The Fruit Hunters Read online

  For the next half hour, he explained how to grow and breed cherimoyas. Then everyone crowded around the picnic tables, tasting rare cherimoya cultivars like Coochie Island, Concha Lisa and Big Sister. Noticing a strange yellow fruit sitting in a box off to the side, I picked it up to get a closer look. It was an egg fruit, something I’d tasted with Ken Love in Hawaii. A red-faced, heavyset man immediately raced over. “Put that down,” he scolded. “It’s a very rare fruit. You’re going to smash it!” I tried to apologize, but the egg-fruit man stormed off. For the rest of the evening, he refused to make eye contact. When he cut open the fruit later on, he came up to the group I was standing with and handed out a slice to everyone except me.

  14

  The Case of the Fruit Detective

  As I go back over this list, I see that pale specters of forgotten fruits will haunt my dreams for many years. How can I defend my omissions?

  —Edward A. Bunyard, The Anatomy of Dessert

  AS A CHILD, David Karp was fascinated by a fruit tree growing in his front yard. Even though it didn’t blossom every year, it occasionally burst to life with hauntingly sweet greengage plums. By the time he was a teenager, his preoccupation with fruits took on an odder hue: he started slipping out of bed in the middle of the night and tiptoeing into the pantry to sniff vanilla extract.

  As an adult, Karp consummated this infatuation by becoming the Fruit Detective. The moniker came to him in “a moment of levity” after hearing about the movie Ace Ventura: Pet Detective. Although his title may be lighthearted, he takes the topic very seriously. Poring through old pomology texts for the names of varieties that were renowned for their flavor, he then spends months or years in search of farmers growing these delicious survivors. Having written dozens of rigorously researched articles about rarities—whether new or nearly extinct—and the maverick specialists who grow them, Karp has become America’s authority on fine fruits.

  The star reporter and photographer for Fruit Gardener, he has also written about fruits for The New York Times and Smithsonian. Karp often says that most farmers would “sooner raise wombats” than highly flavored fruits. He lionizes those who dare to raise finicky crops, and they love him back because he’s just as quixotic as they are. He portrays grower Bill Denevan as having a wild gleam in his eye and quotes him as saying, “I go crazy and do superultra quality.”

  Karp also goes crazy with superultra quality, trekking around America in search of “exquisite rewards,” such as a taste of navel oranges from a padlocked ur-tree, musk strawberries with “an almost mind-bogglingly powerful, primeval aroma” or “fabulously fragrant and expensive” lychee varieties like the Imperial Concubine’s Laugh. He sometimes ventures farther afield, having gone to Puerto Rico for mangosteens, Italy for blood oranges and France for greengage plums, but most of his work is done in California.

  Growers occasionally provide Karp with items few others might appreciate. One year, Jeff Rieger scraped the pure fructose off some dried hoshi gakis and gave him a little container of the bone-white powder for Christmas. “He went crazy for it,” recalls Rieger. “He was like, ‘How many persimmons did you denude to get this?’”

  Although he can’t drink wine because he’s a recovering addict, Karp brings a oenophile’s appreciation of minutiae to fruits. Robert Parker speaks about Bordeaux wines as “flavor bombs.” Karp calls Stanwick white nectarines “atom bombs of flavor.” The best fruits, he writes, are characterized by “sky-high levels of sugar balanced by floral acidity” or have an “astonishingly concentrated sweet-tart taste.” His articles focus on individual fruits, with him hunting down the greatest examples known to exist—and providing readers with mail-order instructions.

  As a self-professed “fruitie,” Karp has dedicated himself to the pursuit of flavor, a quest that has become all-encompassing. In one article in the Los Angeles Times, Karp wrote that he has at times turned orange from overindulging in apricots. That story ended with him jumping up and down in the dusk, trying to reach a couple of Moorpark apricots that dangled just out of reach. When he finally managed to knock one down, it was, he wrote, a “most transcendent apricot experience.” When not out investigating, he wakes up before dawn in order to secure the exact same parking spot in the shadow of the Shangri-La Hotel near the Santa Monica farmer’s market. “He’s totally nuts,” one farmer, a friend of his, told me. “He has a lot of idiosyncrasies, I’m not illusionary about that,” says grower Andy Mariani. “Deep down he’s a nice guy, but, boy, he’s really passionate about fruit, to the point of being obsessed.”

  Although I hadn’t been able to interview him for my Hawaiian article about fruit tourism, shortly after his profile appeared in The New Yorker, a peculiar sequence of events led to a reconnection with the Fruit Detective. While I was in New York editing some footage Kurt Ossenfort and I had shot of Miami’s Rare Fruit Council International, my girlfriend, Liane, was in Los Angeles for a screen test. She ended up going to dinner with Ossenfort’s former roommate, Allan Moyle, the director of a film Liane had starred in. Moyle brought along his friend, David Karp.

  The following day, Ossenfort was out when the phone rang. Seeing a Los Angeles area code, I picked up the receiver, expecting to hear Liane’s voice. It was Karp. When I introduced myself, the first thing he said was, “Your girlfriend’s a real hottie.” It was rather unexpected, seeing as our only two conversations to that point had been about my interviewing him and us going hunting for cloudberries. Karp called her “the vine,” translating her name from French. He was especially taken with Liane saying that cloudberries sound like the sort of thing unicorns eat.

  Not long afterward, Liane and I moved to Los Angeles for pilot season. While searching for an apartment, we stayed with Moyle, who owned a multiunit compound in Venice. Filmmakers, seekers, radical activists and other antiestablishment types were constantly dropping in. On any afternoon I might get my inner spirit “defreaked” by a pyramid-building musical healer or go to a group session with Allan’s psychic du jour—a guy named Darryl Anka from Topanga Canyon, who could enter a trancelike state and channel an all-knowing extraterrestrial force named “Bashar.” Moyle himself spoke with a disarming, almost childlike, directness. This quality was intensified by his alopecia, a condition that has left him entirely without hair. Bald and beaming, he brought to mind an impish, oversized baby. He characterized himself as having an insatiable need to be interesting.

  One of our neighbors was a film producer named Barota. He was training to become a breatharian. The way it works, he explained, is that you open up your crown chakra and convert sunlight into liquid prana. This nectar is apparently far more nourishing than any earthly food. Explaining that he had some friends who had been breatharians for a year and a half, he pointed out that fruitarianism should be seen as a step toward attaining the goal of human photosynthesis. Although he planned never to eat again, I spied him drinking a glass of wine at a party a few weeks later.

  At Moyle’s parties, I met someone writing a book on exercises one can do in the bathtub. I met the inventor of a device that zaps you in order to measure your “frequency.” I met priests of Eckankar, a new-age group that Allan delighted in calling his cult. One of these priests, before leading us on a group chant, explained that he’d recently dreamed of a fruit that cured him of a mysterious ailment. He’d seen seven doctors, and none of them could diagnose his condition. In his oneiric state, he saw himself eating lots of fruits every day. After starting to eat these fruits, he said, he’d been cured of his ills within three weeks.

  At one of Moyle’s happenings, David Karp dropped by. It was the first time we’d met in person. He again spoke fondly of Liane, whom he called “the divine Miss Vine.” We spoke mainly of writing, and of how little money writers make. He wanted to know how it was possible for a freelancer like me to make ends meet. I explained that it always worked out, somehow. I’d just gotten a two-hundred-dollar check from a magazine for a piece on Werner Herzog. He explained that he received
thousands of dollars a month from his “fortunate parent situation” on top of the five-figure advance he’d just received for his book on the fruits of California.

  As I started explaining how I hoped to interview him for this book, a hippy-dippy Moyle-type girl interjected, asking if either of us had ever tasted Scuppernong grapes. Of course, answered Karp, and went on to describe their characteristics and origin. “Oh my God, they’re the best grapes in the world,” she said, fawning. “I can’t believe you know about them, nobody knows about them!”

  Karp left shortly thereafter. Someone joked that he had run out to chase down some wild berries in the alley. As the party dispersed, I felt like I’d yet again blown my chance to secure an interview.

  A YEAR LATER, Liane and I found ourselves living in an apartment in Echo Park that had once belonged to fruit worker rights activist Cesar Chavez. Karp and I stayed in touch, sending brief e-mails and speaking occasionally on the phone. “How’s the vine?” he’d ask. He’d speak about himself in the third person: “Fruits like hot summers; Fruit Detectives don’t.” In one call, he said he was feeling demented because of the medication he was taking for his cluster headaches: “And there’s nothing worse than a stupid Fruit Detective.”

  In an exchange about mangosteens in Montreal, he asked whether they oozed gamboge, a “smegmalike” substance that can perforate the fruits’ outer surface. I thought the use of the word smegma in conjunction with a fruit was odd, but he didn’t seem to be joking.

  Then Moyle and his demure wife, Chiyoko, invited Liane and me to a dinner party with Karp and his girlfriend, Cindy-Cat.*As soon as we arrived, the awkwardness began. I shook Karp’s hand and then got caught in a bungled attempt at a greeting with Cindy-Cat, who blocked my forward cheek-kiss movement with her hand, which I ended up shaking. She gave me one of those extremely limp, barely there shakes, and glowered at me. Had I made some social gaffe? I started feeling embarrassed and paranoid. But as they took off their coats, Moyle took me aside. “Did you see how she shook my hand?” he asked. “Like an empress!”

  Liane asked her why she was called Cindy-Cat. She didn’t reply. After a long pause, Karp said: “Some members of the opposite sex have qualities that are equine, or bovine. In her case they are feline.”

  “In Liane’s case, they’re like a vine,” I offered, trying to defuse things.

  Karp agreed, expounding on her vinelike attributes: “She’s so tall… slender… blossoming.”

  “Creeping,” interjected Cindy-Cat.

  “Clinging,” I added, attempting some “vine” humor.

  Moyle then pointed at Cindy-Cat’s black-cross medallion and said, “You’re so goth.” She said nothing. After a moment, Moyle announced that, “Cindy-Cat is not at her best tonight.”

  The table stiffened. Moyle, who thrives on getting people out of their comfort zone, was relishing the tension. Karp held Cindy-Cat’s elbow and said, “You can’t make a cat be loquacious when she doesn’t want to be.” Changing the subject, he started talking about his recently deceased cat, Sahara, whom he missed so much that he still called her name every morning.

  We then spoke about Montreal, with Moyle reminiscing about the city he’d left behind since getting kicked out of McGill University. I mentioned that my mother had gone to that same school.

  “In the English department?”

  “Yes, I think so. Maybe you guys were classmates.”

  “What was her name?”

  “Linda Leith. Do you know her?”

  “I fucked her!” he said, laughing uproariously. I started blushing, not entirely sure whether he had or not.

  Moyle talked about a party he’d been at with Vladimir Nabokov where a bee was buzzing around annoying everybody. “The bee is indiscreet,” he said Nabokov said. The subject then turned to past lives, with Moyle suggesting we all find out who we once were. There was talk of booking a session with the sensitive who helped Shirley Maclaine realize she had been, at different times, a geisha, an orphan raised by elephants and Charlemagne’s lover.

  Karp explained how, in the past, gentlemen used to bond over fruits the way they do today over golf. As Chiyoko cleared the dishes, he set upon the table some chocolate-and cinnamon-flavored persimmons procured from a “connection” with a scant supply. He sliced them and handed them out. They were incredibly flavorful, chocolaty and spicy. I said that I’d never tasted such delicious persimmons.

  Most people have never had a good fruit, he responded, saying how the produce sold in supermarkets is invariably low grade. “Biting into a store-bought persimmon can be like an explosion of dust in your mouth,” I said. Karp approved, nodding his head vigorously. “Is that what’s called astringency?” I asked, cautiously.

  Absolutely, he replied, and then quoted Captain John Smith, who said of the persimmon that, “If it be not ripe it will drawe a man’s mouth awrie with much torment.” We all laughed. Sensing that I had busted out an appropriate shibboleth, I again asked if I might be able to interview him, perhaps by joining him on one of his research trips. Karp said he’d think about it. He then said we could discuss it if I helped him move some bookshelves the following week. I agreed, excited that I might finally be able to secure my interview.

  After Karp and Cindy-Cat left, Liane and I helped clean up. I took a deep breath, trying to assimilate it all. “So have you resolved your karma with Karp now?” Moyle asked.

  SOON THEREAFTER, Karp picked me up in Bessie, his white pickup, which also happened to be the name of the white van my punk band had toured in years ago. Karp and I navigated the morass of rush hour on the 405 freeway, making our way to some industrial wasteland to pick up the custom-made bookshelves he had ordered. Karp drove hunched up over the wheel, incapable of focusing both on the road and on the conversation.

  Back at his Beverley Hills bungalow, we set up the shelves in his office, a converted garage behind the house. After flipping through Hogg’s Fruit Manual, an alphabetized, synoptical list of superior fruit varieties, he showed me his library’s latest acquisition, an 1880 pamphlet by G. R. Bayley. It contained the line, “Who loves not fruit—ripe, glorious fruit—a priceless boon from the great Creator’s hand?” I asked if I could copy it down. He agreed, although he seemed a little ambivalent about it. In exchange, I shared a quote from Dante I’d recently come across about fruits in purgatory.

  Like a comic book geek, he showed off his collection of citrus monographs, saying how rare or expensive each one was. Having become something of a fruit nerd myself, I thoroughly enjoyed the time he took to show me his favorite rococo orange paintings. He told me that his two favorite words are pamplemousse (grapefruit in French) and albedo (the white spongy layer in between a grapefruit’s peel and the fruit segments). “I’m fond of saying, ‘Look at the albedo on that pamplemousse,’” he said. I laughed, which made him uncomfortable. I thought it was supposed to be funny; apparently it wasn’t.

  A small section of his clubhouse sanctum was devoted to the works of Britain’s Edward A. Bunyard, whose 1929 masterwork, The Anatomy of Dessert, is a fetishistic handbook of fruit exaltation. With each chapter devoted to a different fruit, it is a guide to the complex, highly sweet and highly acidic varieties of the early twentieth century, many of which are barely available today. It’s written with an aesthete’s ornate flair, as evinced by his description of one plum, the Reine Claude Diaphane: “a slight flush of red and then one looks into the depths of transparent amber as one looks into an opal, uncertain how far the eye can penetrate.”

  Bunyard’s panegyrics have a cult following among fruit votaries. An uptight, eccentric dandy who loved gardening, he wore Le Corbusier glasses, dressed in dapper suits and hated bananas, which he found “negroid.” Watermelons were fodder for “the South American negro.” In his defense, Karp writes that Bunyard’s “contempt for watermelon eaters betray[s] the prejudices of his class.” Or perhaps such racism is an echo of internecine protohuman forest warfare.

  Like his wealthy father, w
ho bequeathed him a successful nursery, Bunyard fraternized with and was patronized by nobility. When he wrote about the “opulence” of certain fruits, he was being sincere. He considered his garden a collection d’elite—like Jefferson’s, minus the slaves. Unfortunately, Bunyard had a family history of fiscal ineptitude, explains Oxford don Edward Wilson, editor of 2007’s The Downright Epicure: Essays on Edward Bunyard.

  Bunyard was a rabid collector whose burgeoning enthusiasms often flopped commercially. This didn’t prevent fruit peregrinations to Algiers, South Africa and Tunisia, where he discovered a single apple tree growing “under the shade of Palms in the island of Sfax.” He lounged around the Riviera, listening to nightingales and ordering magnums of what his compatriot George Saintsbury called “supernacular” wines.

  A bachelor concerned with “the science of living,” Bunyard was also a scientist. At the same 1906 conference on hybridization where the word “genetics” was first adopted, he presented a paper on xenia, the effect of pollen on seeds. He spent days dissecting fruit components, using magnifying glasses and other measuring implements to record his findings. He went on what he called “joy rides” of fruit experimentation, planting hundreds of different pear trees, or collecting every specimen of gooseberry known to man. A committed bibliophile, Bunyard’s library featured an abnormally large sexology section devoted to erotic mores through the ages. He also wrote about roses, occasionally under the pseudonym Rosine Rosat (which recalls Marcel Duchamp’s bicurious alterego, Rrose Sélavy).

  Bunyard hung out on the Continent with exiled British homosexuals like Reggie Turner, an aesthete who’d been part of Oscar Wilde’s clique. As surviving correspondence testifies, Bunyard was close with the author Norman Douglas, who also happened to be in what Wilson calls “serious paedophilic” relationships with a fourteen-year-old boy named René Mari who lived in Ventimiglia and a ten-and-a-half-year-old girl named Renata. Wilson ponders—vaguely, given the lacunae—whether Bunyard shared the predilection. This much is certain: Bunyard and his companions not only argued about which ports to pair with plums, they also discussed the proper terminology for smothering a child by lying upon it: Is it “overlaying,” or “overlying?”