My friend Jason used to be a real dick. I didn’t know him then, but I believe him. He tells me that he was the worst kind of person until the day he shot himself in the face with a 357 magnum. He put the gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger at eighteen. Bang. Jason had become a man.
He tells me that it was the best thing that ever happened to him and to hear it , is the amazement of deformity. The best thing? Really? How could that be true?
The slug ate through his scull like it was devouring leaves, leaving one of his eyes to drip the ooze of an injury that would never heal, and an arm to dangle nearly useless. That eye can’t see what he has become to look at, but the other one can. I decided that he is handsome, though I am not sure he would be my type physically if he were still normal. Jason doesn’t look like everyone else. Jason doesn’t look normal, and in fact, he isn’t.
Jason Millman is the the evolution of extraordinary. He is an extraordinary nice man, and he became my friend at the gym. I meet the best kinds of people through fitness. I become better by them, while realizing my own sick. He is a better person than I am, enough that I am half tempted to try to swallow a bullet. I would, except it sounds like suicide. Jason insists his wasn’t that attempt. He just thought he could, and so he did. He pulled the trigger and his life changed. He didn’t die because he didn’t intend to. That is how I know he is better than me. I imagine the same scenario and all I can see is my death.
I was imagining his just yesterday, not Jason, my own father. I thought about Jason as I stood in Tacoma General Hospital wishing I could shoot my dad in the face.
