A Bullet in your Head: A True Story

One fall day in 1981, a kid hopped in his 1969 Mustang and drove to school. He was a senior. And then the sheriff came to get him. The local newspaper blared it out the next day on the front page: WOMAN DIES IN DOMESTIC DISPUTE.

Only in the last year did he finally connect the dots though. His dad's version of what happened just had too many inconsistencies. He now believes his dad killed his mom in the heat of the moment after she picked up a .38 revolver and opened fire.

A few weeks after his mom died, he filled out his college financial aid forms. His dad said to falsely claim he had thirteen dependents, three of them in college. What? When he tried to refuse, his dad said, "I'll put a bullet in your head." Was "too" implied at the end?

So the 17-yo kid lied. And he got a needs-based scholarship under false pretenses. But he quit after a year and joined the military. Twenty years later he wrote most of this down and called it "My Head Is Not In My Butt" during NaNoWriMo and hid away the 50k word draft.

Ironically, on his own merits, he had been accepted into honors college. Two weeks before his mom died his classmates had voted him most intelligent. The Sunday School class of the most intelligent girl sent him a sympathy card. So did his Spanish class from the year before. Both cards are still very special to him.

The draft of this story sits on my iMac. "A Bullet in Your Head" would be the new title though. The cover story is that Isaac (my pen name and a minor character in CENTER) finds the draft in the files of one of the main characters in my story arc that starts with CENTER.

But the story is painfully true. I am sure you've already guessed that kid was me in real life. One deputy sheriff drove me home and another one drove my car home that day. That normal ten-minute ride seemed like an eternity.

The police tape I saw when I arrived home was real.

Later, I saw that the bullet holes and the blood-soaked carpet were real.

But the way my dad later continued to treat my sister and me was also real. And it was hell on earth in many ways.

This is a huge part of my story. It shapes who I am more than most people will ever know.