Grotesque And Slightly Pornographic

This is the short and sad story of Paul Newman, so named after the legendary movie star, and who, per most people named after legendary movie stars, shared absolutely none of his namesake’s incandescent mien. This story was relayed by someone with a barely functional grasp of the English language, and as such, details are sketchy and the ending, it should be noted, is truncated. This person, who has asked to remain anonymous for their own safety, had been in the process of making a documentary about the cutthroat world of dog breeding when they were put in touch with Paul Newman, himself a dog breeder, albeit an unsuccessful one, hence the documentarian’s desire to use him as a subject, as the documentarian sought to create a body of work concerned solely with non-fictional portraits of the marginalized and incompetent. Based on a brief and almost incomprehensible interview with the documentarian, who hails from Hugary, this much could be gleamed concerning the trials of tribulations of Paul Newman: after finding out that an entire litter of beagles he had bred were infected with a sexually transmitted disease only found in humans and thus unsellable in the marketplace, Newman found himself in dire financial straits, close to defaulting on a loan taken out for the explicit purpose of making inroads into the beagle breeding business (of which Newman had almost no prior knowledge), and so, out of desperation, contacted an acquiantance even further out on the margins of the business, a man whose name the documentarian refused to divulge. This nameless acquaintance provided Newman with information about a stolen shipment of beagles that had been due to arrive in Houston, Texas, but which had gone missing, and offered Newman a substantial sum to track down the shipment. He also provided Newman with the name of another down-on-his-luck breeder who could offer help, a man from Houston, who may have been able to direct Newman in the right direction. It was at this point that the documentarian fell out of touch with Newman, who, through a byzantine set of circumstances, found himself in Juarez, Mexico. What happened next to Newman stretched the limits of the documentarian’s command of the language and forced him to engage in a grotesque and slightly pornographic round of charades, whose meaning none in attendance were able to parse, despite the documentarian pretending to strip naked and violate two of his four orifices with what was either an invisible hammer, or, perhaps, an elongated, processed meat product. It was then that the interview was put on hold. Those connected do not expect it to happen any time soon, if at all.

• Fiction