The colourful characters who populate these stories live in Buffalo, but they will be readily recognisable to everyone. These are the blue collar men who never leave the neighbourhood and move to the large house in the suburbs. They work in the steel mills, and when those mills close, they do whatever they can to stay afloat on the sea of anger created by the circumstances of their lives. They drink, they fight, they hang out in pool halls waiting for "something to develop". They never achieve the American Dream -- in most cases, they don't even buy into it -- yet they are in the truest sense heroic. They are ordinary people stumbling through one small disaster after another.