True Story (4)

So one night, about twelve years ago, this was, I'm out cruising on my motorcycle ('65 Harley Panhead. The guy who sold it to me said it used to belong to Sonny Barger, but I kind of doubt it)... I had just left the bar and was enjoying the cool night air, when I start to get the craving for a taco. Everybody knows tacos are the perfect late night snack. Don't trust anyone who says otherwise. They're probably Al Qaeda.

Anyway, I pull into one of those late night fast food taco places. I'm waiting my place in line, mentally playing out that classic debate: Hard Shell vs. Soft. The car ahead of me finishes his order and pulls through. But before I can pull up to that beautiful glowing menu with the speaker set into the middle, this white Cadillac whips around me. I'm dumbfounded. I like to imagine we live in a civilized society, the kind of place where a nice orderly line is respected, maybe even embraced. Line cutting is bullshit. So I hop off my bike and walk up to the window of the Cadillac to tell the driver so. But instead of entering into a discussion of patience as a virtue, I find myself looking down the barrel of a 9mm handgun.

"Great," I think to myself, "I'm about to die over a taco."

Suddenly there is the roar of an engine and terrible crunch. Now, instead of looking into the window of a Cadillac, I am looking into the window of a pickup truck. The Cadillac skids across the parking lot, up over the curb and into a clump of trees. The two gang bangers climb out of the Cadillac and take a few steps toward the pickup truck, but stop dead in their tracks. The man inside the truck is gigantic, and he is holding the two biggest chrome revolvers I have ever seen. This guy is so big that he has one gun out the driver's side window and the other out the passenger's side window, and he never even had to shift in his seat. The gang-bangers, wisely, decided to get back into their damaged Caddy and took off.

I asked the big man his name, and he told me it was McDougal. I shook his hand and offered to pay for his meal.

It cost me three hundred seventy-two dollars and sixty seven cents.