Continued from last week…
The funeral was beautiful, if somewhat sparsely attended, with sun seeping through the balmy boughs of the palms that lined the memorial park. After the ceremony, while chatting with a few generally reliable sources, over a few generally reliable drinks, I learned, and was reminded of, much.
First, Phil’s sister Jeanie brought to my attention something I’d completely forgotten, something that might bring the Dr. Phil saga a bit closer to home: Do you recall the incident a few years ago where a guy had one of his fingers bitten off by a Portland Police horse? It was in the papers, and even made it briefly into the national media.
Anyway, yes, that was Dr. Phil.
Long story short, he’d come to visit, and after a night of partying downtown, we stumbled by the stables where the cops keep their horses, which was on the way to my apartment at the time. I remember we were having a particularly heated and boozy argument about whether dogs or whales had greater intellectual capacity, and midway through one of my rants (I was on the dog side of the debate, my thesis being that they had to deal with people, which is always a complex and trying proposition, while whales simply swam around and beeped at one another) I realized that Dr. Phil was no longer with me. I looked back about half a block to find him scaling the fence to the stables, and just as he reached the top, one of the horses came by and, for no apparent reason, plucked one of his pinkies right off, chewed it, and swallowed it.
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