Spring Break

"Do you ever get tired of writing all those lies about me?"

And so began another confrontation between McDougal and I about the contents of this very web page. These were becoming an almost daily occurrence since his discovery of my weblog while he was on the run from the law following that nasty business on Superbowl Sunday.

"They aren't lies McDougal, they're the honest-to-God truth."

This particular discussion was taking place through the bars of a jail cell in Key West. McDougal absolutely despises Florida, yet he owns a great deal of land in the Keys. I suspect there is a story in there somewhere, involving illegal activity. His presence in the jail had nothing to do with that though.

"If they aren't lies then why the hell don't I remember any of that shit."

McDougal was incarcerated because he was the only person in the Keys that fit the description of the man who viscously assaulted a street performer the previous evening. Some sort of singing wizard or some such nonsense. The street performer, that is... The suspect was described as a white male, approximately 7' 3", 415 pounds, wearing a toga fashioned out of a banner advertising a popular Mexican beer and a crown of barbed wire.

"Um... If I had to guess? I would say a combination of booze and drugs, coupled with rough living. You know, repeated blows to the head and such..."

Apparently the street performer made a joke about McDougal's appearance, as if a man wearing a robe and a peaked hat, strumming a guitar has much room to talk. Obviously McDougal took offense, because they found the man beaten senseless with his own guitar.

"I do believe I'm going to have to kill this son of a bitch."

McDougal was speaking of the public defender who was standing next to me. I suppose you are wondering what a man of McDougal's wealth and power was doing enlisting the services of a public defender... The county was anxious to move the weekend's backlog of cases through court, however McDougal's attorney had spent the entire day before his client's arrest engaged in nine rounds of the Diary of Anne Frank Drinking Game with McDougal, and had not yet regained consciousness. There wasn't a single other lawyer in the State of Florida who would come near McDougal with a ten foot pole.

"Mister McDougal..."

That was the maximum number of words McDougal would allow to escape the public defender's mouth before he interrupted him. The attorney explained to me that he wanted to pursue an insanity plea based on statements McDougal made to the 27 arresting officers about his abilities to move fluidly through time and space and to make the laws of physics bend to his will. McDougal wouldn't hear of it.

"The United Nations wasn't able to find me insane, what luck does this shitwater burg have?!"

The public defender just looked confused by this argument. Apparently he didn't read the newspapers much between '85 and '87. McDougal changed tactics...

"I'm going to tell you a story. Listen carefully, because I'm only gonna tell it once. When I was hiking in the mountains of Austria back in 1892 I came across a family who were being set upon by a pack of rabid wolves. Now, ordinarily, I would have walked on by, maybe stopping for a minute to point and laugh. But the family had a young boy with them, and so, for once in my life, I decided to show a little mercy. I fought those wolves for three hours, losing a bit of my left thigh in the process and contracting a case of rabies. That young boy grew up to be Adolph Hitler. I have to live with that every day of my life, and I haven't shown a millisecond of mercy to anyone since."

The public defender repeated that story in court the next morning and all charges were immediately dropped.