Leo Gray works in a North Carolina toll booth, where he happily reads The World's Great Thinkers--Rousseau's Contract, Hegel's History, Marx's Manifesto; Schopenhauer, Heidegger, Nietzsche--the Transcendentalists, the French poets, the Modernists, and the Beats. Everything is dandy. ...But then his social worker girlfriend convinces him to turn upwardly mobile, and Leo gets a job writing for a weekly newspaper on the coast of his home state Georgia. Sounds great, right? But his two bosses are named, ahem, Big Dick and Little Dick Taylor, And his girlfriend refuses to relocate with him, since she's taken on another down-and-out lover, a stroke victim in his sixties struggling to relearn the alphabet. In hopes of transforming yet another loser?, Leo wonders.