Everything changed the day Luke Lacy was hit by a meteor in his sleep. The roof softened some of the blow, and the chunk of space rock bounced right off his forehead, waking him up in a stupefied daze. The doctors wanted to keep an eye on him. So did the whole town, once they got wind of the incident. Everybody wanted to see what he would do next.

I had been performing as a solo country music act for about ten years at this point. I had dated Luke on and off when I was younger, but we were more just sentimental acquaintances at this point. I played the local pubs and music venues. I’d busk on street corners in art districts and downtowns. Some nights I would just drive my Chevy out into the open desert and play my guitar under the stars.

It was shortly after he was hit with the meteor that Luke Lacy found me busking downtown with my acoustic, slouched against a brick wall outside a coffee shop, with my case swung open and a makeshift sign attached. 

“Howdy, Luke.” I nodded. 

“Howdy.”

He stood there watching for some time, and when the next song was over, he clapped and threw a few dollars down into my guitar case.

“Thanks, Luke,” I smiled.

“No problem. Hey…mind if I try that? I’ve never played guitar before.”

“Yeah, no problem.”

So I sat Luke down next to me and showed him a couple major chords, and patterns of variations of them to play some simple riffs. We were laughing together about it. It felt like old times. Like when we was close. 

A crowd started to form.

“Hey, Luke Lacy is playing guitar!”

“That’s Luke Lacy…” people whispered.

“Who?”

“The meteor guy!”

When he was done playing the chords I showed him there must have been about thirty people around us clapping and cheering. Luke handed back my guitar and thanked me. When he walked away, so did the audience.I couldn’t help but feel some bitterness. In all my years as a musician I never gained or lost a crowd so easily. I suppose that’s what local celebrity does to someone. It was next week’s newspaper that validated my grudge. And, oh, what a headline.

LUKE LACY, THE METEOR MAN, STARTS NEW BAND, LUKE LACY AND THE METEOR MEN!

Just like that, he was selling out clubs in the rural southwest, playing my riffs, famous off his name and a random junk of space dust. He shortly signed a record deal and got set up with a producer out in LA.

A new article hit the papers a month or so later. Luke was being interviewed

“Hell, if I can do it, anyone can,” he told the reporter. But he only did it with the same stroke of luck as winning the lottery. I had worked hard my whole life to hone my skills, and still nobody cared.

I would sit at the bar with other musicians in my same situation and tell them, “Y’know, I think I’d be okay being a nobody if maybe just one time I got to go up there to a full room of people. And maybe some of those people would be singing along…Just one time is all I need.” 

We’d laugh at the sheer impossibility and cheers to a glass of whiskey. Old country tunes would play; the slow and sad kind. It was the kind that could make you cry with the simplest, plainest lyrics. The way those singers sung, no matter how off-key or grizzly, there was an authenticity to their pain that could drench a bar towel with just one eye full of tears. The beer flowed like water, and soon the well of our wallets was all dried up. And it was time to busk.

It was after Luke Lacy pressed his first record, Lace ‘em Up, that I got offered a real good spot with some touring musicians on a Friday night in downtown Santa Fe. I practiced every day I wasn’t working and got me down a set I was really proud of. I showed up to the gig an hour early to an empty bar. The promoter told me to stay put. He promised some people would come.

I sat at the bar and waited. On TV Luke Lacy was on the Hee Haw show popping out of fields of corn to sling one-liners to a laugh track. I drank deep and flipped my shot glass upside-down on the bar. There were three people there. Me, and the other two acts.

I was heartbroken. I thought back to those old country tunes in those nameless bars with nameless musicians just as insignificant as me, and I decided; I got nothing to lose. I’ll just pour it all out right now. Every last bit I got. And tomorrow? Who knows if I’ll ever do it again.

So I sang. I sang like God intended songs to be sung. And when I finished, the two touring musicians were cheering and clapping. 

It was the best I had ever played.

The next singer got up on stage. He sat down on his stool and adjusted the microphone, smiling. He heaved a big sigh and looked me in the eye. He had traveled all the way from Oklahoma just to be there.

“This is what it’s all about. I wouldn’t trade this for the world,” he said. And likewise, he sang his heart out to both of us in the crowd, and I started tearing up. First in self-pity. Then, at the realization of his words.

I went home that night, buzzing off whiskey and comradery. Instead of going straight to bed, I walked out into the desert and stared at all the millions of stars up in the sky. 

I strummed my guitar.

All the stars were so beautiful that each one was just as insignificant, I figured. But without each one of them, there would be no significance. 

I played some quiet songs to myself and imagined what it might be like to be a pre-historic human, singing in a cave, beating bones on the ground, whistling through primitive flutes. Those songs were never written down or recorded. Or idolized. Or bought.

They were shared.

“This is what it’s all about,” I reminded myself, sitting amongst the cacti and the sand, under a sky of orchestrated lights and lost dimensions.

Another meteor fell that night. Right into Luke Lacy’s bedroom. Again. But this time the roof didn’t soften the blow. 

When they found him in the morning, Luke had a fist-sized hole smashed in the front of his head. You couldn’t see his eyes or his nose. He had been smiling in his sleep. Never even had a chance to wake up.

Nothing as interesting as that ever happened in our town for a long, long time.

I don’t play out as much as I used to. I’m just focusing on enjoying life. Most nights I’m happy with my place in the world.

Other nights, I stay awake in my bed and look up at my ceiling lamp, praying for a meteor to smack me right in the goddamn face.