On the Side

In the Depression Era 30s, McDougal did a stint as a sideshow performer. He didn't need the money, but as a Communist in those days McDougal felt it would be a great gesture to the Proletariat.

Yes, McDougal is a freak of nature ... but McDougal's freakish elements are not the kind men normally pay to see (can eat metals, can hold his breath for over nine minutes, has been alive for somewhere between 5,500 and 8,000 years, etc.).

When the former proprietor of the freakshow interviewed McDougal, he told him that while his resume was impressive, McDougal wasn't really the right fit for the program. McDougal then beat the man to death with his own shoes, skinned him, roasted him on an open pit, and fed him to the freaks by telling them they were eating rhinoceros, which they found incredibly exciting and exotic.

With the former sideshow CEO permanently dispatched, McDougal promptly shook up the line-up and made himself the main attraction. Crowds would come in and watch bearded women pleasure themselves with sticks and rocks; tattooed midgets wrestle alligators, hyenas, bears, and bearded women; old Vietnamese men contort themselves in impossible positions, and Chinese dogs type French manuscripts (blatant rip-offs of Camus ... but since Camus hadn't yet penned his first novel, the dogs, it turns out, were quite revolutionary), and your typical sideshow fare.

The show was about four hours long, and the crowds were usually pretty racked from second hand opium smoke by the time McDougal's act came on. It's hard to say whether that was a good thing or bad thing leading into McDougal's "performance."

McDougal then walked out on stage (usually jacked up on a mix of opium and oxidated horse dung) in a three-piece purple velour suit and a rhinestone studded tophat and sat down on a three-legged stool and lit a pipe.

When the pipe was lit, an American Indian (usually a Navajo) would walk out on stage completely naked and offer McDougal a plate of pickled herring, which McDougal always refused -- generally to the great delight of the assembled crowd.

When the indian was gone, McDougal would sit and smoke his pipe for anywhere between four and 38 minutes (depending on the crowd).

In McDougal's version, that's all there was to the act. However, according to two verified reports from the only surviving members of the sideshow the "act" was "performed" about 12 or 13 times and inevitably concluded like this:

McDougal sits there smoking his pipe while the audience watches. While the amount of time varies depending on the crowd, the inevitable reaction is boos, hisses and grunts, and finally attempts to depart the tent. It is at this point that McDougal's "act" spins into a horrific and terrifying direction.

The way the story is told, McDougal would let the first person out. No one's sure if this was a gesture of compassion or a ploy to lure the rest of the audience into a false sense of security. He'd let the second person get one foot out of the door before leaping out of his seat and attacking him with the blunt edge of a hatchet that witnesses swear materialized from thin air.

McDougal would then collapse the tent on the remaining crowd and summon a pack of wild half-starved Irish Springer Spaniels, who would viciously attack the crowd. While the crowds were busied defending themselves against the spaniels, McDougal would bellow a deep gutteral "barooooooga," which would call in the nude Navajo and a horde of Belgian mercenaries who'd swoosh in on toboggans and beat the entire crowd to death with their penises.

I asked McDougal the other day if the witnesses accounts were true and the big man smiled, and responded with one simple word.