Faith and the Street Mango

So I'm walking home, 13 hours after I last left, and I'm dying for some food. Any kind of food. I don't want to eat terrible food, but I do want something fast.

...and there's the guy on my corner who sells mangos and corn from a cart. He's a Mexican guy, and speaks little or no English. His sign is hand-drawn in bad, crooked block letters. But I know what he sells, so this isn't rocket science. You say "mango" or "corn", and you'll pretty much get what you ask for.

I ask for mango.

He slices and dices. It's looking good. He's a pro. It looks like his hands are pretty dirty, and he's definitely touching the fruit that I'm about to eat. But I decide to have some faith and go with it. On some level, that's part of the experience when you buy from a street vendor. Also, I'm just going to assume that he's been cutting fruit and vegetables all day, and these are fresh products...I do actually see the pile of fruit and vegetables, so how bad could they be? What's a little finger dirt? (That is rhetorical. I do not want answers to that question.)

He cuts the fruit (no small feat with a mango. have you tried?) and says, decipherably, "evretin?" I say yes. He piles on the salt. Then he piles on the cayenne pepper. He pours it all into a big cup. He then cuts a whole lime in half. Squeezes one half until it's done...squeezes the other half. Two fifty. Done. I have my snack.

It's delicious. Miraculous.

And then, about 25 yards later, I start to think of Pierce Brosnan in Mrs. Doubtfire, who choked on cayenne pepper to the point of screwing up Robin William's entire plan to win back his family and teach about dinosaurs at the same time. The important part of this memory for me is that Pierce Brosnan was allergic to cayenne pepper (but he ordered the shrimp jambalaya, fucking moron).

I digress.

I start to really wonder if I might die. 25 yards after that, I'm still shoveling the fruit that is clearly a gift from the gods into my mouth, which is quickly becoming incapeable of receiving food due to some sort of pepper overload.

Anyway, I made it. It wasn't an allergic reaction. Just a normal reaction to a vastly abnormal amount of pepper.

But I was going on faith there for a while.