I am so used to having a bullet in my neck that I never think of it, only when the subject comes up and someone—full of doubt or amazement—gingerly reaches a hand out to feel it. It is a memento of the shooting on an empty road on the edge of Newark, New Jersey, when Rosalind Pace and I got lost on the way from Newark airport to a conference of poets in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. We made the mistake of stopping at a red light and were cornered immediately by two boys, sixteen or so, dressed in starched jeans and jackets and sporting zip guns. Before we could reason with them, or submit, or try to escape, they began shooting through the open windows. The boy on Rosalind’s side pointed his gun, a .22, directly in her face, a foot away, but it misfired. The boy on my side emptied his gun, hitting the steering wheel, the window, and the dashboard. One bullet grazed my right shoulder, and one hit my chin then buried itself in the left side of my neck, less than a half inch from the carotid artery.
     Everything in such a situation takes on a life of its own, and the few seconds it took me to realize I wasn’t going to die seemed like a much longer stretch of time, and though my neck swelled up and blood was pouring out, my only thought was to get out of there as quickly as possible. My memory was that I fell to the floor, pushed the gas pedal down with one hand, and with the other put the gear into drive till Rosalind took over and drove us out of there. All the time I was screaming at her not to lose control, that she had to save our lives. It was Friday night and we were someplace in downtown Newark, and it was 1986 or 1987. No one would give us directions to the hospital; it seemed as if everyone was drunk or high. I kept jumping out of the car to stop cabs, but when they saw the blood they rushed off. Then, by some fluke, we found ourselves driving up a lawn to the back entrance of Beth Israel where, after a crazy altercation with a ten-dollar-a-day rent-a-cop with a noisy beeper, we drove over another lawn to the emergency entrance where, thanks to the fake cop, two doctors were waiting to rip my clothes off and save my life. I’d told the fake cop that if there wasn’t someone waiting I would crawl back and kill him, even if it was the last thing I did in this life—I think I said “with my bare hands” for, after all, I was in the midst of a great drama—and that may have awakened him.
    The one thing the doctors, the nurses, and the police lieutenant, who came later, said over and over was that it was a mistake to stop at the red light. “Why did you stop at the red light?” I was asked. “No one stops at that light!” I felt guilty, as if I myself were the perpetrator. It was as if Newark lived by a different set of rules. Certainly it was a battle zone and probably more intensely so in the mid-eighties than it is now in the twenty-first century, at least at this point. There is rebuilding and there is talk about rebirth. But the burning and the racial wars and the final flight may have been too much, and New Jersey may have lost its only true city.
    Rosalind has written an essay about the event. Some of the differences in our memory are striking, particularly in details, but what interests me is the emotional difference, what we make—or made—of the shooting. She remembered the boys as eleven or twelve years old—I thought they were a little older; she remembers the one on her side as wearing a sweat shirt—I remember them both in freshly ironed matching jacket and jeans, almost like uniforms; she remembers us going up a drive, at the hospital, into an entrance—I remember us driving across the lawn. We could either be right, or neither, and it makes little difference—it is how we received the event in our lives, how we absorbed it and located it. For her the initial emotional response was a mixture of shock, disbelief, and fear. Later, it was more anger, mixed with guilt, sadness, and frustration. My initial response was also disbelief and fear, though later it was mostly grief—and almost no anger. I don’t mean to make an odious comparison; if anything, I am perplexed at my lack of anger, and if I comment on my own feelings it is not by way of either denigrating or elevating Rosalind’s. I may have been only concealing or converting my anger; furthermore it is a quite decent and quite useful emotion—anger—one which I make use of all the time, and I get furious at soft-spoken cheek-turners who smile lovingly at the slaps, however their eyes are wet with pain, rage, and disappointment. It just didn’t happen for me here. Also, Rosalind’s experience was different from mine in two ways: she was driving and therefore felt responsible, and she wasn’t shot, and I was. It was more than guilt, her pain; it was agony.
    I know that I was more “accepting” of the event than she was. I never argued with the circumstances or raged against the gods. Nor, for a second, did I blame her. We did make a wrong turn off the highway, we did stop at the red light, we didn’t leave ten minutes earlier—or later. That’s that! If anything, I felt lucky. The bullet didn’t kill me, the gun on her side misfired. There were angels watching over us and they had a hell of a time leaping from side to side of the car, deflecting and stopping the shots as well as they could, keeping enough blood in my body, helping us out of there, guiding us to the hospital. If anything, I am grateful, and I love and kiss everyone and everything involved. I regret Rosalind had to go through this. I’m sorry for her suffering. But I don’t hate the boys and I’m not angry with them and I don’t hold it against Newark. In a way, once it happened I was glad it did, which doesn’t mean I wouldn’t prefer that it didn’t. I suffered a few months from a stiff jaw and swollen neck, but there’s no permanent damage except for the bullet that lodged in my neck and was never removed and, as I say, I forget it’s there unless I’m telling the story to someone and press his or her amazed finger to the center of my neck, a little to the left of the windpipe.