Saturday, November 17, 2007 | by nathan

Centennial, Part 4

Yesterday, November 16, 2007, was the 100th anniversary of Oklahoma’s statehood. I’m commemorating the occasion by writing a series of short essays about Oklahoma, the state I call home.

Part 4: The Watermelon and the Getaway

 

Flickr photo courtesy Gambling Gringo

When I first met Brian he was living in a studio loft only steps away from the site of the Oklahoma City Bombing. When we first got together I started spending so much time at his apartment that it felt like home really quickly, and he was very kind and gave me a key to the place. It was a great building, restored with federal funds after the bombing. It had a gorgeous rooftop terrace that looked out over the bombing memorial, and if not for our mutual tendency to be messy and to spread out - not to mention the train that roared past every morning at 3:30 a.m. - we might still live there.

The summer that we lived there was incredible, peppered liberally with get-togethers and parties, even though I was working seven days a week at two jobs. Sometime in the middle of the summer we got the bright idea to try to make a vodka watermelon, and to that end we visited the local farmer’s market and bought a fresh, large watermelon which, because of our busy schedules, sat on our counter for two weeks or more.

That summer, Brian’s best friends Peter and Sarah came to visit, and we were all standing on the rooftop in the middle of the day having some drinks. Someone, somehow, got the idea to take that watermelon - too old and disgusting to be of any use now, we told ourselves - and push it off the edge of the building. Flush with drink and chemical courage, we rushed downstairs to retrieve it.

The roof of the building was four stories high, and we all gathered around excitedly as Peter set the melon on the edge of the building and pushed it off into the alley behind. This was the side of the building that faced the Memorial site, and across the alley was a parking lot for Memorial visitors.

Peter let the melon fall, and we heard nothing; after a second or two we all peeked over the edge of the building into the alley. There was our melon, in a million pieces, the scent of mildly rotten fruit already rising up to meet us. For whatever reason (read: the alcohol) we all thought this might be the funniest thing we’d ever seen or done. The watermelon lay, rotting, in the alley for a few days, behind the dumpsters. No doubt countless visitors to the bombing memorial wondered at the smell.

Later, I finally got around to reading American Terrorist, an accounting of how McVeigh and Nichols had carried out the attack in Oklahoma City. The authors were reporters from McVeigh’s hometown of Buffalo, NY, and they were granted unprecedented access to visit him in prison before his execution. He drew them a map of his getaway route that is included in the book.

Turns out that after McVeigh parked the Ryder Truck in front of the Murrah building, he ran up 5th street, then right through the alley where, ten years later, my friends and I would drop a watermelon, giggling in drunken glee to ourselves at our mischief. He had parked his getaway car only steps from the front door of what would later be our building. At that moment it was, like many buildings in downtown Oklahoma City at the time, an empty warehouse about to have its windows blown out, its foundations rocked.