Primarily set in New York City and Los Angeles, the book is a first-person account of a musician-turned-filmmaker's immersion in the punk-rock scene of the 1980s and his subsequent struggles in Hollywood.

Haney has said it required nine years to complete the novel,[1] which was well received by the underground music press and has been called a "cult favorite" by the New York Journal of Books.

[2] As a restless high school athlete in a small, unnamed town in North Carolina, Jason Maddox, the book's narrator, has a sexual encounter with his popular girlfriend's alcoholic mother.

Devastated, Jason decides he's finished with music and, using money from an insurance settlement, he produces and directs a film that takes him to Los Angeles, where he falls in love with an aspiring actress who is herself seeking a new life after fleeing the civil wars in her native Yugoslavia.

The actress, Irina, is married to a wealthy Englishman who is happily unaware of her affair with Jason and, possibly, others prior.

At a party one night, Jason meets another former punk who tells him that Jim Cassady has recently been spotted, homeless and panhandling on the streets of Hollywood.