"I was renting a basement, a hovel, really, at an absurdly low rate, on Park Street, but it never deterred any of the women I brought there, and there were quite a few. If the dust that coated everything bothered them, they didn't complain. If the unwashed dishes in the bathtub frightened them, they didn't say. If they saw from the surroundings that I wasn't fixed like a man going places in the world, it didn't seem to make a difference. "Best of all, I didn't give a damn what they thought. That's how a man should always live. I had it once. So why did I give it all up?" Max Zajack's life is in flux. After the parade of women charted in 'Lounge Lizard' and the grind of deadend jobs endured in 'Dirty Work', perhaps an ordinary existance is Max's best path. But normality has its own problems. . . and its own secret escapes.