Updated 2 years ago
Everyone has incidents which helped shape their lives, and their particular politics. Here’s one of mine.
Once long ago in Conroe, Texas some stupid kid with a BB gun the next street over shot me in the cheek from a hundred yards away. This only pissed me off.
Years later, when I was about 12 in 1980, I had a group of friends who all played video games and skateboarded together also liked to go out by the railroad tracks by my house and played what we called “BB Gun Wars.”
We didn’t have eye protection or anything, we just sorta randomly broke out.
At some point I had bought a CO2 pistol, which was much more powerful than a BB gun.
The next time three of us went out by the tracks to an area where the tracks are surrounded on both sides by a canyon:
One of my friends ran across the other side of the tracks, which was about 30 yards away, and climbed up the canyon and started shooting at us from behind a tree.
I crouched down and yelled at him to stop shooting, pointing out I was now carrying a much more powerful gun.
Yet he kept shooting.
We were always a little competitive, the way adolescent boys are, so finally I succumbed to bravado and started shooting back. I wasn’t gonna “be a pussy.”
I was able to get off 5 rounds for every one of his.
It went on back and forth for about 20 seconds when he yelled to stop.
He left his cover and approached us.
He was bleeding profusely from his face.
We could barely see through all the blood that he had been hit on his lower forehead, almost exactly between the eyes.
We made camp, and squeamishly tried to dig down with a Bowie knife to find and extract the BB.
It was too deep.
We stopped with the guns, and I never picked up another. I tossed the CO2 gun once when pulled over, a cop found it in my trunk.
Years later at a reunion, on our late 20s, with the faint bravado of adolescence still coursing through our veins, my friend and I still joked about it.
The BB was still lodged in his forehead. He had never told his parents for fear of getting in trouble, and had never had it removed.
Obviously, an infinitesimally small hair left or right (or even below…) and he would have been dead, blided, and/or seriously brain damaged, and I would have carried the guilt my entire life.
Right-left-up-down. That is the cross I bear.
I still carry the shadow guilt.
I am a completely different man than I was even in my 20s. It’s taken decades to admit to myself that I don’t have all the answers, life is complicated, and am simply too flawed to have life or death responsibility over another human being.
