I Thought Stepping In A 'Bad Luck Spot' Ruined My Wedding. Then I Met The Man Who Drew It.

The author and her husband, Chris, in New York City's West Village before their wedding reception.

Two years ago, the day before my wedding, my fiancé and I walked through Washington Square Park in New York City to enjoy a coffee before addressing the final details. Passing the chess players and the very un-squeamish squirrel trainer, we stepped into an extremely large chalk-drawn circle.

I don’t remember the color, but the writing became clear as we approached the midpoint. Smack in the center, beneath our feet read the words “Bad Luck Spot.” We caught each other’s eyes, looking for fear in the reflection. Our ceremony, reception and future couldn’t be hexed by voodoo, could it? “No” — we laughed it off. We trusted in our commitment to each other, denounced the devil’s own luck, and cried, “Not today, Felix!”

If you live in a New York borough, you may be familiar with artist Felix Morelo’s Spots. He draws both Good Luck Spots and Bad Luck Spots, in addition to Kissing Spots, Screaming Spots, Pooping Spots, and sometimes the more controversial Fucking Spots and Racist Spots. We were familiar with his drawings and had previously walked through the positive spots with purpose and avoided the bad ones.

Our heads in the clouds on that day, we did not dodge this particular circle and found ourselves two hours later suddenly without a wedding venue. We arrived at a West Village carriage house — the address of which had been embossed on 75 or so of our invitations — with the intent to pre-set arrangements and our welcome table.

Our shopping bags cut deep into the divots of our fingers, filled over with table settings, Jordan almonds, and an Etsy-made wooden replica of the venue, when a stranger met us at the door. He barely braced us for impact when he explained the locks to the building had been changed. His ex-wife was keeping us barred from entry unless he surrendered additional assets in the divorce settlement. Our wedding was held hostage.

If we are superstitious about anything, it is Felix Morelo’s Bad Luck Spots.

A giant Bad Luck Spot made by Felix Morelo in Union Square Park.

We got married. At another venue. And we never saw the owner of the original venue — or her ex — again. But I was magnetized to Felix’s work, and I’d often wonder how he would react to our chalk-drawn circumstances.

This previous fall, as we celebrated our “cotton” anniversary, I got a call from human resources. After 22 years, my position was being eliminated. I am a creative producer and executive who climbed the corporate ranks until the current media shitstorm reorganized all of middle management, leaving the rich richer and us unemployed.

I was good at my job, and it was stable. And though I constantly craved opportunities to produce more personal work, take creative risks and write a movie or my memoirs, my risk-averse anxiety kept my creative dreams close to the vest.

Depressed from my layoff, I spent too many December mornings hurkle-durkling like a tween on holiday break. Scrolling Instagram, I saw someone had commented on a recent Bad Luck Spot post by @morelofelix , “Please find a new thing… you’ve exhausted all you can.” He responded “No.”

I felt inspired by his single-syllable negative and, with nothing to lose of my own, I wrote him, “Have you thought of collecting personal stories?” He replied, “DM me.”

A cluster of Bad Luck Spots near Union Square in New York City.

Felix was born in the United States only six days after his mother arrived from Colombia, and they quickly returned to Cartagena. He moved back to New York at the age of 11, believing “everyone lived in skyscrapers and no one was poor,” he told me.

His grandmother provided him a home in the 1980s near the then sin-stained heart of Times Square, the Forty-Deuce on 9th, and he has since traded the American dream for the New York hustle.

His first foray into street art was in 2009 while he studied at the Parsons School of Design. He mostly drew faces in chalk and started toying with Good and Bad Luck Spots.

Now in his young 50s, Felix lives in Glendale, Queens. The shortest commute to Greenwich Village is 55 minutes by foot, bus, and the L train, and he makes the trek often to keep his work timely.

We met below Union Square at a coffee shop. My social anxiety kicked in as I walked over, and I fingered the emergency Xanax in my pocket, but my tension eased when I saw a Good Luck Spot drawn in front of the cafe.

A Good Luck Spot outside the coffee shop where the author first met Felix Morelo.

Felix was already in line for coffee and he offered to buy me one.

“But I invited you,” I reminded him.

“Next time,” he said.

To break the ice, I told my bad luck story. He listened, but I could not find empathy in his eyes. Typically, people are sucked into the gossip surrounding my doomed ceremony’s saga — “What did she want from her ex?” “Did you bang down her door?” “How did you find another venue and tell everyone in 24 hours?” “Did you go Bridezilla on steroids in the street?” — but Felix just listened.

I know the woman would have changed the locks, whether or not I had stepped on a Bad Luck Spot or a Good Luck one. In this city, a locksmith would take more time than it did for Felix to travel his chalk from Glendale to the park, draw a 20-foot-wide circle, and wait for an unknowing couple to stroll into it. But still, how could he have no reaction?

Felix is familiar with the repercussions of his work. He has received hate mail and death threats. He’s been attacked on the street and had the police called on him. One man said, “I hope you fall down a subway grate and never come out,” as if his previous comment, “If I ever see you knelt on the ground doing your stupid chalk drawing bullshit, I’m kicking you in the face” wasn’t already sufficient to express how he felt.

“Everything comes with even more pushback and controversy,” Felix told me.  He shuts his phone down at night to avoid the 3 a.m. hate messages.

But the response isn’t all negative. Felix has seen couples embrace in the Kissing or Hugging Spots. He has received press invitations, documentary proposals and a plea from a local dog dad to make the Bad Luck circles smaller in Tompkins Square Park. They’d be easier for the pup to avoid.

One message that still weighs on him was from a grieving parent requesting Felix draw Stop signs with a message against buying and selling illegal drugs after they lost their only son to tainted street drugs.

Felix Morelo drawing a Screaming Spot in Union Square Park in New York City.

Felix’s spots are an attempt to uncover the mystery of the mind. A social science. They’re like walking under a ladder, or breaking a mirror. Inversely, throwing salt over your shoulder or finding a four-leaf clover.

“We’re all subject to being influenced,” he told me.

Felix may set the stage, but he isn’t the puppet master. The players are the public, hosting an improv master class. They manifest a reason to vent and place blame, exorcise demons, or accept a path toward healing. Perhaps “we could stop making patterns out of things that were not even there or don’t exist,” he suggested.

Last summer, my husband and I were near the 1 train at Christopher Street. Bad Luck Spots ran rampant up and down 7th Avenue and West 4th Street and sprawled across Sheridan Square. We inverse hopscotched around the circles, desperate not to get caught. We watched as others meandered through, jumped away at the last minute, or stepped in and then sulked. Their day may have been ruined by Felix.

In truth, Felix was putting his reality out into the world — releasing his negative feelings, anger, and unrest so that he could, once again, draw or paint with positivity. Catharsis via chalk.

“No matter how dark the work is, I want to also show some light. A sign of hope,” he said.

Listening to Felix, I thought about the odd and oxymoronic joy I receive from my sarcastic and self-deprecating defense mechanisms against depression and anxiety. When I embrace my faults, I feel better. When I apply them in writing, verbally with friends and colleagues, or in the content I produce, I feel exalted.  But without a job, I felt scared, insecure and stifled. I tried to write, but I was blocked.

I had a list of all the things I could do if I had time. I did none. I scribbled cover letters with confident verbiage but I could not disguise my anticipation of rejection.

Felix associates my struggle with a ship that stays at shore.

“Without motion, it rusts,” he said.

His efficacy cut deep.

He then provided a spin: When the bamboo plant survives the winter and collects and preserves its proper nutrients, it will flower and its growth can be unstoppable.

The author and Felix Morelo enjoying Washington Square Park in New York City.

Felix never loses sight of the yin or the yang. If not for the good and bad luck, the devil and the angel on your shoulder — without that confrontation — what are we fighting for?

He acknowledges there is fear in the reciprocity when putting work out to the public. Felix has his defenses on alert at all times, but he will not let it stop him because being out there is more important to him.

I misread his lack of interest in our wedding-gone-wrong story as indifference, but he was keeping his guard up. “This is New York City,” he reminded me. “You never know.”

Felix is on a five-year plan with the spots and it is working. After making art for 35 years, for the first time, he has savings in the bank, is making regular sales, gets commissioned work, and was featured in The New York Times last summer.

Knowing he’s struggled with homelessness, depression and injuries, I asked him how he’s managed to stay afloat. “Three hundred jobs,” he quipped, with a face so straight I wiped the smile off mine.

The laundry list of occupations he’s held includes bike messenger, art model, elevator operator, Spanish translator, art instructor, tour guide and a meat processor. Even so, Felix is held back by student loans and unsure if he’ll ever complete the six credits between the debt and his receiving his degree from Parsons.

He admits if he didn’t experience hardship, he may have judged the spots as “gimmicky or insignificant.” But the street art is only a portion of his portfolio.  His studio houses large-scale narrative paintings, drawings, and sculptures.  The spots are pop radio. The narrative works are the deep cuts.

Felix Morelo’s studio in Queens, which includes a wall of his narrative work — aka the “deep cuts” — featuring colorful cubes.

Felix reads to build his business. He educates himself on accounting, taxes, copywriting and other practices. The Mr. Morelo One-Man Band composes the A and B sides to his soundtracks, writes the marketing plans and forecasts an ROI measured in legacy. He envisions a subway mosaic the length of a train station, or the entirety of a city block facade. He imagines immortality and influence long after the one who wields the tool fades away.

“It’s a job,” he told me. You have to do the work. The fiscal transaction may come, but not without the exchange of energy.

I visualize our meetup like two circles on the street, our lines intersecting like a Venn diagram. My Crisis of Confidence Spot overlaps with Felix’s Teaching Spot. Two friends — once strangers — sit in the cross-section and share how difficult it is to believe in yourself every day, but how there is power when you do. How demons are the shadows of dreams and we should want to face the sun. How action and failures must coexist, and true success is earned.

Felix reminds me the spots are drawn in chalk: “It doesn’t last long.”

The rain, foot traffic, and street cleaners will wash the spots away, and for the first time I understand there is resilience in that disappearance.

I can draw something new.

A little bad luck didn’t stop our wedding and it’s not going to stop me now.

I have work to do.

Jaimee Kosanke-Martello is a live TV, documentary, and sports producer with 20-plus years of experience. A passionate storyteller in many mediums, she explores her journey through writing creative nonfiction and personal essays. She has been published in Newsday and the Village Sun.

For more from Felix Morelo, visit his website and find him on Instagram .

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