It felt as if someone were pressing a lit cigarette to my thigh. I knew that burn, thanks to my father’s drunken humor, but this was worse. I’d been shot.
There was no bang. No pop. No fanfare. Just a sudden, intense burning sensation emanating from my thigh as I sat, back against a streetlight, trying to make sense of what happened.
In the spring of 1982, the adults in my neighborhood on Manhattan’s Upper West Side seemed perpetually consumed by work, drugs or family dysfunction. The streets were left to us kids. Like something out of “Lord of the Flies,” roving bands of Black and Puerto Rican boys besieged the neighborhood.
Their presence could mean several things: an epic game of football was underway, someone’s bike was about to be stolen, or something worse. The news media eventually labeled all of us “wolf packs,” but as a Black child in that world, I felt more like prey.
I was 8, sitting alone outside, lost in my latest batch of collectible baseball stamps. Ten feet away was the local ice cream shop, which doubled as an arcade. Inside, neighborhood kids marinated in the electric hues of Pac-Man, Donkey Kong and Centipede.
There was no hole in my pants, barely a mark — just the mystery of the burn.
I tried waiting out the pain the way one does a charley horse, but it surpassed all familiar thresholds: my sister’s pinch, my mother’s belt, my baby sitter’s extension cord.
I had never considered what death would feel like. But as the agony breached the realm of the unbearable, I started to understand.
I had developed rules of survival while running beer and cigarette errands for my father: Scan the horizon for trouble, and always be ready to run. My fast feet were my parachute. I tried making a break for the arcade, but my leg was crippled, so I crawled. Using the door to get to my feet, I hobbled inside. Inside, my whimpers were drowned out by the clamor of kids. Their lives were on autopilot. Mine seemed about to end.
By the time I found my sister, my face expressed what my mouth couldn’t. Panic. Confusion. She was only three years older, but when I was under her supervision, she was both mom and dad. “What’d you do?” she accused. “It hurts!” I cried.
She led me to a small gap behind the games and peeled down my now bloody pant leg. A chunk of flesh the size of a quarter was missing from my thigh. I shuddered at the sight of it. I had hoped the cause of my pain was a bug bite. A red ant. But there was nothing natural about it. I needed help — real help.
The closest thing to an adult was the teenager working behind the ice cream counter. He was a tall, blond-haired white guy who looked as if he were on loan from some California beach town. My sister asked him for a first-aid kit. Oblivious to everything but the clock, he replied, “Sorry, employees only.”
My sister pushed back: “Look at his leg!” The sight of the bloody Rorschach taking over my pant leg sent him scrambling to the back. He returned with Band-Aids and rubbing alcohol — it was all he had. Even as a child, I found that absurd. The regret on his face suggested that he did too.
Before he had a chance to call 911, a pack of boys close to my age, with dingy clothes and unkempt hair, swarmed the entrance. Their leader surveyed the room then asked, “Did somebody get shot?”
Shot? I’d been shot! My pulse hammered. Were they there to finish the job?
I scanned the group for a familiar face — someone I had played stickball with, or tag. I recognized one kid from the projects around the corner. I knew him to be wild, maybe even dangerous — but not murderous like the stickup-kid-turned-hit-man my father occasionally left us with while out buying weed.
The eyes of these boys were solemn, maybe afraid — at least I was betting on that as I raised my hand.
“We stole it,” the leader said, explaining it was his older brother’s gun. They had fired one shot, he said, from the playground just around the corner. It soared over the building and, by sheer chance, found me.
“We sorry. We ain’t mean for nobody to get hurt.”
The gentle handshake that followed somehow felt like a gift — giving me permission to breathe again. It was the same feeling I had at the end of each of my parents’ arguments leading up to their separation.
Happy to be alive, I accepted his apology. After they left, the kid behind the counter offered to call 911. I shook my head. Hospitals sometimes brought more complications. Besides, the bleeding had stopped. The kid handed me a free ice cream cone instead. That bit of sweetness — the cone and gesture — made everything feel better, at least for a moment.
Finally out of harm’s way, I turned my attention to protecting my father. He was a world-champion boxer — part of Sugar Ray Robinson’s team. By the time I was born, all that was left of his career was a box of newspaper clippings at the bottom of our closet. Still, his hands could destroy any man. I had once watched him beat a guy unconscious for harassing my sister. But these boys had older brothers who fought with guns, not fists. If my dad found out that I’d been shot, more bloodshed would follow. And I couldn’t be certain whose blood it would be.
Once home, I convinced him that the cut came from someone throwing something from a window — a common occurrence in our neighborhood. Enraged, he pressed the issue: “What building? What window?”
Once I sold him on the flying object story, all that was left to do was ride out his waves of emotions.
While brutal in so many ways, my father was tender in his intentions with us. He had spanked me only twice, both times with a silk necktie.
My home was ill equipped to treat my wound, much less heal it. A search of our medicine cabinet yielded nothing but more Band-Aids and alcohol. Our local pharmacist recommended stitches, but my father didn’t like hospitals either — not since a doctor’s order ended his boxing career. We opted for ointment and gauze instead.
I was in my 20s, at a family gathering, when I finally exposed my secret. It was met with gasps and laughs, before being trumped by a cousin’s equally gruesome knee-slapper.
Later, my mother pulled me aside. “Did your father know? Why’d you keep it from us?” “Because …” I said, “I handled it. Don’t worry, it was a long time ago. I’m fine.” Disbelief etched into her face, she shook her head, chuckled, then returned to the party. I followed. She was wise enough to see my naïveté but not wise enough to save me from it.
Thirty years after the shooting, an X-ray of my leg found no bullet.
But the onset of panic attacks after the birth of my son revealed that the wound was, in fact, still there, everywhere.
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