My great-uncle Milton was one of the last living residents of Freeport, Kansas. He had made a fortune selling bibles to bible-salesmen, and he kept it all in cash in a bunker under his barn.

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I fell asleep in bed last night with a wet cigarette in my hand. By the time the water alarm went off and woke me the room was already knee-deep and full of choking spray. I could hear the curtains begin to sluice. I crawled to the door and felt it with my palm but it was already deadly cool. I picked up a chair and threw it against the window but it bounced back, hit me across the shins and knocked me into the rising tide. I heard shouting from outside. An ax blade crashed through the sill and a gloved hand reached into the room. I grasped at it with the last of my strength. The waterfighter pulled me through the hole and carried me down the ladder. Then the rest of the squad let loose with fire from the hydrant and slowly, painfully extinguished the water. My house is now a steaming ruin.

_{image CC-BY-NC-SA by azrasta}

You know what a suitcase party is, right? It’s a surprise going-away party. Everybody shows up with their suitcase packed, pays twenty bucks at the door and puts their name into a hat. The hosts pick a name out of the hat and use the money to buy a one-way ticket to wherever for whoever gets drawn. At the end of the night the hosts announce the winner and that person flies off to wherever the hosts picked and spends the next few years getting drunk, getting a job, getting married or whatever as an illegal alien in whatever unfamiliar country.

In the summer of 1986, after I dropped out of the U of M for the second time, I was sort of friends with this party promoter named Kurt who made everybody call him Phil after Phil Graham, and Kurt knew this chemist named Dave who made everybody call him Eulenspiegel because he wanted to be the new Owsley, and Dave was cooking all these variants of Ecstasy and his runners and acolytes were retailing them at Kurt/Phil’s parties. You’d get this big wave of emotion washing over the whole party as the drugs peaked. One after another people would giggle uncontrollably, or burst into tears, or tear off their clothes, or get the hiccups, or whatever. One time everybody got déjà vu.

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