Billy Ray Schafer stepped off the plane in Amarillo, Texas, with twenty-six hundred dollars tucked down the leg of his black ostrich-skin cowboy boot. He walked to baggage claim slowly, jelly-legged and nearing lucidity, coming out from under the Xanax he snorted before the flight...'Debauched, divorced and courting death, Billy Ray Schafer is a comedian who has forgotten how to laugh. Over the course of seven spun-out days, he travels from hell gig to hell gig across the American Southwest in search of a reason to keep living.

Trapped in the wreckage of his wasted career, Billy Ray is the answer to a tragic question: What happens when opportunity never arrives? Or - worse - when it comes and goes?