An introverted man disfigured by a scoliosis brace and trapped in a co-dependent relationship with his mother finds liberation through a young girl while attempting to escape his tyrannical father.
An introverted man disfigured by a scoliosis brace and trapped in a co-dependent relationship with his mother finds liberation through a young girl while attempting to escape his tyrannical father.
Pearman is a man of 30 who still wears the scoliosis brace from his teenage years. His torso is disfigured from the constriction: his upper body disproportionately thin, adolescent, his lower body unusually round from his organs having been pushed below the brace. Pear Man.
Brilliant, particularly in electrical engineering, Pearman lives with his overbearing father and a mother, Cora, with whom he is in a co-dependent relationship. She is the guardian of his self-esteem. Against his father’s wishes, Pearman and his mother make a plan to visit her sister in Texas, whom she hasn’t seen in decades. Though she hides the recurring symptoms from her husband, Cora suffers from a terminal vascular disease that requires expensive medication in order to function daily.
Pearman works at a junkyard that deals in various miscellaneous goods, scrap metal and electronic equipment, some of it stolen. To build enough money and medicine for he and Cora to escape to Texas, he begins to steal cutting-edge computer equipment from the university where his father teaches.
At his work, Pearman meets an attractive girl, Julie, with whom he falls in love, though she is merely intrigued by him as a new friend in a new city. Julie and Pearman borrow his boss’s car and take his mother out on the town for her birthday. The plans to visit Texas become secondary as Pearman gets more and more distracted with Julie. Cora becomes jealous. Pearman loans Julie a large amount of money and the two of them later share a moment of physical intimacy. When Julie realizes it was a mistake, however, she breaks his heart and disappears. Defeated, Pearman returns to the coddling care of his mother.
Though detectives begin to case the shop and yard, Pearman risks stealing more equipment from the university in order to recover the lost money, the plan for Texas resumed. In so doing, Pearman discovers something hideous and pathetic about his father’s real activities. Pearman approaches his mother, bus tickets and medicine in-hand, ready to leave. They argue and Cora declines, however, realizing all along that she is the impediment to her son’s emotional development.
The next day, Pearman discovers the cops have sealed the junkyard off and arrested his boss. He returns home to discover his mother dead, having finally succumbed to an aneurysm. Baffled and lost, his father also comes home to the scene, but Pearman wraps his mother in a quilt, steals his boss’s car from the now-abandoned shop, places his mother in the back seat, and finally takes her to Texas, anyway.