Dean Decetes, a pornographer with messianic delusions, spins out of control in Los Angeles, where he spends his time drinking himself into a stupor, getting beaten up by strangers he's recklessly insulted, stealing credit cards to pay for sex, being arrested, begging favors, and mounting a PR campaign to make himself famous, with the help of a "loyal footsoldier" -- a porn-loving midget he met in jail. Meanwhile his pious, romantic spinster sister, who reluctantly keeps house for him, busies herself writing quasi-religious love notes to the boss she worships at the statistics company where she works, and her co-workers--an obsessive-compulsive Christian Scientist in a twisted marriage and a promiscuous, depressed blond bomb-shell--become enmeshed in her life as she dreams of ridding herself of her freeloading brother and being carried away on a white horse by her employer. Next door, a teenage math genius runs away from home after her mother humiliates her in school and hooks up at a bar with Decetes's suicidal editor. The story is told from five points of view--those of Decetes, his sister, the lonely blonde, the Christian scientist & the high school math genius--over three days which the five lives intersect.