Part IV of IV

"Is he feeding Bananarama?!" McDougal yelled, frightening the server under our table and knocking a ramekin of syrup to the floor.

There are many offenses McDougal classifies as punishable by death. I didn't think feeding bananarama was one of them, but I decided I wasn't going to stick around to find out. I grabbed one of the unspilled ramekins and threw it at the man's family. This caused a slight commotion, just enough for me to put a sack over McDougal's head and run out to the parking lot.

Sack over his head. What a terrible idea. As soon as my foot hit the pavement, I felt a giant mitt come down with the force of a steel press on my right shoulder.

McDougal must move at the speed of light.

I turned and began to recite the lyrics to "Gimme Three Steps" (which is a kind of McDougal lullaby), but it had no effect. The sack was still over his head.

"They are free," he moaned and I looked, the Denny's father had unchained two of the Bananaramans. They were clambering into his Honda Odyssey.

The ground began to tremble under my feet.

I turned back to face McDougal, who had inhaled the bag and was swallowing it as I laid eyes on him.

"Sinner," he said. "REPENT!"

I'm a Branch Davidian and am unsure of how to repent. I told McDougal as much.

It was at this point he pulled out his PDA and looked up the "Repentance" section of the "Catholicism" entry on Wikipedia. We sat down for about 15 minutes while he read aloud to me (around the bag in his throat) and answered any questions I might have had (of which there were 3). Once we agreed eye to eye on the finer points of the concept, we resumed positions and he punched me in the neck.

You know how freakin' big McDougal is, right? And strong. Like a goddamn bear. So, obviously, the neck punch took my head completely off. I felt like such an idiot ... my head just lying there on the ground, staring up at my body as it teetered and after a moment or two, collapsed in a heap.

McDougal then picked my head up by the hair and hurled it as hard as he could at the fleeing Odyssey.

As much as I hated going through the rear window of the van, I was absolutely delighted when I landed face down in one of the bananaramans' crotch.

And that's basically how it was the whole way until we got to Tampa.

Smokestacks and Pipe Bombs (Part III of IV)

I pull the lichen off my sack and throw it at the blonde one in Bananarama, and she quickly eats it. McDougal never lets the Bananarama girls eat on these kinds of trips and I feel bad, I usually hide fries and stuff in my pockets and sneak them when McD is asleep. She kind of grunts at me in appreciation.

"Okay Max, stop this car and let's find some drugs," he yells, even though the car is sitting quietly in a Denny's parking lot and my name is not Max.

"Will do," I say, and open what's left of the passenger door. We walk into Denny's, where people get shot all the time, and sit down in a sticky booth. I try to imagine what we must look like, McDougal with his He-Man costume and giant stuffed purple tiger, me completely nude. God, how did I come to this.

"We'll have the best drugs you have, and some flapjacks," he orders, and then adds "and I'm running for President."

Next thing I know the server is under the table sucking off McDougal, I'm smoking PCP out of a Chinese bong, and we have more blueberry pancakes than we need. I offer some (pancakes) to the family sitting next to us and they decline, so I quietly ask the dad if he'll sneak some out to the 80s girl band chained to the axle of our car. He agrees, and I relish the small victories of life.

Moss Back Lichen (Part II of IV)

I woke to find a mouth ful of Flexerol. Or Flexerel. Flexiril? The one where in the commercial the woman is throwing a dying mouse to her cat and Still the Same is playing behind the medical warnings: you could lose your genitals, don't take with Prohaxenol, you may have reflux, don't run faster than a fast walk, you could die.

I look over and see McDougal is asleep at the wheel. Well, at the wheel is generous, as he is actually in the back fucking Bananarama, and asleep, but you get the point. It's a colloquialism. I drop my eyes down and see that the accelerator has a brick on it. I look up and see the sunroof has a flag of Switzerland flying out of it. I look down and see my scrotm has lichen scotch-taped all over it.

"McDougal!" I whisper.

What the crap are these? Raisins? (Part I of IV)

McDougal stole a boat. Not like a yacht or anything. Just some stupid-assed row boat or john boat or canoe or something.

Thing is, there's no goddamn water here.

Nights I can't sleep because I never know when I'm gonna open my eyes to see the big man standing at the foot of my bed with a molotov cocktail and a disemboweled otter or something.

He wants to raft the Tennessee Tombigbee, raping and pillaging the power substations along the way. Says we'll live off the fat of the land, we'll get our food from trees, our sex from local shops and gas stations, our spirits from drinking methanol.

There's no such thing as methanol.

I tell him, you can't run for president and rape people at gas stations at the same time. He responds by cuffing me with a broken chalice and eating my Wii.

"You have NO IDEA what men of power can do," he says to me.

"That was a line from Revenge," I tell him.

"No way out," he says.

"Oh yeah. I forgot those were two different movies. Man, Costner loves him some formula drama doesn't he?"

"No way out," he says again.

"I Know. I know."

"Seriously," McDougal says. "You're going to die here."

So I grab a satchel and pack the necessary accoutrements for a boat trip with McDougal: lotion, pears, grenadine, four mongol (mongrel? Maybe both?) children, boom box, pack of blank cd's, some rainwater in a goose bladder, eight Fortune magazines from 2003, and a pile of nickels.

"That's it?" McDougal asks. He seems pissed.

I run through our last outing. What the fuck am I forgetting?

"Banana-fucking-Rama!" McDougal barks.

Shit. I forgot Bananarama. And I got no idea where they are.

"Relax," McDougal says. I follow him outside where he opens his trunk and there they are ... the angels, Siobhan, Sarah, and Karen.

"Hello, Ladies!" I say with a smile.

Karen immediately and violently vomits all over the trunk, my pants, and the asphalt.

"GUFFAW!", McDougal guffaws.

"Three of my world famous Syrup of Ipecac Martinis and look who can't hold her jelly!"

I feel bad for Bananarama, but fuck, they signed up for this shit. No pain no gain.

We peel out of the driveway, McD and me in the front seat, Bananarama in the trunk, and the satchel left back in the puke on the asphalt. All of us are nude and bruised from the neck down. I can see that McDougal is heading South, which is in no way the direction of the Tombigbee, but I don't bother to tell him.

I know what's south, and all I can do is drift to sleep to gather strength.