In the early eighties, the chainsaw house was still kind of "out in the country" outside Round Rock, Texas. The owners had moved on up, and rented the place out to some UT grad students who were friends of some other UT grad students that I was honored to know.
The party was one of those sun-dappled, indeterminate affairs that were so quaintly indigenous to the Austin area back then. At about two on Friday afternoon, I arrived in a borrowed Checker Marathon. This was judged a favorable omen by the Arbiters of Coolness there, and I was received as a peer. Music was playing, and lounging about was in progress. I walked around inside the house, and found nothing particularly remarkable about the place. I had never seen the movie, so it held no dread for me. It was just another Hill Country farmhouse, with linoleum flooring and beans soaking in the kitchen, and tiny white tiles and scuffed enamel in the bathroom. It was a beautiful day, and every door and window was open to the light. I took some pleasant folks for a ride in the Checker into town for more ice.
There were a few head of cattle grazing on the surrounding property, and a fenced-in area with some geese nearby, but the lawn around the house was large and lush, with great oaks spaced perfectly around our croquet course. If nobody bothered to put on a record, somebody would pick up a guitar. We had all brought food, so everybody ate like royalty, but nobody served like a slave.
Frankly, the party was a bit on the civilized side for me. My cohort tended more toward the broken glassware and fire extinguisher school of social intercourse. We tried to get some action going with tequila and pyrotechnics, but the Arbiters demurred, and drifted off, and my dissolute chums and I were left to ourselves in the darkened kitchen. Every light went out, every door was closed, and I began to sense the appeal of the place as a cauldron of horrors.
There were only a few of us left standing - none of us tenants or familiars of the property. We were too drunk and too far from home to try to escape in the Checker, so we just went outside and sat in lawn chairs on the back porch, drinking and amusing each other with the old familiar routines. Eventually, those among us who still harbored the bright spark of Natural Selection claimed a seat in the Checker or a lounge cushion, and sank into a healthy stupor. That left only the three dumbest bastards on the face of the earth - no, wait, Kevin's passed out - just us two.
I don't know how Billy was doing, but I was certain that the only thing I was capable of doing was drinking another beer. I started to do so, and I got about one good slug in me before I realized that I was wrong. Wrong about that next beer, and wrong about the last four. For some reason, I was suddenly concerned about the Judgement of the Arbiters, and I decided that I didn't want to mess up the porch, or even the beautiful lawn, so I scrambled out to the edge of the manicured area. I fell on my knees and heaved the big good heave out into the goose pen.
I had not known (but was soon to learn) that it was fairly difficult to raise geese in that area in those days because of the depradations of coyotes. An obvious first line of defense against coyotes is an electric fence. That's what I puked on. My excellent friend Billy, seeing that I was being killed before his eyes, and identifying the hazard, and being drunk as Hogan's goat, grabbed it, as though to tear it away. That didn't work, and he got shocked too. Nobody woke up, because it didn't seem unusual for us to be shrieking and rolling around on the ground, I guess.
Later on, I found out that the coyotes managed to eat the geese anyway.