Ernie Borderman - A Pointless Novel, Page 1

Ernie Borderman was a lonely man.

He lived alone in a small one bedroom apartment on West 83rd. During the week Ernie worked at the Newport meatpackers down about a block from his home. He was a butcher there, and he hated his job with a passion. It wasn't the thought of defiling the innocent beasts day after day that gave Ernie such a hatred for his job, nor was it the bloody mess that it left on him that he seemed to be forever trying to clean, nor was it even his obnoxious co-workers, who were forever amusing themselves with a crude running commentary of the women they'd take and how. It was none of this. What bothered Ernie was the meat itself.

Over seven years of working at the meat-packers Ernie had come to regard the smell and sight of the cuts of meat with disgust, so much so that he had been forced to alter his own diet quite dramatically, and had become a vegetarian some five years before. This was a problem at times, for the owner of the plant, a rotund man named Sonny who had taught Ernie the trade when he was only two months out of high school (at his mother’s insistence, as she had forseen that her son would never set the world on fire with his intellect), was continually bestowing on Ernie his generosity through a variety of cuts of meat.

Summer sausage, head cheese, sirloin tips, lamb chops and one christmas, a full size roasted pig. Ernie received it all, and he would thank his boss kindly, all the while muttering curses under his breath.

It would have been irksome enough to Ernie, being a vegetarian, to receive the meat as gifts. But recently this practice had escalated as the old butcher had taken it into his head, for reasons unknown to Ernie, that the meat could be substituted for wage. And so this was often the case. Not that the old man was cheating Ernie; its true that the meat that Ernie would bring home with him would often, in pure face value, be more than double his wage. But this was little consolation to a vegetarian who could now hardly stand the sight of the fruits of his labour.


- posted by Sigurd2/24/2004 09:13:00 PM