Victor Ulkin awoke to his CD player alarm spinning The Stone Roses' sellf-titled first album, and although the clock read 8:30 AM, he was happy. He was happy because today was Thursday, the day his younger sister Franny was flying into Indianapolis before making her way up to Chicago for a photo shoot.

He sprung out of bed, showered, dressed, and hopped in his 1979 Jeep Grand Wagoneer with all the enthusiasm of Dick Clark on amphetamine. He was smiling, humming, and tapping the dashboard, singing, laughing and cracking jokes with himself all at the same time. Today was Franny Day, and nothing could ruin it.

The two of them had been sexually active together since earliest childhood when they copied the little Amazonian youths they played with. Victor had since fucked his cute little sister, now an NYU art history student, any way he pleased.

He had even gone to the trouble to get Gert-Jan to airmail him 4 hits of Ecstasy pills from Amsterdam. As good as American drugs were, Amsterdam pills were light years ahead. They always put you on your back for a spell. 2-CT-2 they were calling the new ecstasy. Yeah, right.

He thought good thoughts as he popped more of his dad's Benzedrine and lit up a pre-rolled emergency joint from the glove compartment. Incest was not so much immoral as it was "fun for the entire family". They had been in love for years, and everyone seemed to know but their parents.

Victor arrived at the airport fifteen minutes early so he would have time to park the car and meet the flight. He was inexpressibly disappointed to find out that a big northeastern storm had delayed the arrival time. The plane hadn't even left yet from Boston.

"It will be another 3 hours at least", was as good a guess as the USAir representative could give him.

Shit, thought Victor and decided he needed a few drinks while he waited and headed for the bar. He stopped along the way to see if they had any good magazines at the news stand to read while he drank. They didn't, so he bought Rolling Stone and sauntered to the back of the large, surprisingly comfortable little smoky cafe.

He ordered a pint of Budweiser because they didn't have any good beer on tap there and lit a cigarette. He paused to think how the essence of Budweiser and Rolling Stone was the essence of America. Why in a free society do people enslave themselves?

When the cigarette was done he lit another one and smoked it. America does have the best cigarettes in the world. When his beer was done he ordered another. After drinking his third pint a strange man sat down beside him and stared at him as if he knew him. The man was ugly and had a noticeably large butt.

Victor thought at first that he recognized him, perhaps one of his father's University friends, but then a strange smell hit him. It was coming from the man. He smelled awful, totally repulsive, like he had bathed in rotten patchouli oil. Victor had never smelled anything like it before and became instantly nauseous.

Why did this man sit right next to me?, pondered Victor annoyed, as there were many other tables open. The strange man's body resembled a large hairy tit. Not a tit, really, more of a large saggy furry droopy old lady boob.

The droopy boob man was wearing green overall pants and a blue oxford shirt. On his nose was a clothespin, and he had eyes the width of silver dollars.  The man attempted a smile and it looked hideous enough to put a junkie off his habit.

Victor's mind was too sensitive for such sites and he recoiled in alarm and stupification. He immediately convinced himself that the Mindfuck Aliens from his 2CB days in Amsterdam were back. They would fuck with him but only when he was high. The Benzedrine alone couldn't have possibly brought them back; multiple doses of highly-experimental chemicals were necessary for the Mindfuck Aliens to make their appearance. Victor then realized that perhaps the man wasn't merely a hallucination but actually real. His frown turned upside down and he went loopy.

Maybe the Mind Aliens were for real after all, he thought.

Maybe the universe is pear-shaped, he mused further.

The hairy tit reached in his coat pocket and produced a pack of strange 100-sized cigarettes. He took one out and lit it.

He then spoke these words:

"Hello Victor. My name's Hessloth, Herman Hessloth. We've met before, no?" His accent was thick, reminiscent of a Czech or maybe even a Russian.

"Have we?" asked Victor relatively sure he would remember meeting someone as repulsive as this Herman guy unless his brain had blocked it out like an overly-traumatic childhood experience.

"Oh yes." responded Herman grinning a wide smile.

Victor's eyes bulged out of their sockets- no incisors! The man had no incisors! All his teeth were like molars. This alarmed Victor considerably.

The man seemed dismayed at Victor's open-mouthed shock. Then suddenly  a gleam came to his eyes like he just remembered something and reached in his pocket and took out a small glass vial of oil with a cork at the top. He spread the oil on his hands and started perfuming himself with it. A dab on the chin, a bit under the armpits and some on his hands.

"Better, huh?" Herman said in his thick accent as he smiled.

"Ugh!" was Victor's only response. But the smell was gone. He smelled like a normal person now, which is to say not very much at all.

Human-scented oil. Very strange, thought Victor.

Then the man stood up and puffed deeply on his cigarette. He inhaled deeply and blew out the smoke in Victor's face, which made him cough hoarsely. Then he spoke again:

"Da livin Ded Don Git uh Holleeedy".

"Wha?" replied Victor.

"Whhooopon", he said. "Dooddly Whoopon weel save us."

The man then stood up, turned around and farted in Victor's general direction as he walked away. It smelled so bad that Victor had to light a match. The match flame rose three inches in all directions when it was held up to the fart gas and it took nearly ten minutes for the air to clear. Weird, thought Victor, really weird. Victor knew intrinsically that when things like this happen the best possible recourse is to get so blarmy drunk that you don't remember them. He ordered another pint, drank it, and then ordered another and another...

Chapter 7: Part B

Victor, now on his seventh pint of Budweiser, realized for the first time that he didn't have enough money to pay for all these airport pints he'd just downed, (an airport pint being just like a normal pint except costing three times as much), and he decided his best option for the moment was to order yet another one and then pass out drunk. About two hours later, his horny little sister Franny woke him up.

"Victor! Wake up, you're drooling."

"Franny...what are you doing here? Where am I?"

"The airport, Victor. You were supposed to meet my flight. I called you at home. Then I realized where you would be. Can we go home now?"

Her voice wasn't too pleasant, sort of huffy, sort of angry. Victor responded, "I had a strange dream".

"No wonder. You've been drinking Budweiser. How many did you have? Funny how you're drunk all the time. I was hoping you'd be sober enough to fuck me in the car."

She knelt down to kiss him, kissed him, and then retracted. "You smell funny," she said.

Victor, too hungover to defend himself, simply replied again, "I had a strange dream."

"Let's go, I'll drive", she said irritated.

"Okay," Victor said and left without paying for any of the beers.

Chapter 7: Part C

Once home, Franny threw her stuff in the bedroom and disrobed while Victor rolled a joint.

"It's great to be home alone with you again", Franny cooed and she approached him naked.

"It's great to see normal tits again", he muttered.

"It's so good to be fuck my bro again", Franny replied. "Even if we have to do it here in Evansville."

"Aspirin?" offered Victor to his sister as he checked out her ass cheeks as she walked over to close the living room drapes.

Franny sneered. "You never have any good drugs anymore."

"That's because I took them all", replied Victor referring to an especially large chunk of money he had spent on what at the time seemed a thousand years supply and was all gone in three months.

"Sex is so dull on aspirin!", cried Franny with a crazed drug-less glow in her eyes that shone from the place where her soul should have been.

"Sex is never dull with kindred cock inside you, my dear Franny."

Franny approached Victor's stiffening cock and knelt seizing it and cuddling it between her breasts.

"Something strange happened today, Franny. Something I don't understand at all."

Franny seemed preoccupied with the task at hand and proceeded to ease his mind. Victor opened the vial where he kept the 2-CT-2 and gave himself and his sister three pills each.

Chapter 7: Part D

Things remained hot between Franny and Victor in the next few days. There was no where to go so they smoked herb all day, dropped 2-CT-2  and drank wine and fucked all night for three days. In the recovering moments, Victor read his philosophy texts, Descartes' First Meditations, Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, and Foucault's History of Sexuality.

Franny read Flaubert and Camus and stopped every so often to fuck her sweet brother and bake sweet marijuana brownies. No invitation was extended to Victor to go to Chicago with her, so he watched her go off totally resigned to stay in Evansville and read up his philosophy texts. Victor sat alone in the apartment and read and occasionally broke down into serious bouts of depression. Depression, they say, can at times be even worse than philosophy texts.

About a week later Victor was out of pot, money, food, and very nearly his mind. Victor thought about slashing his wrists or even calling his parents and asking them for money. He decided that he could always slash his wrists later and that he hadn't spoken to his parents in about six months anyway so they might even offer him some dosh without his even asking. He dialed the plethora of numbers needed to reach the Chilean rain forest...

"Hello! Dr. Ulkin speaking."

"Hi Dad."

"Hello, who is this."

"It's your son, dummy!"

"Honey, do we have a son?"

Victor could hear his mother joking in the background, "Yes honey, remember back in the seventies…"

"Oh yeah, he's the ungrateful lout who spends all our money and gives me grief. I got him confused with my prostate cancer"

"Very funny Dad. Did you discover any psychoactive ant saliva down there?"

"Victor! Why are you calling me? It costs a bleeding fortune! What have you been up to that you needed to call and pester me?"

"Nothing much. Smoking pot, masturbating, starving to death, the usual."

"Good, good" replied Victor's dad apparently oblivious to everything.

"No dad. I'm serious. I'm broke. I called to beg for money. I can't even eat. I even considered selling my car."

"That is not your car until you come up with the $3,200. That is my car."

"Yeah, well, look. Are you going to send me some money or not?"

"Son, I'm in Chile looking up lizards' assholes for bacteria. Doesn't pay very well you know."

"I just need about $500 to get me through the month. The rent is late and all."

"You don't pay rent, silly, we own the house!"

"Yes. I try and stay sane. I call it "mental rent", it's a full-time occupation."

"This conversation is going nowhere. Sell your keyboards."

"Already did", Victor lied.

"Really? You sold your keyboard? Your $2500 keyboard?"

"And all my compact discs. It's all gone. If you deny me this loan I'm going to start selling the furniture."

"You sell my furniture I'll skin you alive. Don't think I can't find someone to do it either. If you need money get a j-o-b."

"Thanks Dad, I would have never though of that."

"Bye son. I have a love/hate relationship with you."

"Yeah I have one with you too", and slam-ding, went the phone as Victor hung it up.

As Victor pondered the recent developments in his life, he grabbed his Klonopin and took 5 of them. He then sat down and drank himself into a state near death which wasn't very hard with an empty stomach and the klonopin in him. The next day he received a telephone call from Gert-Jan. He was so happy he would have wet himself if he weren't so comatose.

- Hello?

- Hello Victor.

-GERT-JAN! Help me I'm dying.

-Good. I'm only coming to visit you for a few days.

-Great! Where are you?

-Chicago Airport. I should be chez-toi by midnight at the latest.

-You want to party tonight?

-Are you kidding?

-Good Good. I'll get some supplies. Jim Beam and red creme sodas all around I guess.

-You still drink that stuff Vic?

-Hell yeah!

-All right. It'll be like old times.

-See ya' man. Just get here!

-Ciao. click.

-click.

Victor was so strung out from the last night's substance abuse he couldn't see three feet in front of him and so he passed out again.

Chapter 7: Part E

At about 11:00 PM Victor awoke and yawned widely. Feeling a rumbling in his tight yet undefined belly, he headed to the kitchen where he poured himself the last shot of Jim Beam into a glass and poured three quarters of a can of red creme soda over it.

When he had finished sipping his drink he looked at the clock in horror. It was 11:48 PM. Gert-Jan would be there in 12 minutes and the liquor stores had closed hours ago. If he didn't have any booze there was going to be a lot of explaining to do. He took his last remaining stash of money, mostly change, and decided to make a run for the Circle K. As he sprinted for the front door he realized he was still naked and so he quickly changed into something less comfortable and left.

As Victor sped to the Circle K to buy beer, he remembered he had a problem. The laws of The United States of America require a person to be twenty-one years of age before being is allowed to buy this liquid.

Victor Ulkin was 26, so this was not the problem.

The problem was that in Indiana, a state in the heartland of The Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave and All That, one cannot buy any alcohol, even beer, after midnight.

Thoughts raced through Victor's head as he drove his 1979 Jeep Grand Wagoneer frantically down the suburban streets, glancing at his watch every 5 seconds in disbelief that it read 11:58 PM, and that he was too foolish not to have had any more foresight then he did.

When he finally got to the Circle K and parked his car, which he left running because he had seconds earlier calculated that this move could save him approximately 2 seconds, he sprinted into the store and grabbed the first two twelve packs of beer he saw, which happened to be Miller Genuine Draft in cans. As he approached the counter with the beer his entire body involuntarily heaved a sigh of relief when he saw in front of him being allowed to purchase beer.

The store clock read 11:59 PM. It was his turn.

"Can I see some ID?" beeped the cashier lady.

"I don't know, can you?" was the obvious reply, but since there was no time for sarcasm that would go unappreciated he responded more conservatively, "argh".

The lady glanced at the at Victor, her ugly wrinkly face and bloodshot eyes making him wince. No ID?

"I'm sorry, no."

"No?"

Victor now knew he had lost the Battle of the Booze. Anything he could say or do would be uselessly futile. He basically had three options: He could grab the beer and run, he could mellow out and think of a way out of this predicament, or he could resort to verbal abuse. He decided calmly that the second option was his best one, but couldn't resist a bit of the third either.

"I buy beer in this state all the time without my ID. I'm embarrassed to live here and forced to get drunk to survive. If you don't serve me there will be blood on your hands."

"Read the sign. It says: We must card anyone who looks under 30..."

"I know what the sign says," interrupted Victor brusquely, "but can't you cut me a break? I'm 24 years old. I feel I have fairly and justly earned the right to drink pisswater until I pass out."

"As I said before," the woman went on obviously not enjoying herself but just ticking right along like a slightly out of tune and very annoying robot, "we must card everyone under 30."

"How would you know if someone was under 30 if you didn't card them?" Victor muttered to himself before he turned around completely bemused and pointed himself away from the cashier. If a buzz was unavailable in the preferred format, he had to resort to Plan B.

Victor, remembering he had left the car running, screamed bloody murder, threw a tenner on the counter and bolted.

Bad laws begin to melt when upright citizens like Victor begin to flaunt them.