Small Town Summer -- "The Witherspoon Meteorite"
On Memorial Day weekend, a high school senior's prank restores a town's legacy...
Here we are at the beginning of summer. Though it may be unofficial, as we surround ourselves with Memorial Day festivities, it is summer nonetheless, and everyone in town knows it. They don’t need a calendar to tell them that the summer solstice, the official beginning of the season, is still a month away. No, they know summer is here. They know it in their bones and they know it with their senses.
The citizens of Viscauga know summer is here because along the vast canals of power lines that cut through the piney woods, the electricity hums a little louder in the corona discharge, and the cicadas sing in the trees at suppertime.
They know summer is here because of the sudden wave of humidity, making their backs wet with sweat, and making them become one with their clothes.
They know summer is here because of the heat waves -- the literal heat waves -- that float in front of their faces, and around noon make the landscape a floating illusion, and how the kids play in the sprinklers in the space between their houses.
They know summer is here because the restaurants around town spike in their sales of cold refreshments: cold sodas and milkshakes, Italian Shaved Ice, and of course, cold beer. You can see the outside patios filled to capacity every night, standing room only as the patrons indulge, and move under the hot street lights to the beats coming from their car stereos.
Of course, a sure sign of summer’s arrival in Viscauga is when the roadside sign of Joe Towne’s Cosmic Twin Drive-In out on Route 78 has been flipped on once again, the flickering, buzzing neon of its large arrow pointing the way to another summer of Hollywood escapism, bottomless boxes of popcorn and styrofoam cups of soda, and mini-golf. Joe Towne himself has lost count of how many seasons he’s owned the Cosmic, but he, as well as his patrons, know why it is named the Cosmic. They’ll never forget that, because the particular incident that is its namesake put the drive-in and the very town of Viscauga itself on the map back in 1955. Back then it had been named simply the Viscauga Twin, but all that changed one bright, cloudless night that summer, when a small grapefruit-size meteorite fell through the atmosphere and struck the leg of a teenage patron as he sat in the bed of his truck with his date, watching, appropriately enough, It came from Outer Space, or so the legend goes.
Somehow, the anomaly did not kill the young man, although if his date had chosen to be a little closer to him, it would have surely killed her. No, it just nicked the meaty part of the kid’s thigh, but nevertheless stunned him into shock. When Bill Witherspoon woke up in the hospital the next day, he found a small bandage just below his right kneecap, and his face on the front page of every newspaper from Atlanta to Shanghai. Dave Garroway and J. Fred Muggs even interviewed him on the Today show.
Today, you might expect to visit the Viscauga History Museum on the second floor of the Public Library on Stanton Street and see the rock that crash-landed and shot Viscauga to the stratosphere of fame for a day. But, sadly, this isn’t so, for the recovered meteorite has sat in a glass case at the Paul Bear Bryant Museum in Tuscaloosa since two days after the incident all the way back in June of 1955. That was when the governor stepped in and decided the rock should be in a popular, heavy-trafficked, and central viewing place in the state -- not some backwater burg like Viscauga that nobody ever visited, but at the University of Alabama, where throngs of Crimson Tide fans could pass it for a brief instant on their way to the stadium every Saturday in Fall, without giving it a second thought.
If you’re asking yourself the obvious question, then the answer is ‘yes’, the people in Viscauga are bitter about it. They have always been bitter about it, especially because long after the governor and the administration of the University of Alabama who conspired against the town had either left their posts or died, there was no attempt at restitution. Not even a murmuring of returning the Witherspoon Meteorite, as it had been dubbed, to its terrestrial home long after the novelty had expired, which was about a week after the kid had been struck. What was probably more insulting to the town was that the School of Art at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, sometime in the early 60’s, as a peace offering, designed and donated a paper-mache mold of the meteorite to the town, where it sits today, depressingly, in a glass case on top of the concession stand at the Cosmic Twin Drive-In, next to the Big Pretzel oven. It’s a bittersweet display, but the people of the town accepted it anyway, because that’s what they do and that’s what they have always done in Viscauga: accept it. Bend over, and accept it.
Still, today, you are not likely to find a single supporter of the Alabama Crimson Tide in the town of Viscauga. Most everybody roots passionately for Auburn, and those who don’t, don’t care at all.
Of course, school is officially over for the year. It ended on Friday afternoon at 3:25, Central Standard Time, but not before this year’s graduating seniors had their last say. You see, a for-sure sign that summer has arrived in Viscauga is the sudden surge of juvenile vandalism around town. It’s a pretty common site to see lawns T-P’d and windows soaped. The pranks are led each year by the seniors at Daniel Pratt High School. Nothing too sinister, of course. The pranks are only somewhat destructive and disruptive, but mostly they are charming.
This year’s Big Senior Prank saw the seniors, led by Abe Gibson, Class President, First String Quarterback for the Viscauga High Confederates, and Homecoming King, in a black-on-black outfit with matching ski mask, sneaking with his uniformed mob of hell raisers into a window in the gym basement they had left open the previous day, and raiding the darkened teachers’ rooms -- all seventy-five of them -- and swapping the top drawers of these educators’ desks. It took about two hours of diligent and motivated hard work, the seniors shuffling like Ninjas through the dark and silent corridors of this place that had been their lives’ work these last four years, and which, after tomorrow, they would never set foot in again.
When teachers and administrators arrived the next morning, they were at first surprised to find everything in school as it had been the day before. There were no missing or found items as there had been in previous years of senior pranks. No gigantic, unrolled sheets of bubble wrap covering the floors as there had been with the Class of 1978; no vehicles of administrators had been taken apart and re-assembled in the gym, as the Class of 1981 had done. No, everything seemed in order. That was, until the teachers began opening the top drawers of their desks, finding they had been removed and placed in the desks of their colleagues. It took no time for the teachers to figure out what had happened, and nearly three hours for them to meet among themselves and figure out which drawer belonged to whom.
There were some truly odd finds, too, specifically when Miss Dwyer, the choir teacher and, on Sundays, organist at the First Baptist Church, opened her drawer to find the latest issue of Penthouse magazine. Initially, no educator stepped forward to claim this drawer, and it wasn’t until a custom ball-point pen with Mr. Bentley’s name inscribed on it was discovered among the drawer’s contents was the drawer officially identified by administration. Mr. Bentley, the junior social studies teacher and the perpetual bachelor among the faculty, was questioned by Principal Danvers about this contraband, but he simply stated his case that the porno magazine had been planted, a sort of “cherry on top” for this year’s act of senior rebellion? Principal Danvers, having had enough of a headache for one day, and having little recourse if he were to question Abe Gibson (what was he going to do to the senior, expel him?) excused the tenured teacher, and allowed him to live to instruct another day. Close call, Mr. Bentley.
And down at the banks of the Cahaba, in a distant and shaded spot in the thick pines, the Senior Class gathered in a makeshift parking lot of mud to celebrate what none of them could imagine would be the one time in their lives where everything was behind them, and everything was in front of them. It was just the start of a long weekend of debauchery, filled with parties and beer busts, and one-time “I Had No Idea You Liked Me” hook-ups, and all of it to be only interrupted for a short time Saturday morning for a formal graduation ceremony at the football stadium.
Of course, most of the action at the celebration centered around Abe Gibson, the hero of the moment, who sat ten feet off the ground atop the bed of his F-250 with jacked-up suspension. He would never be this beautiful again. The girls surrounded him, offered to get him another beer for his koozie, swooned over his recounting of how the midnight raid on Daniel Pratt High had gone down. Watching all of this, in the shadows of an already heavily shaded spot, was McCord Nix -- “Mac” to his friends, of which he had few that were true -- trying not to let his jealousy overtake him. For years, Mac had been watching a movie on broken repeat. It was called “My Life in Paradise: the Abe Gibson Story”, and to him, the plot was a dud. It defied in total the logical arc of stories, a perversion of the very nature of interesting stories. The Freytag’s Pyramid in the Abe Gibson Story was more of a Plateau. It did not consist of an Inciting Incident to spark the action, nor a central antagonist to hurl conflict at him, Abe Gibson, the protagonist, as he approached the climax at the top of the pyramid. No, the Abe Gibson story was a flat narrative. It started out with the guy getting whatever he wanted, and then continuing to get whatever he wanted, forevermore. Mac had watched this story play out since Kindergarten, and he was sick of it. Many stories that follow the natural rise and fall of Freytag’s Pyramid, he had noted in AP English, where he was an “A” student, were consistent with a “pleasing” denouement, or a “happy ending”. But, Mac thought, what was the point of a happy ending if the whole journey up to that point had been happy? The ending could not logically be earned, and therefore, the ending must be counterintuitive to the rest of the narrative. There was Abe Gibson facing his ending, on the back of the pick-up truck his Construction Contractor father had bought for him on his sixteenth birthday, fought over by an ever-increasing gaggle of concubines. It was not logical. It could not stand.
“Wanna go for a swim?” This was Eddie Brass speaking, Mac’s best friend since the fourth grade, drawing Mac’s attention away from King Abe to the river, where their fellow seniors were splashing and floating, and diving in wild contortions off the rope swing.
“You know, it’s not even that great of a prank,” Kirk lamented. “Switching teachers’ drawers. Like anybody’s ever gonna remember that fifty years from now.”
And it was right then that Mac Nix had his big idea, for even though he had been about as unmemorable to anyone but his grateful teachers the last four years, whom he constantly pleased with his exemplary work, Mac was about to pull off the greatest senior prank of all time. Or, maybe it was more of a “happening”, the kind he’d read about Charlie Manson and his Merry Band of Pranksters doing before they started getting into killing people, when they’d sneak into people’s houses and arrange the furniture around, and never let on who did it. Whatever it was, the people of Viscauga, Alabama would not only remember and talk about what he was about to do fifty years from now, but it would become a part of their town’s very legacy for generations to come.
“You’re full of it,” Cherry Prince said when she walked over to Mac and Eddie, offering to share a cigarette, and Mac had told her the plan. “No way you pull that off! At least not tonight, on such short notice. Why don’t you just forget it and come on to the party at my house. You might actually have a good time if you don’t think about it so much.”
Cherry was the one girl in high school Mac could talk to without feeling threatened and stuttering like a tool. She had an easy way about her, an accessible personality that could move between all rungs of the social ladder. The jocks, the princesses, the wastoids, the mathletes, the dweebs: everybody loved Cherry Prince, and it goes without saying that Mac had a major crush on her. The only problem with Cherry Prince was that for a brief time last Fall, she had dated Abe Gibson, but Mac had let that slide. She had just wanted to become Homecoming Queen, so there were politics involved. Anyway, the personal invitation to her house was tempting, but Mac, more disciplined than ever, hopped behind the wheel of his junker 1988 Crown Vic, a hand-me-down his grandfather had sold him on his sixteenth birthday for one dollar, and hit the road West, toward Tuscaloosa and the University of Alabama.
Of course, he and Eddie, who tagged along for want of anything better to do -- and definitely not one to walk into Cherry’s party all by himself -- had to stop first by the Cosmic Drive-In. Mr. Towne, as he had for the last three summers, had given Mac a job as a projectionist at the Cosmic, and usually expected him to work every Friday night between late May and early August, but he had given him a rare night off to enjoy the fruits of his labor on Graduation-eve. Nevertheless, there was Mac at the Drive-In, keeping a low profile among the throngs of roving families and lip-locked teenagers, and impatient cinefiles, hoping that if any of his fellow staffers happened to see him, they would just assume he was working as normal, and not up to anything suspicious as he snuck behind the counter of the concession stand, and swiped the paper-mache mold of the Witherspoon Meteorite from its glass display case next to the Big Pretzel oven.
And West they drove through the night, Mac and Eddie, along I-59, making only a quick stop at a Stucky’s along the way, so that Eddie could pee, and Mac could drop a dime to his older cousin, Johnny, out of the blue, and ask him for a small, random favor at midnight.
For as long as Mac could remember, Johnny Nix, his senior by ten years, had been the lone, stray leaf on his family tree. Once busted for running an unlicensed pharmacy out of the trunk of his car, and, ever since being excused as a guest of the state, ambling around all points of the Deep South looking for whatever place would hire him on conditions, Johnny now worked on the landscape crew at the University of Alabama, which didn’t much help his credibility with his family, Viscauga born and raised. Still, Johnny the Fredo was always looking for a way back into the inner circle, and here was his cousin, Mac, calling out of the blue, with a request to meet him at the entrance of the Paul Bear Bryant Museum with his passkey.
The job took a mere ten minutes, most of which were consumed with making polite small talk with Johnny, who wanted to know how his momma and daddy were doing -- not Mac’s momma and daddy, but his own, for they had disowned him since his arrest. After those pleasantries were exchanged, it then took only two minutes to slip into the shuttered Paul Bear Bryant Museum, sneak past the monuments of great Crimson Tide victories past, open the glass case, and make the switch.
On the road back, Eddie worked double hard on his inhaler, while scanning through the night for highway patrol who had been alerted to their scheme. But Mac assured him there was nothing to worry about; the thing had gone down cool as Coke. Well, half of it, anyway. They still had to get to the Cosmic Drive-In, where by now, at one o’clock in the morning, the place would be closed and silent, and they should be able to sneak back into the concession stand with the keys Mr. Towne had given him for being his trusted employee, and restore the real Witherspoon Meteorite to its rightful place. Piece of cake.
As a matter of fact, Mac was so cocky the closer they got to Viscauga, the closer to pulling it all off, that he decided to stop by Cherry Prince’s party after all, and prove to her once and for all that he wasn’t “full of it”. He wasn’t some booknerd, capable of understanding the world but incapable of shaping it to his own will. He had topped anything Abe Gibson and the whole stupid lot of those tools could pull off.
When he told Eddie of the detour, Eddie affected his best Short Round voice from Temple of Doom: “No time for love, Dr. Jones.” To which Mac just rolled his eyes. How had he been friends with this dork for so long?
Cherry’s party was in full swing when the Crown Vic rolled up and Mac walked in the door with his backpack slung over his shoulder and Eddie following behind, tapping his inhaler hard against his palm and denying that it had been cashed. Among the throngs of wasted youth, it was tough to find a quiet corner of the house to show Cherry the contents of the Jansport, but Cherry ushered them both into the quiet laundry room to tell them to spill the beans on what was so important.
And it was at this point that Mac’s story would take a dramatic twist, generally referred to on the diagram of Freytag’s Pyramid as the “Crisis”, the point just before the climax where all hope is in jeopardy, and the protagonist must either embrace his final obstacle, or retreat. For just as Mac opened the bag to reveal to Cherry its contents, a boy and girl, looking for a quiet place to have a “I Had No Idea You Liked Me” hook-up, barged in and asked what he had there, in his little bag?
And Eddie, wheezing from the depths of his lungs, fearing they had been caught and that the jig was up, admitted it all. They had the real rock, the Witherspoon Rock, and were on their way to return it to the Cosmic Drive-In, its terrestrial home, where it had fallen years ago, on the behalf of the senior class.
The boy and girl quickly abandoned their hook-up, and instead got their release by being the ones to spread the word. Before they could blink, all eyes were on Mac and Eddie. They could’ve retreated, stuffed the rock back in the backpack and bolted out the back door to resume their plan, to silently place the rock, and have the people of Viscauga wonder who had it been? Who had restored the rock and the very town itself to its former glory? But instead, Mac looked at their eyes, their faces, the whole lot of them: his peers, the offspring of the town that had been kicked around, pushed to the sidelines, and disrespected for years. So, he took the rock out, and hoisted it high over his head. “Behold!”
Mac and Eddie were hailed as the returning heroes. The meteorite was passed around and examined by the house, tossed around as a football in an impromptu game in the front yard, posed with for pictures. Mac and Eddie, meanwhile, were surrounded for the next two hours. Their hands were never free of a drink, and by the night’s end, they could have commanded a legion of their fellow classmates to do their bidding: rob a convenience store, strip naked and dive into the icy cold waters of the Cahaba River. Mac should have done this years ago.
But not everyone was hip to it, for in the shadows, the cold, gleaming, jealous eyes of the one they had usurped -- the cuckolded Abe Gibson -- watched. In a small dead moment of the night, he managed to get Mac alone, on the premise of “congratulating” him, face-to-face.
“I just want you to know,” Abe said, soon to take the gloves off, “that you committed a crime. My prank didn’t hurt anyone. But you’ve robbed from a town, and when you put that stolen rock up at the Drive-In, you’re gonna make the rest of the town as big a criminal as you. And you’re not gonna get away with it. I won’t allow it.”
Mac, speechless and for the first time that night quivering and doubting his actions, was soon interrupted by Cherry, who had been listening to the whole thing. Mac noticed a piece of paper in her hand.
She said, “You tell anyone what Mac did, and I’ll tell everyone where you’re going to college in the Fall.”
“What are you talking about?” Abe Gibson said. “Everybody knows I’m going to Auburn!”
“Is that true?” And with that, Cherry showed him the paper in her hand, a photocopy of his Letter of Intent to join the Freshman class of the despised University of Alabama.
“I told you about that in confidence! Anyway, that letter’s B.S.! I never even sent it in.”
“Yeah, but you considered it enough to sign it.”
Mac had to admire Cherry’s cunning. Apparently dating Abe Gibson last Fall had come with some unique fringe benefits for political leverage.
“Well it’s a free country anyway!” Abe was beginning to whine. “I can go to any college I want to.” Now he was quivering and doubting his actions. “I don’t owe this town anything!”
“Yeah,” Cherry said, “but your dad still works here, and once they see this Letter of Intent in the Sunday paper, no self-respecting citizen of Viscauga will ever hire him to build them anything ever again.”
In the early morning hours, long after Abe Gibson had backed off his threat and left in a rage, and most of the party had either left or passed out in the nooks and crannies of Cherry’s parents’ house, Cherry, the sober host through the night, chauffeured Mac and Eddie to the Cosmic Drive-In, where they fulfilled the final stage of their night’s purpose. They walked casually to the glass case next to the Big Pretzel oven, and placed the rock in its cradle. Then they sat there on the hood of Cherry’s Mustang, a small dot of life in the giant, vacant lot, littered still with the Styrofoam Coke cups and popcorn boxes from the night before, and they stared up at the black sky, slowly growing brighter, from where in years so long ago they were now legend, a small rock the size of a grapefruit had fallen and made this place important. And they talked about what they would be, where they would end up, and how they would continue to change the world.re
Writer’s note: The Witherspoon Meteorite is based on the Hodges Meteorite, an actual space rock that smacked right through an Alabama housewife’s roof back in 1954 in Sylacauga, AL. Of course, it didn’t stop there. Once it breeched her shingles, it hit her! For years, Ann Hodges remained the only known human to have ever been struck by a meteorite. Like in the story I just told you, there was a lengthy political battle over just who owned the rock, and, eventually, it was determined that Ann Hodges had been through so much already that she should be the one to hold onto it. She ended up donating it to the Natural History Museum in Tuscaloosa, where it remains today. When I visited the Sylacauga History Museum back in 2016, I found that time did not heal all bruised egos, and the small town historian told me there were still some ill-feelings toward the museum in Tuscaloosa that they have not returned the Hodges Meteorite back to the terrestrial home gravity had once chosen for it.