Plot
Pedott, a peddler, has the curious ability to give people exactly what they need before they need it. The old man enters a cafe where he first gives a woman a vial of cleaner. Then, he gives a down-on-his-luck ex-baseball player bus tickets to Scranton, Pennsylvania. The ball player receives a job offer in the city the tickets are for; and the ball player needs his jacket cleaned, for which the woman just happens to have the cleaner.
Renard, a small time thug, asks Pedott to give him what he needs, and the peddler gives him a pair of scissors which save Renard's life when his scarf gets caught in an elevator's doors. Renard shows up at Pedott's apartment, asking for another thing he "needs," and the peddler comes up with a leaky pen that predicts a winning racehorse.
Renard continues menacing Pedott for more. Pedott gives him a pair of new shoes. When a car suddenly heads directly toward Renard, he tries to run, but the new soles are so slippery, he cannot escape on the wet pavement. He is struck and killed by the passing car. The shoes, Pedott explains to Renard's corpse, were what Pedott needed, because he foresaw that Renard would eventually kill him. At the end of the episode the peddler gives a couple a comb, which they use to groom themselves just before they are photographed as witnesses for a newspaper story covering the "hit and run" accident that killed Fred Renard.
Read more about this topic: What You Need
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)
“Trade and the streets ensnare us,
Our bodies are weak and worn;
We plot and corrupt each other,
And we despoil the unborn.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“We have defined a story as a narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence. A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. “The king died and then the queen died” is a story. “The king died, and then the queen died of grief” is a plot. The time sequence is preserved, but the sense of causality overshadows it.”
—E.M. (Edward Morgan)