As the World Turns: Just Another Saturday Night South of the Border

By Ed Rogers

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.

Goines On: The young doctor

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The first words Goines said to himself as he lay in bed this morning were, “I am going to die.” They felt truer than usual, more forthright, more definitive, as though he had merely mouthed them before, saying someone else’s words, quoting them, as when he reported what that doctor who wrote books said, “We are all going to die of something.”