Shoat Rumblin (a.k.a., "Rugs," when in Jail, and "Mr. Big Man-#2" when he is hired as a hustler for a gay business weekend on a yacht off the Biloxi Coast) has been looking for love in all the wrong places, in his travels by thumb around the country, which includes a 1970's pornographic movie house in New York City: the Columbia. There Shoat meets and moves in with a young man, Adrian Rome, who spends two+ years trying to capture and chronicle Shoat's life up until their meeting, both at home with his truck-driving father, Buck, and on the road throughout the country, in a book written about and with Shoat.