It sure felt good when I threw that pineapple off the roof.
It hit the ground with a satisfying thump, and blossomed into a sublimely random pattern of concentric blackish grayish chunks.
My girlfriend gave me the pineapple last year. She is always buying things for no reason at all, so I can totally imagine how a pineapple could have accidentally found its way into her basket on one of her weekly trips to Whole Foods Market. She gave it to me the morning after we had our first “big fight” as a sort of edible olive branch.
The only problem was, I hate pineapple. I never could stand the things. They even look like some sort of medieval torture device. If people ask me why I don’t like pineapple, I usually tell them about a certain disastrously embarrassing school play in first grade entitled “The Four Food Groups.” It’s a semi-true story, but it’s not the real reason. Maybe the simple explanation is that I hate pineapples because my Dad loves them so much and always made such a big deal about them when I was a kid. I don’t really know for sure.
No, eating the pineapple myself was definitely out of the question. But then, what the hell do you do with a pineapple that you don’t want? A pineapple is just so goddamn big. I mean, you can’t just throw it out because you feel like if you did you’d be depriving some Somalian family of enough food to last them a week.
Now that I think about it, I guess I could have given it away to somebody else, but that thought didn’t occur to me at the time. I’ve never really thrown out or given away any of the crazy things my girlfriend gives me, even though at least ninety percent of them serve no practical purpose whatsoever. I just leave them sort of lying around in strategic positions, in a feeble attempt to make it seem as if I use them all the time. Not that she cares if I use them or not.
The pineapple soon found its way onto my kitchen counter, where it sat for the last eight months. Pretty soon I completely forgot about it. I really only thought about it when people would ask why I had a grayish, shriveled-up pineapple on my counter, and I’d make some lame excuse.
Finally it started to smell a little, but I never quite got around to throwing it out. I put one of those adjustable odor-eating cones next to it and that seemed to take away the stench. I had this vague feeling that that withering fruit stood for something, and if I threw it out something terrible would happen. That’s why, when I read the note she left me this morning, the first thing I thought was “Well, at least I can get rid of that damn pineapple!”