Stories Happen

to those who know how to tell them.

Apr 28, 2025

My wife and I don’t argue much, all things considered. But we do argue about stories, and how to tell them.

I keep it tight, compressing dialogue, merging events, combining minor characters and so forth. She’s a stickler for details, and will ruthlessly fact-check me as I attempt to unfurl a yarn. She’s accurate, even if she has to stop a story dead in its tracks and check her phone to get the date and location right, while I grind my teeth.

I maintain that leaving things out is key to a good story, and an essential step when manufacturing sense from experience.

This essay is a story about the details in the real world that a good story would leave out. But these details persist, interrupt and give pause, to the point of possibly undermining the most obvious narrative of life itself.

Attention

Mystery surrounds us. It’s what we are before birth and after death. It’s the future and most of the past. It’s how things unfold right now, and why they happen at all.

But who fucking cares? Most of the time, no one.

There are times, however, that focus the mind, when we not only pay attention, but paying attention to everything, because we’ve just been shocked into remembering that we do not know from where the next hit will come.

The weeks around a death are one of those times. Coincidences cluster, and relationships beyond simply causal ones come to the fore.

Interlude beside a hospital

A few hours after my mother died, a series of unexpected events brought me to Methodist Hospital - now rather absurdly named NewYork Presbyterian Methodist Brooklyn Hospital - with my wife and daughter.

The events that brought us there that specific day were so anomalous and absurd that I’ll omit them entirely except to say everybody’s fine, and the whole affair seems to be behind us.

That day, we had to go to an emergency room. But we had to talk to a lawyer before we did. A cold, rainy afternoon, the last of January, grim and dark as night, we parked outside Saint Saviour’s school on 8th Avenue, a block from the apartment where my Uncle Jim lived, and where he raised my cousin. I lived with Jim there for the first week after I moved to New York, and for a week after I broke my foot when I was twenty. I always loved my uncle - my mother’s brother - who died in 2003. For me, that neighborhood still carries his air of generosity, kindness and his gruff enjoyment of simple, urban pleasures.

The situation that afternoon required that we wait for a phone call in that semi-legal parking spot for about an hour. The situation also demanded that I not tell my little girl that her grandmother had died a few hours earlier.

For an hour, I buried the lede, telling my little girl about my experiences with the hospital and the neighborhood, about my uncle and my mother. Being there with nothing to do but talk to my little girl about her ancestors carried with it a message. Or rather, it felt like a message.

Coyle at the graveside

A week later, we held my mother’s funeral in East Flatbush, where her mother’s family had a plot going back to the first-arrived Irish in the 1800s. My mother’s remains would fill the final part of it. The graveyard had a deacon on staff to do the service if you didn’t bring your own priest. The one on duty that day had the same last name as the one on the plot and the stone, Coyle, my mother’s mother’s maiden name.

Stories happen

If someone told you that today was the day you’d meet the love of your life, you’d look at things more closely.

A death is like that. It’s just one of the times that people get frisky when paying attention and making meaning. For some people, travel does it. For others it’s a visit to the church, synagogue, masjid, movie theater, museum of concert hall. Lately, I’ve had more deaths than museum visits, so I’ll stay with that for a minute.

The green mask

I’ve experienced a string of seemingly meaningful coincidences around a dream I had in 2005. In the dream, I was in an open-plan-office version of hell where everyone faced each other, but couldn’t see each other. I’d been there a long time, when a good friend showed up, not even human anymore. He was a white, unglazed saucer, with a grimacing face in the middle. I carried him to a high window, like the window in a basement. On the short walk, my friend changed into a rectangular metal plate, green like a circuit board. His face in gold lines formed the hieroglyph of a frowning eagle. When I put the circuit board in the sun, the bird face reset itself into a mild smile.

Dreams come and go. But this one stayed with me. Maybe it was the redolence of the hell I’d seen. Maybe it was the sense among my friends and I at the time that something bad was about to happen to one of us, the way we were living. The dream became the lodestone around which I wound an entire novel.

About two years later, as I was putting the final touches on that book, my close childhood friend Joe Martin was killed in Rio de Janeiro on his 30th birthday. At the funeral in Massachusetts, they put his cremated remains in a green marble box with a gold plate. Already rattled, this struck a mysterious chord, opening unimaginable possibilities beyond the obvious, painful tragedy.

Persistence

The book that the dream spurred on - What Smiled at Him - finally came out in 2011, with the buddies in hell as a key scene in it. Around that time, I made friends with Matthew D’Abate, a writer, filmmaker and bartender in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, who always had a project going. At the time, he was assembling an anthology called Drinking with Papa Legba, with short fiction about the threshold of life and death.

I sent that chapter of the novel to Matt, who put it in. After the launch party, I brought a copy home and promptly forgot about it. When Matt died in February, about two weeks after my mother, I met some mutual friends at a bar to talk, drink and console one another. One of them brought Drinking with Papa Legba. And the parallax alignment of a dead friend and the scene from hell hit me like a hard static shock.

It was a frigid Wednesday night and the subway ride from Greenpoint to Bay Ridge took a while. I had a book for the train, Chronicles of Doom, about the life of the rapper MF Doom, who died too young, at 49 years. I was nose-deep in it, mostly to ignore the stop-and-start of the late-night train when I came to a section about the jacket art for Doom’s 2009 album Born Like This, which features a white clay-stone mask and an emerald-green tablet side by side.

MF DOOM, Born Like This (2009), cover art by EH?

The similarity to the two faces of my friend in the hell dream made me sit up in my fiberglass seat.

On my phone, I bought the album, which loaded a bit at a time as the wi-fi came and went at the stations on the way. It was in my earphones for the final stretch of the trip. I hustled up the stairs from the last stop, took a deep breath of the cold air and sneered at the evening, at fortune, at the weather, at the too-short sleep ahead of me that night and the too-long day to follow, when the next track started in my headphones.

It didn’t open with MF Doom, but with Charles Bukowski reciting his poem Dinosauria, We - “Born like this, into this…” Matt D’Abate loved Bukowski and considered him a hero. The poem goes on - a magisterial indictment of all the miseries and pettiness of human existence, resolving into brutal apocalypse and cosmic peace. Then MF Doom clears his throat, the kettle drum sounds, and he adds his new testament to Bukowski’s bible.

As the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge bobbed to the beat before me on the wind-skinned winter avenue, this 20-year circuit of coincidence did something to me. Without knowing the content of the message, I couldn’t escape the sense of being spoken to.

Synchronicity

None of this proves anything. It’s no system. It’s a clue left by something that can’t entirely be an accident. Decoding it is like shooting a bullet at a bullet. It’s wilderness. At best, it’s a predator stalking a better predator, and hoping for luck or pity.

It’s also esoteric. To call something esoteric isn't just to say it's little-known and difficult-to-grasp. It's also to say that one shouldn't be talking about it at all, certainly not so loud, and never in mixed company. But here we are, lingering over the last few paragraphs of a long essay. I suppose we can talk out of school.

Closing epigrams

When it comes to the high strangeness and spooky action at a distance implied by the concept of synchronicity, I’m pursued by the formulation of the psychonaut Terence McKenna that “reality is not only stranger than we suppose, but stranger than we can suppose.”

And I’ll pair it with a line by Deadwood creator David Milch that, “faith is a way of staying available for something better.”

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