Shots (a true story)

By Pat Hamilton

Nick and I walked home from the campus movie, knowing that a few cold beers in the breeze on the front porch would cap the end of a long stifling summer day.
    “Help! Help!” someone cried next door. “They’re killing us all in here!”
    We knew the sound like popcorn popping or tiny fireworks came from automatic weapons, so Nick ran down my steps and up the steps next door, so I followed him.
    “Police! Open up!” he shouted, pounding on the door, and bounded, faster than any wink back down those steps, back up the others, and into my apartment. Shots came from behind the old cheap plywood door before which I stood frozen, lacking Nick’s agility. I managed to descend one step and plaster myself against the brick front wall and to notice splinters peeling from the door.
    It soon opened, and a line of five or six youths filed past down the steps. They looked right at me but miraculously did not unload their weapons into me.
    I had hoped that Nick had called 911, but nobody showed up.
    A policeman lived right across Clinch Avenue from me and saw the whole thing. He applauded my heroism over a sandwich later in the week.
    Nobody got murdered in that house that night. Some car windows and windshields got shattered.
    The kid next door, James, thanked me later and I called him JJ, and he asked how I knew his family called him JJ.
    Thereafter, he took me up to his third-floor room and introduced me to the blunt. I’d heard of them but never seen or tried one. This one was a cigar emptied of its tobacco and stuffed with hi-test weed. We passed it around til I couldn’t take any more.
   “No, no. Go ahead!”
    So I did.
    Which is why this true story lacks a point or a moral, unless you noticed that nobody took action except for two fools: Nick, a silvered thespian, and me, a Chaucerian.
    The movie was An Affair to Remember, and we finally got to polish off a few beers on the porch in the cool of that night. My point, after all, is to express astonished gratitude that I’m still here with you all.
    Think of all we’ve been through!

Copyright © 2023 by Pat Hamilton Pat Hamilton has written three novels, hundreds of songs, and a handful of book reviews for the papers. He taught College English for 30 years, which helps him blend popular and classic literature in his writing. As an Army brat, he traveled the USA and Europe before settling into the beauty of Tennessee, but the rock star he used to be still lives on inside him.