🫖 G’day! I love fruit. So, here is a short and *cough* sweet essay about fruit. For all subscribers. Enjoy! 🫖
The melons at the grocery store looked promising so I began my typical inspection ritual. With roundness and weight in my hands, I brought one to my face and inhaled. It was good, but I whiffed another to be certain. Engrossed in my inspection, I didn’t notice that I was being watched. Do they have any smell? I turned around to see a woman with white hair and an N95 mask perched securely below her spectacles. They’re ripe! I assured her. She selected one for herself. We shared in the pleasure of such a rare delight. A good melon? In April? In New York?
It was a kindness that I could never have dreamt up. What an intoxicating act of service! I will happily sniff fruit for anyone who asks. I will be the preeminent fruit sniffer of the American Northeast.
There is no correct way to cut a melon. Don’t Google it. Leave life hacks behind in 2014. Take a goddamn risk. Attack the sphere with a knife in your living room whilst watching Lady Chatterley’s Lover. When sticky juice seeps to the edge of the cutting board, lap it up like an animal (if you’re home alone). If you’re not home alone, you may offer the juice-lapping opportunity to your roommate, husband, mother or brother.
My paternal grandmother is allergic to one variety of tropical fruit. To play it safe, she won’t touch any of them. Mango. Papaya. Passion Fruit. Pineapple. It never struck her as important to get to the bottom of which.
There must have been mangosteen in the Garden of Eden. The scant, soft white flesh. The undulating curves. The delicate lychee-like fragrance. Like sinking your teeth into a woman rendered by Peter Paul Rubens.
My dad always said that cleaning and preparing strawberries was a labor of love. Washing them and removing their stems tested his patience, but was always worth it to offer the red berries to his kids.
Jack and Jill went up the hill but Evana went tumbling down. With her upcoming fruit-themed housewarming, I figured the arbiter of distaste was sure to have a good fruit story on hand. She told me of picking blackberries in the mountains as a toddler. She grasped for a berry out of her reach and down she went, spilling the contents of her wicker basket, all along the hillside. When her mom gathered her, she was stained with mud and purple juice.
I picked blackberries, too. In Stockton, watching out for thorns, in my maternal grandma’s backyard. Under the hot, dry sun. Peaches, too, were best eaten warm off the tree. In the fall, we pulped squishy, orange persimmons for cookies. I remember the sweet, boozy smell of rotting crabapples that littered the ground.
In fifth grade Social Studies, we were little gods, molding California maps out of clay. Each region got a different color. The Central Valley was green—regally dubbed the Fertile Crescent. And how fertile it was, compared with the sandy soil of my Los Angeles backyard. The fruits on our trees never ripened. Our grapefruits were yellow, bitter and full of seeds. Our avocados were hard as rocks. Our peaches fell off the tree when they were green to get eaten by squirrels.
God bless my mom, she let me eat however I wanted. In elementary school, I used to pack tomatoes in my school lunches and eat them bite-by-bite. Tomatoes have segments, you’ll realize when you eat them this way. Each time you reach a new segment, you’ll be afforded the opportunity to drain its juice like a vampire. It’s a miracle I never got shoved into the proverbial locker. With distaste, a recurring question: you would eat a tomato like an apple? A faulty comparison at best, in my humblest opinion. There are multiple ways to eat an apple, whether bitten or sliced. I never saw why tomatoes should be subjected to different rules.
I am at the airport thinking about fruit. I considered the offerings at CIBO Express Gourmet. A burly, incandescent Granny Smith. A banana encased in tough greenish skin. Oozing masculinity. The two champions of the American fruit throwdown. Fruit in America needs to be tough. Softness and sweetness get squished.
I bought a bag of pink lady apples. Half of them had matching bruises. Little Tumblr girls. At first, I arranged them in my basket with their brown spots facing forward. That way, I figured, I’d remember to eat the bruised ones first, so the whole bunch wouldn’t go bad. But, every time I passed the fruit bowl, my eyes would dart to the bruises. Little anomalies. Like a brown bug on a white wall. I wanted to embrace imperfect fruit, but I was raised under the light of fluorescent supermarkets, wares waxed to a brilliant shine. I pivoted all the bruises out of sight to behold my pink, perfect bounty.
🫖 There you have it! My weekly mixtape features five fun, fruity songs—upgrade your subscription to listen. Thanks for reading! 🫖
Symbolically, fruit is indelibly linked with femininity and intoxication. So, what better place to start than with Summer Wine by Nancy Sinatra? This song is a pervy 60s classic—you can practically hear Lee Hazlewood’s mustache through your speakers. It makes me think of driving around in my friend Sarah’s Honda Civic, crooning along: 🎶 Strawberries, cherries and an angel’s kiss in spring. My summer wine is really made from all these things. 🎶 It’s the story of a sexy dame, effectively roofy-ing a man to burglarize him. The intoxication continues with Neon Fruit by Magic Potion—a ditty that also makes me think of driving. But, this time, I was 17, on a camping trip in Ojai with my friend Julia, singing of unknown psychedelia. 🎶 You have to open your mind. Crack the skull. Let the sun chase the shadows out. 🎶 I like the band’s sneaky little sound—a bit like Vulfpeck. The Seed That Always Died by Jona Lewie affirms that they let musicians do anything in the 80s. It’s a song that evades description: just give it a listen. I suppose that the connection to fruit is more tangential in this one, but… seeds! Also, the title reminds me of all the fruits that withered in our sandy LA yard. 🎶 And she enjoys all the toys which make boys very coy and they’re terrified. She is the nurse to the need when she pleads for the seed that always died. 🎶 Up next: Me and My Husband by Mitski. A song that I always misheard. Where she says “furrowed brow,” I heard 🎶 So, I bet all I have on that *fruit growing*. At least in this lifetime, we’re sticking together. 🎶 I like my version better! Regardless, I think Mitski always perfectly encapsulates the experience of being a soft, bruised piece of fruit. Peace, at last. We close off with Harry Belafonte’s Kingston Market, transporting us to a Jamaican dreamland. Go ahead: 🎶 Get your tamarind and sour sop, mangoes and cassava, bread fruit, okra, pigeon peas, curry, goat and guava. 🎶
"The undulating curves. The delicate lychee-like fragrance. Like sinking your teeth into a woman rendered by Peter Paul Rubens." so much beauty & bounty in this one --- will be chewing it over for a long while <3