Flood: Interlude

 The Conclusion of Flood

 

I

 am too much of a literary whore to let an entire book go up as free content.

So, for those interested, there are only two chapters I am not serializing of Flood’s story:

Large and In Charge, Our conversation after the Y2K water and battery buying panic, sparked by a shared vision of our lovely overnight cashier, in which we ended up talking about our mutual rivals Big Boy and Ralph, our sleazy employers and our mutual enemies, the thugs of Baltimore.

The final chapter is an event that occurred a few years earlier, which resulted in his massive loss of teeth, as he did not have bad oral hygiene and I was moved to ask how he lost so many teeth.  This account, the final chapter, titled The Rent comprises one of the most heroic stands against the odds that I have documented in my weird hobby of interviewing violence survivors over these last 25 years.

Other than that, and whatever became of my coworker after 2002, you have all of Flood’s story I can recall and reshape.

-James LaFond, 1:03 A.M., Sunday, November 15, 2020, Portland, Oregon