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Back in 1959, when I was sixteen and newly released from the hospital after being shot through the mid-section with a forty-five, I was with four friends and we were on our way back from Boystown, which is outside of Matamoras, Mexico. About three blocks from the international bridge we had a flat and there was no air in the spare. It was decided that, because of my condition, I would stay with the car along with one other of our friends. The other two headed off with the spare toward the bridge and the 24-hour gas station there that, at one in the morning, was all that was open.
It was a hot summer night, so we stood outside of the car smoking cigarettes and shooting the bull. It wasn’t until a man came down the sidewalk across from us and stood in a doorway that we noticed the other three men that had come out of nowhere and were also hiding in doorways on each side of the street.
A black car pulled to the far curb and parked. Within seconds, a van crossed the intersection and stopped beside the black car. We were still standing there smoking and talking. A danger light should have gone off by now, but it didn’t. The man across from us pulled a gun and started running toward the van, as did the other men. We were still just standing there looking at all this and wondering what was going on. Then the shooting started. We hit the deck and rolled under the car, which offered little protection, as it was the rear driver’s side tire that was flat and the rear was jacked up. It sounded like a war then police cars raced in from four directions.
You would think that kids growing up that close to the border and being around Hispanic people every day would have learned the language. That’s not the case. We could order drinks and negotiate the price for sex but that was about the limit for most of us. So, when they dragged us out from under the car and began shouting at us, we had no idea what the hell was going on.
When our two companions returned, the police had our billfolds turned inside out on the hood of the car and we were in handcuffs. One of the two who returned – Zeke – was Mexican, thank God.
It took some talking on Zeke’s part, but in the end the police let us go. We had been in the middle of a drug bust, and the cops had been saying we were lookouts for the dealers.
As we were putting the flat tire away, we noticed the two bullet holes in the trunk, right above where our heads had been as we lay under the car.
| Copyright © 2020 by Ed Rogers |
GREAT STORY, Ed, OMG. As for your bilingual skills "We could order drinks and negotiate the price for sex but that was about the limit for most of us." I'm glad you at least learned the most important words first.
ReplyDeleteZeke and the other friends from that night were morphed into the characters in the Book Boystown. One of the guys was the one that had shot me--how craze is that. They are all dead now, and I'm still here. I joined the Army and left, they stayed and ran drugs.
ReplyDeleteEd, seconding Roger's words: you have a heck of a backstory...or here on Moristotle I guess it's a Side Story...about being shot by a .45 and surviving. I've seen people shot with a .45 and I've never seen any of them walk away: How on earth did you manage that?
DeleteThe most important words for a gringo to learn are "Una cervesa mas, por favor," and "Donde es el bano?" But damn, Ed, you have some awesome "backstory" going on there...
ReplyDeleteUnlike Ed I have a deep and permanent emotional connection with the characters in my stories, real, real and fictionalized, or totally fictional. In Dancing at the Driftwood Hotel, I made up a character named Horace Ball, give him a nickname. "Horse Balls," put a picture of an unknown relative in the back with all the real characters, labeled it "Horace Ball", and did a completely fictional bio on him telling how he went on to be a doctor (as everyone in the story always knew he would). I don't always even do this consciously, I couldn't stop creating characters if I wanted to. One in my latest work in progress, "Geneva Pitt", was inspired by a highway sign in Georgia I saw 25 years ago, Geneva to the west, Pitts to the right. And I don't know about other writers, but when I turn a character loose in the world they do NOT, as Ed said, always do what I want, nor do I always determine what happens to them. In Drinking Kubulis at the Dead Cat Cafe, a central character is killed so fast in one scene that until I saw it on the screen, I didn't know myself! I remember and love every single one of them, they are my children, my creations, and like children, they do not always behave. But sometimes, like some children, they redeem themselves, and me with them. In reality, every single character created by a writer is an image of the writer himself, a possible version of who they would be if they were that person. We put ourselves in that body, at that moment, with that history, looking from those eyes, and me, I just kind of report what I see as things go down. Perhaps if you were the type to create characters in your head (I reiterate; I have no choice in the matter) you might have that connection to the characters of others. And thanks for a great discussion on fiction theory-I guess I thought I was the only one who agonized over the mechanics of creating that "suspension of disbelief" so critical to writing, film or stage, but it seems others here, notably Ed and James, share my curiosity and passion.
ReplyDeleteRoger, I finally cracked the code and found your post here. Yes, you and Ed and others on Moristotle have great passion for breathing life into characters and making them more exciting than if they were real--and your fictional writing shows it. I, on the other hand, have great passion for facts and reality--and my fictional writing unfortunately shows it. Being able to suspend reality is a gift, cultivating it requires more time and effort than some of us are willing to take away from achieving our goals in the real world. On the bright side, it all usually seems to work out and keep matters mostly in balance.
DeleteI may have been a little cavalier when I said that to my cousin. The one reason I enjoy writing fiction is it is like reading a book for me, I never know where it will go from chapter to chapter or how its going to end. With non-fiction you know how it ends, maybe not the facts that lead to the ending but the outcome is part of history.
ReplyDeleteEd, you said what to your cousin? I re-read your post and your comments, but I don’t find what you might be referring to. Is it just my eyes?
DeleteSorry that was in the other post, going back an forth is nuts. I said I wrote fiction because the characters had to do what I wanted them to do.
ReplyDeleteYou're right Ed, the long post I made here was supposed to go on Paul's article! I got them mixed up too.
ReplyDelete