'Hot Cross Buns and a Crisp Packet Metaphor' - Coffee with Charl Coconut..

INTERVIEW - 'Four Hours With Charl Coconut I'll Never Get Back'

"GOD! GOD! GOD!" parrots reformed man of violence Charl Coconut as he sits in a coffee shop opposite the town pub where he almost killed some bloke with a single punch in Nineteen Eighty-Bore. It’s publication day for ‘Repentance’ – Coconut’s new book of conversations he’s had in this very coffee shop over the past year.

As the narrative begins, the author is ‘floundering in the wilderness’ after renouncing his life of criminality and violence and being a bit stuck for what to do for money once leg breaking, general intimidation, violence and extortion and the odd shift of ‘door work’ has been wiped off the menu.

Coconut recounts his entry into the Café that morning when he spied a hot cross bun on the counter and knew his moment of revelation had come.

Coconut takes up the story - “It was God speaking to me.”

“Through a hot cross bun?” I say.

“I see God in everything” Coconut extols and off we disappear into a monologue so hermetically sealed against any counter viewpoint it’s difficult to find a way in.

“I lived a life of violence” Coconut states, setting me up for the verbal punch. I leap into the gap a split second before it closes.

“Why did you become violent?” I ask.

“I grew up with a fear of violence. I was afraid” Coconut begins.

“Surely that’s a sensible fear for anyone to have? Violence is moronic. Destructive. Shouldn’t it be avoided at all costs?”

“I needed to confront it. I went looking for violence and I found it. I could find it in any pub or club in town on any night of the week. I learnt it all – how to start fights, how to end them, how to make violence erupt just when it looked like it was all calming down. I learned to punch people in the face before they could punch me. Most of all I learned that I liked it. I started to need it. I began inviting it to my house – if someone threatened to find out where I lived and visit violence upon me I’d give them my address and wait for them in the garden. Naked. I punched a man into the Pick n Mix in Woolworths once. I had to. If I hadn’t punched him into the Pick n Mix in Woolworths, he’d have punched me into the Pick n Mix in Woolworths. It was a real situation. The only thing I asked of life was violence and life delivered upon my request and..”

“And that’s when it all changed?” I say out loud as I’m familiar with how these stories are typically structured.

Something flickers behind Coconut’s eyes – a ghost, the shadow of violence, the briefest flicker and I apologise for my interjection. For being rude. For him being one of the most humourless individuals I’ve ever met.

“I was clinging to violence” Charl continues. “It was my security, a comfort blanket I could throw across my world – but that had to change the night I nearly killed someone.”

He turns and stares melodramatically across the market square where one cold night in the Eighties, Coconut nearly killed a man with a single punch – a fight which began, Coconut says ‘over an empty crisp packet.’

“I was on the door – this guy walked up, saw the crisp packet on the floor and said “You’ve eaten my crisps.” I was firm. I said “I haven’t.” "He said you have. They're my crisps." I asked him what flavour they were. He immediately shaped to hit me but I was quicker.”

By his own admission Coconut went home that night ‘high as a kite’ from the approval of his fellow bouncers and onlookers but the image of the man he’d punched being scraped off the concrete and dragged to a car proved haunting. He could not sleep and by morning had still not received word that the man was alive. I try to imagine how this would feel – presenting myself the scenario of a drunk driver waking in a cell to be informed they’d run someone over the night before and my body floods with terror. But for Coconut this feeling was routine. Eventually that afternoon he discovered the man was not deceased and in a pub getting pissed –

“And everything changed in that moment?” I pre-empt.

Coconut looks sheepish.

“No. Not in that moment. It was another moment that happened later. See, the guy phoned me up from the pub complaining that I’d hit him before he’d had chance to hit me, so I went straight down the pub and gave him another chance.”

“You hit him again?”

“I hit him again, yeah.”

“And that was the moment everything changed?”

“No. They thought he was dead again and took him back to hospital..”

Having escaped killing a man – the same man, a second time, Coconut found the strength to walk away from his life of violence and here the image of the crisp packet proved instructive.

“My life was that crisp packet” he elaborates. “You could have fit my consciousness inside it and my level of education and my future prospects and still have had room..”

But walking away has not been easy.

“Violence is a conversation and when you’ve been violent thousands of times as I have there are thousands of people keen to have a conversation with you and that’s why I was guided to write the book – that’s what God told me to do.”

Over the past year Coconut has met and talked with 806 men who responded to his request for repentance through a dialogue of long held grievance. I ask if all of these men have come in peace. It seems a reasonable question.

“Not all came in peace but all left in peace. I think because they understood I’d batter them if they didn’t quickly calm down. A man that's hospitalized you once can hospitalise you again if he chooses. Also, the moment they sat down I asked if they could feel God in the room and I put a hot cross bun on the table. I think that helped.”

As a locally recognisable man, I ask Charl what impact his project has had on the town.

“The conversations with these 806 men have removed a poison from within them and from within myself” Charl states, then begins a monologue about ‘spiritual truth’ which I allow to mesmerise me for 11 minutes before realising I cannot allow it to continue unfiltered.

“How do you know its God speaking to you?” I challenge. "I respect your right to believe in whatever you wish but what you propose is a supposition - an assumption or hypothesis held without proof. God may well exist but it can only ever be a matter of faith and belief. No one can definitively prove it and no one ever will."

“Everything is spiritual” Charl counters. “I used to punch people unconscious because I was unconscious and once I’d punched them they were unconscious as well. My mission now is to lead the unconscious to the conscious and that all starts with myself. I was in my prayers yesterday and…

“For God’s sake” I erupt out of sheer exhaustion. “Please, please, please can you just get through one sentence without mentioning God!”

Charl smiles as if I’ve confirmed everything he thinks he knows. “It would seem not. God was present even then in your exasperation.”

“You used to be consumed by violence, now you’re consumed by spirituality. You’ve just swapped one addiction for another!” I exclaim.

Charl smiles again and suggests I attend one of his ‘Transformational Repentance’ walks and experience his message for myself.

“Ok, fine” I assent.

“That’ll be £250” Charl announces, producing a card machine. I hand over my card and am instructed to meet him next week by the statue of the fist he petitioned the Council to commission and pay for in celebration of his exploits.

After he returns my debit card I momentarily worry about what I might encounter being seen with Charl as we walk around town. Might any of his past antagonists try to get violent? Then I think maybe he’s hit upon the answer – if anyone does get all sweary and angry he could start talking about God until they voluntarily run full pelt into the path of a lorry on the high street. Whatever makes it stop.

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