Coworker takes a bullet

I once saw a guy get shot, and I was glad that he got shot.

I was sixteen, working as a dishwasher at a restaurant in Alabama, where I grew up. One of the cooks (I can’t recall his name now) was a hard-drinking, skinny guy of about twenty-five who constantly bragged about all the social undesirables (usually by race and sexual orientation, whom he designated by the standard slurs or by ones he proudly invented) he had beaten up.

One night while I was taking out the garbage I saw silhouettes against the light of a street lamp off in the distance, about a hundred yards away near a creek bridge backing up to an all-black housing project behind the restaurant. I recognized him among them from his long straight hair, mustache, body shape, and especially the way he held is arms out away from his side in what he seemed to think was a “tough guy” stance. He was having some kind of confrontation with what looked like some teenage guys from the project.

I rolled my eyes. He’s probably drunk, at it again, I thought. As I tossed the garbage into the dumpster, I saw him run at one of the kids, a tall, thin guy. As the kid retreated across the bridge, he stretched his arm out at a slightly downwards angle towards my redneck coworker. The garbage fell into the dumpster with a loud clanging noise, and I went back inside.

About ten minutes later I wandered back near the meat cooler, where a saw a bunch of my coworkers standing around in a circle. Tough Guy was sitting in the center, his pant leg pulled up above his knee to reveal a trickle of blood coming from a small grey object sticking out of his shin bone. He was grimacing, gritting his teeth.

An ambulance had been called. Some knowledgeable woodsman among us figured it was a .25 caliber. The wound was clearly not life-threatening, nor permanently crippling. But the pain was clearly excruciating :)