Year of the Rabbit

McDougal and I were in Tibet last Halloween.

I dressed as Robert Mitchum in "The Friends of Eddie Coyle." McDougal dressed as Peter Boyle.

McDougal shanghais a ricksha, and at gunpoint he forces the driver to take us into town.

Of course, I don't speak a word of Chinese, but McDougal knows enough to get around. We pull into this Kosher deli, and I get some hummus and a bag of raw oats. McDougal orders a couple of Panda steaks.

Well, the damn Chinese are freaks about those pandas. Next thing I know, the waiter loses it on us and launches about two dozen throwing stars smack into McDougal's gullet.

McDougal goes down hard. He dies right there on the spot; and I'm left alone and helpless in a foreign land.

Then the waiter says to me, "Ming mao a itsi wei."

I kind of just shrug my shoulders, so the guy says to me in English, "Peter Boyle is dead."

Just then, the real Peter Boyle busts in with an uzi and a sawed-off pump action 12-gauge. He kills everyone in the joint, then throws McDougal over his shoulder and says I'm to follow him.

Boyle rushes us to some monastery up in the mountains, where a kindly old Buddhist monk brings McDougal back to life.

Boyle looks at McDougal and says, "Now we're even."

The monk wanted my autograph, so I signed "Robert Mitchum" on his forehead qith a quill dipped in yak blood.

On the way out, this little AmerAsian boy tells us they don't celebrate Halloween in Tibet, so we hop on a freighter bound for Long Island and get there just in time to enter a costume contest at a wharf-side pub.

McDougal won 1st place for his Andy Warhol costume.

I was disqualified because they thought I was a real rabbit.