Thomas was a fat stupid idiot. He liked stupid music. He was content to eat food that had no more flavour than the thin paper wrapping it came in.
He drove a broken down red rusting car.
He used an old obnoxious cell phone.
He was generally hated by most judgmental strangers.
Even his mother found his company difficult to tolerate for any moderate period of time. Luckily his father was dead, so he didn’t have to worry about spending time with Thomas.
Thomas had several ex-girlfriends, and ex-friends in general.
People always thought there was some mystery to be discovered within his tiny stupid brain.
There was not.
His girlfriends always thought they could make him more interesting, or at the very least (towards the end of the horribly dying relationship) they thought they could discover how he balanced out.
Surely there’s some area where he excels, they thought bitterly.
But there wasn’t. He was an anomaly. He had no redeeming qualities whatsoever.
And he was aware of this.
Every morning, he looked into his dull stupid eyes in the mirror and wondered why people spent any time with him at all, much the way a cow wonders why it’s raining, when it wasn’t raining just a second ago.
And like a cow, Thomas would heave himself around his house, doing whatever he felt like.
He could skip work and no one would say anything, being happy to have him gone.
He was a very good waiter at his tacky overpriced cookie cutter restaurant, mostly because all the other waiters did his job so they wouldn’t have to talk to him or look at him.
The managers encouraged this.
“Alright everyone,” the managers would say,”Stacy, Erik, Blevins, Kreltch, you each get one of Thomas’s tables tonight.”
“Why don’t we just fire Thomas?” a new girl would say.
Thomas would yawn and scratch himself, which no one would see except the new girl.
“You wanna fire him? You go right ahead, NEW GIRL!” the chieftain-manager would say.
And sometimes the unsuspecting new girl would fire Thomas. And sometimes they would end up dating because the new girl didn’t know any better.
Even when he was fired, people would offer him jobs seemingly out of nowhere.
People were drawn to him. Like that movie about a treasure.
Mystery, suspense, intrigue.
None of those feelings ever paid off with Thomas in the medium-run.
He didn’t even try to hide it like some fat stupid idiots you might know. He just blatantly oozed disappointment on everyone he encountered, like a cow with a liquefying skin condition.
But most girls just thought he needed attention. They thought he was self-deprecating, but in actuality he might be a musician or a writer or a painter or a person who might be obsessively good with money and wealthy.
And they would sleep with him. They would endure hours of horrific pink movements, like an ocean made of flesh that was lazily trying to drown them. And he would ultimately shudder violently and finish, his skin rippling quickly enough to hurl his rotting sweat hither and thither.
A woman never forgot sleeping with Thomas.
And they never forgot the feeling of loss.
The feeling of investing so much time, so much energy, so much of themselves into him.
The feeling of having him never reveal anything worthwhile; not the least sparkle of moderate intelligence, or consciousness, or creativity.
He ultimately wound up the head of a major automobile company and retired very wealthy, spending the rest of his days eating.
