Your Goose is as Good as Mine

McDougal keeps a gaggle of geese in his guest bathroom.

He got interested in geese about three years ago, while on a drive through the Carolinas with a crew from the mortuary. He swears that the goose spotting on this trip was the first time in his life he had ever seen or even heard of a "goose."

"Wait, the bird is called a goose?" He asked. "You mean goose ... like when you stick your finger up someone's asshole when they're not expecting it? What an odd name for a bird."

"I don't care what you call them," he said. "This marvelous foul is a bird of paradise in my book. And his trumpeting the most beautiful sound I've ever had fortune to witness."

As Benny, Marv, Laurie and I motored through Asheville, McDougal began reaching his giant hands out of the window of our speeding Subaru Justy and grabbing geese out of the air in mid flight. Within minutes he'd pulled in two dozen of the dreadful creatures, and they were frantically flapping their wings and clearing their bowels.

McDougal was in heaven. Covered in gooseshit from the nape of his neck to his ankles, he just smiled and moaned in ecstacy.

Once he'd filled every square inch of the Justy's cabin with geese and goose excrement, he insisted that we roll up the windows to prevent their escape and turn the heat on to "lessen their excitement."

Within ten miles the heat and pungent ammonia-like aroma of goose shit had caused Benny, Marv, and Laurie to lose consciousness. I was not far behind them. I asked McDougal for permission to pull over to get some fresh air. The big man denied my request and demanded that I keep driving, but not to exceed 30 MPH, which McDougal said was maximum goose flight speed.

I made it another 15 or 20 minutes max before I passed out from the heat and the smell.

When I came to, Benny, Marv, Laurie and I were handcuffed to the steering wheel, and the car was afloat in the Tennessee Tom Bigbee.

We were later freed by a Coast Guard crew, and decided to let the car go. Much like Larry King, It's time on this earth had passed.

I went to see McDougal when we got back home -- just to let him know we were OK. He said that our health was of no concern to him.

He had replaced the bathroom door with a hinged chicken wire gate and covered the floor with cedar chips and gravel, and was lying in the bathtub with a mighty Canadian perched on his pecker.

There was no sign of any geese.