You ever have one of those days when it’s 3 in the morning in New York and you find a dark alley to smash a coconut to smithereens because you were told by a psychic it was good luck? And you needed that luck because you were going to lose your house and all of your possessions and you lost your job and all of your money and you were probably going to kill yourself if you didn’t smash this coconut.
Let’s rewind a few hours before the coconut smashed. You ever find yourself in a Thai restaurant, asking the cook for a coconut (don’t they use coconut curry?) and she shakes her head no and has no idea where to get a coconut and then you turn around and you see every drug addict chessplayer you’ve known for years sitting all around the restaurant because here’s where they apparently go at 10pm at night after the park closes.
And then, instead of continuing on your mission for a coconut you sit down and start playing JP and he says in that sonorous voice of his, “what are you doing here?” and you say, “I have to get a coconut,” and he says, “there must be a woman involved in this story” and he laughs in that voice (he should’ve been a radio announcer) and says, “set up the pieces” like he’s been saying to you since you were a kid and you play for two hours while wife (now ex) and baby (now teenager) are sitting at home waiting for you to get back with a coconut.
Rewind more. You ever wait by Port Authority to take a bus to that part of Weehawken where everyone is Spanish and delis contain voodoo dolls and you walk in one place and behind a beaded entrance is an astrologer/tarot card reader who talks a lot about coconuts and what you should do with them?
She’s very busy so you had to wait two hours for her so you wandered around and you thought to yourself, “I could totally disappear here.” You think to yourself: I’d live on the second floor of one of these run down apartment buildings and I’d go out for deli sandwiches every day and I’d marry a Mexican girl. You’d think to yourself, I’d grow a moustache and I’d wear a wifebeater t-shirt and I’d buy an old car with a loud radio and I’d turn the radio up loud and set up some crates next to the car and sit on the crates and set up a table and play dominos with all of my friends. You wonder if this is racist. Who cares. It feels good. You’d wander around for two hours in an orgasmic reverie looking at all the women and you’d think, she’s the one. No! She’s the one.
Life never felt as good as your vision of disappearing. Why can’t life for a split second be like that other dimension, the one that shimmers and you reach for it but it’s farther away than you thought. It’s more than a million miles away. You enter instead into the tarot card reader store with the voodoo dolls and the Jesus dolls and the Mary dolls and she’d talk about coconuts and what you need to do with them. You think back to what Mark said when you first moved to New York. “All the tarot card readers are actually prostitutes.” You wonder how he knew.
Ugh. Rewind some. Fast forward. No. Not there. Rewind more. August 31, 1997, you sold your first company. You call your sister. “It’s done!” you shout into the phone. A woman passes, “Who cares!”
Fast forward. Tribeca, New York. Two in the morning. Coconut in hand. You hold it over your head. You smash the coconut in the ground. It doesn’t smash because you’re not even good at throwing a coconut at the ground. You pick it up and throw it into the ground again. It smashes everywhere. A million pieces. Life is going to be good again, you think.
Fast forward. Ten years later. Which is to say, two years ago. You’re in India. You’re tired because you were put into a yoga position that twisted something a little too far. Your fibia? What if you stretch your groin too far, you wonder, because this was only your first class here and you never know when groin issues can rear their ugly head.
Claudia holds out a coconut. New wife. New life. New coconut. Do you smash it into a million pieces? Guys with machetes seem to know what they are doing. They slice the top of the coconuts right open and put in a straw. You sip the water out of the coconut. Mmmm. “It gives you energy,” Claudia said. She is shimmering like in your vision ten years earlier. You sip the coconut.
You ever have a decade where so many of your dreams turned into nightmares? Where all the good luck that was promised you by parents, education, bosses, money, never really happened. You ever have one of those decades where it was completely your fault all the bad luck you deserved and you wandered from home to home, from misery to misery, no matter what an astrologer told you.
Rewind a few years before that. Its 4 in the morning. Raining. You’re lying in the intersection of third avenue and 52nd street. A girl is lying next to you. You’re both drunk. Cars are swerving around. Wait. That’s another story. Fast forward again back to the coconut stand in India, 8000 miles away.
You remember that dream where you were playing dominos and all the worries and fears were swept away. You pictured yourself in slow motion slamming a domino down and all the dominos on the table but yours would go up about half an inch and then come down and everyone would be laughing because your move was so good. You vaguely remember seeing that in a rap video and everyone looked like they were in love. Love of friends. Everything feels so good. The music coming from your beat up car. Where do you have to be tomorrow? Nowhere. No worries.
Do you remember when you started writing this post? Just a few minutes ago. And all of those fears and anxieties and shames came boiling to the top? They wanted to come out and play again. To scare you. To laugh at you. The post momentarily stripping away your soul, introducing you to the demon taking care of you. Like… what the fuck was that all about?
You shut that down. You shut that down right now for good.