Poor, Poor, Paulie

People didn’t like Paulie, and Paulie didn’t like people.

Paulie was a disgusting man by most people’s standards. The gene pool had not been kind to him – he was not even a very attractive baby. He was short and fat, his eyes too small for his head, his teeth crooked and cigarette stained, and his skin pockmarked with acne scars. His nose made a long “Z” down the center of his face after being broken three times. Years of taunts through grammar school, middle school, and those hugely formative high school years had given him a thick skin, a large vocabulary of profanity, and a wicked left hook. Paulie never cared about how he looked – he was resigned to being a lonely shadow of a man because of the body he was cursed with. He worked as a security guard on the Governor Nicholls Street Wharf down on the river. No matter how many miles he walked each night, dutifully punching his rounds card at ten different stations along the way (to make sure he didn’t sleep though his shift in the office), his uniform still featured a 42-inch waist with a 30-inch inseam on the pants.

Sometimes he would get to work a little early just to see what Evelyn, the pretty office woman was wearing. She usually dressed neatly in a conservative business suit and she smelled nice – even at the end of the day. That was a lot easier to accomplish shuffling papers in the air-conditioned office all day than it was walking the docks outside in the New Orleans humidity all night. When she saw Paulie, she would immediately go into a frenzy gathering her sweater, her lunch containers from the little refrigerator, her purse, and even the picture she kept on her desk of her young son. “Let me get my things…” she would say, voice trailing off, eyes never meeting his as she wrapped her arms around herself defensively as she passed him. Her scent would linger behind her as she hustled by, and Paulie wished she would wear something a little more revealing once in a while.

There were advantages to his lifestyle. His apartment was filled with garbage and crap – no one ever came to visit, so why bother cleaning? He could eat whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted. He could have Wendy’s chili and beans for a week straight if he wanted. Nobody cared how much he farted. The company paid a service to clean his uniforms, so the only laundry he had to do was his underwear and t-shirts. They littered the floor of his apartment along with the used pizza boxes, empty beer cans, and old newspapers. When he ran out of underwear, he would pick a pair off the floor that didn’t look too nasty. That was tough after that week of Wendy’s – everything he owned had skid marks. He used a trick he’d seen in a movie and turned them inside out so he could wear them once more before hauling down to the Laundromat.

Since he worked at night, he would do his laundry in the afternoons after he’d gotten some sleep. He hated it, which is why he only went once a month or so. The place would be filled with young stay-at-home moms and their noisy rug rats doing laundry for the whole damn family using 3 machines at once. They always looked at him suspiciously, like he was going to steal their tiny Victoria’s Secret look-alike panties or molest their children. Mostly he just wanted to wring their skinny little aerobicized necks. They were all cheer girl lemmings that had gotten pregnant sleeping around with high school jocks and were awarded a diamond chip ring, a justice-of-the-peace wedding, and a GED. Yet somehow Paulie was still beneath them because he was born ugly.

Paulie reached into the refrigerator for a beer. It was about the only thing in there that hadn’t been there longer than six months. In fact, there was a real possibility that carton of Chinese all the way in the back had been there since the first night he moved in four years ago. Wait – did he just see something move back there?! Nah – mice can’t live in a refrigerator. But for the first time, Paulie was thinking he might just have to throw some of that old stuff away. If only to make room for more beer.

Paulie brought his beer to his La-Z-Boy recliner, kicked his shoes off, and started on his paper. He tried to ignore the scent of feet that had walked miles in the New Orleans heat wafting through the room and he clicked on the TV and found the wrestling channel on cable. IT was a match he’d already seen, but he didn’t care.

Paulie belched and farted and decided he’d made room for another beer. He pulled out a Schaeffer and he heard a noise at the back of the fridge again. The cardboard carton of Chinese moved slightly. It MUST be in there!

Paulie grabbed the carton, forcing the lid closed so the mouse could not escape. But he got curious and peeked just a little. There was no mouse!

Paulie opened the carton a little further, and the stench of rotting pork met his nose. He didn’t think that pink pork EVER went bad – but here was the evidence. There was a yellow snot-looking gelatin covering the meat. When he tip the carton the pieces of meat flowed – they had turned completely liquid. He stuck his finger in to stir up the gelatinous goo and… “Ahhhhh!’ It just reached for him!

He slowly moved the carton in circles watching the jelly move, and then he put his finger down in the carton again. Again, it flowed upwards towards his finger! This was weird!

He ran around the apartment looking for little living things. There were a lot when you tried. A moth here, a cockroach there… He fed them all to the little carton of goo. Each got caught in the sticky mess and slowly dissolved. Was it some sort of acid? Why didn’t it eat the cardboard?

He put the carton back in the fridge and laid awake trying to think of other things he could place in the little square carton of death…

Paulie was so excited – he finally had something worthy of his attention. He had found a mouse in one of those glue traps in the office at work. He put it in his lunch bag and brought it home to the his strange carton. He pulled the flaps back – the carton was now half full of the yellow goo. It was much more active now that it had been fed recently. Paulie made a point to keep his hands away from the open box. He was no fool. Not like people thought. He then took a knife and cut the section of the glue trap away and watched the mouse drop into the yellow jelly. It was immediately engulfed. Paulie watched for a little while, and then he got bored and found some wrestling on TV.

When Paulie went back to check on the mouse, he was amazed to see that the Chinese food carton was now three quarters full of the yellow goo. There was a red stain in the center where the mouse had been and that was it – not even a little mouse skeleton! As he swished the yellow goo around the carton, the red stain turned it a grotesque pink. He would have to find another container for the goo before he fed it anything more…

Paulie tore the apartment apart looking for something bigger he could use. He found an old Tuperware container that had held a long-forgotten lunch. He started to pour the goo from the Chinese carton into the bigger plastic carton. It flowed slowly to the edge of the cardboard carton, and then suddenly flowed UP and over his hand!

He was sure it would burn like acid – but Paulie mercifully felt nothing. He simply lay on the floor and watched with a strangely peaceful curiosity as the creature slowly engulfed his arm. He would’ve screamed if he could, but he couldn’t – anymore than he could get up and run. It doubled again in size as it crept past his elbow. Soon, it would reach his chest and neck and he would be a goner. But what would happen then?

The landlord opened the door to Paulie’s apartment 2 weeks later. He was disgusted at the state of the place. “That Paulie was a weird one, but I never thought he’d skip on his rent. Damn security deposit won’t even begin to cover cleaning this place up!” he thought to himself. He sighed, and put down his cleaning supplies as he walked around the apartment trying to decide where to start.

He should never have looked in the fridge…