Atlas by Teddy Atlas

matador, slashing the side of my face. The blade was so sharp, I barely felt it. I put my hand up and my fingers just went into my cheek; there was this thick, meaty flap of skin that moved, a warm, wet, syrupy goo oozing from the gash. I staggered and fell to the ground.
    The next thing I knew, Billy was dragging me across the street. We were on Broad Street, right by the projects. There was this little bodega across the way. Billy took me in and laid me on the floor. I was losing a lot of blood; it was all over the place, streaming through my fingers and onto the linoleum floor. The old couple who ran the bodega were afraid. You could see it in their eyes. Billy was shouting at them to call an ambulance. The old woman found a towel and held it to my face. Almostinstantly, it soaked through with blood. She got more towels. The same thing happened.
    The old man was frozen, looking at me, holding the phone. Billy jumped over the counter and grabbed the receiver out of his hand. He called 911. “A cop’s been shot,” he yelled into the mouthpiece.
    Less than five minutes later, half a dozen cop cars and an ambulance were there. I could hear a helicopter’s blades beating up above. In the ambulance, on the way to the hospital, one of the cops with me said, “The kid might bleed to death before we get there.” When I heard that, I was afraid to close my eyes or let go of consciousness. “My father,” I mumbled. “You gotta get my father. He’s a famous doctor….”
    They took me to Marine Hospital (now called Bailey Seton), the place I’d worked as a janitor. As they were wheeling me in, I kept saying, “Let my father do it.” The last thing I remember thinking about before I lost consciousness was his schedule.
    It wasn’t my father who sewed me up; it was an Asian physician, Dr. Lee. It took four hundred stitches. Two hundred on the outside, two hundred on the inside. My father showed up later that night. I opened my eyes and there he was.
    â€œHow is it?” I asked.
    â€œThe cut will heal, but you’re going to have a scar for the rest of your life.” He looked at his hand. There were notes written on his skin. Appointments, prescriptions, phone numbers, things like that.
    â€œI have to go,” he said.
    I wanted to say something to him, or have him say something to me. But neither of us seemed to know how.
    â€œGood night, Teddy.”
    Later that night some of my buddies came to visit me in the hospital. Bruce Spicer, Mousey, and some other guys I knew from the corner. They were all worked up. They were gonna get the guys who had done this. I didn’t care about that. I was fixated on something else entirely: the gold ring that I always wore around my neck on a chain was gone.
    â€œBruce, you have to find that ring,” I said. “The chain must have broken during the fight.”
    â€œTeddy, it’ll never be there. It’s Broad Street. Forget about it.” He and the rest continued talking about finding the guys in the Caddy.
    â€œNo, the ring,” I said. “You gotta get the ring.”
    They stopped talking and looked at me. My voice was so full of intensity, all they could do was kind of shrug, like, all right, we’ll go look for it.
    The reason the ring had such importance to me was that it had belonged to my childhood friend Sean Timpone, who had died the year before. Sean and I had always been close; we had a real comradeship. When we were young kids, he was diagnosed with muscular dystrophy and confined to a wheelchair. I used to go take him out and wheel him around the parks in Staten Island. He loved nature and animals, and he was always reading up on various wildlife, talking about how the animals needed to be protected or they’d become extinct. Out in the woods in these parks, we’d pretend that we were seeing all these extinct animals from the prehistoric era. He loved to fantasize about