you can look at the river over the FDR. Next Friday, two o’clock, I’ll be on that bridge.”
“Me, too.”
Walking around without a gun felt good. I never liked them—they always seemed to make things worse. But what I really didn’t like was guys who liked guns. Some of them, when they handed over what they were carrying so I could see all the special stuff for myself, it made me feel … slimy, like.
Not the gun itself, the whole idea. Like the way those guys in the Sex Offender Treatment Unit would be talking about the stuff they did. Just listening, it was like some of their—I don’t know what to call it—like some of what they were would rub off on you.
I don’t like being around the iron jockeys, either. I never felt right listening to them talk. Maybe that’s just me. Maybe I just don’t like most people.
I got shot once, a long time ago. The slug went into my upper arm, never touched bone. The doc in the ER was an Indian. Not one of those guys you see in cowboy movies; from the country India. He said I must have done something very good in another life to have deserved such luck. I was a little fuzzy, but I could tell he believed what he was saying.
Turned out, the bullet just went in one side and out the other. A nick, they called it. That Indian doctor said the only danger would be infection. Not from the bullet, from not keeping it clean.
I remember asking him how come I couldn’t get an infection from a bullet. In prison, some guys would dip the points of their shanks in their own shit, so you could die from the poison after you were stabbed. I didn’t tell the doctor that, but I really did want to know.
“A projectile launched at supersonic speed would generate so much heat that it would be sterilized,” he said.
“What’s ‘supersonic’?”
“Did you hear the shot?”
“Yeah. After I—”
“You heard the shot because it broke the sound barrier. That’s what makes it supersonic.”
“Thanks.”
He gave me a confused kind of look. But maybe it was the drugs they were pumping into me that made me think that.
They didn’t even keep me. Just gave me a couple of more shots, cleaned it all out, and packed stuff inside before they taped me up.
The cops came. I knew they would. The ERs, they’re supposed to call in any gunshot wound, even if you tell them it was an accident. There’s docs you can go to who won’t call it in, but they charge an arm and a leg, even if they don’t have to take one off.
And—who knows?—they could be on some cop’s Rat Rolodex themselves. A doctor who gets nailed for writing scrips by the pound, he’d “cooperate” with the cops in a second—that prescription pad, that’s his moneymaker.
So the rule is, if you got shot doing something that could drop you down a well, that’s when you take the chance. Say you’ve got a cop’s slug in you, no way you can let a hospital take that out.
But with the bullet I took, I knew I was on solid ground.
What I told the cops: I never saw the shooter. I got no beef going with anyone. Broad daylight, probably one of those punks trying out his new nine. Or maybe it came from inside one of the buildings I was walking past.
What they told me: They can’t protect me if I don’t come clean with them. Maybe the next time, the shooter won’t miss.
They were as bored as I was. Without a slug to put under their microscopes, there was nothing they could do, and we all knew it.
Whatever they put in the wound finally dissolved, just like the doctor said. All it left was a little pucker mark, like a vaccination.
But when I went back to the gym, some of the guys looked at the arm and said it was ruined. They were really sorry for me. I didn’t get it at first. I mean, soon I was back lifting the same weight I always had, so what was the big deal?
One of them explained. He said that bullet had spoiled my skin. You could hide some stuff, like the blackheads they were always getting all over their backs and shoulders, but what I had would never look right.
I asked him, look right for what?
“You don’t compete?” He sounded kind of … disgusted, like I told