Evan Marshall has done time and lives on the periphery of journalism and illegality. He describes his unfolding relationships with an over-the-top personality named Rockman, and Shizuka, a pregnant Japanese woman whose husband spent time in a U.S. prison for drug smuggling. Rockman, he learns, is not only a playwright, actor, novelist, would-be priest and teacher who was fired from his post in Colombia and flown from the country under mysterious circumstances, but a self-destructive alcoholic, drug addict and mental patient. After taking Shizuka to the hospital when she goes into labour on a streetcar, Marshall survives an attack by her husband, mugs an acquaintance, and hangs with his new friend who brawls, tells stories, gets arrested, suspended, spends thousands on crack and whores, and checks in and out of the psychiatric ward. Marshall and Rockman devise a half-baked plan to rob a crack house with a shotgun and cleaver. It does not go well.