Banned for Life
 As a restless high school athlete in a small, unnamed town in North Carolina, Jason Maddox, the book's narrator, has a sexual encounter with his popular girlfriend’s alcoholic mother. Rumors of the encounter circulate at school, and Jason’s girlfriend, distraught when she learns of them, attempts suicide. Jason, himself previously popular, is shunned by his classmates, including the one who started the rumors. Jason confronts and savagely beats that classmate, and in the aftermath, he's arrested, expelled from school, and all but disowned by his conservative, mortified parents. Taking a job as a house painter, Jason moves into an apartment complex where he befriends his new neighbor, Bernard “Peewee” Mash, an intellectually precocious fifteen-year-old who, like Jason, is a local pariah. Peewee introduces Jason to art, literature, and, most importantly, punk rock. He and Jason are particularly enamored of the Los Angeles punk band Rule of Thumb, which is led by a Berkeley-educated poet, Jim Cassady, whom Jason and Peewee both revere. Learning that Rule of Thumb will be performing at New York City’s CBGB, Jason quits his job in order to drive himself and Peewee to New York. After the show, they speak to Jim Cassady, who advises them to start a band. They immediately make plans to move to Manhattan, where they live on the Lower East Side, center of the New York punk scene. There, Peewee becomes increasingly difficult, at odds with Jason musically and envious of Jason’s sexual prowess. Alternately given to tantrums and sullen silences, Peewee is ousted from the band that he co-founded. He and Jason pursue music separately until, recognizing how much they miss each other, they reconcile and start a new band. The new band has a growing reputation for its explosive, destructive shows, which result in injuries to person and property alike. Banned from most local venues, the band begins touring the U.S., and in the midst of what will prove to be its final tour, Peewee is killed in a car crash, with Jason narrowly surviving. Devastated by the loss of Peewee, Jason decides he’s finished with music, and, using money from an insurance settlement, he produces and directs a film that takes him to Los Angeles, where he falls in love with an aspiring actress who is herself seeking a new life after fleeing the civil wars in her native Yugoslavia. The actress, Irina, is married to a wealthy Englishman who is happily unaware of her affair with Jason and, possibly, others prior, though Irina denies any previous affairs to Jason. Their stormy romance is addictive to Jason, who begs Irina to leave her husband for him. She repeatedly, and emptily, assures him she will. At a party one night, Jason meets another former punk who tells him that Jim Cassady has recently been spotted, homeless and panhandling on the streets of Hollywood. This is the first sighting of Cassady, as far as Jason knows, since Rule of Thumb disbanded in the early 80s. Jason has always been mystified and intrigued by Cassady’s disappearance, and, on the Internet, he reads of other alleged Cassady sightings. Determined to find Cassady, Jason discovers that he’s now living in a bleak Los Angeles suburb with his elderly, controlling mother. He shares some of his recent songs and poems with Jason, who thinks they're deserving of a wide audience. Except for Cassady's music and the advice he gave Jason and Peewee at CBGB almost twenty years before, Jason might still be miserable in North Carolina, and he means to express his gratitude by helping Cassady gain a new following. But Cassady is resigned to obscurity, and he grudgingly submits to Jason’s efforts on his behalf. Perhaps out of spite, he causes a rupture in Jason’s relationship with Irina, and Jason promises to kill him for it, only to reaffirm, in the book's epilogue, how indebted he is to Cassady, who has again changed the course of his life.