Be careful what you ask for, you just might get it

 Boys, I've noticed, often want foolish things. Your average nine-year-old, for instance, has no practical use for a flame-thrower. But I've never met a boy who didn't want one.

When I was nine, there was nothing in the world I longed for more than to be shot. With a gun. Preferably in the leg.

I knew it would hurt, probably a lot, but I didn't care. I gladly would have paid someone my allowance for a month to shoot me just above the knee. If I'd known anything about calibers, I would probably have chosen a .22 with a low-yield round, maybe bird-shot. The point was to get myself an awesome scar, but live to brag about it.

Just like the kid I met on the drive-in movie playground. It was summertime and the playground was crowded with the noisy progeny of middle-class parents waiting for the sun to set so the projectionist could cue up the latest James Bond thriller. I saw the kid's scar while we were spinning on the merry-go-round.

Nine-year-old boys don't know from social graces, so I blurted it out: "What's that?" I asked, pointing to his truly impressive wound; a shiny, round hole, healed over and surrounded by scar tissue radiating outward. It was the coolest thing I'd ever seen in my life.

"My dad shot me," he answered without preamble or explanation.

"No way," I said. A small crowd of boys had begun to gather around the kid and his scar. He was enjoying the attention and who could blame him.

"My dad was cleaning his gun and it went off," the kid explained.

This was followed by a chorus of "Cool!" and "Wow!" and "Did it hurt?"

It was cool and it was wow and—according to the kid—it did hurt.

I didn't care. From that point on I wanted a cool scar of my own. Oh, I had a couple by then; one on the forehead from a car accident and one on my right hand, from the time I tripped while carrying a glass jar filled with caterpillars. But I had nothing to compare with this kid's bullet hole. Compared to that, my scars were stubbed toes, the sniffles, hiccups.

A couple years later I was hit by a car and had to walk around on crutches for a few months. That was OK, but still, nowhere near as cool as a bullet hole.

Considering the end-of-the-relationship moments I’ve had with at least a couple of my ex-wives, it’s a miracle I haven’t been shot by now. I still think it would be cool to have a bullet scar, but I’m no longer so sure I’m willing to live through the pain involved in getting one.

 Who says I never grew up?

Mike Taylor’s book Looking at the Pint Half Full is available in eBook format from Borders, Barnes & Noble, and other online booksellers or in paperback from mtrealitycheck.com.

Be careful what you wish for; it may leave a bullet hole

When I was ten years old, there was nothing I wanted more than a gunshot wound, preferably in my left leg. Kids want a lot of dumb stuff, but this particular longing was dumb even by kid standards.

Didn’t matter. I wanted that gunshot wound more than I wanted G.I. Joes, a James Bond spy kit and X-Ray Specs combined. I would have given almost anything to get someone to shoot me in the leg.

Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how you look at it) I didn’t know anybody who owned a gun. Nobody who was willing to shoot me, at any rate. Considering the kind of kid I was, you’d think people would have been lining up for the job.

I wanted the bullet wound because of a kid I’d met the previous summer at the drive-in, back in the days when there were drive-ins and they had playgrounds up by the screen to keep the abundant progeny of Catholic parents busy until the sun went down.

The kid I met had a big scar on his left thigh. Its center was the size of a quarter, with shiny scar tissue radiating out six inches in all directions. It was the coolest thing I had ever seen! The kid’s dad had shot him accidentally a couple years earlier while cleaning his pistol.

Words can’t describe the jealously I felt over that kid’s wound. Not only was it the hit of the playground, but the scar unsurprisingly repulsed every girl who gazed upon it. In the words of Keats, that scar was a thing of beauty and a joy forever.

The idea that getting shot with dad’s .45 must have hurt like crazy never crossed my mind. The possibility that taking a large-caliber bullet might be fatal also never wafted over my transom.

I was a kid. And a dumb kid at that.

As I grew older, my desire to get shot faded. By the time I was a teenager and living in Detroit, where getting shot was a distinct possibility, the longing for a bullet hole had departed entirely.

But recent events have me wondering if I’m really any smarter now than I was then. Do the things I want these days make any more sense than did a bullet hole, or am I still doing things that will wind up scarring me in the end?

In the past couple years, I’ve dated half-a-dozen girls but the only one I really got serious about was—you got it—the one most likely to leave me scarred. Though the pain of the breakup was probably not as bad as, say, getting shot with a .45, it wasn’t as pleasurable as an evening out with Heather Graham might be, either.

And yet, I wanted it. I pursued it.

So. Do we get smarter as we get older? Maybe you do. Me?  The jury’s still out.

If only someone had gone ahead and shot me in the leg back when I was ten, my entire life might have been different. Plus, I would have that cool scar!

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