Tag Archives: childhood

Did I tell you ’bout the time I got shot in the back?

gun-smaller.jpgNo? Well it’s not very interesting, but I’ll tell you.

*cue transitional scene music* It was the summer of 1985. I was a young lad, clad in my green Izod shirt, out playing in the large yard of a neighboring house behind our apartment building. My brother, who is five years my senior, and some other kids liked to play back there because it was large and open but still had lots of trees and bushes and other foliage to play around and under.

It was a sunny day, a perfect day for…bleeding. From a gunshot wound. To the back.

Ok, well when I say gunshot wound, it was more like a BB, uh, shot wound. But it really hurt! See, we were playing and my brother was being the typical mean big brother and he threatened to shoot the other kids. He had one of those multi-pump BB guns. You could pump like 40 times and do some serious BB damage. So we all ran off back towards our apartment building.

Then, everything slowed down. My legs just wouldn’t move fast enough. I felt a white-hot heat on my back just before it exploded in pain. The next thing I know I’m being carried by some neighbors to our apartment. Mom’s on the phone calling dad and generally freaking out. I’m looking in the mirror at the bloody hole in my back and whimpering. I imagine my brother was hiding out at this point.

We make it to the emergency room and they dig around the hole in my back for about an hour and a half but they can’t find the BB. The hole goes about an inch and a half in. Eventually the doc says “oh well” and puts a bandage over the hole.

WHAT?!

Excuse me, doc, but I don’t want this thing in my back for the rest of my life. What about metal detectors at the airport? I don’t want to be labeled as a terrorist. And what if Magneto walks by one day? You know he’ll sense that BB in my back and won’t be able to resist ripping it out of my body. THROUGH MY HEART. And I’ll have to explain to every X-Ray technician what that little white dot in my back is on the film.

Well, here we are 20 something years later and luckily I’ve only had to worry about the last one. But don’t think that when Magneto escapes from jail in X-Men 2 it didn’t scare the poop outta me.