Shooting After Call
On call putting a line in a drug user, coding a guy with end-stage leukemia
for 60 minutes after his wife says ‘you save him’ but then forgives me,
yelling at my intern when my friend and co-resident (our teams on call
together), this quiet guy from southern Georgia, tells me his wife had just
called and told him she was leaving him. We were in the middle of long-call,
a 36 hour shift where you come in to the hospital at 0600 in the morning and
work continuously without sleep until 6 pm the next day, though even that’s
not a guarantee; if there’s still work to be done—procedures to be done on
patients, lines to be put in, blood cultures to be drawn, notes to be
written, you’d have to stay past 36. At the worst, I’d left at 11 pm the
post call day—a total of 41 hours straight without sleep.
Chris was devastated. He’d married his college girlfriend, who he’d shacked
up with for last two years of college and four years of medical school.
They’d been married only a year and a half. She was 10 weeks pregnant and
was working in a flower-shop. Chris and I were both 26 years old. His wife
was 24.
Walking out of Grady Hospital he asked me if I wanted to go shooting with
him. I’d never shot a gun. But I didn’t know if this was a euphemism—if he
was telling me he was going to take his own life. We were both tired. It was
2 thirty in the afternoon. We hadn’t slept at all. There was puke on his
shoe and blood on both of mine.
“Okay,” I said. “Where’s the guns?”
“In the trunk of my car.”
• • •
We got Whoppers from Burger King and drove about 30 miles outside of Atlanta
to a shooting range. The place was a cinderblock building built into the
side of hill. There was a gun and ammo shop up front, with the range in
back.
I walked around mesmerized by all the guns and types of ammo, hunting
knives, arrows and bows. Chris was buying ammo. I hadn’t seen this supply of
weapons since I was in India, in Bombay at the National Museum, where
medieval axes of the Rajas and Rajputs, the desert fighters with the British
at Jodpur, and from Kumbalgargh. It was scary, and thick. I realized I was
getting sleepier and wasn’t thinking well anymore. After a burger and I felt
even thicker and walking mushier.
“Mo” Chris called my name. He was standing at the back, near the entrance to
the shooting range. At the door their the musty smell of a basement and
gunpowder rolled out. The sound of round after round echoed—some light like
a tap-shoe clicking, others like a cannon.
“Pick a target” the guy at the counter said to me, with a slightly annoyed,
irritated tinge in his voice, which made me think he didn’t have patience
for scrawny lightweights firing their first gun at my age. When I saw the
three targets I realized it was probably something else. He didn’t see a lot
of brown guys here.
There were 3 stacks of targets, all paper about the size of concert poster.
The first was what you’d expect from movies where the rookie FBI agents
train—Clarice Starling at the academy: black background with concentric
white outlines of human body, each outline of a head and shoulder smaller
and assigned point-values. The third was a painting of a large buck out in
field, with a background of tall trees; the imagined vantage point was
clear: you’re hiding in a clutch of head-high grass, under a cloudless blue
sky, and this magnificent animal wanders into your scope-sights.
The middle one was a photograph of black man wearing dark aviator sunglasses
aiming a shotgun at you. He was about 20 yards away, behind a sports car,
with a leather longcoat. Thin cross-hairs and a circle indicated that he was
in your sights, and his facial expression indicated you were in his. It was
frighteningly real, racist. It was the stack that was nearly to the bottom,
while the other stacks were at least five times as tall. It made me realize
where I was, who I was, that I didn’t belong here, and why the gun-shop
owner’s voice was irritated with me. I thought about leaving. But Chris had
brought me here. I didn’t want to be afraid. I actually wanted to shoot a
gun, having never shot one before. I didn’t want the gun-shop owner to get
any satisfaction. I slipped one off the first stack and followed Chris
inside.
Inside the range, two off duty cops were practicing with a variety of
weapons. They were both hard-muscled like body-builders, wearing black T
shirts, with golden badges on a chain around their necks. They both, like
Chris and I, were wearing the sound-resistant head-gear and eye goggles.
Caps and shells littered the ground around them.
• • •
Chris says he came in to buy his wife flowers. Met her and fell in love.
They moved in together in a week.
Then, after shooting, after drinking Chris says “Now she wants an abortion.
She wants to abort our baby so she can have this new life and babies with
him. What can I say? I’ve got 7 more years of training [he wants to do
cardiology]. I’ll be 33 before I’m done. How could I be a single dad till
then?”
—Mohit Bhasin
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