Anatomy of a Star

Did I ever tell you about the time that McDougal and I went yachting in his pancreas?

I know some of you have probably heard this before, but the whole thing was just so amazing to me that I feel it bears repeating.

One night, McDougal and I had just eaten about 415 beef ribs between the two of us, and I was lying cramped up on the bathroom floor, bemoaning my inferior digestive system. McDougal - ever the gracious and compassionate host - came to my aid. He lifted me from the bathroom floor and instead of mocking my weak duodenum or making fun of my overly acidic digestive fluids, he says to me, "Son, let's go for a walk."

He then takes me by the hand, opens his mouth four and a half feet wide and guides me down his esophagus.

Let me tell you some things you may not know about McDougal:

First off, his breath is divine. It's holy. It's nothing short of a modern day miracle. Words don't do it justice, but I'll tell you, as we trekked past his uvula, I smelled the sweetest scent ever to drift through these nostrils. The air in the back of that man's mouth is like a cross between fresh cut cedar and sweet crude oil. It's intoxicating in its brilliance.

Secondly, the man's hygiene knows no bounds. I remember remarking upon the absence of sinewy matter lodged between his teeth as we climbed over his right molar. You know what the man told me? He said that he'd trained himself to floss with his mind. After every meal, McDougal actually willed his teeth clean. Listen, I know you're doubting me here, and if I hadn't seen it with my own eyes, I would never have believed it. He spent about thirty minutes trying to teach me to do the same, but I'm just a fucking dolt, and I couldn't learn. The lesson ended with me and tears at the base of his tongue and him prying out four of my rotted teeth with a pair of makeshift pliers fashioned from a couple of silver pie servers.

I know I've seriously digressed here, but one third amazing thing I learned on that journey -- McDougal's esophagus is lined with delicious aspic. Now I know a lot of you may not be fans of the jellied meats, but when he busted out the pâtés and foie gras, I might as well have died and gone to heaven right there. Seriously, if you're ever in the vicinity of McDougal's liver, please try the foie gras. You just have to trust me on this one.

Anyway, the whole day was really on a rapid downhill slide after about my 39th beef rib. I'd gone from a state of pure ecstasy and unbridled joy to boundless despair and an overwhelming sense of futility in life brought on by incessant projectilvomitingng and shitting out 5-7 feet of my own intestinal tract.

I don't know what powers McDougal harnessed on that cold December night, but the big man managed to see right through me -- to cut through that bravado and faux machismo that I'd strapped on like a prosthetic penis somewhere in the vicinity of my 95th beef rib. He saw deep inside me -- where I was really hurting. And like the miracle worker he is, he tended to that deep open wound that ran from the pit of my stomach all the way to the tail end of my hardened black soul.

He really opened himself up to me that day. And I don't mean that exclusively in the literal sense that you might interpret from me recounting the tale of walking into the big man's stomach. I mean, he showed me a soft, warm side of him that I'd never seen before. And that is something that I will never forget.

And it wasn't until we reached his cystic duct that I realized what a true marvel I was witnessing.

"Go ahead," McDougal said. "Touch it. It's all copper."

"Jesus Christ."

The man had replaced the crappy fibrous tissue that originally lined his digestive tract with solid copper. It was, truly, a thing of beauty.

He said the maintenance was pretty tough, which is why he'd figured out how to do it all himself, but it was well worth a little extra elbow grease for the kind of performance he got from his enhanced system.

Anyway, when we got to McDougal's bile duct, I was only half surprised to find we weren't alone. I was, however, quite surprised to find the original inhabitants of the Roanoke Colony living happily in the safety of the big man's gullet -- 450 years after they vanished from the New World.

I spoke briefly with a Lumbee elder who explained how the tribe had come to live in McDougal's belly, and how he was able to clean the copper around McDougal's sphincter with a brush he'd crafted from beaver pelts, potato skins, and a 5,000-watt diesel generator. I thanked him for the information, and McDougal said it was time to move on -- We'd see the sphincter later, he promised.

And we did eventually make it to his sphincter, which was of course, clean as a whistle, which (as it turns out) is an appropriate comparison because McDougal can whistle Pachelbel's Canon in D Major through his asshole, and it actually sounds better than the London Philharmonic, I shit you not. Which is just how McDougal explained it to me as we climbed out.

I think I left out the part about the boat. I guess it wasn't really that germane to the story anyway.

"So you see, Larry," McDougal announced as he shat us out on stage during some G.G. Allin tribute band show somewhere up in British Ontario. "The digestion you lament is attainable only through alchemic upgrades that you do not currently possess."

And you know what? That motherfucker was talking in metaphors.

And he was completely right.

That night I shot myself in the head and bled to death alone in some shitty hotel outside of Denver.