However, while (the fictitious) Lester Jones is still going strong almost thirty years later, Rex has been leading a quiet and modest life without a regular income together with his live-in partner, Christine, Gabriel's mother, who back in the good old days designed trendy clothes for various rock stars.

Gabriel's twin brother Archie died while still little, and in many ways the family of three still live and think according to the unwritten laws of the late 1960s and 1970s, despising anything remotely connected with middle class mentality, advocating universal freedom, and smoking the occasional joint.

While Christine herself gets a job as a waitress in a bar and hires an au pair from some Eastern European country to look after Gabriel, Rex, left to his own devices, ends up in a shabby bedsit a few blocks away from his former home but even there has difficulty paying the rent.

Unfortunately, each parent independently has the same idea of presenting the drawing to Speedy, an old friend of theirs who runs a hamburger restaurant full of 1970s memorabilia—a place occasionally even visited by Lester Jones himself—so that the picture can be exhibited there.

Looking for someone to give his spoiled teenage son private guitar lessons, Jake offers the job to Rex who, encouraged by Gabriel to do something useful and earn some money at the same time, reluctantly agrees ("We're not so desperate that we're going to start working for a living") and eventually, after word of mouth has spread and he is teaching not just one but several kids, quite enjoys being seen as an authority on music by his pupils.