Spacejunkies

Did I ever tell you about the time I was abducted by aliens? It was McDougal the whole time, of course, but... Well... It's a little more complicated than that.

See, I was sitting on McDougal's couch thumbing through a copy of the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition that was sitting there. He had invited me over to watch this video he just bought from one of those guys downtown that sells bootleg DVD's out of a shopping cart. It was called Arabia's Funniest Beheading Videos or something like that. McDougal swore it was going to be a hoot. So anyway, after he invites me inside he says "sit down, I'll be back in a minute," but then he disappears for like half an hour. So I'm sitting on the couch looking at this magazine when I start hearing this humming noise. It keeps getting louder and louder, so loud it makes my fillings rattle. Then it just stops suddenly. That's when McDougal hops out from a doorway and pulls his face off.

I laughed of course, McDougal is always playing pranks like that. Underneath his "face" is... Well, you've all seen those rubber alien masks... Giant almond-shaped black eyes, nostrils, but no nose, tiny little slit of a mouth... McDougal lunged across the room and grabbed me by the front of the shirt, lifting me up off the sofa. As he pulled me close I could see beads of sweat on that giant round forehead, the corners of the mouth twitched, those huge black eyes blinked... Conventional wisdom always says that aliens are little fellows. McDougal is not. I would say that if it turns out McDougal is half Martian, half Samoan... Well, that would explain a lot.

"You think this is funny, human?" McDougal whispered menacingly. With one hand he tossed me right through a window into the front yard. I never hit the ground though. Instead, I was drawn upward within a blue beam of light into McDougal's spaceship which hovered above the house. McDougal came up the beam immediately after me. He barked some orders to the ship's crew in a language unlike any I've ever heard and the ship zipped off into the night.

He probed me of course. Probed me viciously. In the anus.

You would think that all the probing would have ruined the trip for me, but McDougal's spaceship was just so damned fascinating that, after a while, I didn't really notice it that much. Outside of the mechanical anal raping, McDougal was a very gracious host. He explained to me, in detail, the function of various ship systems and how they were constructed. If I had a better understanding of things like thermodynamics, molecular chemistry, particle physics, nanoengineering and quantum mechanics I could probably be a very rich man by now. But, unfortunately, I had no deeper understanding of what I saw than that there were some really neat, shiny gadgets.

Like a metal pill that contained thousands of microscopic robots. If you swallowed it, the robots would be released throughout your body, curing any illnesses they encountered. And a device that could convert any organic waste into delicious and nutritious foodstuffs. McDougal explained to me that the ship was powered entirely by the energy given off by all living things, so as the ship swooped over the farms and fields, instead of expending energy, it was actually gaining it from the crops and livestock that we passed over. When we had gathered enough of this energy we rocketed out into deep space and, as we journeyed across the universe, McDougal showed me more and more amazing things, each more incredible than the last...

I woke up on the floor of McDougal's living room, my right hand clutching a half-empty box of .357 hollowpoint bullets. The unpleasant heaviness in my stomach led me to believe that I had, at some point, swallowed the other half. "Well, good morning!" McDougal roared as he entered the room with a pot of coffee, looking quite human. I tried to move my left hand, but couldn't. It was jammed deep inside a blender which was encrusted with vomit. Fortunately the blender was not plugged into an outlet. Instead, the plug was jammed deep into the side of a dead carp which lay on the floor.

"What..." I tried to speak, but my throat was dry and raw.

"You've been tripping, my friend."

McDougal explained that I had inadvertently picked up one of his latest experiments, ordinary-looking magazines soaked in high-powered acid, and absorbed a massive dose of LSD through the palms of my hands.

"You've been running around my house for three days ranting about aliens," McDougal said, laughing, as he sat down in front of the TV, where a large man was cutting off someone's head with a sword.

"The spaceship..." I mumbled.

McDougal laughed and pointed to a 1973 Plymouth station wagon, wrapped completely in Christmas lights, that was crashed halfway through the wall of his dining room.

"I don't know where the hell you got that thing and, to tell you the truth, I don't want to know," he said, not taking his eyes off the TV.

"Why did you shove this vacuum cleaner up my ass?" I asked, gingerly removing the long hose from my rectum.

"You did that to yourself, you twisted little fuck," McDougal replied.

I left his house, embarrassed. It all made sense. McDougal wasn't really an alien. He couldn't be. It was all an acid freakout. A bad trip. Except for one thing McDougal... How do you explain this tattoo? You know the one I'm talking about McDougal. The one between my shoulderblades, where I could never possibly have put it myself. The one that changes shape, glows in the dark and pulsates like a jellyfish. The one that contains letters no one in the entire Foreign Language Department of Rutgers University was able to identify. The one that is, right now, alternating between that red alien lettering, and the phrase "McDougal's Bitch" in neon yellow English letters which have helpfully arranged themselves backwards so that I can read them in the mirror. How do you explain that McDougal?