OMAHA
New York City native Stan, a none-too-bright slacker, thinks he has come up with a fail-safe plan to dump his current girlfriend without having to go through the usual tears and recriminations. The plan, to be executed with the help of his brother, involves a fictional job transfer to Omaha, which will take him permanently out of the city. Everything spins out of control when his girlfriend, a take-charge financial analyst, decides to help him through this 'difficult transition time', with the result that he winds up losing all his possessions, his girlfriend, and his rent-stabilized apartment on a desirable street in the West Village.
CHECKING OUT
In a cut-rate motel room, a man lies, blood seeping from his head and soaking the pillow. When the cleaning woman comes in to get the room ready for the next occupant, she doesn’t turn a hair. She sees right away the man is faking, and that the ‘blood’ is stage blood. His attempts to explain himself result in the arrival of another hotel guest and the two of them become locked in a bizarre duel to prove which of the two is the greater failure. In the end, it is the cleaning woman who, in one stroke, subverts their entire argument, telling them to go ahead, check out, and get on with their lives.
THE TASTE OF THROB
A journeyman reporter on a small-town paper discovers he has an unusual talent: he is able to taste words as if they were truly edible. Indulging his verbal gluttony soon lands him in trouble with his editor - and with his girlfriend, who doesn’t like him putting on weight. But his career takes off and before long he is reporting as a war correspondent in a tropical country. There he finds a new use for literature and saves his own life with some heavy artillery in the shape of volumes ranging from War and Peace and Moby Dick to the collected works of Stephen King. Returning home, he catches up with his cynical editor only to find that he too has now become seized with the same hunger for words and has devoured in one sitting the epic poem on which his ex-reporter had been secretly working in the hopes of escaping into true art.