Mango

The first time I tasted mango, I lived on an alley called Brosnan Street. We had the brightest little apartment on the top floor of a four-story walkup in the Mission District. The Levi factory was across the alley, a big, dazzling, yellow building that reflected sunshine into our small rooms. We always woke too early on Mondays, when the big trucks would rumble up Brosnan to unload rolls of denim the size of redwood tree trunks.

Cameron, at 24, had lived in Pakistan and Singapore and Napa Valley and India. He’d been to Bangkok and he’d been to Sri Lanka. He’d eaten things I couldn’t pronounce, knew as much about wine pairings as how to tie a sarong properly. I knew why I was with him; I never could figure why he was with me. The most exotic place I’d ever been was San Francisco, that very apartment where we humbly lived.

One day he brought a mango home from Rainbow Market and sliced it open in the kitchen. He had a good set of knives - he was a boy who took cooking seriously - and he sliced two halves of the fruit cleanly off the pit. Then he swiftly cut a grid pattern, like Tic Tac Toe, into each half. He inverted the fruit and handed one to me, taking the other over to the sink. I admired the perfect, orange, one-inch squares sticking out all over the half moon in my hand. The room was so light and golden, the color and smell of mango just added harmony. “It’s really juicy,” Cameron said, his mouth full of the fruit as he leaned over the sink. “Come here.”

I stood next to him for my first taste, biting the square from the exact middle. It popped neatly into my mouth, the flavor exploding, a taste and texture so ripe and fleshy it wasn’t like fruit at all, at least not any fruit I knew. It was a taste like being alive. It was a taste like everything in the world I had yet to discover.