Meteor

There was this crate in the back, see, this unmarked crate in the back of the Bonham's and Butterfield's, that auction house on Sunset. This was six years ago and I was working on something called "Ginger's Rise," a low-budget movie, and non-pornographic too, although you might not be able to tell from the title. We were shooting some uninspired and talky scene in the auction house and ordered not to touch anything and there were paintings everywhere and antiques and they normally peddled fine furniture and wines and jewelery and even antique cars and things like that, but I am not a part of that subculture so it's hard to say for certain what exactly goes down at B & B amongst the auctioneering set. But I found this crate in the back and and lifted the lid off and inside was a dark gray stone, about two feet wide and a foot high and not spheroid or elliptical in any sense but like an enlarged version of the rock you might pull out of the ground, just kind of rocky overall, but smoothed out, very smoothed out, creamy almost although if you shrunk it down to the size of your palms the edges might get sharp again. I reached out and touched it and it was then that an employee happened by, because in stories like these employees wander by just at the moment when one is compromising his ethics and law-abidingness in general and spinal well-being too by leaning over and trying to heft a very heavy space object with poor lifting technique. He told me that it was, in fact, a meteor or rather a meteorite, technically because it was no longer not-of-this-earth and rather now-on-this-earth but not from it, if you know what I mean. I bent my knees and prepared to deadlift this medium-small stone and found that I could not, it was heavier than anything I had ever experienced, heavier than something designed for heaviness, like weights, for example. I could not lift it. It was dense and smooth and ridiculously weighty, like goddamn no wonder it made it here to earth where it probably crushed a football-field-sized hole in the desert before B&B found out and sent out an appraiser to hoodwink the white trash meteorite discoverer and buy the thing for a song and then smuggle it back to Hollywood to peddle to old Beverly Hills ladies with toy dogs and Bono glasses. I am telling this story because I drive by Bonham and Butterfields every day that my car is not in the body shop, and every time I drive by I think of the meteor and how fantastic it was that it was just sitting there, this object from outer space, amongst a bunch of vases and gilt-framed oil paintings in an unmarked crate where no one would ever see it except for me and my friend Luke who happened by with some scripts and when I showed him the 'roid he laughed long and loud and said he couldn't believe it either.