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

between the two bones, so I’d crack both bones but not break either one. Just take a little off the side, you know? I didn’t want a permanent limp or nothing—I was just trying to dodge the draft.
    I had on this pair of moccasins, and I dotted that spot on my foot just perfect. I ended up with a big old target on my moccasin. The girls were watching this, and when they saw the target, they really started in with the tears.
    I got this big old shaky-ass gun, and I went out to the garage by myself. I sat down, drew a bead on my foot, and all of a sudden, it hit me—I was fixing to shoot my own ass with a fucking gun. At that point, I decided to weigh things out and see what exactly it was that I was going to gain from inflicting pain on myself.
    I got up and went back inside and poured myself another stiff drink, and I said to my brother, “Man, this is fucking crazy. I could miss and maim myself for life, and then it wouldn’t be so funny.” By this point, the girls are crying even harder, so Duane said, “Give me that fucking thing—I’ll do it!”
    Now, he’s pretty loaded because he’d been drinking all day, and when he grabbed the gun, he points it right between my eyes. I’m thinking, “Shit, he’s gonna miss and shoot me in the head.”
    “Give me that fucking thing back, and get the fuck out of here,” I said to him.
    He left, and I drew down on that target, and boom! The fire came out of both ends of that gun, and it scared me to death.
    Man, it felt like a rocket had gone through my foot, and for like three seconds I thought I was going to die. Then it went numb, all the way up to my thigh. Every time my heart would beat, the blood would spurt out the hole in my foot, like a geyser. My brother got a beach towel and wrapped it around my foot, and he and Shepley loaded me into the car. Even though he was good and drunk, Duane insisted on driving, and we headed off to the hospital.
    We got to the emergency room, and the doctor asked me what happened, and I told him, “Well, I was cleaning my guns before I had to go off to war, and when I got to one of my Magnums, I forgot I had a round in the chamber. It went off and hit me right in the foot, Doc.”
    He goes, “My, I wonder how much of your foot is left,” and he starts to poke around down there.
    Suddenly I had a bad thought: “Oh, fuck me. He’s gonna see the target on my damn moccasin, and he’s gonna put two and two together. He’s gonna call Selective Service, and I’m gonna end up in Leavenworth!”
    For some reason, he left the room, and I said to my brother, “Man, there’s a fucking problem.”
    He’s like, “What? What is it?”
    “The moccasin’s got a fucking target on it.” I said.
    “Oh shit,” he said, without seeming all that worried. “Just wait a minute, I’ll be right back. I’ll fix that.”
    I’m thinking, “Why don’t you just take it off, damn it?” He goes and finds a marker and paints a target on the other moccasin, and I’m like, “Man, what is wrong with you?”
    A nurse came in and hit me with a shot of morphine, so I was really rocking now. The doctor returned, grabbed the moccasin, and without even looking at it, snatched that son of a bitch off and threw it over his shoulder. That hurt worse than the bullet going in did, because the damn leather had sunk inside the hole and dried in there, and he just ripped it wide open again.
    He asked me what caliber gun it was, and I told him it was a .22 Mag. He said, “Well, you’re lucky, because it could have hit one of those bones, traveled down it, and come out the tip end of your toe, and you might have never walked right again. Don’t worry, I got just the thing for you.”
    He pulled out this little tube, which looked just like Blistex, and he stuck it in the hole and filled the wound up with this goo, put a Band-Aid on either side, and told me, “Okay, you’re out of here.”
    “Wait a minute, Doc,” I said. “I’ve been mortally wounded