Read Online My Cross to Bear by Gregg Allman - Free Book Online

on home, and that the marshal would be by to pick him up.
    Duane came back down to the car, and he looked drained, man—he wasn’t the same person.
    “I’m going to jail, man.”
    Just joking, I said to him, “Knowing you, they’ll lose your fucking card.”
    Well, guess what? They lost his card. They never came after him, never called him, nothing. As far as the United States Army was concerned, my brother was no longer in existence.
    A year later, they called me with my “greetings.” Things were just going right with the band, and of course, that’s when they called me up. Man, the bottom just dropped out for me. I went to my brother, and I said, “What am I going to do?”
    “Well,” he said, “like you told me—just don’t go.”
    “Man, I don’t think that works but once,” I said. “And besides, you still might get a letter tomorrow.”
    Then it came to me: I decided to shoot myself in the foot. It seemed like the thing to do, and when I told my brother, he was in complete agreement.
    “Yeah,” he said, “that might just work. I’ll tell you what we’re going to do—we’re gonna have a foot-shooting party. We’ll get a bunch of whiskey and have a bunch of women come over. We’ll get you good and fucked up, and then you can take care of business. You can do it out in the garage, and then we’ll take you on down to the hospital, and then over to the induction center. It’s gonna work out fine, bro.”
    The fateful day arrived, and my brother invited a bunch of friends and told them that we were going to have a foot-shooting party. We put a big box full of sawdust out in the garage, and my brother turned to me.
    “Are you ready to go?”
    “Yeah, I’m ready,” I said.
    Now, I wasn’t slobbering drunk yet, but I wasn’t feeling any pain either. Then something occurred to me and I got Duane’s attention.
    “Hey, genius, we forgot something.”
    “What?” he asked.
    “A fucking pistol, man.”
    “Oh shit.”
    There was a silent moment, and all the girls were crying, and I realized, “This really is a foot-shooting party. Somebody is fixing to shoot themselves, and that somebody is me.”
    Duane, Shepley, and I got in the car and headed over to “Spadetown,” as we called it, to get a pistol. It wasn’t a racial thing at all, because we loved it there—it was just the name that everybody used back then. They had the best barbecue over there, they had the cheapest gas, and they had the best records, so we loved to go over there.
    Now, I know this sounds like a bullshit story, but it’s all true, every word of it. We stopped one guy on the street, and he said, “Can I help you?”
    One of us asked him, “Hey, man, you know where we can get a Saturday night special?”
    “Oh,” he responded, “it’s a pistole he wants! Well, maybe I do.”
    “How much is it?” I asked.
    “Well, how much do you got?” he replied.
    “C’mon, man, how much is it?” Meanwhile, I’m thinking, “Man, don’t fuck with me—I’m fixing to shoot my own ass.”
    “It costs however much it is you got in your pocket.”
    “How far do you got to go to get it?”
    “I just got to pull it out of my pocket is all.”
    “Well, in that case, we got twenty-seven dollars.”
    “Ain’t that strange,” he said. “Because that’s just how much it is.” We collected up all the dough, gave it to the man, and he gave us the pistol, a .22 short, and three bullets, and we took it back to the house.
    If you picked that damn pistol up by the butt and shook it, the whole thing would rattle, like somebody had loosened all the screws on it. A precision weapon it wasn’t. I mean, that gun had no hope. I asked my brother, “Man, you expect me to fire this fucking thing?” He told me, “Don’t worry about it, man. You’ll be fine.”
    I did luck out in one way, because beforehand I had studied a foot chart. The long bone in your foot comes to a V with the bone next to it. I wanted to put the bullet