I swear I never meant to shoot the guy

I once shot a man.

Boy, when you come right out and say it like that, it sounds pretty bad, doesn’t it? Of course, there were extenuating circumstances. The guy was robbing me. The shooting was an accident. And the offending projectile was not a bullet, but a six-inch long arrow.

Maybe I’d better start at the beginning.

I was 19, living in a third floor efficiency apartment in a less-than-hospitable section of Detroit. I made a passable living as the bassist and token white guy in a blues band playing various clubs up and down Telegraph Road. Live music was the thing in those days, and we played five, sometimes six nights a week, so most evenings, my apartment was empty until well after 3 a.m.

On this particular night, however, I had called in sick with a terrible case of the flu. By 10 p.m., I was in bed, heavily sedated with over-the-counter flu meds, and sleeping like a baby—a sick and drugged out baby.

It must have been around midnight when I first noticed the light slanting into my combination living/bedroom from out in the hallway.

Being “Nyquil-ized,” I rose to wakefulness slowly. It took a full minute before I realized I wasn’t alone in the room. Someone—from my perspective only a dark shadow silhouetted against the hall light—was riffling through my dresser, methodically opening each drawer, inspecting its contents, then moving on to the next.

Like most folks living in the neighborhood, my apartment door sported the Detroiter’s vertical line of deadbolt locks. In my drug-induced haze, I had forgotten to engage any of them, and the guy currently checking out my underwear and socks had simply waltzed on in.

Because of the questionable geniality of the neighborhood and my desire to live beyond my teen years, I always slept with a small, pistol-type crossbow secured between my bed and nightstand. It had all the stopping power of a BB gun, but I somehow felt safer knowing I wasn’t the only resident in the apartment complex sleeping unarmed.

Moving slowly, as quietly as possible, I wrapped my fingers around the crossbow’s pistol-grip and pointed it in the general direction of the intruder. It was—I swear—my intention to point only, and use my manliest voice to bark out something like, “Do you feel lucky punk? Well, do ya?”

It never got that far. Nervously raising the crossbow, I exerted just a touch too much pressure on the trigger. Thwap! The tiny arrow flew, passed through the intruder’s left cheek (the cheek south of his beltline), and thwunked into the opposite wall.

Emitting a yowl I can only describe as a cross between a deranged yodeler and a bobcat snagged in a barbed wire fence, the intruder grabbed his backside with both hands and bolted out the door.

Though positive I was going to wind up doing hard time at Jackson, I called the police anyway. The two cops from Detroit metro who showed up half-an-hour later took the report, giggling like schoolgirls throughout most of my narrative.

“He should be easy to find,” said the older officer. “We’ll check the emergency rooms for a guy with an arrow hole in his butt.”

That was the last I heard about it. This was Detroit in the ‘70s and the cops had bigger fish to fry.

I left the arrow stuck in the wall as a reminder. Sick or not, I never again forgot to lock my door.



More “Reality Check” online at http://mtrealitycheck.blogspot.com or www.milive.com. E-mail Mike Taylor at mtaylor325@gmail.com.