Waking Up with the D

One morning I woke up with McDougal sitting next to me in an 18-wheeler going 230 miles per hour. I looked over at him with that damn silly grin on his face, tried to slam on the brakes, and of course they didn't work.

"What the fuck are we going to do now?" I yelled, gripping the wheel for dear life. And he just lit his cigarillo and kicked a porno in the truck's DVD player.

So there I am, trying to keep this thing on the road at 240 plus and McDougal is over there jacking off to a skin flick. I checked the gas, no problem there, tested the brakes again and felt no resistance whatsoever, and decided to settle back and just take it in stride.

McDougal.

Once he was done cleaning his clock, I asked him to at least let me in on what we were hauling in the big rig.

"You got 400 pallets of nitroglycerine, 30 cases of Grade A PCP from San Juan, Puerto Rico, and a dead endangered skink back there, hot rod," he laughed. I knew the "you" meant that I personally had purchased it all and loaded it fully under hypnosis, giving him witnesses and fingerprints to clear his name in case this thing went belly up. I was in deep.

I wiped the sweat from my brow and tried to remember where I was last conscious. Grand Funk Railroad reunion? No. Tibet? No. Ahh.. then it came back like a flash,

I'm standing on a diving board in a hilltop pad in an L.A. suburb. Rodney Dangerfield is doing lines off both of my big toes and there's McDougal, naked as the day he might die, drinking out of a plasticized blowfish.

"Salty Dog," I hear him say in a bleary crash of drugs and Ro-Tel cheese dip, "you're going to drive that rig if I have to hypnotize you and hide behind bushes giving you commands to make sure you get it all packed and loaded on deadline."

So that explained it. Now I just needed to get the damn thing over the border, shut the yapping Shi Tzu up in the overhead sleeper, and get McDougal to quit shooting bottle rockets at the state troopers.

"Pull over at the next stop, Jansport, and let's get some Arby's."

I reminded him that the brakes were out and I'm sure you were expecting this one - yep, he took a woman named Joan Finley, tied her to the grill, threw her out like an anchor, and brought the whole mess to a screeching halt: troopers, truck, skink carcass, and Puerto Ricans. We got the 5 for 5, and damned if McDougal didn't give me his Potato Cakes for not getting too mad about it all.