McDougal in the Raw

"Let's get some of that raw fish that them slants eat."

Whenever I hear those words I know it's time to find a sushi restaurant, and fast. McDougal is extremely susceptible to suggestion, particularly when the suggestion is his own. McDougal is an absolute fiend for sushi, but he steadfastly refuses to say the word. I've never been able to figure out quite why. It may be some sort of weird superstition... That's the best I've been able to come up with because his Japanese is excellent. So much so that he is able to order his favorite delicacies using the accent, no matter how subtle and obscure, of whichever city, town or village a given sushi chef hails from. But when he speaks to me of sushi, he always cloaks it in backwoods racism. Now that I think of it, perhaps it is out of contempt for my complete inability to pick up the Japanese language...

Anyway, McDougal's love of raw seafood knows no bounds. Why, one time while we were snorkeling on the great barrier reef, much to the horror of the tourists on shore. McDougal repeatedly dove down to the bottom and emerged with live sea urchins, which he immediately cracked in half and loudly sucked out the still quivering flesh. Actually, this alone probably wouldn't have been enough to horrify all of the beachgoers. Some were no doubt cosmopolitan enough to appreciate the value of fresh Uni. It was McDougal's attire that really got to everyone. McDougal, you see, favors Speedo swimsuits. He is, as I have mentioned before, a very large man. Comedian Drew Carey once said that if he were to put on a Speedo he would look like "a Bartlett pear with a rubber band wrapped around it." That's not a bad description, but it doesn't take into account one factor. The skin of a pear is rather firm, whereas McDougal's is not. Don't get me wrong, there's a full acre of tightly coiled muscle under there, and woe unto the man who forgets that, but the exterior layer is fairly flabby. McDougal is much like a walrus in that respect.

A few of the tourists might have still been unfazed by this display, particularly any who had been to the beaches of Greece where fat men in Speedos are common, but there was just one more thing... The Japanese believe that Uni, the sea urchin, is a powerful aphrodisiac. Personally, I doubt this very much. It seems to me to be more of an exercise in psychology, specifically the power of suggestion. But as I said earlier, McDougal is extremely susceptible to suggestion. So there he stood, glistening in the Australian sun, loudly slurping on a sea urchin's spiny shell, with a massive erection bulging out of the lycra of his Speedo. An image like that burns itself into your gray matter in a way that now amount of drugs, alcohol or therapy can erase.

A Trucker's Journal

An excerpt from McDougal's diary.

He doesn't date his entries, so I have no idea when this was written. I tried to cement a timeline by the TV shows and technology he lists, but it seems to be all over the board. McDougal is timeless.

On the road from Cincy,
Stopping soon to watch Quincy.
She's a re-run
and I've seen her before.
Hope to see a new episode of Highway to Heaven
tonight. I live for the TV.
Goddamn it's hard to type and drive.
Double
clutch. WHo knew?
Over the counter speed and the finer stuff.
Gonna pack
it in, I think.
Drive this rig into a refinery. Take us all out.
Burn
out hot and die fast ... better than the alternative slow, cool fade.
And
these high-tops smell like a filthy rest stop latrine.
Hold on ... something
in the road.
Hitcher.
I put the pedal to the metal and he's in my
sights.
Barely even makes a noise, and he's left mangled in my wake.
Was
an Indian man by the look of it. LIkely Comanche.
And I drive on.
Like
the man in black says. Drive on.
There's a Krystal in Branson, and I think I
can make it by suppertime.
I eat like a bear when I'm on the road.
Out
of trashcans and without use of my thumbs.
Catch fish when I'm near a
stream. Of consciousness.
And these pills lock in my vision.
And I'm
alright.
Says so on the radio.
8-track.
And sometimes when it's
late, and I'm alone in the cab, I put on John Denver.
He always says,
"Please, McDougal. Let me go."
But there's the sushi.
And I can't.
Got a copy of Dianetics. Think it's a diet book or something. Stole it off a
dead gypsy in Aimes. Wondered for a minute if that dead gypsy wasn't me. A quick
look up her skirt just to be sure, and I'm alright.
I push the pedal down to
the floor and the old tanker rumbles. The road is empty. Wide open. My own.
Trailers for sale or rent ...
You know the drill.
You know the
skiff.
The skit.
The story.
It's the same story, really.
The
same one you tell your kids at night.
There are bears, and princesses, and
poison arrows.
And off to the side of the road, those pines, in symmetrical
rows.
And I'm tired.
So I take another handfull of speed and a swig of
Dickel, and the road calls me dear.
I don't answer her.
That's the
siren's song.
The song that pulls me out of bed in a cheap motel room in
Tuscaloosa or Alameda or Wichita.
She says, get movin' you fat, old bastard.
You can't stay still.
That's how they catch you.
Those demons.
Get back out there.
Don't stop.
Never stop.
I grip the wheel
tightly to stop the shaking
of my hands.
Bare hands
Bear hands.
And I'm constipated.
Got the 'roids.
Damn this trucker's diet.
And these headaches.
Thank God for B.C. Powder and Art Bell.
And I
see the black helicopters, and I know.
They're coming for me.
Those
demons.

Rocky Mountain High

In some ways it's not so bad to be eating sushi off John Denver's back, but in other ways, it's one of those things that in retrospect you know you wouldn't do if it wasn't for McDougal.

McDougal LOVED "Rocky Mountain High". He would play it over and over again, this was in the days before he could make a tape of the song back to back, or a cd of nothing but that song repeating over and over again, or fill an 80GB iPod with 16,000 320kbps mp3s of the exact same song. Back then he would just hit rewind on the 8-track and he got to where he could hit the beginning of the song to the second and yell FUCK YEAH at the top of his bong-ravaged lungs.

Most times it would make him cry, or shit himself, or blubber. If he saw it in a jukebox out somewhere he would destroy the jukebox, saying he was pulling the "essense of the song" from the machine or some late-70s horseshit like that. He claimed Fleetwood Mac as Mr. Denver's sworn enemy, and single-handedly caused the band to break up and impregnated that girl with the long black dress and would have impregnated Lindsay Buckingham except men cannot be impregnated.

So one day he hauls off and kidnaps John Fucking Denver. I was like, "McDougal, you can't do that." He tied Mr. Denver down to a table and we ate all our meals off him, and the poor guy had to pretty much sing that same song 24 hours a day. If McDougal fell asleep, Denver would beg and plead with me to set him free or feed him some food or blah blah blah, and of course McD would hear him and wake up and start blubbering and beating him about the torso. Then Denver would shut up and sing and we were pretty much like that til 1987.

Summer of 87 I let John Denver free mainly because I was so Goddamned Sick of that song. McDougal I don't think even noticed, he was heavy into Nordic Metal and was busy with graduate school.

The day John Denver died, McDougal called me up and said "Sally, want to go down to Mexitown and get some cheap ponchos?" I did, and that led to the icefishing incident I told you about in July.