Being Shot [Part 1 of 2]

By Ed Rogers

The following account is a true story. I have used the real names of individuals who were with me during the time recounted.


It was 1959 and I had just turned 16 years old that January. We were taking our mid-term finals in school. There was no need to be at school unless you had a test. I had finished my only test that morning and had the rest of the day off.
    As I was walking toward the street, some of my friends called out to me. It was Dudley Jobe, Arthur Cline, and Jack Kerney, who were all in Dud’s Nash Metropolitan. I ran to the car and Jack got into the back. The rule was that the shortest people rode in the back (leg space was limited back there).
    Dud’s father owned three gas stations around town and was well-off. Cline’s father was a judge. Jack and I were just poor nobodies, but the other kids liked us. Plus, we had known each other since the sixth grade, where I had decked Jack and we had become best of friends. The other two had been friends with Jack, so it came as a package deal. Besides, at the time, there was only one other person I knew that had a car.
    We were kicking around ideas what to do. We soon gave up on going down to Mexico, as none of us had any money. It was the same for going to the beach; it cost a dollar to go across the bridge. And when I say we had no money, I mean no money of any kind.
    Cline spoke up and suggested we go by his house and pick up a gun his dad had and go shoot it down by the Arroyo River. The Arroyo runs into the Rio Grande and is used to irrigate the farmland around the Valley. No one swims in the river and very few boats go on it because of the biggest alligator gar I have ever seen. There’s a cliff by the river where people go to shoot their guns. It made a great firing range.

    The gun was a chrome-plated Colt 45 semi-automatic. Cline’s father had gotten the gun after a murder trial he had been the judge on. He had ten rounds for the gun. They were tracer-rounds, their bullets made of brass, but hollow with phosphorus poured inside – important for what was soon to happen.

We shot nine of the bullets and, because they were tracers, we couldn’t hit shit. So, we quit and headed back toward town. I heard – but can’t understand to this day why Dud and Jack didn’t hear – Cline say he was putting the last round in the clip and no one should mess with the gun.
    On our way back into town, we passed a park across the road from a cotton gin. As far as parks went, this one wasn’t much. It had a wide-open grass area and two tables. We sat under the trees that shaded the two tables for a while and I’m not sure who came up with the idea to get on top of Dud’s little car and hold on to each side of it to see whether Dudley could throw us off. It was a ride as scary as hell, because the only hold each of us had was a hand inside each window opening while our bodies slid back and forth with each turn. Lucky no one was hurt or killed.

    Afterwards, I sat on the ground for a while leaning against the side of the car. I could hear Dudley on the other side of the car talking about the gun. I stood up across the hood from him and saw that he had his back turned to me. I was about to tell him to put the gun away before he shot someone when I heard the slide move back and forth, putting the final bullet into the chamber. And before I could say anything, he turned with what he thought was an unloaded gun and aimed it across the hood at me, his idea being that he was going to scare me.
    I have read books and seen war movies where they would say, “You never hear the one that kills you.” They’re right; I saw the fire jump from the barrel, then felt something like a baseball bat hit me. I don’t remember falling to the ground, but Jack said I hit the ground and bounced back up like a rubber ball.
    I was bent over holding myself. Blood was pouring over the top of my hand and through my fingers. It looked like I had been hit in the heart. The first thing that came to my mind was, “I’m dead.”
    My three friends were going crazy; they were running about shouting, “What should we do!?” I seemed to be the only calm one among us. At last I said, “Get me in the car and drive to the hospital.”
    I had squeezed the hole in my side hard enough that the bleeding had stopped, but blood still ran freely from the bullet’s exit wound. I was told later that the floor of the car was covered with my blood.
    I began to feel myself sliding down a long tube. I knew the end was coming and Jack was leaning over the seat holding me. I looked at him and said, “Tell my mother I love her.” Then I was gone.

There was no
bright light,
nobody
waiting for me
– just darkness

The next thing I remember was opening my eyes and seeing that Jack was still there, with tears now running down his face. I said, “I just died.” He said, “I know!” There was no bright light, nobody waiting for me – just darkness.
    While I was gone to wherever I went, it had been decided that the car was going too slow and we needed faster transportation. They had stopped at Sammy’s, a local drive-in that everybody hung out at. I could hear Dudley and Cline screaming about me being shot and needing to get me to the hospital.
    Jack tried to stop me but I was getting out of the car. Bones Russell caught me before I hit the ground. He helped – or more than likely carried – me to Buddy Tanner’s 1956 full-blown Chevy. Bones put me in the front with him on one side and Buddy driving on the other. I was told much later that we were doing over a hundred on the way to the hospital. I raised my shirt at one point and hollered back at Jack, “Those 45s do make a hell of a hole in you!”
    The bullet had entered just below my left rib cage. It had torn a black and red hole about two inches long. I must have tried to turn away from the bullet because it went across my body and come out under my right arm. Like a rocket, it had driven up to within a half-inch of my heart and then turned down, and then back up, going through my liver and taking off the bottom part of a lung, coming out between two ribs on my right side. The phosphorus had cauterized as it traveled through my body, and that’s the reason I’m alive today – that and the fact that the operating doctor had been in a MASH Unit in Korea.
    At the hospital, they lifted me onto a gurney, and one of the ribs, where the bullet had come out, broke and protruded from my side. Up to this point I had not been in any pain. It sounds crazy, I know, but now the pain was really bad.

“Put me
to sleep!”

    I knew I was dying and I had little hope of living much longer, but I didn’t give a shit about that: dying was one thing that I couldn’t stop, but the pain…someone needed to put me to sleep, and fast.
    In the emergency room, they were cutting my shirt off and asking me questions. I pulled my billfold from its back pants pocket and threw it, hollering, “It’s all in there. Will you put me to sleep now?”
    Someone put a mask over my face and told me to breathe deeply. I asked, “Will this put me to sleep?”
    I was told no, but it would help me to breathe. I knocked it away. “I don’t want the damn thing. Put me to sleep!”
    Then they were rolling me out into the hall. Dudley was laying on a gurney against the wall. I hollered out, “What the hell is he doing laying down? I’m the one that got shot.”
    Rolling me into an elevator, they hit the back wall with the gurney. I blacked out. The next thing I remember is a nurse patting me on the shoulder and saying, “Now, now, son, you mustn’t use that kind of language.”
    The last thing I remember is a doctor saying, “We’re going to put you to sleep now.”
_______________
[Part 2 – Final will appear on Tuesday.]

Copyright © 2021 by Ed Rogers