I know there might be a bullet in the rifle, but I press it against my chin anyway.
I don’t care.
I’m drunk as hell.
Coors Light. In the cans. Twenty down the hatch, maybe even 25 by this point in the afternoon.
My wife, Joanie, had needed a break from all the chaos that was going on — a quiet evening to gather her own thoughts and get some rest — so she spent the night with friends. But my brain keeps telling me she was with another man. Over and over and over again that thought clangs around in my brain. Each beer is like a pause button for my head. But the pauses don’t last long enough. So I figured I’d try something else. I decided to go out onto our ranch and shoot at some cans — head spinning all the while.
When Joanie gets home I’m just sitting on a bench behind our barn, screaming about who knows what.
I see her, and I look her in the eye, and then I reach for that rifle. With it pushing so hard against my jaw that it tilts my head upward, I yell some more.
“This is what I would love to do! This would solve everything.”
She’s sobbing. I keep going.
“You don’t know what it’s like to live with my brain. Everything would be so much better if I could just turn off my head. It would be so much easier on everyone.”
I’m staring Joanie dead in the eye when I say that, and then I just….
Pull the trigger.
I don’t feel anything after that.
It turns out that there is a bullet in the gun. And now it’s headed right for my brain — the brain that, over the course of 47 years, had proven to be among my worst enemies.
That bullet is directly on course to turn off my head.
For good.
