Thoughts on the Decomposition of an Apple

Every day for a week now, or even longer, I’ve passed by a half-eaten apple which lies in the alley behind my house. It was one of those yellow-red apples, and had evidently been quite large, for it looked to have been sliced into sections at one point, and even as a section the owner had thrown it away only partially eaten.

It’s wintertime in Burbank, which means that while temperatures range from mild to hot during the day, insect activity is at a minimum because it gets quite cold – by local standards, anyway – at night. Because of this the normal panoply of flies, ants and what-not, which would have devoured the thing to its core in a matter of hours, never appeared. Day after day it just lay there in the sun, the rain, and the chill of darkness. The first few times I passed by it, heading to the gym or for coffee in the mornings, I wondered, because of the temperatures at night and the lack of bugs, it is still edible? If I was homeless I could pick that up, slice the dirty half-eaten part away, wash it and eat it. That got me thinking about whether or not I would have a knife if I was homeless, and whether it would be a plastic knife or a dull table knife or something with an edge, like a kitchen knife or a jack knife, and whether its edge would have blunted since I probably had no means of sharpening it except on a rock, assuming the right type of rock could be found. Then I thought about water and whether water is precious to the homeless. When I worked at Optic Nerve Studios anyone could have walked up to the hose on the side of the building and turned it on and filled their water bottle or cup or or jug or what have you full of cold clean water as often as they liked, and I imagine if you are homeless you know where the public parks are and those always have water fountains. I imagined the homeless, even when they are half-crazy, have bags of tricks and stores of knowledge for obtaining water which people who have homes with running water do not. But it any case, I wondered whether I’d have water to spare to wash the apple free of road-grit after I sliced it with the knife that I hoped I’d have with me, both for such moments as this and for other moments when it was necessary to defend myself against other homeless people or robbers or against the sort of human beings who prey on the homeless for no other reason than that they are homeless.

(As if having no home of your own was not sufficient punishment for whatever collection of bad luck and bad choices left them homeless in the first place.)

So every day I walked by the apple and every day it still looked edible until at last the mold and bacteria and the sun and the rain perhaps a possum – I saw one waddling ratlike over a wall just the other day – worried it into something which no longer resembled an apple, something only the ants could possibly want. And I thought it was a fine thing that I had a home, small as it was, with its own orange tree in the yard, and that when I was hungry and had nothing else, I could simply go into the yard and twist one of the heavy ripe oranges off its branch and take it inside and run water over it from the tap in the sink and then slice it into sections with my good knife and fill my mouth with the sweetness so keen it made my taste buds cramp. Of course I did not need to take the orange inside; there was a hose on the lawn so I could wash it right there, wash it while it still hung drowsily on the branch, and eat it without going inside at all. I could do this whenever the season was ripe for oranges, and the tree was so heavy with them that it would take a long time to run out, and some oranges would rot on the vine before I had a chance to eat them all. And this tree was mine because I paid the landlord for the little one-room house, and the yard came with the house, and so the tree and the hose, and all these things were mine so long as I kept paying the landlord. So long as I kept paying the landlord I could push the gate open every morning and walk down the alley to buy a cup of coffee, and pass the apple decomposing in the street without having to pick it up and slice off the dirty part with my dull knife and wash it in precious water that was probably needed for drinking, just so I could put something in my belly. So long as I could pay the landlord I could pay for other things and did not need that apple, and neither had the person who had thrown it half-eaten into the street. But somewhere, someone would have been glad to have it.