Banging A Coconut in a Tropical Quid Pro Quo

After all the scratches and the moments of doubt, I now had a coconut in my hands. But I had no idea how to open it. I did knock on it and asked, “Excuse me, Mr. Coconut, can you open, please?” But all I heard back was, “Stranger danger!”

Well, not really. It sounded like water whooshing from one side to the next. But I think that’s what it was saying.

Hundreds of times, I had seen my grandfather’s foreman do it, the synchronized movement of his hands, bringing down the machete on the coconut as the other hand flicked and turned it in the air.

All movements designed to make the coconut pointy like a conehead.

Then with one final machetazo, he would create an opening from where to drink the coconut.

I didn’t have a machete, so I tried the next best thing.

I went upstairs and got a dull 7″ santoku and a cutting board. I tried to serrate a cone shape on the coconut, but the knife kept slipping out of the skin, and as someone who has cut himself in the kitchen plenty of times, I knew where this heading.

I don’t know if I learned this in Colombia, or read it or what. But I knew that I could bang the husk out.

So I went downstairs again with my daughters in tow and started smashing the coconut against the parking lot’s asphalt.

I thought for sure now my daughters would finally think of me as a lunatic. But after the first loud smack, they were cheering me on.

Now, I’m no coconuist—which is what I think people who study coconuts are called, but let me teach you a little something about coconuts.

A thick skin and husk protect the shell of the fruit. You have to get through all of it before getting to the meat and water. The meat or “white innards” is considered the fruit, and the water is considered the endo-sperm of the fruit.

I don’t know which coconuist came up with all those names, but he sounds like a depraved degenerate. Can a man not eat coconut without making it sound like he is giving it a blowjob?

I started banging the coconut (okay, I guess I’m not helping my case) against a giant rock next to the parking lot. As I noticed the threads of the husk becoming looser, I started to rip the fibers to uncover the shell.

My daughters kept cheering me on, excited we were making progress.

Neighbors were coming out of their apartments, trying to determine where that noise was coming from. They quickly skittered back in when they saw a man who had lost his mind.

Jovie asked me to take over because she saw how much fun I was having banging the coconut.

After twenty minutes of repeated movements, banging against the rock, banging against asphalt, and pulling the skin back, we finally had a much smaller ball in our hands.

We only needed to figure out how to break in and get the water.

I saw the rock I had been using as a blunt object had a pointy end. So I used to push through the pore on the top and ask my wife for a glass to pour the water in.

Nothing is fresher than coconut water right out of a coconut, but it is even better when you are drinking it while your next step in life is uncertain and you decide on an impulse to show your daughters you can climb a coconut tree and then open it and get its sweet, sweet water.

After the water was done, we went back to the rock and smashed the coconut into several pieces. The meat wasn’t slimy, but it wasn’t too hard either, which made it perfect to pull from the shell and eat.

It was delicious, but it wasn’t better than seeing the faces in my daughters thinking, “Wow, my dad can do that!”

When it was all done, I knew I had been possessed.

A sense of mission had taken over me, and while I didn’t, at that moment, have a job, I showed my daughters I would always provide, even if it meant that I would have to spend hours banging a coconut against a rock for a little water and a little meat.