On the day in question, I’m perusing the grapefruits at my supermarket. I make sure I pick only a grapefruit clearly stickered “Star Ruby.” Meaning it’s not a pink grapefruit. Meaning it’s not an apricot. Meaning it’s not a bran muffin, or an anvil, or former Secretary of State Warren Christopher. It is only – and can only be, according to the label whose sole purpose is to state as such – a red grapefruit.
Of course, you can’t check inside the grapefruit beforehand, as that would be vandalism. So, you are left no choice but to trust the label placed on the exterior. As such, I purchase my grapefruit, questioning nothing, like a good consumer.
Some time later, I’m home, groceries well put away. I get a hankering for said red grapefruit. I palm the fruit’s golden hide and, humming a carefree tune, give the leathery orb a light toss in the air, like a plaything. The grapefruit is placed down on a cutting board and measured up by a serrated knife with no lack of care.
Slice.
Pink.
Hold on a second, my brain tells me.
I re-close the two halves of the grapefruit.
I gather myself. “Get it together, old boy. The label said ‘Star Ruby.’ Let’s try this again.”
I re-open the grapefruit.
Pink.
Three minutes later I’m storming down the street, back to the supermarket, half a pink grapefruit in my left hand, the right a fist gnarled by injustice.
“Excuse me!” I state, eventually breaking the sliding-door threshold, grapefruit aloft. “I’d like to speak to a manager!”
By this time, of course, I have no pants on.
A quick rewind. I took my pants off before leaving my apartment in a rage. I kept on my shirt, and my shoes, and my underwear, it should be noted. But my pants? Nope. Nah-ah. I refused to right this wrong while sheathing my thighs.
I did this in a sort of fugue state. I kept a hard eye on the evidential grapefruit as I removed my sweats and tugged them off the ends of my shoes, which I stoutly refused to remove from my feet. I proceeded to exit my front door, in a hunched march, hand and fist swinging like pendulums as I surely conveyed righteous menace and displeasure. Pantsless.
“Hey!” This is the assistant manager, I come to learn. The manager manager is apparently indisposed. Well, excuse me, Charlemagne.
“Earlier today,” I begin, unprompted, “I purchased a grapefruit in this very establishment.”
“Please leave!”
“I’m stating my grievance.”
“You have no pants on!”
“Your sign states that only shirts and shoes are required. I am wearing both.”
“Get out of here! Get out!”
“Are you the manager?”
“I’m the assistant manager. Now get out!”
That was the moment I discovered his true place in the hierarchy. “Underling, I say this to you: your establishment has lied to me and others.”
By now, he’s grabbing a worker by the arm. “Just call the police.”
I’m undaunted, like a monument stone against a windstorm. “A grocer has an unspoken contract with their community. When one of us – today it was me, tomorrow it may be another – when one of us is deliberately misled into buying the wrong item, all of us are deceived and trampled upon.”
I pause for some kind of cheer or affirmation from other shoppers. It never comes. I just assume it’s a quiet awe instead. Just as reassuring. “And your manager is where exactly? I demand to see their face! Because their face needs to see this grapefruit in all its ugly deception.”
“Your head’s bleeding,” a worker parps. “It’s really fucking bleeding, dude.”
To rewind, again, my wife had left me. In between purchasing the grapefruit and aiming to eat the grapefruit, she hit me. In the head. With a cast-iron pan before storming out. It was a flat pan. Which allows for more speed.
I could explain why she did all that. There’s time enough for getting into “who groped who” when they were blackout drunk, or how close of a relative they were to my wife, or why a person can easily mistake an uncovered love handle for a roll of paper towels after spilling their fourth shot of Fireball into the hair of somebody’s toddler, trying to do the right thing by cleaning the poor little creature up, yet giving in to natural, if misguided, human tendencies, and blah, blah, blah.
And there’s plenty of time to get into the whole who-was-de-priotizing-who, and which small corrosions in the marriage had become untraversable chasms, or where else she would rather be in the world, it could be anywhere, even Botswana, as long as I wasn’t there, and now I’m defending the good people of Botswana from her prejudices, which to her is criminally beside the point, and blah, blah, blah.
But this is about the grapefruit.
Things become blurry.
“This asshole’s going to fall.” It was that same worker. Observant. Maybe they should put him on the grapefruit sorting. Or have him replace the useless assistant manager.
Before I could suggest exactly that, the world around me turns amorphous. In one sense, I knew I was falling. However, I don’t know where up or down is. Does one truly fall when that’s the case?
Turns out the resulting head injury – my second of that day – proved that, yes, one truly does fall, even if that’s the case.
“Shouldn’t you call an ambulance for the crazy fuck?” A fine worker. Observant.
“The cops are already coming,” says the feeble assistant manager, I assume. “They’ll call one.”
These are the final words I hear for some time, from somewhere in the immediate ether before me. All words are beautiful, when you’re barely conscious from brain damage. And these had the echo of lyric poetry in that fading moment. Was that Yeats and Rilke eulogizing me then? Do all moments fade? Can all moments fade? Please, can they?
Joe Thristino is a writer based in Brooklyn. He is a staff writer for food and culture website The Takeout, as well as being a playwright (Dramatist Guild member), short story writer, script writer, and all-around worker in words and narrative.
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