placed through it. The arms and legs were placed in position and permanently fused with a lighter and wired to the pipe. The handle is a coat hanger wrapped with black electrical tape. A piece of wire mesh fitted into the top completes this masterpiece of juvenile subversion. I have always been a junk junky. I was collecting rocks, bottle caps and sea glass before I was 5. By the age of 12 I was buying antique glass sets one at a time with my paper route money. So by the time of that party I had already developed an eye for unusual and unique items and when I saw that bong I knew that it was destined for greatness.
Flash foreword 15 years. I have been working in the Halifax film community for a number of years and have recently completed work on an insane feature length film which we had shot on weekends over several months with borrowed gear. It was a delightfully surreal film about a pair of self styled pet assassins called the Trailer Park Boys. Mike Clattenburg asked me to help him make the movie one day when I had run into him in line at the royal bank on the corner of Queen and Spring Garden Rd. I had provided the guerilla art department services for Clattenburg for several of his films over 7 years and it was always a lot of fun because his work was always unconventional. He would shoot in B&W and to this day I still think his framing might be the most beautiful that I have ever seen. I was always proud to be of any help in bringing his vision to life.
It seemed like a dream a year later when I got the call that Showcase had picked up TBP for 6 episodes. We were going into production. My mandate was to bring the world that these guys lived in to life. There would be some changes, the pet assassins were gone. These guys made their money from drugs. So I was going to need some ‘greasy’ drug paraphernalia as Clattenburg put it. My mind almost instantly raced back to that bong. I knew I had to have it for the show but where was it now.
We had all kind of lost touch with each other over the intervening decade. But after a bit of detective work I discovered that its owner had run afoul of his biker friends and had been shot by them. He lived and was under police protection for a time but then just disappeared. Weather he’s in 9 different weighted sleeping bags at the bottom of a number of lakes or lurking in the swamps of Louisiana as he once said he would have liked to do is anyone’s guess but he’s never been seen again. As fate would have it his aunt who had all of his stuff in storage for several years had decided to sell it all at the flea market. She let me know when and on the appointed day I was first in line convinced that it was preordained that I was to own this bong.
When the doors opened I rushed through market looking for her table, when I finally found it I scanned it feverously looking for the bong. It wasn’t there. I asked the aunt and she in turn asked her daughter who was helping her sell stuff. The daughter said that a guy from one of the other tables had bought it before they opened the doors. I was dazed but unbroken. After getting a good description of the guy I found him several rows over. I was hoping that he was planning to resell the bong but it wasn’t on his table. The fellow in question was a rather large old school heavy metalist, he had the leather jacket with the jean vest over it and the tight black jeans with the large pair of Kodiak boots. I knew I had my work cut out for me. I asked about the bong and was told in no uncertain terms that it was not for sale. I offered him a fair amount of money, twice what he had paid for it. He again refused. Two subsequent higher offers were also rebuffed. It was at this point that I changed tact. Remember at this time no one knew anything about TPB. So I told him about Ricky and Julian and how that bong needed to be seen by Canadians across the country, that that bong was going to help change the way we see ourselves forever. It was at that point he agreed to sell the bong to me and you know the rest of the story. And that my friends is why this is the coolest bong ever to appear on Canadian TV.
~Abbie
