Growing up in a steeltown going obviously down the toilet, sometimes I had to dodge a bullet. The first time I was fourteen years old standing in the woods near a strip cut smoking a filtered cigarette. An older boy I\u2019d known for a long time, a dark-haired boy who\u2019d had a driver\u2019s license for over a year and could bench press nearly 200 pounds, said he wanted to shoot the cigarette out of my mouth with a pistol. The boy\u2019s younger brother was there too. He was leaning against a birch tree. A minute earlier, offered the same proposition, he\u2019d said, \u201cNo way, man. Not a chance.”<\/p>\n
Of course, that sealed it. If his own brother refused to stand at parade rest in the middle of a replanted forest on the ridge line above a played-out coal mine and let him fire a copper jacket hollow point a few inches from his milk-white face, I sure as hell was willing. \u201cWhy not?\u201d I said. I took a quick drag and pursed my lips, pushing the cigarette out as far as I could. Closing my eyes, I locked my hands behind my back. I waited. A pistol crack echoed through the forest.<\/p>\n
After, the cigarette still jutted from my mouth. Untouched. No one said a thing. When I asked the younger brother afterwards if it was Doug\u2019s suspect marksmanship that kept him from volunteering, he told me that wasn\u2019t it. “He\u2019s a pretty good shot,” he said finishing up his Coca-Cola and getting up, “as far as that goes.” It was only later\u2014after Doug took a pot shot at two boys fighting in a field\u2014that I heard he\u2019d been talking about shooting somebody square in the head all that antic summer and how he just might get away with it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
If his own brother refused to stand at parade rest in the middle of a replanted forest on the ridge line above a played-out coal mine and let him fire a copper jacket hollow point a few inches from his milk white face, I sure as hell was willing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":19466,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[760],"tags":[3206,110,3205],"class_list":["post-18732","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-creative-nonfiction","tag-deindustrialization","tag-guns","tag-risk","writer-damian-dressick"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18732","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18732"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18732\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19467,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18732\/revisions\/19467"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19466"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18732"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18732"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18732"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}