Rooftop Cosmonauts (A Crash Course in Divination)

The coin flipping began back in high school, when Jonny Quiktune and his legendary partner, Oscar Ramirez, would prowl the streets of the Upper West Side by night.  Jonny in his seventies motorcycle jacket, Oscar in his big chrome ‘iron specs.’  The normal course of our weekend ranging encompassed certain choice city rooftops (where the water towers on surrounding roofs looked to our starry eyes like rockets about to blast off), the Jerusalem falafel joint (where fez-clad Muhammed let us crack open a bottle of cheap bubbly in the restaurant’s gloriously grimy environs one memorable New Years, before he disappeared back to Syria) and Sal and Carmine’s Pizza (still the best slice in the world, R.I.P. Sal!), and down to the Village to Small’s jazz club, back when it was B.Y.O. booze and jazz cigarettes.  Indian Row on East 6th was a favorite haunt; we’d let the touts vie for our business for a while, gleefully bargaining down the price of the already dirt cheap dinner special and enquiring as to the contents of their Mulligatawny soup, before settling inevitably on whichever identical little christmas light-lit, mirror-ceilinged restaurant was featuring live sitar and tabla music that night.  Then we’d stop into the corner store and buy an absurd amount of beer to quench the fire.

Fact is we had it pretty good as teens in the city.  But sometimes all of Manhattan’s parks, pizza places, rooftops, jazz clubs and blind-eye-turning bars weren’t enough to occupy us.  Sometimes a certain restlessness would take hold, and all the familiar pleasures of the city would seem stale.  This, I imagine, is how the coin-flipping began.  

Picture, if you will, our two protagonists, on a windswept city corner, a gleam in their eyes and a devilish itch in their minds.  What to do on such a Saturday or Tuesday night?  Jericurl James is grounded; Doktor Milkbar is lost to the world in the mythical land of Staten Island; Andrew the Sleepy Pinwheel’s phone has been dead for days and Dead Dave seems actually to have perished this time.  We are two, and two is trouble.  We could roam the zoo of St. Mark’s Place, browse the record shops, get weird and then get some Belgian fries--or rent out a dingy rehearsal room at Funkadelic Studios for a couple hours and make some noise--but such schemes smack of the ordinary, the tried and true.  We crave excitement, adventure...are these not our alter-egos we’re wearing?  Is this strange city not our oyster?  

At such a moment, one of us reaches into a corduroyed pocket and extracts a shiny quarter.  Heads we head East.  Tails West.  (Tacit agreement as to the sacrality of the act, later we’ll spell out explicitly that such fate is not to be trifled with; coin flips are final).  A moment’s suspense, and we have our answer.  The coin has spoken.  We’re headed to Brooklyn (or the park, or the coffeeshop, or the waterfront).  The coin has spoken.    

Simple 50-50, heads-tails flips provided for countless nights of unexpected adventures, for once you start flipping coins for trivialities there’s no logical stopping point.  A particular sequence of heads and tails might land us at someone’s apartment having Turkish coffee or on an unexplored rooftop having a smoke, fourteen stories above the city’s twinkling lights.  I’m sure I ended up miserably seasick on an all night fishing boat out of Sheepshead Bay once because of the divination god’s sense of humor.

If flipping coins was something of a novelty for a while, though, it soon receded to another tool in the kit.  It wasn’t an end in itself but an expedient.  It became, for me at least, a way of acknowledging that I don’t know what’s going to happen anyway no matter what I decide or plan to do.  A way of creatively and explicitly inviting chance to play, rather than pretending control over the millions of variables present in every moment.  It became, at various times and to various degrees, a point of pride, a lifestyle choice, a handicap, and an inspiration.  

When the time came to decide which college to attend, after some consideration I finally turned to the trusty quarter.  Heads, I email University X and play their game, telling them I am committing to their program so please go ahead and let me in off the wait list.  Tails, I tell them to screw their wait list and accept the offer at Small Liberal Arts College Y.  The coin god spoke, and I went to Swarthmore.  In retrospect, it was the right choice, though I’d never have been able to suss out why in advance. Perhaps the big, stuffy Ivy League school would have somehow set me on my path as well. Maybe there are no wrong choices, only more and less interesting ones. In any case, I’ve never yet had cause to regret a coin flip.

A particuarly memorable flip occurred a year or two later, when Oscar and Dave (back from the dead) and I converged during Winter break for a New Years road trip.  Canada was our destination; this required no divination (why flip a coin for something so obvious?).  We were also assuming that we would head to Montreal, but upon consulting a map we realized that Toronto was equidistant from our Upstate New York locale.  A moment of deliberation; then a flip. Tails: to Toronto we go, by way of the Finger Lakes.  What followed was an unreasonably joyous expedition, as revealed in the photos: the three of us beaming in the spray at Niagara Falls, spontaneously playing a song at an open-mic that seemed straight out of 1994, and, on New Years Eve, sharing champagne with some extremely random Japanese tourists.  On the first day of the New Year, we flew back across the border so fast in my green Honda (no tickets in Canada! it seemed) that we got a hefty, buzz-killing ticket almost immediately after crossing back into NY State.  

In my old age I’ve cooled it a bit with the coin flipping.  This is not to say that I don’t indulge, just that I tend to go for modest tosses.  Where to go for dinner, say, or which river to head to on a hot day.  My divinatory spirit is alive and well, however; for complex or intractable issues, I’ve learned to consult the grand-daddy of coin flips: the I Ching (or Yi Jing).  The ancient Chinese oracle, and quite likely the oldest book on Earth, is akin to a sixty-four sided coin.  And though the traditional method of consulting this oracle involves yarrow stalks, it can be done with six coins.  Each of the oracle’s symbols consists of a solid line (yang) or a broken one (yin), and yang lines can be in the process of changing to yin and vice versa.  That gives four types of lines.  Call these 6, 7, 8, and 9: 6 is yin changing to yang, 7 is simple yang, 8 simple yin, and 9 yang changing to yin.  Then assign heads a value of 3, tails of 2, and flip a coin three times for each line (starting with the bottom one and working up).  Tails-tails-heads means 2 + 2 + 3 = 7, a yang line.  Three flips for each of the six lines yields up the Hexagram, which is keyed to a number of further symbols and statements in the text of the Yi Jing.  If you haven’t encountered it before, welcome to your latest obsession.  

Still, for simple binary questions--yes/no, left/right--the simple coin flip remains king.  Asking the Yi Jing whether you should turn East or West on a New York street corner is like breaking out the sextant and compass to figure out which way the sun sets, or looking up “crunk” in the Oxford English Dictionary: massive overkill, and not likely to succeed.  The Yi Jing sings in 64 tones, each a shade of grey; a coin flip is and always will be nice and black and white.  Anyway, the Yi Jing is heady stuff, powerful and often confusing; coin flipping has a way of seasoning one for the work of serious divination, if only by developing faith in the power and wisdom of chance, or fate, or whatever you prefer to call it.  

Another reason never to spend the last quarter in your pocket...