The Grapefruit Saves America

Ode to the Power of Citrus

Photo by lilartsy on Unsplash

Hey! (Author’s Note just feels way too formal). A gallery owner in Hamtramck, Michigan commissioned me to write a piece for the closing night of an art show devoted entirely to grapefruit. So I wrote one. The gallery is small, not many people will see the piece performed, so I’m sharing it with Substackland too.

The Grapefruit saves America.

You wake up after a night of swilling the latest Porcupine Testosterone Porter from a microbrewery that somehow manages to produce 92 flavors in their little microcosm, stumble going down the stairs on the three D printed Lego AR-15 your kid left there while they’re putting the finishing specs on a rocket launcher, belch so loud you wake the Fed Ex driver who never left because your spouse read that becoming a thruple would prolong your marriage by an average of three weeks and open the fridge.

You peruse the selections, wondering why Ocean Spray doesn’t make a Cranapple Cyanide, because you do not want to go to your job drafting west region sift margins on deprecated incubators vacillating between neodisrupted offshore follies and eleventh hour Copenhagen phaseouts while navigating a coworking space populated by charade-playing non-profit sycophants ensconced in MegaFerret Apocalypse team building marathons, lounging barefoot in converted bumper car chairs.

And there’s a plump little pinkish yellow masochist waiting for ya.

You’re hungry, but only as a rebellion against the thought of eating fennel seed and chive bagels with Clair from Logistics, who has a birthmark on her neck that looks like Jesus but she swears it’s Adam Levine.

Your anxiety, your disgust with humanity builds.

There’s a grapefruit.

You can’t eat a grapefruit whole.

You can’t gently peel a grapefruit like the uniform of a FedEx driver you don’t want in your bed in the first place.

The only way to eat a grapefruit, is to cut a grapefruit.

You pull open the utensil drawer like you’re Ponce de Leon after a long voyage pulling open the door to the world’s first PortaJohn and you grab the first blade you see. You put it back, because that’s the knife that did your son’s bris, which is really weird because you’re Lutheran, then you find a suitable blade you ordered late at night on an Adderall and cheese fries bender, and bisect that Grapefruit like it’s the head of a tribe who pillaged your Fisher Price village.

Now you are staring at moist pink flesh, and as stressed as you are, even you know that that joke is way too easy for a spoken word performer, and you see that the flesh is broken into little triangles, and you hate triangles because you failed geometry in high school.

So you go back to the utensil drawer—not the main one, the secondary one, the one with the little spikes to hold corn and the bamboo skewers for meat you will never barbecue, and a Gideon bible and a ceramic frog and a receipt for nunchuks —and you find the original, pre Taco Bell, actual metal Spork made specifically for digging out those adolescent memory inducing triangles and popping them into your angry little mouth, and the Nova Scotia citrus growers association will tell you that it’s tart, and tangy, but it’s not really that, it’s kinda bitter, just like you, but as you carve those nuggets of acidic nourishment out with the menacing little teeth on the Spork you think deeply of how much you despise everything, and those dozen little triangles die one by one, representing everything you hate-your job, your relationships, Blue Cross infomercials, band names that are complete sentences, and somehow, somehow, as the juice drains down your throat you relax, let the Vitamin C wash into you, kiss your Linus Pauling tiki doll and walk out the door, ready to face another day.  

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