Michael's Story

Marilyn McCoy stayed in her car, the gun by her side. She scanned the crowd outside 805 North 12th St., for a glimpse of James Kenneth Pleasant, the man accused of shooting her brother, Michael Dixon, leaving him paralyzed from the shoulders down.

Marilyn, "Mert" to family and friends, had come to ... to what? Scare Pleasant? Harm him? Kill him?

In her confused state of mind, she didn't comprehend her intentions. All she knew was that her baby brother's life had been compromised by three shots in the dark.

According to eyewitnesses and police, Michael's shooting was a case of mistaken identity. Pleasant had been expecting trouble and when Michael stopped his car in front of Pleasant's house to turn around, the man started firing a 9 mm Ruger.

While Michael lay paralyzed in a hospital bed, with a machine helping him to breathe, Pleasant was out on bond, hosting a Labor Day party in his front yard.

Mert remembered the face of the alleged assailant from court, but she didn't see him in the holiday crowd milling outside the man's duplex.

He had to be there. Where was he?

From her vantage across the street, she scanned the faces again and again and again, but didn't recognize Pleasant. Frustrated, Mert lost her nerve and sped away, averting a second tragedy for a family who had enough tragedy to deal with already.

Pleasant probably never knew his home was being watched that day, much less that he was spared a confrontation because of a haircut. Mert caught a glimpse of him later, when cooler thoughts prevailed, and realized the 34-year-old man had indeed been outside his house that afternoon, but he looked different after a trip to the barber.

"You wouldn't think that a haircut would change a person's look so much, but it did," Mert remarked later.

After that incident, three months after Michael Dixon was shot, no one in his family talked of retribution. Dot, the matriarch, encouraged her sons and daughters to pray for the peace of Philippians, a "peace that passeth all understanding."

Mert put aside her hatred by immersing herself in the care of her brother, who moved into her home after leaving the hospital, but, try as she might, she never could forgive the man she sought that day.

The ramifications of his new life became acutely apparent when Michael was discharged from the hospital. There were reminders everywhere of how changed he was.

On TV, the weatherman would predict perfect weather for a walk in the park.

Or there would be an advertisement for a movie he'd like to see. Or Michael would get a card from a former co-worker and wish he could just get into his car to go see them.

But, without transportation, Michael was stuck. Even if his 1993 Mustang, the car he wrecked as he tried to flee the shooter, could have been salvaged, it would have been no use to him. With a portable ventilator and batteries attached on the rear, his wheelchair measures over six feet and weighs more than 300 pounds. Only a full-sized van, adapted with a lift, could transport him.

And, of course, someone else would have to do the driving.

Getting across the room was now a major hassle, much less trying to go across town.

So he stayed in his room at Mert's house, watching TV, talking on the telephone through a headset receiver, listening to music.

These activities helped to pass the time, but they didn't make him forget that life was different.

Three bullets had robbed him of his body, but not his mind. He still had memories, an archive of "last times" the last meal he fed himself, his last day of work, the last time he hung out with friends in his hometown of Linden, the last girl he kissed, the last time he dribbled a basketball.

Life without basketball. That one stung hard.

Basketball is king in Perry County, a small county 20 miles off the beaten path of Interstate 40 and hard against the Tennessee River, which serves as its western border.

Six state championship trophies have been brought to Linden, the county seat, by the boys basketball teams from PCHS. Three were won in the mid-1950s, when small schools had to duke it out with larger schools to claim the top prize. Other state titles were added in 1976, 1977 and 1997.

Basketball was the only game to play when Michael was growing up. The county didn't field a football team, so if a young boy wanted to wear Viking black and gold, he dribbled and practiced layups year round.

But it took more than desire; the talent quotient was all important. Average players don't make it far in Perry County.

By accounts of former coaches and teammates, the Dixon boys were above average. Jimmy "Buck" Dixon, the oldest, was a leader on the never-say-die 1977 state championship team. In the semifinals they came back from a 12-point deficit with three minutes on the clock to advance to the finals, a feat that's still talked about as a Perry County highlight.

Robert "Bo" Dixon played on the 1979 team that was defeated in the sub-state tournament. A two-sport athlete, Bo later played baseball at Tennessee State University.

Terry Dixon was a senior on the 1985 squad that made it to the first round of the state tournament. Nat Dixon also played on that team and on the team that made it to the semifinals the next year. After graduation, Nat attended Columbia State on a basketball scholarship.

Then there was Michael, the youngest. What he lacked in Buck's and Terry's ball handling abilities or Bo's muscle under the basket or Nat's shooting skills, he made up for by being lightning quick.

"I loved to steal the ball, taking it away and sending it on down the court for one of our guys to make a layup. I loved what it did to the crowd when it happened, how they yelled," he said.

There were so many basketball games they meld in the mind, a seamless string of hard court appearances, starting in the fourth grade at Pope Elementary, then Linden Elementary and, finally, Perry County High. Between seasons there were hundreds of pickup games, one-on-one contests with buddies and solitary sessions dumping layups into an old lamp shade nailed to the side of the house.

But one game in December of 1989 stands out. Two weeks prior to the game, Michael had been injured in a car crash. Returning home from his girlfriend's on a wet Saturday night, his automobile soared off an embankment and rolled several times. Although he was catapulted free of the tumbling car, Michael landed hard against a tree. He suffered back injuries that doctors said would keep him out of the lineup for at least a month.

He was devastated. A month is an eternity in a high school season, so he determined to recuperate in half the time. Two weeks after the accident, number 25 was cleared to play.

Nearly a decade after the game, detailed memories of that night are stored in his mind: the steals he made, the blocked shots, the assists, the layups he made. It's as if his brain filmed the game in slow motion.

But it wasn't the points he scored or his defensive hustle that he remembered most.

"It was just being back on the court, just being able to play after such a bad accident. I had been given another chance and I was relieved," he said.

As the days yielded to months following his discharge from the hospital, the memory of that game haunted him. There would be no reprieve, Michael realized, from this new chapter of his life that had been involuntarily scripted for him.

He was a quadriplegic.

Like the fingers of early morning gray mist that settle on the Tennessee River near his childhood home, depression clouded his thinking. Before his eyes, he was disappearing from the world, as if he had died. Friends who had been loyal to call and send cards while he was in the hospital, no longer kept in touch. He was unemployed, dependent on a government subsidy to meet his daily needs.

It hurt that a rumor was circulating among his friends that he had been gunned down in a soured drug deal. He saw where they were coming from: one black man shot by another black man on a street corner, late at night.

The slanderous story was devastating to Michael, a devout born-again Christian who abhorred the drug scene. For people whom he considered friends to think he had become a dope dealer made him sad beyond words.

Meanwhile, Michael felt he was a burden to his family, forcing them to be as much a captive to his paralysis as he was. He couldn't help but see the frustration in their faces when plans had to be altered because no one could stay with him. He saw how tired they were from caring for him 24 hours a day.

The gray mist turned into a thick blanket of despair. He wanted to die, to succumb quickly, but realized even suicide was an unavailable option. To slash a wrist, one must first be able to grasp a razor.

Michael came to a conclusion: to lighten the load on his family the only way he knew how. He called them to his bedside and announced:

"I want to go to a nursing home."