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.

Fejee Mermaid

For well over 100 years the Fejee Mermaid has been regarded as one of P.T. Barnum's most infamous hoaxes. What has not been revealed, until now, is McDougal's very important role in the saga of the Fejee Mermaid.

Contrary to popular belief, Barnum did not intend on perpetrating a hoax with the Fejee Mermaid from the outset. With, by today's standards, so little of the world explored at that time, new and amazing species were constantly turning up. Barnum was, of course, eager to exploit anything new and unusual. Being somewhat of a charlatan himself, he was naturally skeptical of the truly bizarre items that people were constantly trying to sell to his museum.

Barnum must have initially been highly suspicious of that mysterious merchant who repeatedly sent him letters full of tales of mermaids in the secluded waters of the Pacific isles. However, when the merchant finally arrived with a specimen, a live specimen no less, Barnum was elated and immediately paid the man without even trying to bargain down to a lower price. The "mermaid" was a dreadful creature, more monster than maiden, but Barnum had learned long ago that the grotesque attracted far larger crowds than the beautiful anyway. He immediately set about the seemingly contradictory tasks of hiding the creature away from prying eyes and heavily promoting its arrival at his museum.

When the exhibit finally opened, the crowds lined up to gaze at the upper body of a monkey sewn onto the tail of a fish, quite lifeless. This was a crude hoax, even by Barnum's standards. Nonetheless, it did not seem to hurt ticket sales at all. This was not much consolation to Barnum, who had arrived at his museum to find an empty tank where the exhibit that was supposed to be his greatest triumph once was. Instead, he was forced to cobble together yet another cheap ruse. The legions of suckers out there in the street may not have cared, but Barnum knew that the mermaid was real, and this filled him with rage.

Fiji Mermaids, as the island is now spelled, were incredibly long-lived. However, they were also incredibly slow to reproduce. The islanders hunted them, believing them demons and white men harvested them, hoping for a quick buck, though no other living specimens ever made it back. The last gasp of the Fiji Mermaid seems to have been the heavy bombardment of World War II. In the decades since, no one has sighted a single Fiji Mermaid in the waters of the Pacific islands. However, at least one Fiji Mermaid survives, unknown to modern science. It swims inside a large saltwater aquarium, where McDougal has kept it since the day he stole it from P.T. Barnum. Above its tank, for company, hangs the original Mona Lisa. That one that hangs in the Lourve? Just another hoax...

The McDougal Family Tree: A Portrait in Greatness (Part 4)

The late 1800s are regarded among historians to be the Golden Age of the Circus. By 1944 numerous factors, including the rise of the motion picture, the Great Depression and two World Wars had caused a steady decline of the American circus, but it had yet to be dealt its death blow by the arrival of television. It is in this climate that we find Bernard Stockton McDougal, owner of a struggling circus, tearing down his tent after a weekend of shows in Lawrence, Kansas. The Saturday afternoon show, his best-selling of the weekend, still only filled a mere 150 seats in his 800-person capacity tent. These were desperate times for Bernie McDougal. Overwhelmed by the cost of feeding dozens of exotic animals like elephants and camels, he had not paid most of the human performers in weeks. The entire sideshow walked off the job three weeks earlier, taking their freakish talents to a rival carnival. In Albuquerque he had been run out of town on a rail when a newspaper reporter revealed that his "zebras" were diseased horses stolen from a local glue factory.

As Bernard McDougal sat pondering his misfortune, a newspaper drifted across the empty fairgrounds and caught on the tent support rope nearest to McDougal. The headline caught his eye immediately and he snatched up the paper. That same weekend, in Hartford, Connecticut his largest competitor had a tragic fire! Hundreds killed! McDougal could not believe his luck. He knew immediately what he had to do. McDougal franticly called around, canceling his remaining Midwest dates, and set off by train for the East Coast.

Upon his arrival in Boston, Massachusetts, Bernie McDougal furiously promoted his weekend performance, paying particular attention to Boston's wealthiest neighborhoods. He promised the cream of Boston's high society that for the princely sum of five dollars they would be able to witness the spectacle from very special "Gold Circle" seating. However, when the morning of the performance dawned, these wealthy citizens found themselves seated not within the big top, but on a large set of covered bleachers two hundred yards away.

Meanwhile, inside the tent, a capacity crowd of widows, orphans and Irishmen, who had paid a nickel each, were enjoying the antics of various clowns, animals and acrobats. At least, until the cry of "fire" began to ring out from several different locations inside the tent. Bernard McDougal had spent the entire train ride East stewing over the free publicity that his competitor was receiving from newspapers across the country and grew determined not only to match him, but to finally one-up him.

Outside, the Gold Circle spectators watched, fascinated, as the horror unfolded. Afterwards, all agreed that although they found McDougal's use of the widows and orphans in the act to be a bit distasteful, they did not think that they would really miss the Irishmen all that much. They also agreed that Bernard McDougal had really thought of everything when planning the show. The Gold Circle bleachers were erected upwind, out of the smoke, and the spectators were fully protected from trampling by panicked crowds and dangerous flaming elephants by an enormous wrought-iron fence.

McDougal's success was short-lived of course, as he was immediately arrested for numerous counts of murder and arson. But to quote one stunned spectator "although Mr. Barnum's circus has ownership of the title, for today at least, it was B.S. McDougal's Circus that was truly the greatest show on earth."

State Fair

Couple of years ago, me and McDougal were at the State Fair down in Columbia. Now you know McDougal's a big man. He goes like 6'9", 320. We get to the weight guesser and the guy shouts, "Hey, Golliath. Let me guess your weight."

McDougal takes a deep breath and swig of PGA from that half-gallon flask he always carries. Then he holds up his Churchill and spews the liquor all over it, sending a huge fireball at the weight guesser. Lights the guy up like a Roman candle.

McDougal just sits there while this carnie burns to death, jumping around, screaming, and just going nuts. It takes about 14 minutes for him to cook all the way through.

When he falls dead, McDougal leans in, picks the guy up, and swallows him whole.

He then looks over at the bearded lady and says, "You feel like guessing my weight, too, you nasty yak?"

She looks at him with those cold, black yak eyes, and says, "Probably about 402 after eatin' the weight guesser."

Goddamn if she wasn't right.