The year is 1978. Bill Springer is a sheltered white Anglo-Saxon protestant mamaas boy and has just been transferred from mundane rural Olathe, Kansas, to eclectic New Jersey. Leaving Kansas behind with its Midwestern values and prejudices, Bill is about to live alone for the first time in a condominium surrounded by a menagerie of individuals, the likes of which he has never seen. The reader is invited to pull up a chair and join in the rollicking good times of Billas crazy ride. Surrounded by man-hungry divorcees, gays, lesbians, murderers, religious fanatics, people with personality disorders, and other crazies, he is utterly shocked into reality. In other words, by the end of the story he is turned into a real New Jersey boy.