When Danny Dowd – a spoiled, upper-class white kid – is kicked out of college again, his father decides to teach him that not everyone is born with a silver BMW in the garage. Sentenced to spend a summer doing manual labor at a shipyard in St. Louis, Danny comes face to face with people from all walks of life. One of these is Clement Buchman, a guitar-playing welder who claims to be the bastard son of Jimi Hendrix. Another is Maggie Moore, a single mother, hair-stylist, ten years his senior, and the love of his life. Thus begins a year that will lead to leave, drugs, music, more drugs, and finally a sort of catfish-catharsis in the middle of the Mississippi River.