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.

A Pleasant Evening Down South

A couple of hours ago, I remembered that I owe McDougal about $1,600 (US) for several assorted expenses and debts that have added up over the past six nights.

I also remembered that McDougal had my family tied up in gunny sacks in the crawl space beneath his trailer.

I also remembered that he had poked three holes in my liver with an ivory handled letter opener he'd received as a gift from Margaret Thatcher in 1981 ... and that he'd bound my hands and feet with leather straps and had secured a long piece of nylon (maybe about 30 feet long or so) to my ankles and was dragging me behind his Cutlass at that very moment.

I wondered why I hadn't thought of all that before.

I wondered if surgeons would be able to reattach my right thumb or to cosmetically repair the words McDougal had etched into my back with an ice scraper: cogito ergo vagina.

I wondered if McDougal was going to stop the Cutlass and come back and talk to me again.

I wondered if he was going to tell me another joke like the last time we stopped, when he said:

“A rabi, a nun, and a prizefighter walk into a bar. The nun and the prizefighter sit in a booth, and send the rabi to the bar to place their drink orders. The rabi says to the bartender, 'I'll have an imported beer, two bottles of Listerine, and a dozen egg whites.' The bartender says, 'Your honor, I can understand about the beer, and even the Listerine, but what the hell are you going to do with a dozen egg whites?' The rabi didn't say, a word. He shot the bartender eight times in the mouth, then went and sat down with the prizefighter and the nun. The nun was shocked. She says to the rabi, 'Mr. Ashcroft, why on earth did you just shoot that man?'”

I'm not really sure how the joke ended, or for that matter, if it was even a joke at all. I think McDougal might have actually been recounting some experience from earlier in the evening. Either way, I passed out before McDougal got to the punchline because the plastic bag he'd placed over my head restricted the amount of oxygen that was available to me at the time.

He didn't stop though until we got back across the border, when he said he forgot why he had cut off my thumb and tied me to his bumper.

“That's funny,” I said. “Over the course of this evening, I've forgotten most things I knew in my life, too.”

McDougal said that in my case, that actually made sense because he'd removed the left side of my brain and sold it to some Mexican scientists for beer and gas money in Matamoros.

It had been a long night, and McDougal and I were both pretty hungry, so we stopped at a Denny's in Brownsville. McDougal ordered the Texas Scrambler and I just had some toast.

Engine Mounts

Was all that on the menu at the Italian restaurant?

Actually, I know what you're talking about. McDougal NEVER orders anything on the menu.

Back last August (after his 5th heart attack), McDougal and I were at a Denny's in Deer Springs, Missouri. The waitress (young girl, couldn't have been more than 18 -- cute ... looked like an American Michelle Wie) comes up to take our order.

McDougal's staring at the menu and he busts out (in French) with, "Yeah, sweetie. I'll have the engine mounts from a 1979 Desoto soaked in a light Brazillian pepper sauce and liver paste, warmed but not burnt, the ass end of a rodeo clown, and three hundred thousand fresh blueberries with a side of amaretto ice cream and a barium enema."*

The waitress doesn't even flinch. She just looks at me. I'm speechless at this point. I don't know what to say. So I just sit there, staring like an idiot.

Then McDougal orders me the Grand Slam.

I'd never had it before.

It was the best meal of my life.

~~~
* In the original French:
Ouais, bonbon. J'aurai les bâtis de moteur d'un Desoto 1979 imbibés dans une pâte légère de sauce et de foie à poivre de Brazillian, chauffés mais non brûlés, l'extrémité d'âne d'un clown de rodéo, et trois cents mille myrtilles fraîches avec un côté de la crême glacée d'amaretto et d'un enema de baryum.